034. 10 Essential Kitchen Hacks to Streamline Your Thanksgiving Prep and Cleanup

Thanksgiving prep is exciting -- at first! And the clean-up? Ugh!

I've got 10 hacks to streamline your Thanksgiving prep and the cleanup this week. These are hacks I use every time we have a big gathering at our house. Feel free to use these to simplify your hosting, no matter the size of your home, or the number of guests you've invited!

1. In the kitchen, use command hooks to hang multiple kitchen towels. 
2. In small spaces, think vertically for your decor. 
3. In the days leading up to Thanksgiving, plan out your serving dishes and serving utensils in detail.
4. Prep a dedicated beverage station
5. Use your microwave as a proofing oven.
6. Double your oven space with a toaster oven.
7. Create a 'clean as you go' space.
8. Chill salads and appetizers in the fridge overnight.
9. Employ the slow cooker as a warming drawer.
10. Ready the coolers.

Connect with me:

My Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/fireflybridgeorganizing
My Website: https://fireflybridge.com

Transcript

Hey hey! Happy Thanksgiving!

I’m Zee Siman, welcome to Organizing for Beautiful Living

If you’re in the US, of course, Thanksgiving is on Thursday!

In my house right now, we’re busy with preparing. I’m prepping for the kids to be home, we’re all preparing for the holiday lunch with family and friends, and then going out to enjoy the city together later that afternoon, maybe sneak in a nap, a light dinner and wine in the evening and a neighborhood walk. That’s my plan, anyway! But I’m ready to go with the flow.

OK, I’m here today to give you 10 hacks to make your Thanksgiving easier!

And you know what? You don’t need a BIG kitchen to make Thanksgiving awesome and elegant.

I found that just putting these hacks into action made the entire day more enjoyable and easier to prep, serve, and clean up. 

Because I think that we all want to LOVE having family or friends over for gatherings like this, but we make it overcomplicated, we think of how all the defects of our house is going to make it hard, or that it’s not going to go perfectly because our dining room is too small, or not decorated enough, or we don’t have enough kitchen prep space.

ALL of those things can be fixed, or at least made better. From years of all of these doubts causing me to not have gatherings in my house, especially when the kids were little and the house was cluttered with their gear and toys, I’ll tell you that I regret not just doing these hacks that I’m going to tell you about today, and just going ahead and inviting people over anyway!

I do like going to other peoples’ houses for the holidays, sure! But there’s really something special about hosting, don’t you think? You are welcoming these precious people into your home, you’re creating a special space and time for them, and you can be really creative, in your own style, and you get to share that with them.

You know, cooking a meal and decorating my table and my home is a form of creativity for me. So while we usually follow a traditional recipe for one of the dishes and the dessert, I do love to do something unique, new and creative, too. 

To make this happen with minimal stress, I have a few hacks in my toolbox that I will use if needed.

And I want to share 10 of these with you today.

So here we go:

#1: In the kitchen, use command hooks to hang multiple kitchen towels. When you’re prepping a big meal and you’ll have other hands helping you, you end up with a bunch of kitchen towels being used, right?

Well, instead of having kitchen towels thrown all over the counters, or crowded on the handle of your oven or dishwasher and they stay wet and gross, if you just pop a couple of command hooks onto the wall in your kitchen, there will always be a dry towel for you to wipe your hands with, or to grab a hot handle with.

I have one command hook on the windowframe just next to the sink. It’s a silver one, and I’ll add one to the opposite side of the sink as well, and then, after the holiday, I like for my kitchen to go back to normal. So I’ll remove it and keep the hook to reuse for the next holiday prep.

#2: In small spaces, think vertically for your decor. 
If you have a small dining room, you want to maximize the space on your table and sideboard, if you have one, for the food and dishware and things. I really think that in that case, don’t put a centerpiece on your table. Instead, look up for a centerpiece. Add foliage and maybe even flowers to your chandelier or light fixture. You don’t want anything to be touching the bulbs, and keep it lightweight. It can really make a striking impression, AND it’ll leave your tabletop space available for the actual food and your pretty dishes!

#3: In the days leading up to Thanksgiving, plan out your serving dishes and serving utensils in detail. For each and every dish, pick out what you’ll serve it in, and take that serving plate or bowl out of your cabinet, right? Then choose what utensils you’ll use to serve it with. I use post-it notes to write down what will go in that plate, and I stick the post-it to the serving plate. If I’m serving a sauce, I do the same for a little sauce bowl. And you can wrap a post-it around the serving utensils, too, to keep track of those. 

Lay everything out onto your kitchen counters. Don’t forget to think about the dishes your guests might be bringing if you asked them to contribute. You may need serving dishes for those, too, right? And then, take a quick snapshot of everything with your phone so you can remember everything you picked out.

