Heat and Serve!

For many years I have said that I would be fine if for Thanksgiving we all just had TV Dinners.  This came from countless years of agony and anxiety over the nightmare that was always our family Thanksgivings.  It was the kind of thing that could have become the storyline for a Griswold's Family Thanksgiving without the comedy.  Someone not buying enough basic supplies which then meant  having to fight the other nincompoops at the one grocery store that's open for a stick of overpriced vegan crap butter because it's all that's left or having to bake 10 pies in one oven and having no counter space because the counter is already piled up with unitasker kitchen gadgets coated in an inch of dust....   I honestly hated Thanksgiving and really do have some sort of form of PTSD over it.  For the past 5 years we have finally been able to make some changes and lessen the nightmare even being able to enjoy the holiday, making it our own.  

So this year I decided to do a Thanksgiving theme based after my at-the-end-of -my-rope declaration of the past "I would rather just have a TV Dinner than put up with this thanksgiving nonsense!"

Here is the sideboard in the dining room in Heat and Serve mode:

I printed the large posters at our library back before the pandemic.  They used to have a Large Format Print night a couple of times a month that was free.  

Even though the theme was TV dinners I did make us the traditional meal only I do it simple and easy out of all convenience foods.  It's instant mashed potatoes, stove top stuffing, premade rolls, canned cranberry sauce, frozen peas, and even jar gravy.  We never eat this kind of stuff so that makes it a treat.  I did bake the turkey but that's super easy.

To make the theme really play out I decided to plate our meal looking all TV dinner-fied:

I bought some cheap aluminum baking pans from dollar tree and made the dividers out of foil wrapped cardboard.

And for dessert?  A frozen premade pumpkin pie!