Just in Time for Thanksgiving — Keeping Cut Potatoes from Getting Brown

With Thanksgiving coming up this week, and all the meal preparations that go along with it, and Christmas just around the corner, I thought it might be helpful to share a tip with you from a few months ago. This might come in handy when you need to prepare some foods ahead of time because Thanksgiving Day can become a very busy one in the kitchen.

I have been known to cut up my potatoes that I'll be using for dinner earlier in the day. Sometimes I do it for convenience, and sometimes I do it because I'll be gone from the house until right before it's time to start cooking dinner and I don't have time for the actual preparation. The problem is that the potatoes will turn brown soon after you cut them.

The solution: place them into a bowl of cold water, cut up or whole, and put them into the refrigerator until you are ready to use them. You can even leave them there overnight.

You can't tell too much with the potatoes still in the water, but this is what the water looked like as soon as I took the potatoes out, which in this particular instance was after about three hours in the water:

As yucky as that looks, my potatoes were still pretty. Here's what they looked like as soon as I put them in the hot pan (I was frying potatoes this time, but this week we might all be making mashed potatoes):

As perfect as if I just cut them!

Hope this makes your Thanksgiving food preparations a little easier.