Thanksgiving Search Results « Food Hacks

Open on Thanksgiving: Where to Eat if You Don't Want to Cook

Who says you have to cook on Thanksgiving? If you need a break, have surprise guests in town, or simply don't want to be in the kitchen cooking all day long, never fear: you have options.

How To: Make the Most of Your Thanksgiving Leftovers

There are those who prefer Thanksgiving leftovers to the actual official meal, much like people who prefer cold pizza over hot. I'm definitely in the latter camp. There's something luxurious about enjoying your perfectly cooked turkey and stuffing while wearing sweatpants and not having to make small talk with your weird uncle who drinks too much.

How To: No-Stress Thanksgiving Desserts That Don't Require an Oven

Oven space is scarce on that fated fourth Thursday of November. Even if you can find a spare space for pumpkin pie on the bottom shelf, you risk turkey drippings overflowing from above and ruining your beautiful dessert — not to mention a burnt crust from different temperature requirements. The bottom line is: oven real estate is valuable, and it's tough to multitask cooking for Thanksgiving when every dish requires baking or roasting.

How To: This Thanksgiving, You Can Have Your Booze & Eat It, Too

To some people, Thanksgiving is merely quality time with family and friends that they can't get throughout the rest of the year. To others, it's that one time when it's okay to be a greedy hog and get hammered all weekend long.

How To: 3 Weird & Tasty Ways to Cook Your Thanksgiving Turkey

Roasting turkey is a topic that inspires endless debate among cooks. How do you get the perfect mixture of juicy meat, crispy skin, and flavor? Everyone has a favorite technique, whether it's brining the bird or spatchcocking it. However, if you're ready to move onto Ph.D. levels of turkey cooking, you might just want to look beyond these methods and get genuinely wild.

How To: Time-Saving Food Hacks for the 7 Most Common Thanksgiving Foods

With T-Day on the horizon and approaching rapidly, you are probably in one of two camps. The one that is eagerly awaiting the holiday feast with barely-contained drool. Or the one that involves breathing heavily into a paper bag while worrying about your lack of oven and stovetop real estate, while also bemoaning the lack of multiples of you to get all the prep work done.

How To: Store Thanksgiving Leftovers for Maximum Longevity

By now, you've stuffed yourself with enough cranberry-soaked turkey to last you until next year. Still, there's a formidable amount of leftovers, and you're kidding yourself if you think you won't be craving them when you wake up tomorrow with a food coma/hangover.

News: 5 Common Mistakes That Will Ruin Your Thanksgiving Turkey

When I was 12, for some mysterious reason, my dad put my little brothers and me in charge of cooking the Thanksgiving turkey. Naturally, my brothers and I spent the rest of the day playing hide-in-seek in the backyard and forgot all about the humble bird defrosting in the sink.

Turkey Day Hacks: 7 Alternatives to Traditional Stuffing

When it comes to Thanksgiving, some people live for stuffing (or dressing, if that's what you call it). Personally, I love all stuffing, even the boxed kind. However, even the classics can start to feel a little staid and dull after a while.

How To: 8 Simple Tweaks to Transform Your Boring Pumpkin Pie

Pumpkin pie is a symbol of autumn, and it's the traditional dessert to whip up for your fam when Thanksgiving Day arrives. But year after year of the same old thing can be a total bore if you're not a strict traditionalist. So, we found 8 unique ways to make that pie a little less snooze-fest and a little more interesting.

How To: Make a DIY Roasting Rack for Your Turkey

One of the golden rules to cooking a Thanksgiving turkey is to place it on a roasting rack before it goes into the oven. Missing this step and cooking it directly on the pan will burn the bottom of the bird, resulting in overcooked, dry meat.

News: Tiny Food-Based Works of Art to Drool Over

I don't know about you, but visions of pumpkin pie and cornbread stuffing and big, juicy turkeys are constantly dancing through my head right now. I'm sorry, healthy eating habits, but it's Thanksgiving week, and all I can do is think about food.

News: No, You May Not Pumpkin All the Things [DEBATE]

Guys, this has got to stop. It's not funny anymore. I'll defer to one of my all-time favorite people when it comes to my feelings on this unsavory subject:

How To: Skip the Canned Crap—Microwave Your Own Pumpkin Purée Instead

Maybe you decided to make your own pumpkin pureé because of all the buzz about canned pumpkin actually being squash (which, by the way, is a load of bull: it's made with ugly pumpkins, but pumpkins nonetheless). Or maybe you just wanted to be that person that proudly proclaims that they made everything from scratch for their Thanksgiving feast this year (ahem, me).

How To: 7 Delicious Reasons Why You Shouldn’t Throw Away Stale Bagels

Confession: I love bagels. I love to make them, but above all, I love to eat them. In college I ran a mini-bagel business from my kitchen, and on bagel-making day, it wasn't uncommon for me to eat the circular goodies for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Yet even with my obsession I can't always eat bagels fast enough to keep them from going stale. That's why I started learning ways to use bagels even when they're a day or three past their prime. As it turns out, there are a million and one thin...

News: Take Babka to the Next Level with These 11 Variations

It seems like everything old is new again these days where food is concerned, and that includes the recent renaissance of babka. The name of this rich, rolled yeast bread, with roots in both the Jewish and non-Semitic Eastern European communities, means "little grandmother" in Ukrainian, Russian, and Yiddish.

Pumpkin Mania: 8 Classic & Creative Uses for Your Holiday Squash

Fall is my favorite time of year, yet I cringe every time it begins. Why? Because it seems like every business is in a frenzy to start the Christmas shopping season the day after Halloween ends. For those of us who are fans of pumpkins, that's a buzzkill.

