7 Things You'll Need to Survive the Holidays

Feature photo by +Simple on Unsplash

The holiday season brings happiness, warmth, and unfortunately, a huge amount of stress. Stress comes from many directions during the holidays from not being prepared enough, to not spending enough time with loved ones. Large holiday family dinners are no different. You can already imagine it… you’re stuck in the kitchen, most likely since the night before prepping for the big feast. All your friends and family are gathered in the living room. The children are running around and you have some lovely volunteers to help you in the kitchen. Everyone is anxiously waiting for you to finish cooking – and so are you!

Prepping holiday dinners eat up a lot of quality time. For all the time spent prepping, you could be lounging in your living room chatting with family and friends. But, no. Here you are with a whisk in one hand and flour on your face. No one wants to miss their own party. Just because it’s a celebration doesn’t mean you should slave away all day in the kitchen. Reduce the amount of time spent in the kitchen with these 7 appliances to help yourself secure a “merry” holiday:

1. Slow Cooker

With all the food you have to cook including the main course, the pies, and the sides, you start to realize that there’s just not enough space on the stove or in the oven. Solution: a slow cooker! These are a great way to make a dish with a more hands-off approach. You just put your needed ingredients in, turn it on, forget about it, and focus on other tasks at hand. You can make stew, fondue, soup, and literally anything else that requires heating up for a large amount of time. Another plus is that it’s easy to clean afterwards.

2. Meat Thermometer

If you’re like any of the many skeptical and paranoid people out there, you’re afraid of uncooked meat. Uncooked meat, even slightly under cooked, can make someone sick, and no one wants to be sick during the holidays. There’s a lot of pressure in cooking chicken, turkey, or ham to perfection. The amount of things that can go wrong with cooking them is endless, but being under cooked can absolutely be avoided. It’s difficult for people to gauge if meat has been cooked thoroughly. So, a meat thermometer is the perfect tool to check if any and all meats has been fully cooked to perfection.

3. Food Processor

Prepping ingredients is one of the easiest tasks to complete. However, it’s one of the most time consuming. For one, there’s a million ingredients to cut, wash, and, drain. Second, you can’t start cooking until the ingredients are ready. There are certain sizes and shapes that you want for certain dishes, and you can’t cut them too quickly in fear of a slicing accident. One way to beat this is by using a food processor. Food processors can instantly cut ingredients in a matter of seconds. They can also cut them to any desirable size. As always, it’s an easy clean up with its convenient removable parts.

4. Kitchen Faucets with Sprayers

Piled up dishes are one of the biggest enemies in any household. They can lead to irritation and unethical disputes. A way to make it easier and faster to clean dishes is to equip your kitchen sink with a faucet that has some sort of sprayer: side sprayer, pre-rinse, pull-down sprayer, or pull-out sprayer. These strong sprayers allow you to wash away any grime and left overs from the dishes or sink before you start washing. This makes it quicker to lather up your dishes and rinse. Consider equipping these in your kitchen for future crazed holidays.

5. Wine Bottle Opener

Refilling wine glasses never seems to end during the holidays and we’re not complaining. However, you should make sure you always have a handy dandy wine bottle opener to make sure that after every toast a glass is full. Be certain that your wine bottle opener is reliable and works well. There’s nothing more irritating and struggling to open a bottle with a dull opener!

6. Knife Sharpener

There’s nothing worse than when you finally finish cooking and settle down at the dinner table, upon cutting into your poultry, you end up mutilating it. All that hard work just went right out the window and everyone was there to witness it. Make sure to keep your knives sharp and ready for use with a knife sharpener. Knife sharpeners are just one of the many handy tools you can have around the kitchen, because no one appreciates a dull, useless knife.

7. Mixer

Dinner can’t be complete without dessert! Homemade goodies are the best, but they require a lot of upper body strength. Strength you’ll need to keep the “happy” in holiday going. Eliminate the need of a whisk with a mixer. Whether it’s a stand mixer or handheld, your arm should be free from the soreness of manually mixing. Mixers can go at any speed you desire and are easy to clean.

This holiday season, relax and enjoy with these useful tips we’ve covered. Happy holidays, all!