8 holiday cooking tips from Alexa and Food Network Kitchen

Getting all the ingredients on your grocery list is simple when you ask Alexa. Use Alexa to shop millions of products from Whole Foods Market or Amazon Fresh, and Amazon will deliver your order safely to your door so you can avoid long lines during one of the busiest times of the year.

Cooking for the holidays can be stressful—you’re bound to forget something. Ask Alexa to remind you to take the turkey out of the freezer, help you find your favorite serving platter, or announce to your household that it’s time to wake up and start cooking.

There's no need to stress about adjusting your favorite recipe for eight to feed a party of two this year. Simply ask Alexa how much turkey or stuffing is best for your party size, or ask her to do the recipe calculations for you.

Whether you forgot to pick up brown sugar for your holiday ham, or ran out of chicken broth for the stuffing, Alexa has a solution. Just use a phrase like, "Alexa, what’s a substitute for brown sugar?" to get specific quantities and various options for substitutes.

Follow along with your favorite Food Network Kitchen chefs or cook hands-free with live and on-demand classes and step-by-step recipes on your Echo Show, Fire TV, or Fire tablet. Simply ask, "Alexa, find Thanksgiving recipes from Food Network Kitchen." You’ll find pointers from chefs like Bobby Flay, Giada de Laurentiis, Alex Guarnaschelli, and others. A few tips to get started include:

• Only stir mashed potatoes once, or they’ll get gummy.
  "If you notice, I haven’t stirred my potatoes once. Because I want them to be nice and light, and the more you stir the potatoes, the more sticky they’re going to get. And we don’t want that to happen. So we’re going to put all the ingredients in there, and then we’re just going to fold them together and we’ll be done."
  - Bobby Flay, Food Network
• You should be buttering and seasoning your stuffing bread.
  "This is my dad’s Italian American recipe. Straight up, good old, white American bread. You know what the real key to great stuffing is? Getting the bread toasted, browned, and seasoned, so it has a lot of taste. It’s not just like, filler. When the toast comes right out of the toaster, butter it like you’re buttering toast for your firstborn child. Or your grandmother. Or your cousin that you like a lot. Pinch of salt on the toast."
  - Alex Guarnaschelli, Food Network
• Broil brussels sprouts for faster, crispier results than baking.
  "We have a pound of brussels sprouts right here. And what I do is just cut the ends off them. You want to slice them thinly because we’re going to cook them under the broiler and it’s only going to cook for like six minutes so you want them to be pretty thin so they’re nice and charred. That’s the whole beauty—it goes so quickly."
  - Giada de Laurentiis, Food Network

Alexa Routines help you bundle multiple Alexa capabilities to set routines around your home. With Thanksgiving dinner behind you, set up a movie night Routine with your Echo, Fire TV, and Amazon Smart Plug. Use the Alexa app to create the Routine and get your entire house ready for your favorite holiday movie—either with a simple voice command or by setting up a timed occurrence. Shared Routines make this even easier by allowing users to enable Routines made by others, or turn their own Routines into shareable website page links.

Alexa Skills are voice-activated apps that add functionality to your experience with Alexa. There are more than 100,000 skills available in the Alexa Skills store, which means you can find one to help with almost anything. Some of our favorites include the Bartender Skill, which can help you choose the perfect cocktail to pair with a recipe, and the Save The Food Skill, which offers tips to store food, determine expiration dates, and even revive items that are past their prime. You can also create your very own Alexa Skill with Blueprints. We recommend the Whose Turn Blueprint, which can help you decide who gets dish duty after the holidays.

Use your Echo Show to guide you through recipes, stream movies or shows, and even video call family and friends while you cook. Stay connected with your friends and family from afar this holiday season by saying, "Alexa, call Jim," or "Alexa, call Mom."