It's All About the Stuffing

Get the kids cooking this Thanksgiving with heirloom recipes

Issue 66: From Dana

We’re less than two weeks out from Thanksgiving, and if you’re anything like me, you can’t stop thinking about the meal. What new sides or pies or appetizers am I trying? Where am I getting the bird this year? Who’s coming over and what are their dietary restrictions – and who should sit (or not sit) next to whom?

As a former food magazine editor, I’ve been conditioned to obsess over what’s arguably the most important cooking day of the year. The November issue was always our biggest, most beautiful, and largest newsstand seller: we started brainstorming in the late spring so the advertising team could shop around whatever novel concept we came up with, and until we shipped it to the printer in early fall, it was nonstop turkey and sides for months. No one in my house was complaining, but it wasn’t uncommon for my family to sit down to one Thanksgiving dinner after the next all through June and July. 

After a decade of this, I started questioning why we had to reinvent the wheel each year. I felt like a hypocrite – “Forget what we published last November, THIS is actually the best way to cook your turkey!” Time-saving Thanksgiving. Celebrity Chef Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving on a Dime. Real People Thanksgiving. One year we even did a Mix-and-Match Flip-Book concept complete with cut-outs so readers could compose a scrap-book of their ideal meal. Ooof!