The Banana Clip of Cooking Magazines

Thanksgiving menu - CHECK! (Finally).  I feel like I'm a couple days behind on this one.  Usually I have  it done by the 1st of November.  OK, maybe it's a couple of weeks behind.
Anyways, it's done and I'm excited.  I was never a fan of Thanksgiving until I started hosting it.  Now I LOVE IT!  I try to add a new dish to the menu each year to go along with the standards.  So today I hauled out my stack of Taste of Home magazines from  past October/Novembers and started going through them.  I sang the praises of Taste of Home, in my early post about Menu Planning, and it's abundance of easy recipes.  But I noticed as I thumbed through issues that went back as far as 2000 (YES, I AM A MAGAZINE HOARDER! I have Martha Stewart Living issues that go back to the '90s!), that the transformation of Taste of Home in the past 2-3 years has been incredible.  In my mind, TOH was the "banana clip" of cooking magazines;  useful, but a LITTLE outdated.  I used it in the deep, dark corners of my kitchen...but would never use it in public ;-P  I re-subscribed to it after I received the TOH Best Recipes Collection Cookbook for Christmas a few years ago.  By purchasing the book, you receive a year's subscription to the magazine.  Boy was I surprised when the first issue arrived in the mail!  Banana clip no more! Gone are the features on dowdy country kitchens populated by goose and heart wallpaper, pictures of great-grandma contributors/editors, reliable, yet not that exciting, recipes and boring photography.  Bring on bright feature articles, focus on functional and modern kitchens, interesting product recommendations, what's new in food and family-focused products and healthy, inventive recipes using a wide variety of ingredients...yet still EASY! I found 3 new recipes from the October and November, 2011 issues -  and managed to plan almost the entire month of December dinners from those two issues as well.  If you're looking for a place to get started running a well-oiled family kitchen, I  recommend getting a subscription to Taste of Home STAT.

TASTE OF HOME TRANSFORMATION

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2008

2012 Christmas Issue

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