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Thanksgiving dinner

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8 common stuffing mistakes that could ruin your holiday dinner

Okay, maybe “ruin” is a bit dramatic, but that doesn’t mean you and your guests won’t be disappointed with dry or less-than-stellar stuffing. This classic Thanksgiving dinner dish — with its familiar flavors of onion, celery, and herbs mixing with crispy, chewy, buttery bread — is well-loved, but it’s also easy to mess up, so be sure to avoid these 8 common stuffing mistakes: 1. You make it on Thanksgiving Day Don’t wait until Thanksgiving day to start your stuffing. Your bread base — whether it’s a bread loaf, cornbread, bagels or even waffles — needs to be dry and stale, so let it sit out for at least a day or two before you begin. If your bread is still moist, your stuffing will be soggy. 2. You try to save calories If you’re looking to keep your Thanksgiving meal within a certain calorie count, perhaps you could cut…

The first TV dinner was a Thanksgiving feast

While you may not think America’s most celebrated homemade holiday feast has anything to do with a modest frozen TV dinner, the two forever share a slice of history. The first mass produced TV dinner was, in fact, literally made from Thanksgiving leftovers. As the story goes, in 1952, someone in charge of purchasing at Omaha-based C.A. Swanson & Sons seriously overestimated how much turkey Americans would consume that Thanksgiving. With 520,000 pounds of frozen turkey to unload, a company salesman named Gerry Thomas had a light bulb idea. Thomas, having been inspired by the neatly packaged Pan Am Airlines airplane food, ordered 5,000 aluminum trays. He recruited women, armed with scoops and spatulas, to run his culinary assembly line, and work began making mini Thanksgiving feasts full of turkey, corn-bread dressing, peas, and sweet potatoes, thus creating the first-ever TV dinner. The original TV Dinners  sold for 98 cents…

How many calories will you consume at Thanksgiving dinner?

We’re not here to burst your Thanksgiving Day Parade balloon, but if you’re concerned about calories on Turkey Day, you might want to take note. According to the Calorie Control Council, most Americans will consume around 4,500 calories next Thursday — and that’s during dinner alone! As if that’s not bad enough, most of us are in denial. According to a Basis Science survey, most Turkey Day diners expect to consume just 1,780 calories, and 75 percent of diners estimate their meal will clock in under 2,000 calories. While ignorance can be bliss, your pants will always know better. And you should, too. From appetizers to dessert, we took a look the calories in a traditional Thanksgiving holiday menu. Too scared to read on? No need. We won’t ask you give up gravy — or pie.  You can have an enjoyable holiday feast without depriving yourself. Just be mindful of what…

Opposing politics cut our Thanksgiving dinner short by more than an hour, study shows

Large family dinners can already be tricky to navigate, but recently, politics has added a fresh, new layer of malfunction. A recent study published in the journal Science shows that Thanksgiving dinner 2016 was considerably shorter than other years. (If you need a refresher, the holiday hit just shortly after Trump’s surprising victory.) The report suggests that annual holiday meals were cut short that year by an average of 30 to 50 minutes when people of opposing parties were seated at the same dinner table. To gather their data, researchers went pretty deep, and yes, creepy. They first collected 21 billion smartphone location pings from cell phone users all across the United States. Then they overlaid that information on an election map with the election result for 172,000 precincts. Essentially, the researchers figured out each person’s home using pings, extrapolated their political ideology based on where they lived, tracked where they went on Thanksgiving…

A make-ahead Thanksgiving dinner plan

A stressed out hostess makes for a lousy shindig, and let’s face it, orchestrating a Thanksgiving dinner is no therapy. Our national feast typically features multiple different dishes that all require different cooking times and temperatures. If you’re making Thanksgiving dinner this year, relax, and remember there are plenty of dishes you can prepare ahead of time. Planning will help eliminate the stress of holiday cooking. Plan out what days you’ll make what dishes in advance, and then make a “day-of” map so everything gets it’s proper time in the oven and arrives warm to the table. This list should help you spread out your workload and make the process a whole lot easier. Pie dough or Fruit Pies 1 day to 4 weeks in advance Whole fruit pies can go in the freezer up to a month before Thanksgiving. Wrap your pie in several layers of plastic wrap to minimize air exposure, then wrap in…