As Thanksgiving quickly approaches, the stress of meal preparations can be overwhelming. Most of the time, it’s fair to admit that slaving over a stove for hours on end preparing for the whole ordeal is hardly ideal, let alone worth it.
This year, though, you’re in luck. Lucky’s is here to save your bad-at-cooking ass.
Before Thanksgiving, Nov. 21 and 22, local store Lucky’s Market put on their yearly Holiday Tasting Fair to show off “the season’s best offerings.” The event was a soiree of free food from the store itself along with the rest of CoMo. Samples from the store’s premade Thanksgiving meal deal and other store departments were available to customers, pretty much until all the food was gone.
Lucky’s hosts the event every year, and the in-store vendors usually include a popular local salsa company and other local merchants. This year, the store featured a cheese vendor during the first day of the tasting fair, though it’s up to each department manager who they want to bring in.
“It’s local products,” marketing manager Shay Jasper says. “A lot of times they’ll have in a local salsa vendor. We have samples all around the store from each department, so cheese samples, we’ll have pie samples, things like that.”
Lucky’s premade Thanksgiving meal gives customers the chance to “heat and eat” by feeding any holiday dinner party a 14-pound turkey, mashed potatoes, gravy, green beans, stuffing and dinner rolls. The tasting fair served as an opportunity for customers to try everything included in the meal before they decided to purchase one.
“What we want to do is promote that sale of a meal so people can taste everything in that meal (today), starting at 11, basically until we run out of food,” Jasper says.
Preparations for the event include hard work from the culinary team to ensure that the store has enough food for customers to be able to sample everything included in their Thanksgiving dinner package.
“I come in about a couple hours early, and I make sample cups of pies,” Jasper says. “Our culinary team is working really hard to get enough food made, so people can come through and basically have their own mini Thanksgiving meal. So, they’ve prepared all the sides that would come in the dinner package as well as the turkey.”
The supermarket will be hosting another tasting fair for Christmas on Dec. 5. The menu features ham instead of turkey and live Christmas music.