Q&A for How to Keep Food Hot

You can always use a warm oven. Most ovens have a warm feature. If your oven doesn't have a warm feature, try keeping it on at 160 or 170 °F.

The easiest way would be to pre-cook things and then warm them up quickly in a pan when you're ready to eat.

If it's corn on the cob, leave it in the water you cooked it in. You can also add a little milk and butter in the water after turning off the heat and let the corn sit in it for a few minutes to flavor it. It should keep the corn warm for up to an hour, and the corn soaks up the milk and butter really well. In addition, don't throw that water out! Use it to make potato soup; it gives a great flavor to the broth!

Don't keep it in the cooker on warm for more than a couple of hours. "Warm" food causes bacteria to form pretty quickly, but you should be okay for two hours or so.

Yes, this should be fine.

Yes, you can. If your oven has a "warm" setting, you could also use that to keep your food warm.

You should wait to serve it until just before you're about to eat. This way, it will be warm when people dig in. If you're dealing with a lot of food in a bigger setting, you can store it in a container called a Food Warmer, which is commonly used in buffets to keep food hot.

You could try keeping it warm at a very low temp, but if you aren't serving it for an hour, I would wait until you're about ready to serve the pizza, and heat it in a 400 deg oven for just a few minutes and watch it closely! Leaving pizza in the oven for an hour, even at a low temp, would likely dry it out quite a bit.

Buy a thermos that's designed to hold hot beverages and retain the heat. That should keep your hot chocolate warm for at least an hour or two.