Time Saving Tips for Holiday Meal Preparation

Holiday meal preparation is very time consuming. If you want to cut down on the time spent in the kitchen this holiday season, and spend more quality time with family and friends, these time saving tips will help you to achieve that goal.

To save time with holiday meal preparation, you can start to prepare your holiday meals as much as a week in advance. Anything that can be prepared and frozen may be cooked in advance, and then thawed and reheated on the holiday.

Dice your fruits and vegetables for cooking, the day before and place them in plastic baggies or storage containers, then refrigerate until ready to use.

Check your recipes for all of your holiday dishes, make a list of all the ingredients that you will need. Plan a trip to the grocery store to shop for everything that you will need to prepare the holiday meal. This will keep you from discovering a missing ingredient that you would have to run to the store to purchase, thus saving you time.

Use that crock pot! The crock pot can save you a lot of time in holiday meal preparation. Simply add your ingredients, plug it in and turn it on. Two to six hours later (depending on what you are cooking), and your dish is ready! You can be performing other tasks without fear of letting anything scorch.

Enlist the help of family members to help with the simple tasks, such as setting the table, washing dishes or cleaning up, to save time with holiday meal preparation. This way you are able to focus solely on your cooking, without these small tasks taking up your time.

Have something precooked for breakfast on the day of your holiday cooking. Donuts, muffins, breakfast burritos, microwave sausage biscuits are all foods that can be easily available for quick eating, with minimal clean up.

Prepare salads such as fruit salad and cauliflower salad the day before and keep refrigerated until time for the holiday dinner. This will save you time as well as making the salads more flavorful, as the different ingredients will have had time to blend within the salad to create a wonderful taste.

I hope that these time saving tips for holiday meal preparation will be of benefit to you and that you will get to experience the joy of spending more time with your friends and family this holiday season, and less time in the kitchen.