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frozen food

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Foods you should never freeze

Your freezer allows you to do everything from plan meals ahead to eliminate food waste. While you can usually throw in most dinner dishes or leftovers and be fine, the super cold temperature isn’t ideal for all foods. Certain ingredients can morph into something gross once thawed or even become a health hazard. The freezer has it’s limits. Here are some foods that just shouldn’t be frozen: Milk While it would be nice to have a few quarts of this staple item stowed away, milk stored in the freezer can separate into chunks and turn watery when it thaws. It is still technically safe to consume when this happens, but the consistency won’t be anything like what you would expect for your morning coffee or cereal. If you absolutely must free milk, try putting it in an ice cube tray to lessen the effect. Pull it out, and you won’t…

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…

You can thank this woman for your convenient frozen dinner

What’s for dinner tonight? If you’re considering anything that comes from the freezer, you can thank Mary Engle Pennington. Pennington, “The Ice Lady,” was a pioneer in food preservation. As the population of the United States shifted from the countryside into the city in the early 20th century, people began turning to grocery stores for their entire food supplies. The lure of the Industrial Age left families without the relative ease and safety of food they once had in their backyard farms. But there were no standards for safe food handling or storage at the time, and as a result, many frozen or refrigerated foods were rightfully deemed unsafe. Among other issues, people complained their foods arrived to their grocer spoiled, dried out and even moldy. Hundreds died and thousands became sick every year after consuming contaminated foods — particularly eggs, milk, fish and poultry. Pennington was a key scientist in the passage of the landmark…