The Mandoline That Saved My Holiday Cooking

Every year around the second week of November, my kitchen turns into something closer to a small factory than a place I actually enjoy cooking in. Twelve people for Thanksgiving, sometimes eighteen if my son's in-laws make the drive down from Ohio, and every single one of them expects scalloped potatoes, because that's the dish my mother-in-law used to make and now the job has landed on me. The thing that finally rescued that Wednesday night was a small OXO mandoline slicer, but I will get to that.

For years, that meant an entire Wednesday night hunched over a cutting board with a chef's knife, working through eight pounds of russets one slow slice at a time. My hands would cramp around nine o'clock. My slices got thicker and sloppier the longer I went, which meant some potatoes in the dish cooked through and others stayed hard in the middle, and I'd serve a casserole where half the bites were perfect and half were a letdown.

Two Thanksgivings ago, I nicked my thumb badly enough that I spent twenty minutes at the sink with a dish towel instead of finishing the gratin. My husband ended up rolling out the pie crust I was supposed to handle, the potatoes went into the oven forty minutes late, and dinner happened at seven-thirty instead of five like I'd promised everyone on the phone. I remember standing in the kitchen afterward, potatoes finally baking, feeling like I'd failed at the one thing I actually wanted to get right that day.

My daughter-in-law, Kristen, is the one who finally talked me into trying a mandoline slicer. She'd been using an OXO one at her own place for holiday sides and kept telling me it would cut my prep time in half. I was skeptical. I'd seen the horror stories online about mandolines and fingertips, and I figured a small kitchen gadget wasn't going to fix a problem I'd been living with for fifteen years of hosting.

She brought her own mandoline over the Sunday before Thanksgiving last year and set it up right on my counter next to the sink. She showed me how the hand guard holds the potato steady, how you just run it down the ramp instead of forcing a knife through, and how the thickness dial lets you pick the exact same setting for every single slice. I watched her get through four potatoes in about the time it used to take me to finish one.

I ordered my own that week, the same OXO Good Grips model she had, adjustable from paper-thin all the way to almost a quarter inch. It arrived two days before Thanksgiving, which felt like cutting it close, but I unboxed it at the kitchen table and read the instructions twice before I trusted myself to use it.

Eight pounds of potatoes that used to eat up my whole Wednesday night took me eighteen minutes, and every single slice came out the same thickness, all the way through.

That Wednesday before Thanksgiving, I set the mandoline up over a big mixing bowl instead of a cutting board and worked through all eight pounds of russets in under twenty minutes. Every slice came out the same thickness, which meant the gratin baked evenly for the first time in years, no hard centers, no mushy edges. I remember standing there almost annoyed at myself for not trying one sooner.

I didn't stop at potatoes. That same week I ran through three onions for the green bean casserole topping, a dozen apples for two pies, and a cucumber for the relish tray my sister-in-law always remembers at the last minute. The hand guard on the OXO held every piece steady, so my worry about the knife slipping just wasn't part of the evening anymore.

By the time everyone sat down that Thanksgiving, dinner was on the table by five-fifteen like I'd promised, and my son actually commented on how even the potato slices looked, which is not something anyone has ever said about my cooking before. My husband still teases me about how calm I was in the kitchen that year compared to every year before it.

Since then I've used it for Christmas Eve latkes, Easter ham with scalloped sweet potatoes, and a summer cucumber salad that used to take me half an hour of knife work and now takes about five minutes. I keep the hand guard on every single time, no exceptions, even for something as simple as a cucumber, because that's the one habit that keeps this tool safe instead of scary.

What I'd Tell You If We Were Sitting at My Kitchen Table

If you host any kind of holiday meal and you're still working through pounds of potatoes or onions with a knife the night before, I'd tell you to get a mandoline before your next big one. Not because it's some miracle fix, but because it turns the most tedious hour of prep into the easiest fifteen minutes of your whole day. Use the hand guard every time, don't skip it because you're in a hurry, and don't expect it to replace your knife for everything, it won't dice an onion or mince garlic for you. But for anything you're slicing into even rounds by the pound, it will save your wrists, your time, and probably a nick or two on your thumb. That's the honest truth, from one holiday cook to another.