DIY FOR YOUR THANKSGIVING TABLE:

Happy Thanksgiving week! I LOVE Thanksgiving!  And we host it every year, we all love to cook so it's a team effort. I try to change it up a bit every year and this year we will be having Thanksgiving alfresco in our vegetable garden. Inspired by Joanna Gaines and my Instagram addiction to farm house chic. It's a great holiday to take your table from drab to fab for very little money and very little effort with this DIY. So Sunday morning we took to the hills and foraged. (My new favorite word). We collected lots of pine cones, branches with holly berries, and sticks. The buckets were $1.99 at our 99 cents store. (Yes, our 99 cent store sells things for more than 99 cents, eye roll). Still, how could you go wrong with a galvanized bucket for $1.99! I may or may not have bought all they had. When we got home we arranged them into beautiful Thanksgiving center pieces. Perfect for the rustic look we're going for this year. I also asked everyone coming to bring a few things they have collected from nature so we can arrange a few more buckets together. So much fun, so simple, and so cheap :)

Here's a few other ideas and pics from our past Thanksgivings.

 Lots and lots of candles.

Keep your Halloween pumpkins and paint them for Thanksgiving.

 I like to mix up my dishes.

Move it outside if you're in a warm climate. Hang lights from the trees.

 

Mix up textures and patterns.

Wishing you a wonderful Thanksgiving filled with home, heart, love, blessing, over eating, and a fabulous table.

HEALTHY UP YOUR HOLIDAY FOOD:

I decided to healthy up Rosh Hashanah dinner yesterday. Rosh Hashanah is the Jewish New Year and if you know anything about Jewish in general, every holiday is about food.  Food, food and more food. Delicious, artery clogging, fattening, bloat inducing food. Oh, and guilt if you don't eat the food.

Traditionally on the new year you are supposed to eat sweet things, so you'll have a sweet year. Makes sense, very practical. Unless like me, sugar is your nemesis. I love it, it hates me. Once the holiday season starts to roll around it's a real challenge to stay away from the white poison, as I call it. Even at Thanksgiving my husbands amazing, (made from scratch), creamed corn has a secret crunchy topping on it that everyone loves. Here's the secret, (sorry handsome), it's ground up Captain Crunch cereal. Captain Crunch!!!! We can't blame him, he's from the Midwest.

My memories of Jewish Holidays often revolve around some of my favorites, Matzo Ball soup, Matzo Bri, Matzo Pudding and Matzo Kugel. You get the picture. Matzo is made out of flour and water. That's it. Kind of like paste running through your veins. Matzo, I love it, it hates me. Also, the famous meat of all Jewish Holidays ~ the Brisket. A big slab of meat smothered with sweet gravy.  

Since I no longer eat red meat, and being the rebel that I am, I decided to make a turkey. I went to three markets and no one had any turkeys. The first meat dept. manager looked at me like I was crazy and felt the need to tell me that Thanksgiving is in November.  The second offered me a pre-cooked pre-wrapped turkey breast that looked like a big bald bunch of jellied meat substitute and the third meat dept. manager showed me to the packages of turkey legs and wings and said that's all they had. I asked him what they did with the rest of the turkey???

So I bought a chicken. Since we have chicken a lot I took to my trusty Pinterest food board to try and find a fabulous recipe for a chicken. And I did. Chicken rosemary (from our garden) stuffed with apple with new potatoes, sweet potatoes and garlic cloves that caramelized just thrown in the pan and were so delicious. The apple was the sweet part, for the new year. I used a little chicken broth in the pan instead of the wine it called for. The house smelled heavenly, and the chicken was amazing. Find the recipe here.

As a side dish I made Tzimmes. I had never made this traditional Jewish dish before. It called for brown sugar, that's a no, so I used honey. I couldn't really find one good recipe I liked so I read a few and then made up my own. I do that. I cut up carrots and dried fruit, cranberries, apricots, even a prune, and used the juice on an orange that mixed with the honey to form a glaze that was really delicious. And I put in a cinnamon stick too. Dried fruit naturally has a lot of sugar so I did not add any other except the honey.

The Moist Apple Cake was a random recipe I saw on line from Egglands Best, I couldn't pin it so here it is, very easy.

