Making a full Thanksgiving feast for guests can be daunting, for some perhaps even terrifying. The world, and especially Hallmark movies, is full of holiday disaster stories: burnt turkeys, failed desserts, steamed hams. But I'm not bragging when I say that the first Thanksgiving dinner I prepared for my extended family—a little early, this year—was an unmitigated success.
My aunt couldn't stop talking about the black pepper in the biscuits and the sage on the carrots. My uncle went in for the turkey and the apple-sausage stuffing. My father didn't speak at all, unless prompted. He just ate and ate. This was a compliment.
But of course, I had cheated. I had ordered my Thanksgiving in the mail—one of the new breed of Thanksgiving meal kits.
The meal was genuinely home-cooked, of course, prepared mostly from scratch. But the entire seven-platter feast—its ingredients and recipes—had arrived two days before, in a box large enough to house a primal cut of beef. It was Thanksgiving in a box: a $200 “Chef's Table Thanksgiving” meal kit available from sister meal delivery plans Sunbasket and Gobble.
The spread from Sunbasket was vast and generous. The table contained a nearly 3-pound roast of turkey, mounds of mashed potato, pebbled cranberry compote, roasted carrots dressed in miso-sage butter, brussels sprouts dappled with pecorino romano and pancetta, an endless platter of fennel-apple-sausage-stuffing, Gruyère black-pepper biscuits caked more than an inch tall, a tureen of deep brown turkey gravy, a ginger apple crisp waiting in the wings.
Sunbasket is among a new bounty of meal kit companies that aim to ease the stress of the holidays by doing the planning and the shopping for you—big meal boxes tailor-made for those who still want to make a home-cooked meal but for whom the prospect of planning a vast and complicated feast is prohibitive.
Here was my experience with Sunbasket—and some of the other Thanksgiving meal delivery options to get your whole Thanksgiving meal delivered to your home.
Want meal kits for more everyday occasions? See WIRED's guides to the best meal delivery services, and the best plant-based meal delivery kits.
The Sunbasket Chef’s Table Thanksgiving
Somehow I managed to slip past the age of 40 without ever preparing a full holiday feast. In part, I have lived an adult life of Friendsgiving potlucks and Chinatown feasts. But in part, I have been lucky. Well into my midlife, my parents still have the whole extended brood over for the holidays—asking that we bring just a salad, a side, a dessert. I generally bring random experiments: a queso de bola cheesecake, say, or a Hungarian mushroom soup from a local chef's recipe.
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