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Hello, hello, welcome back to your mama's kitchen.

This is the place where we explore how we are shaped as adults by the kitchens that we grew up in as kids.

I'm Michelle Norris.

And as we get ready for all that Thanksgiving will bring

to our kitchens and dinner tables this week, we at your mama's kitchen wanted to take you down

memory lane to some of our favorite conversations with guests to give you some fun ideas

and what to put on your table and how you can be the hostess with the mostest this season.

I remember when Gail King told us about her surprising secret to serving up a tender turkey.

It's not something you might expect.

Thanksgiving was a big deal because she did all the cooking, but, you know, she did all the cooking always.

She had a thing that we always each had to slap the turkey before it went in the oven.

Wait, what?

Yes, exactly right.

Slap the turkey.

Was this superstition? Was it? Because my mom said, I think that was just her way of engaging us. She said that it made the turkey more tender. And so we would all have to come in the kitchen, line up and do a... On a raw turkey? Yep. You know, he was all basted and all that good stuff.'d all slap it, and she said that would make it more tender.

And now all of my sisters do that with their kids and their family. Everybody has to come in and slap the turkey. Okay, there are going to be people all over America slapping their turkeys on Thanksgiving because of this. Because my mom said that it made it more tender. Okay. Not everybody likes turkey. and if you are personally not a fan of turkey,

Pete Holmes might have a different show-stopping protein for your dinner table. And yet another interesting way to cook it. And when I say interesting, I mean interesting. Here's how he describes his family's holiday table. And shall we say unusual tradition?

There's a lot of smoked fish. It was a lot of pickled fish. Herring. Haring. There was eel.

We would eat eel, like just a slice of eel. Like you knew what it was. It was a, you were eating an eel off the bone.

And then later it got kind of fancy.

She would steam,

...