Now, if you have a small kitchen, or if you need all the countertops to be free for your cooking, you can go ahead and put the serving dishes and utensils back into the cabinets and drawers they came from, with the post-its still attached. On Thanksgiving morning, you then refer to the  picture you took, and take the serving plates out of their cabinets, and you’re ready for plating.
#4: Prep a dedicated beverage station. You’ll avoid kitchen traffic jams by setting up a small table or cart with all the drinks and accessories outside your main cooking area. We use one section of countertop that’s right next to the fridge to lay out all our drinks, the ice bucket, various glasses and napkins, lemon wedges and any other items our guests might need. While we may serve the first drink when our guests arrive, we want them to be able to get refills and water anytime, without necessarily having to ask the host. You’re going to be busy with prepping and plating, as well as with welcoming and chatting with guests, so a drinks station will make things go more smoothly for everyone, and your guests will feel more comfortable knowing that they can come grab a drink when they need it without bothering anyone.

#5: Use your microwave as a proofing oven. Have you heard of no-knead dutch oven bread? Oh! You want to look this up online if you haven’t! I have a breadmaker machine, a Vintage one that I took from my mom a long time ago. And it makes perfectly OK bread, but it can’t handle a chewy, crispy-crusted bread. And I really don’t want to knead bread dough myself. But I recently found no-knead dutch oven bread, and the crust is chewy, crispy, almost like REAL french bread! 
The dough proofs only once, but if your oven is being used for baking other dishes, then you can zap a cup of water until it steams up the microwave, then turn it off and quickly sneak your dough in there with the steam. It’s like a spa day for your bread; it’ll make it rise relaxed and ready for the oven, and it’ll be off your counters, and it won’t take up oven time for proofing.
#6: Double your oven space with a toaster oven. On Thanksgiving Day, you know your oven is going to be booked up. So remember that toaster ovens can be really great for roasting veggies or keeping dishes warm. If you own one, today is the day to break it out of your cabinet! Mine lives in the corner rotating cabinet. I like to keep my daily countertops neat and clear, so I have a cabinet space dedicated to the toaster oven. It keeps it out of sight because I’m not using it every day. When I need it, like on Thanksgiving, it’s easy to just take it out for the day. So, yes, roasting vegetables can be done here, you can bake cookies here, brownies, warm bread, all the while leaving the big oven available for the big dishes or dishes that take a long time to bake or roast.
#7: Create a 'clean as you go' space. During the hustle and bustle of cooking, you can end up with a lot of used utensils and bowls. To make clean-up easier for you overall during the day, designate one side of your sink as a Clean-As-You-Go space. Make sure everyone in your household knows that dirty dishes can be quickly scraped into the garbage or compost tub, and the dirty dishes can go into this side of the sink. Now, I would prefer that they just put things into the dishwasher, but this is a close back-up. It’s going to keep your workspace clear, and if you need a cooking utensil that’s been used, you know exactly where to go to find it, give it a quick wash, and get back to cooking easily. 
I think clean-up is the killjoy of any party, right? So a clean-as-you-go space makes clean-up a tiny bit easier. If your family members, and maybe even your guests, know where to place dirty dishes and glasses, then your clean-up will go much faster if you don’t have to make multiple trips throughout your house to pick up dirty dishes left all over!

#8: Chill salads and appetizers in the fridge overnight. Going back to the serving dishes labeled with post-its, go ahead and get your cold dishes into their serving bowls the night before. It’s one less thing you’ll have to think about on Thursday. Of course, if you’re like me, you might just forget the asparagus and parmesan salad I made one year, and only remembered it 2 days later! So be sure to take a quick peek at your menu as you’re taking things to the table to make sure you’ve gotten everything out of the fridge that you meant to!
In fact, having a printout of your menu isn’t a bad idea. Tack it up somewhere so you can see it and check things off with a pen, if you need to, without having to open up your phone when your hands are in the middle of food prep. 
Oh, and another tip, print out your menu in BIG letters or you might find yourself squinting to see which salad is which on there!
#9: Employ the slow cooker as a warming drawer. This is another idea to free up your oven. Think of your slow cooker as a heating drawer. Your  gravy can be in here, or a soup, mashed potatoes, or even a main dish that you need to keep warm for a bit, but your big oven is being used. I mean once a side dish is made, I’d love for it to remain warm instead of cooling it, refrigerating it, and then reheating it. So having a slow cooker keep it warm saves you a few steps at mealtime. 

#10: Ready the coolers. If you don’t have a secondary fridge, or even if you do, and that space isn’t enough, then use coolers to stash overflow fridge items that you don’t need on Thanksgiving day, because as your guests arrive with their own dishes, you might need your fridge space to keep all that stuff, right?. So it’s a good idea to move unneeded daily stuff, like condiment bottles, cheeses and deli meats, extra fruit, anything that you don’t really need that day, move it into your coolers.  You’ll need to have some ice for those coolers, think about that ahead of time and on Thanksgiving morning, set them up in another room, out of the way, and get some help and just fill them with the things you’re not going to be using. 
And then after the guests have gone if your coolers are still chilled, you’ve got to move the refrigerated foods back into your fridge.

All right? So there you have it—ten hacks to make your Thanksgiving not just manageable but memorable, because it’s not just about setting a beautiful table or carving your turkey; it’s about having and enjoying those moments of laughter and lightness amidst  you know all the chaos of preparing and cleaning up and all that, right? Remember, the goal is to make this Thanksgiving so smooth, including the cleanup, you know, that you will want to do this again next year!. Happy organizing, and an even happier Thanksgiving to all of you! And I’ll see you on the next episode!