5 Shortcuts for Thanksgiving Cooking

Everyone looks forward to Thanksgiving dinner all year long; everyone but the cook that is. With a little planning and some strategy though, you can cut down on your time in the kitchen and join the family in front of the football game! Here are some shortcut tips for Thanksgiving cooking:

Prepare Ingredients Ahead of Time:

Everyone eats macaroni and cheese at Thanksgiving. I think it might be a law or something. Macaroni and cheese form scratch is time consuming. Try boiling your pasta a day or two beforehand. Put is in a Tupperware or Ziploc bag with a tiny bit of oil to keep it from sticking together. Now you don't have to take the precious time on Thanksgiving to boil the large pot of water, watch it while you wait for it to boil and then wait 9 more minutes cooking the pasta.

Measure Your Ingredients Ahead of time

You will be shocked at how much time it saves if you measure out your ingredients beforehand. For example, if you just have to make your famous yeast rolls every year for Thanksgiving dinner, then this step should apply to you. Measure out all of your dry ingredients for the yeast rolls. Go ahead and sift them. Place the ingredients in a Zip Lock bag and all you have to do it dump it into the blender with the wet ingredients on Thanksgiving Day.

This is also a great step for the mac and cheese. Go ahead and measure out the cheese and milk.

Assemble Anything You Can

Some Thanksgiving dishes are perfectly fine made beforehand and then cooked the day of. A prime example would be traditional Thanksgiving stuffing. Make ahead, keep it in the casserole dish, wrap with plastic and stick it in the fridge. You can take it out on Thanksgiving Day, let it come to room temperature and then pop it in the oven to warm it. This would also freeze well if you wanted to make it weeks ahead of time.

Make mashed potatoes the night before. To revamp them on Thanksgiving Day at a little warm milk or cream and stir until they are fluffy again. Reheat them over a double boiler though; you don't want to scald them.

I have made Mac and Cheese all the way to the point where you cook it, then put it in the fridge the night before, and then taken it out and cooked it on Thanksgiving Day. No one had any idea!

Many Thanksgiving dishes would work well this way. Restaurants and big dining venues all work this way. Hotel, casinos, and even Sports Arenas use all of these tricks. There is no reason they can't work on a smaller scale in your kitchen.

Make the Desserts Beforehand

Desserts are the end to the perfect Thanksgiving meal. You can easily make any dessert the day before and it will still be fresh on Thanksgiving Day. Honestly you could make dessert up to 3 days beforehand and they should still be fine. Remember though, if they need to stay in the fridge, keep them there.

Wash That Turkey The Night Before!

This is the most easy step you can take to shorten your time in the kitchen on Thanksgiving Day. Simply prepare your turkey the night before. Cover it with foil or plastic wrap and set it in the fridge. Easy. Bring it and let it sit at room temperature for at least two hours before you cook it.

Using these tips you can easily cut your time in the kitchen on Thanksgiving Day in half. You may be running in there to heat something up and pop this or that in the oven. This is nothing compared to hours of cooking from scratch crammed into one day through!