It always feels like we’re pining for more free time during the holiday hustle, but often, when we’re faced with a few days at home to ourselves, we’re too spent to figure out how to enjoy them. Inspired by the release of the all-new Madden NFL 12 from our friends at EA Sports, we decided to spotlight some rewarding holiday activities you can enjoy in your newly discovered down time. Whether you’ve been celebrating Thanksgiving at home this year by choice or by consequence, we’ve come up with ten ways (Madden included) to keep you entertained — and none of them involve stepping foot out the front door. Read More »
File under: funny because it’s true. Grant Snider, of the wonderful Incidental Comics, has mapped out the typical Thanksgiving dinner. Feast your eyes on the Republic of Turkey and its adjacent Cranberry Sauce Bog, and those mountains of stuffing and sweet potatoes bordering the vaguely frightening Untouched Casserole Wilderness, all surrounded by a massive Sea of Gravy. Now that we’ve seen this, we’re pretty sure we’ll be entirely unable to stop picturing it tomorrow, when our plates really are loaded with four kinds of pie. [via Laughing Squid]
Thanksgiving is upon us, and it’s high time to enjoy all of our favorite yearly traditions: the turkey, the stuffing, the pumpkin pie, the awkward family encounters, pretending to care about football… and, most of all, that venerable standby of episodic television, the Thanksgiving show. As best as we can determine, the first weekly series to do a Thanksgiving-centered episode was The Burns and Allen Show, back in 1951; Ozzie and Harriet, Father Knows Best, Make Room for Daddy, and Mr. Peepers quickly followed suit, realizing that a Thanksgiving show offered plenty of fodder for conflict, resolution, and warm holiday cheer. We’ve selected ten of our favorite Thanksgiving episodes — and in the culinary spirit of the holiday, we present them in the ever-popular Zagat’s dining guide format, because why not? Check ‘em out after the jump and add your own in the comments.
Tomorrow is Thanksgiving, so obviously we have something very important on the brain — yes, food. But not only food: this time of year, when we make the pilgrimage to our childhood homes, also makes us think of the books that delighted us as kids, still waiting for us on the shelves, beaten up as they are from many reads. So in case you’re feeling like a literary feast tomorrow, and in honor of nostalgic reading and home-cooked meals on this most belly-stuffing of holidays, we’ve re-created one of the original Redwall feasts — Abbot Mortimer’s Golden Jubilee. Warning: these recipes have not been tested, so take them with a grain of salt. A Redwall Cookbook does exist, but it’s slated for grades 3 to 7 — not a serious chef’s read. Consider this us clamoring for an adult version! Click through to see the famous dishes and recipes of good old Redwall Abbey, and let us know if its fictional feasts have ever inspired your own culinary ambitions. Read More »
Thursday’s meal may not be a crowning moment for the avian kind, but birds have done well making a name for themselves in pop culture. From the lovable Woodstock to Harper Lee’s lessons in morality, the trendy act of microblogging to birds that actually microblog, they have left their tiny tracks all over our consciousness. With anthropomorphic birds (see Big Bird), humans channeling birds (see Björk), and even birds killing humans (see Bird Flu), it seems that the two species have never been more closely linked. Below the jump, we’ve rounded up 40 cultural it birds who did better for themselves than the one on your Thanksgiving table. Read More »
Thanksgiving is a time of coming together, of enjoyment, of abundance — in a word, of food. For centuries, the meal has been an American cultural centerpiece, a moment of epicurean indulgence and familial togetherness. And while we remember the feasts of our childhood with heartwarming nostalgia and salivating mouths, the feasts that have the most power over our imagination are the ones we’ve never actually attended, experienced only through the mind’s eye and the magic of editing. Perhaps it’s because they’re unattainable that they’ve become the focus of our hedonistic fantasies. Or maybe it’s because multimillion-dollar studio budgets went into creating them. We’re too hungry to keep contemplating, so while we raid our fridges, feast your eyes on the most delicious meals in movie history. Read More »
Are you a victim of society’s silly implication that Halloween is the only appropriate holiday for rejoicing in cheesy horror films? Have you been scrambling to watch as many outlandish scary flicks as possible before this spooky season’s end? Slow down, freak-loving folks, we have a solution that will keep your Halloween hunger satiated all year round. That’s right — horror films for every holiday! Can’t decide what to watch with your extended family after Thanksgiving football? ThanksKilling will be a great after-supper snack. Bought a whole king cake for your mouth but nothing for your eyes? Mardi Gras Massacre should do the trick. We’ve got something for all your New Year’s, Hanukkah, and Memorial Day horror needs after the jump.
Everyone knows that it’s not polite to discuss politics or religion at the dinner table. Those rules, of course, go double for massive feasts such as Thanksgiving, when relatives from around the country come together to eat and judge each other. It is a holiday when grandmas insinuate to mothers that teen daughters’ skirts are too short, when years of unspoken ill will can produce mealtime fulminations that give everyone indigestion. So, to ensure that everyone has as relaxing a Thanksgiving as possible, we’ve created this handy list of 10 people and issues to avoid mentioning at all costs.
This is the time of year when, inevitably, there are just too many cooks in the kitchen. Whether it’s your cousin leaning over your shoulder and chiding you about the amount of salt in your potatoes or the hundreds of celebrities shouting about their home-cooked, organic, nutritious-yet-sinfully-tasty fare all over the internet, all the hubbub can be overwhelming. Here at Flavorwire, we get most of our advice from rap lyrics and the Muppets, so we turned to our beloved, slightly un-PC. Swedish Chef for pointers in the cooking department. As it turns out, most of his Thanksgiving lessons fall into the “what not to do” category. (Don’t, for example, shoot holes in biscuits and call them donuts.) After the jump, our favorite culinary tips from the Muppets.
