Good Morning and Happy Thanksgiving! This day is one of my most favorite days of the year, and this year it is even more special. I am still here in this world and I get to watch the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. Watching this parade brings back the memory of discovering Santa Claus when I was young lad living in a small town in Western North Carolina. Also, Thanksgiving would mark the start of the Christmas holiday season and the knowing that snow would soon be coming. As a kid, a snow day in the winter was like one of the most special days of the school year. It meant me and my friends could go sledding down the one street that was favored by all of the kids in town. What more can I say. Good time memories.
Thanksgiving is also the day that I typically cook a family feast including a golden-brown turkey. My favorite side is candied yams in a brown sugar sauce covered in melted marshmallows. However, this year I needed to consider how I would cook this family feast now knowing that so many of the ingredients I traditionally use will need to be changed to support heart healthy eating. I questioned if I could even meet this challenge since I would use lots of butter and dark brown sugar in my family feast. I have never used a lot of salt in my cooking so this I felt was not an issue.
It has been almost three weeks post event and I am feeling pretty good and excited for the day. We got a free turkey this year and I have been collecting up all of the various ingredients I would be using with limitations on quantities. So, this year instead of using a pound of butter for basting the turkey I need to come up with different ingredients for basting, but I still used some butter. I think there is a saying that everything is better with butter. You can say the same for bacon. I also needed to reduce the amount of dark brown sugar and butter for my candied yams as well. This was typically the one day of the year that I stuffed myself with sweets including several glasses of yummy eggnog while preparing the family feast and watching the parade.
The family feast typically consists of slow roasted turkey, stuffing both inside the turkey and in a baking dish, canned jellied cranberry sauce, candied yams, mashed potatoes, gravy, a vegetable of choice, and crescent rolls. I also make a homemade orange cinnamon cranberry sauce too. No wonder I had developed a man-belly over the years. Our family feast would feed us through Saturday, and sometimes on Sunday, which was nice.
On Friday we got up early and headed out to the Christmas Tree farm to cut down our tree for the season. We have to leave early because the line to the farm forms quickly and we could be sitting in this line for over an hour or so if we don’t get the timing just right. Cutting down our tree has become a family tradition and the girls love to find the perfect tree. Sometimes it seems to take forever searching the mountain side for our perfect tree. We try to stay on the upslope so we are dragging the tree down the mountain side to where it is prepared for the journey home. We have been going to this same tree farm since the girls were born and even before then.
We typically decorate the tree and the house over the Thanksgiving weekend. On Saturday I dug out the holiday decorations which are buried below the stairs which is accessible from the basement storage room. This effort requires me to become a contortionist for an hour or so in order to get the 20 plus storage containers out from under the stairs and up to the main floor. This year was a little more challenging in effort since I felt that I had not recovered my strength that I had prior to the event. I did complete the task at hand and we began to make the house festive for the holidays. Of course, once we finish our decorating activities I have to put the containers back. At this point in the weekend I have a very sore back and strained muscles, but I am happy to get ready to celebrate extra hard this holiday season. Cheers!
“If you have experienced a major medical event, how did you celebrate your first holiday season post event. Please share with me in the comments box or by email.”