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Eat Your Way Through Thanksgiving Like a Country Star

Darius Rucker, Dierks Bentley Charles Kelley, Josh Turner, Alan Jackson Dish on Their Favorite Dishes

Whip out those stretchy pants, everybody, especially if you plan to celebrate Thanksgiving like Darius Rucker.

“My favorite part of Thanksgiving is easy,” he says. “It’s food. It’s eating. It’s hanging out with family and getting some great food. Thanksgiving is about giving thanks for all the great things you’ve got, and I always give thanks for the greatest thing I’ve got -- and that’s my family.”

Yes, family and food. That’s what it’s all about. Oh, and turkey, if you ask Dierks Bentley.

“You gotta have a big turkey,” he insists. “Thanksgiving is not possible without a turkey. … You really can’t, to me, cook a turkey wrong.”

And there’s no wrong way to eat one, either. I’ll bet Lady Antebellum’s Charles Kelley would agree with that statement. In fact, he’d probably tell you the more turkey the better -- really the “more-anything-the-better” on Thanksgiving.

Kelley and his brothers actually host an annual eating contest on the big day, starting early in the morning and not stopping until the cows -- or the turkeys -- come home. And their inaugural year was quite memorable.

“We started that morning and weighed ourselves,” he recalls. “And at the very end of the night, we weighed ourselves out, and all three of us equally gained 5 pounds.”

That’s a heck of a lot of bird, y’all.

For Josh Turner, the Thanksgiving spread is all about the deviled eggs. Turner admits deviled eggs are kind of a South Carolina food tradition and reveals he’s never had a bad one.

“It’s like everybody has their own twist on it, but they’re all good,” he says. “But I always loved it when my mama made ‘em.”

But Alan Jackson is the one who has it right, in my book. He’s all about the dressing on Thanksgiving Day.

“My favorite Thanksgiving dish would be the homemade dressing … cornbread-based kind of dressing that we always have with turkey,” Jackson says. “That recipe is a kind of a combination of my mama, and Denise has taken it and perfected it over the years, so that me and my children really enjoy it.”

I feel you, Alan. I have to say my mama makes a mean dressing, too. So good, I can almost taste it now.

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