October

Every year, in early October, I sit down with my husband and go over what we will be doing for the holiday season.  Halloween is always taken by my grandmother’s birthday, so we don’t do anything else.  This year, we will have my family with us for Thanksgiving day, Jeff’s family the day after Thanksgiving and it will just be the four of us for Christmas.

Thanksgiving is our major holiday every year, and it is both mine and Jeff’s favorite holiday.  We plan on re-roofing our house the week of Thanksgiving, so I will be doing a small meal for us and my parents, plus anyone else we know who needs a place for the holiday.  The day after, Black Friday, my husband will undoubtedly hit the stores at 4am to secure the Christmas gift for the kids and then we will have family visiting that afternoon.  I plan on low-key, easy food for the whole weekend since it looks like we will be extremely busy.  I will likely be choosing a ham large enough to feed plenty of folks over two days instead of a turkey.  Sweet potato casserole, green beans, maybe some rolls or sourdough loaf bread.  Pumpkin pie with a coconut flour crust.  Mom might ask for a salad.  Quick, simple and easy.  Dad will ask for my mom to make a pecan pie, the one thing he requests every Thanksgiving.  Mom and Jeff are both cutting carbs to help deal with health issues, so I don’t want to put a lot of carby dishes in front of them so we’ll likely skip the dressing.  I’m sure the kids will oblige in providing plenty of decorations in the days before the meal.

I am still trying to decide on the Christmas Eve meal.  This year, Jeff totally left that ball in my court and informed me that he didn’t really care what I picked as long as his belly was full when the meal was done.  I will likely ask the kids to pick, and I imagine we will wind up with something like homemade pizza.  Today a friend stopped by and told me about using the coconut flour peanut butter pie crust from Bruce Fife’s Cooking with Coconut Flour cookbook and making a mocha pie.  I thought about making a rich and decadent pie involving chocolate filling, whipped coconut milk and that pie crust…. we’ll see what I come up with. We have some parts and pieces of a half-cow still in our freezer, and we found the tenderloin while digging through the other day.  I plan on cooking the tenderloin Christmas afternoon.  If we don’t have snow or freezing cold, I might even grill it or talk Jeff into grilling it for us.  I’ll probably allow the kids to choose the side dishes and help in their preparation.  We will spend a quiet afternoon playing with the kid’s new toy.  The four of us will be getting one joint gift this year. I’d so much rather spend my time in the living room, having fun with the kids, than to spend the whole day in the kitchen and not feel up to or not have time to enjoy the family.  I will be sure to fix some favorite treats around the holidays, with them instead of for them.

As a Southerner, black-eyed peas with some form of pork is traditional on New Year’s Day.  I will likely leave that meal up to my mom and she will ensure that the kids get the pennies in the pot for good luck in the coming year.

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KerryAnn Foster runs Cooking Traditional Foods, the longest running Traditional Foods Menu Mailer on the internet. KerryAnn has over nine years of traditional foods experience and is a former Weston A. Price Foundation chapter leader. Founded in 2005, CTF helps you feed your family nourishing foods they will love. Each mailer contains one soup, five dinners, one breakfast, on dessert and extras. You can learn more about our Menu Mailers at the CTF website. For a free sample Menu Mailer, join our mailing list. You can also join our forum to chat with other traditional foodists and learn more.