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Confession time: I’ve never been that into Thanksgiving.
The “traditional” menu is typically incredibly bland and one-note (so many shades of brown and beige on one plate). Preparing the turkey showstopper involves shoving your arm inside a wet bird carcass to remove a bag of innards, which is objectively disgusting. The expectation to have multiple side dishes—potatoes, stuffing/dressing, green beans, mac and cheese, etc.—served with the aforementioned bird requires hours of work, planning, and precision timing that feels like a Herculean task to pull off. Ultimately, I always felt that the food-centric holiday has always felt like an outsized amount of work for what amounts to a fairly mediocre meal.
This isn’t just a Thanksgiving issue, either—most of the winter holidays on the calendar include some kind of elaborate meal (or several), which involves a lot of work and can be incredibly isolating for the people stuck in the kitchen preparing it. Sure, the cooking itself is often a joyful tradition in its own right, but there are also times where the act of making that food can take you away from the very people for whom you’re preparing it. I recall many a Christmas at my grandparents’ house where I wouldn’t even lay eyes on my grandmother until dinner was served at 7 p.m. (And Christmas was usually the only time of year I’d see her.)
The bottom line:
Holiday cooking is difficult and stressful, and I’m not the only one who feels this way. According to a 2021 survey of 1,400 people conducted by Cinch Home Services, one in 10 people feel very stressed about Thanksgiving and Christmas, with “timing the cooking just right” the top source of stress for 61 percent of respondents. Another 2021 survey from Irish dairy brand Kerrygold found that 89 percent of respondents were stressed out by the work involved to prepare holiday meals.
So last year when my sister-in-law, who had a young baby, asked my husband and I if we could host Thanksgiving, we thought about how we could make the experience significantly less stressful. The last thing I wanted was to be stuck in the kitchen all day, working my butt off to make food I didn’t care about or enjoy eating, and miss out on time spent with my family. We asked ourselves how we could maximize the best part of the holidays—spending time with loved ones over delicious food. That’s when we landed on it: a no-cook Thanksgiving.
What a no-cook holiday entails
What that meant: The kitchen was off-limits on Thanksgiving Day, except for reheating. No one was allowed to start or prepare a dish in our kitchen on that day—the oven, stove, and microwave were only meant to get pre-cooked stuff warmed up and ready to eat.
We were worried that people would balk at this idea, but the family was generally pretty supportive. I whipped up a spreadsheet so my sister-in-law and I could figure out what would be on the menu and coordinate what we’d order versus what we’d prep ourselves. We decided that there were four specific dishes we definitely needed at Thanksgiving, all of which could be made vegan so my sister-in-law could eat them too: mashed potatoes, stuffing, cranberry sauce, and sweet potatoes. For everything else—pies, turkey, gravy, and other sides—we opted to order from local restaurants and split the costs.
Once the menu was set, my husband reiterated to his parents that all they needed to do was show up. Meanwhile, I plotted out how reheating would work, Googling “how to reheat X” for literally every item on our menu. The Sunday before Thanksgiving, I cooked the cranberry sauce and stored it in the fridge; the night before, I whipped up the mashed potatoes and transferred them straight into a baking dish for easy reheating the next day. Finally, the big day arrived. And I was shocked at how much more relaxed everyone was. People were sitting around the living room, laughing and chatting. I was in the kitchen for a total of one and a half hours, mostly just moving things in and out of them oven before coming back into the living room to hang out. We lingered long over dinner, savoring our food, then reconvened in the living room for more chatting while digesting.
The best part:
Having a more streamlined menu still allowed for leftovers without requiring a ton of work. (Everyone got to bring home an individual Tupperware filled with their favorites).
And having someone else make the turkey and the pies didn’t take away from our enjoyment. In fact, I would argue that the turkey was way better having been made by a professional! And the pies tasted all the sweeter considering that I didn’t have to deal with making the crust. At the end of the night, as everyone was pulling on their coats and hugging goodbye, my in-laws both said how special the day felt and how much fun they had. And everyone immediately committed to doing Thanksgiving this way every year.
How to pull off your own kitchen-less, no-cook holiday meal
Do you also hate the kitchen toil on big holidays and want to try your hand at a cooking-free holiday meal? Here are my tips to set you up for sweet, sweet success:
- Plan your no-cook holiday menu in advance
- Outsource stuff you don’t want to cook or don’t have time to cook
- Think about your reheating timeline
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