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4 Tips For A Successful Thanksgiving

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Food tends to define Thanksgiving Day - and the particular dishes that define it seem to vary by region, neighborhood and family. 

On Think, guest host Courtney Collins talked with Dallas Morning News restaurant critic Leslie Brenner and television chef and restaurateur Tiffany Derry about tips for a successful holiday.

And in the second hour we spoke to Jeremiah Tower, author of “Table Manners- How To Behave In The Modern World, And Why Bother,” about the dos and don’ts of dining.

Think Hour 1

http://traffic.libsyn.com/kerathink/KERA_Think_11-23-16_HR_1.mp3

Think Hour 2

http://traffic.libsyn.com/kerathink/KERA_Think_11-23-16_HR_2.mp3

1. Try something different.

“Honestly, I like a little bit of something different. We’ve been having turkey the same way every year. My family is such a large family that everyone has their dishes that they make. My grandmother makes the turkey and she also makes the duck, and it’s always the same. It’s fantastic. I’m sorry grandma I’m not saying that I don’t love the turkey, but I’m just saying it’s always the same so I am a fan of taking the bone out of the turkey and roulading it so that you can have something a little bit different.” – Tiffany Derry

2. Make a list.

“Make a list of what you want to serve … After my shopping lists and the lists of what I’m going to make, I start backwards like what time you want to sit down. Then kind of make a list backwards about what you have to do at each step of the way. What time the turkey has to go in. What time you want to flip it over. What time your stuffing goes in. Once you do that, you can look and see what you actually really have to do.” – Leslie Brenner

3. Don’t just offer to help.

“Helping out, you know its good manners to offer, but it’s much better manners to actually do it. So if you see wine bottles to be opened and there’s a wine opener there, no one assumes that those corks are going to jump out of the bottles by themselves, so go over and do it. I hate people coming and saying, ‘Well, what can I do?’ Well when it’s perfectly obvious, you know you can pour water, you can open bottles of wine or just sit down.” – Jeremiah Tower

4. Don’t talk about politics.

“These days that’s so volatile I think I would stay with sex and religion just to keep everybody safe. And also it’s getting a bit much now I’m sort of tired of hearing all that conversation. I think I’d rather talk about somebody’s vacation or whatever they saw in a museum or the book they’ve read.” – Jeremiah Tower