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📺 National TV Dinner Day 2025 🍽️
You’ll agree that many a Hump 🐪 Day has seen us pulling little plastic trays from the microwave. This National TV Dinner Day has us looking back at times when those used to be crimped aluminum trays that we pulled from the regular oven.
📺 Radio Dinners? 🍽️
If it weren’t for Philo T. Farnsworth, inventor of television, we’d still be eating frozen radio dinners. ~Johnny Carson
Here’s a little secret…
I come from a world where everybody didn’t have microwave ovens.
I actually remember when TV dinners were packaged in crimped aluminum trays with little sections and an aluminum lid.
You heated them up in the oven. Like, the actual oven where you make your 🦃 Thanksgiving Day 🥧 turkey 🍗.
That was actually the only oven we had when I was little.
Later, we got a toaster oven.
The aluminum trays worked just as well in the toaster oven and was a convenient alternative if you were just making one or two.
If everybody was having TV dinners, you could just put them on a baking sheet and do them all at once in the regular oven.
In the 80s, we got a microwave oven and the TV dinner people started putting them in microwave-safe plastic trays instead of the crimped aluminum.
The same basic configuration was maintained in the plastic trays.
You had your main dish in the big compartment, two or three sides and maybe a dessert.
The cobbler, cranberry sauce, spiced apples or mini-cake were a treat that baked or nuked right with the dinner.
The convenience made a busy day go more smoothly and they still satisfy a need for a quick meal when you’ve been running around all day.
What started off as a pragmatic solution to a surplus of frozen turkey took the world by storm over the succeeding decades.
Yet another incredible American invention that people take for granted. Peel the lid off and wait four and a half minutes. Miraculous…
📺 Retro Comfort Cuisine 🍽️
20 Classic TV Dinners.. Only Gen X Kids Will Remember!
In order to have a TV dinner, you needed a TV tray! I mean, if you want to do it right.
The full experience is to set up a TV tray in front of the sofa or easy chair and put on something everybody can enjoy watching.
Whether it’s the news, a movie, a favorite sitcom, whatever, we’d gather around the living room with our TV dinners on our TV trays and share a family experience.
People say you shouldn’t watch TV with dinner.
I’d say, don’t watch TV with dinner all the time.
There’s nothing more uniting for a family than sitting around the dinner table, engaging with each other over a home-cooked meal.
There’s nothing more special than sharing a TV dinner around a favorite show or movie now and again.
Wizard of Oz, Super Bowl, Ten Commandments, something meaningful to the whole family is the perfect opportunity to sit together around the living room and share space and joy.
There can be too much of a good thing. If you eat TV dinners around the tube all the time, it ceases to be special and fun. It’s actually just lazy.
There’s a lot to be said for putting some effort in on the family’s dinner, but occasionally, the chef deserves an in-home dinner date.
That’s why we still enjoy TV dinners. Leave the prep to the frozen food vendor and the cooking to Chef Mic(rowave).
Put on something awesome (like Star Trek ) and enjoy some quality time sitting side by side with your special someone for a treat…
📺 25 Minutes 🍽️
For many families, though, TV dinners were just the ticket. Pop them in the oven, and 25 minutes later, you could have a full supper while enjoying the new national pastime: television. ~Kovie Biakolo, Smithsonian Magazine (November 2020)
Kelly and I have a lot of shows we like to watch together. We also have a number of shows we each wish the other would watch with us.
For the life of me, I don’t know why she won’t watch The Wire end to end with me.
Then again, I don’t know why she would ever want me to watch The Amazing Race. Good God, I hate that show so much.
There’s no accounting for taste.
All things being equal, I prefer writing to watching.
I’ve got a few in progress. As previously mentioned, I’m still working on The Sentinels: New Blood and have been letting my subconscious run cycles on 💡🎄🌟 Goodness & Lights 🌟🎄💡.
I’m curious to see which bits of retro-lore will tease themselves out in this year’s Holiday Season Serial Romance.
Retro-lore? What do you mean, Rob?
It’s been established since my very first Christmas RomCom that these take place in The Sentinelsverse.
Name drops, cameo appearances, little tidbits scattered across the holiday stories reflect actual facts in the Core13.
Should be interesting to see which tidbits slip out. I don’t plan them. They just occur organically as I write.
I didn’t know that Baked Alaska was Tim Wisler’s favorite dessert until I wrote it.
I had an idea that Hellion would have a comic book style public square throwdown with the Silver Age team of the Sentinels, but I didn’t realize a piece of his armor would become a collector’s item until I wrote it.
I didn’t know about Meirhe’s hoodie phase (to cover the enormous bruise on her forehead after the assassination attempt) until I wrote it.
These things always come up in conversation between characters with absolutely no skin in the game.
It’s simply characterization of people in a different state several years later, and it always surprises me.
If you think a plot twist is cool in a movie or TV series, you ought to see how it feels when one pops out of your own brain as you’re writing.
That’s entertainment…
That’s all for today. See you back on Saturday for Uncle Sam…