While the holidays are all about joy and fun, holiday meals can be some of the most stressful times you can have in the kitchen. Often you are cooking for more people than a regular meal with more dishes and more specialty items. Planning how to best use your appliances during your holiday meal preparation can save a lot of stress and hassle in the kitchen.
One of the biggest issues with preparing a holiday meal is that almost everything uses the oven. It’s an art to try to get all of the baked, broiled and roasted dishes that you normally cook in your conventional oven to all come out hot and ready to serve at the same time. A large-capacity countertop oven like the TO1640B is the perfect solution to use as a supplement to your big oven. You can use it to cook side dishes, keep dishes warm and to heat buns, so your big oven stays reserved for main dishes and other things that take more space or more time. This way, you don’t have to try to plan side dishes around the cooking of the main event.
Another issue in holiday cooking comes in the limited number of burners on your stove. Between side dishes and sauces, you often run out of room on the stove just like you do in the oven. If in your meal planning you realize that you have a lot of stovetop cooking items, you may want to consider adding an electric skillet into the mix to give you more room to cook all your stovetop items. A family-sized electric skillet like the SKG105 from Black & Decker allows you to prepare whole side dishes and more, just like you would on your stove. Plus, with a generally larger cooking surface that most stovetop pans, you can enjoy the extra space if you’re cooking for more people.
In addition to using the countertop oven and the electric skillet, look at your meal plan closely to see if you can use any additional cooking appliances to take off some of the stress of your larger appliances. Steamed vegetables can be done in a Handy Steamer like the HS1000 and some side dishes and even desserts can be done in a Slow Cooker like the SL5470. Of course, for many Latin holiday meals, you will also be using your Rice Cooker like the RC3406 to fix one of your main side dishes, so make sure you have a capacity on your rice cooker that’s big enough to make all the rice you need for your guests.
On the day of the meal, prep work will definitely be one of your biggest concerns. Dicing for one recipe, chopping for another—it all adds up to time you have to spend during cooking. Look at your prep work closely the night before the meal. If there are items or ingredients that you can prep in advance, go ahead and prep them to save yourself time and hassle as you cook. Use a food processor like the FP2500 to shred cheese and slice any produce that can be sliced in advance. The more you can prep in advance, the less stress you will have as you cook the big meal.
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