How To: Turn Any Pot Roast Recipe into a Crock Pot One

Fall is here, and it's time for warm, filling meals... that don't involve a lot of effort, because it is getting cold outside and you spent a full day at work wishing you were on the couch with a blanket over your head, dammit.

How To: Clone Taco Bell's Doritos Locos Tacos at Home

Doritos Locos Tacos were the brilliant concoction of a man named Todd Mills who never worked for Taco Bell, and never made any money from his creation. He originally pitched the idea to Frito-Lay, and when they said no, he took matters into his own hands by creating a Facebook page.

How To: Make Perfectly Fluffy Mashed Potatoes Without Adding More Butter or Milk

Mashed potatoes are universally beloved, and for a good reason — they're cheap, tasty, and relatively easy to make. What's more, they're adaptable to just about every dietary regimen, whether you're vegan, gluten-free, or lactose-intolerant. And they're a staple for holidays such as Thanksgiving.

How To: 5 Delectable Ways to Use Up Your Leftover Halloween Chocolate

There's only one day that can top the aftermath of Easter and its copious amounts of leftover candy, and that is November — the day after Halloween. As you come down from your sugar rush and realize you now own more chocolate than your stomach can physically hold in one sitting ... fear not! Here are several ways to turn your Halloween chocolate into delicious snacks and desserts that you can enjoy at your leisure.

How To: Truss a Chicken (Or Any Other Whole Bird) With or Without Any String or Twine

You've probably seen someone in your family truss the turkey on Thanksgiving before roasting it, even if you don't recognize the word. To truss a bird or roast just means to wrap it up as compactly as possible before placing it in the oven, and it's usually done by tying it with string. Trussing a bird is a tradition that's been around for a long time, and a lot of home cooks do it religiously even if they don't know why. It's a highly debated topic with fierce supporters on both sides, but f...

News: Candy Corn Is a National Treasure & Don't You Forget It [DEBATE]

Seriously, what's with all of the candy corn hate? I don't care what anyone says, candy corn is and always has been the perfect Halloween snack for me. Only recently did I realize that not everyone gets as hype as I do about small, sugary vegetables.

How To: Potato Mashers Are So Yesterday: Mash with a Mug & Save Money

The potato masher is one of the most dreaded tools in my kitchen; it always gives me flashbacks to when I had to mash potatoes for Thanksgiving dinners while growing up.

No Preservatives, Please: How to Make Frozen TV Dinners

Please read the following in Rod Serling's voice. Picture, if you will, a mother. She comes home after a long day at the office, relieved that she took some chicken breasts out to thaw and will be able to make a quick and easy dinner for her family. She opens her refrigerator to get the chicken, but to her horror she does not see it… she forgot to take the chicken out of the freezer after all. What will she make for dinner now? How will she feed her family? She has entered…the Panic Zone.

How To: Make Bad Airplane Booze Taste Better (& Save Money, Too)

It's nice to have a drink on an airplane, whether you're taking a flight somewhere fun or for work. However, what's not so nice is the high prices and relatively bad quality of the liquor that's available.

News: 8 Edible Cups That Make Finger Foods a Snap

"You can even eat the dishes," claims the song "The Candy Man Can" from 1971's Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. The idea of edible cups, even back then, grabbed my attention—any kid would much prefer to eat her dish instead of clean it afterward, of course!

How To: Get Crab & Lobster Meat Out Without Any Special Tools

For many of you, the carving fork only comes out at Thanksgiving as an essential turkey-slicing aid. Perhaps you pull it out of the knife block to slice up the occasional roast. But the carving fork (also known as kitchen fork) can be used for many more tasks around the kitchen, and some of the more unusual involve your favorite shellfish.

How To: 8 Essential Tips from the Queen of Foolproof Cooking

Cookbook author, celebrity chef, television personality, and former White House nuclear policy analyst Ina Garten is familiar to many as the queen of foolproof cooking. Also known as the Barefoot Contessa, Ina hones in on techniques and tips that make time in the kitchen far less intimidating to folks of all skill sets. We've rounded up 8 of Ina's most useful cooking tips to help you out—from dinner parties to everyday cooking. Her philosophy is that it's always easier than you think!

News: The All-Natural Secret to Turning Food Purple

Even if you haven't heard of ube (pronounced "OO-beh"), you've probably seen pictures of desserts made with this brilliant purple yam.

News: This Tropical Fruit Is Actually as American as Apple Pie

If you think that "pawpaw" is just an affectionate name for your grandfather or a cute way of talking about your cat's feet, you're missing out on one of the most interesting fruits out there.

How To: 10 Unbelievably Delicious Substitutes for Boring Ol' Croutons

Fall is a time of change. The leaves change color, the weather changes from warm to cool, and we change our clocks to fall back an hour. This last change means that many of us will get home from work in pitch-black darkness; for me, the early onset of night makes me less interested in cooking dinner and more interested in getting in my sweats, throwing leftovers in the microwave, and binge-watching The Affair.

How To: 12 More Delicious Reasons to Dust Off Your Waffle Maker

Your waffle maker might just be the most underutilized tool in your kitchen. This one appliance can make bacon, eggs, hash browns, cupcakes, falafel, mac and cheese, and cinnamon rolls much more quickly and with less mess than traditional methods. Plus, the results all come out waffle-shaped—what's not to love?

How To: Prevent Carved & Uncarved Pumpkins from Rotting

Pumpkin carving and decorating is a favorite October pastime. After you've carved an amazing design or face into a pumpkin or two, you want to show it off through your window or set it out on your porch for the neighbors to see.

Ingredients 101: Why Properly Rinsing Rice, Barley, Farro & Quinoa Is So Damn Important

Many lazy cooks skip rinsing off their grains before they cook 'em, but that's a big mistake for a few reasons. Some grains have coatings on them that need to be rinsed off to cook properly and taste good.