• 4 cups of diced apple
• 2 cups of flour (I used gluten free)
• 1 1/2 cups of sugar (I used a little honey, you could also use stevia)
• 1/2 cup unsweetened apple sauce
• 2 large beaten eggs
• 2 teaspoons baking soda
• 2 teaspoons cinnamon
• 1 teaspoon of nutmeg
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 cup chopped walnuts

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. In a large bowl combine eggs, sweetener, applesauce and diced apples. Mix in egg and nuts. In another bowl sift flour, baking soda, salt cinnamon and nutmeg (I must confess I never sift). Add to apple/egg mixture and stir until mixed well. Pour into a greased 13 x 9 inch baking dish. I used two small bunt pans instead. Bake for 1 hour.

Whatever your traditional foods are, remember there is always a way to make them healthier. You can still have your cake and eat it too :)

Here are some common and healthy ingredient swaps;

• One banana = two eggs
• 1/2 cup of applesauce = 1/2 cup of butter
• One cup of Greek yogurt = one cup of sour cream 
• One cup of crushed nuts = one cup of bread crumbs
• One cup mashed avocado = one cup of mayo
• Substitute dates for sugar 
• Substitute nut flour for 1/2 all purpose flour

BE WELL WEDNESDAY:

Helloooo ~ I have been excited about this and wanting to share it for a while now as I have been really into making it for weeks. And I finally took some pictures!  It's one of those 'trendy' things right now but it's actually been around for thousands of years. And it's called Bone Broth. AKA 'Liquid Gold' or the 'Magic Elixer' that saved Lakers star Kobe Bryant's career. Wow that's a lot of hype!

I first read about Bone Broth in an article about a European model who said that drinking a cup of bone broth a day was her entire beauty routine! And when I mentioned it to a nutritionist friend she got really excited and encouraged me to drink, drink, drink up!

Then I read this article about how basketball star Kobe Bryant's joints were saved when the team nutritionist Dr.Cate Shanahan began feeding the team bone broth.

And then I couldn't find bones and quickly learned that everyone in my neighborhood was apparently making bone broth and I was advised by the butcher at our Whole Foods to come on Wednesday mornings when they put the bones out because by Wednesday evening they're all sold out!

It's important that the bones are good quality and come from pasture raised and non gmo meat. The better the quality the more pricey. You can buy a package of bones at your local market for about $3.00 and a package from Whole Foods for $13.00 but you will see there is a huge difference in the amount of bone marrow you will be getting, and that's what you want, lots of marrow. It's totally worth it if you can afford good quality bones.  And it makes so much broth, from one package I usually can fill about 7-8 ounce mason jars.

Before I get to how easy this broth is to make, here are the basic reasons it's so amazing;

• It's extraordinarily rich in protein and minerals.
• It's a Super Food for your immune system.
• A cup a day is said to repair Leaky Gut Syndrome and other stomach issues.
• It contains Glucosamine and Chondroiton to help with and ward off arthritis and osteoporosis.
• It's full of Collagen for your skin and hair (remember the model.)
• It's full of Gelatin supporting bones, skin, hair and nails. 
• In Chinese Medicine it's considered to strengthen our essence, qi, as well as build blood, nourish the kidneys, liver, lungs and spleen.
• Rich in Calcium, Magnesium, Iron, Phosphorus, Sulpher and other trace minerals.
• It also contains Marrow, Cartilage, Glycine, and Proline.

What you will need to make your bone broth;

• A big pot.
• A package of good quality bones - you can use beef, chicken, turkey or fish.
• Filtered water.
• Optional - vegetables and/or spices of your choice.
• A big colander/strainer.
• Storage containers - I like using mason jars so it's already in portions.
• Time - it's best to let it cook on a low flame for about 8 hours.

See, so easy! You can use this broth as a base in any kind of soup or drink it plain, it's really good! I like to cook beef bones with an onion and some stalks of celery and a couple of carrots. When it's done, just strain the veggies out, it's delicious, like the best chicken soup you've ever had, (even though it's beef bones!) It needs salt though. You'll see hunks of marrow and gelatin which look like the 'fat' my mother used to skim off soup and throw away, who knew? You'll want to leave that in the broth. It freezes well and should look like gelatin. 

  

 

Easy, nutritious and delicious!