I never liked Thanksgiving much. Actually I have always loved the celebration of the harvest with a Thanksgiving meal, just not the food. Even in childhood I just didn’t like meat. Yams with marshmallows? Yuck. Mashed potatoes—generally yummy, just not with gravy. Stuffing inspired a special kind of gag reflex. Even cranberry sauce just didn’t do it for me. I will readily admit a great love for homemade apple pie, but pecan pie—not so much.

A Vegetarian Thanksgiving

Becoming a vegetarian in my late teens I was ecstatic when Thanksgiving rolled around. Not only did I now have a valid excuse to not eat that horrible turkey stuff, but I also had an opportunity to show off my vegetarian cuisine. Thanksgiving became a unique challenge to cook something even more delicious than the turkey so that all the meat eaters would covet my meal rather than enjoying their turkey. Over the years each Thanksgiving holiday meal has brought out the best in my culinary skills, with long hours spent pouring over cookbooks in search of a recipe both unusual and scrumptious enough to take grand prize at the family dinner table.

A Locavore Thanksgiving

A new Thanksgiving challenge emerged last year as our family had recently made a commitment to being Locavores. Now our entire meal had to be sourced from local farmers and represent food that was either in season or had been preserved by us. Some may interpret this idea using the Spanish root of Loca, meaning crazy woman. Believe it or not, Locavore was voted the top new word entering the Oxford American Dictionary last year, meaning one who eats exclusively, or at least primarily, from their foodshed.

It was a bit crazy, really, August and September found us madly canning tomatoes and pasta sauce, freezing pesto, husking, cooking, and freezing the kernels from over twelve dozen ears of corn, and making countless jars of jam from the blackberries that grow in wild abundance all around our region. The quest for food security, and the fear of being stuck eating nothing but potatoes all winter was enough to boost our commitment to food preservation from intrigue into devotion.

A Locavore Menu: Some New Ways to Give Thanks

With thanksgiving just around the corner I thought I’d share with you a few of our lessons learned as Locavores:

1. Cranberry sauce, when homemade rather than from a can, is really quite delicious. Most things, by the way, when homemade, taste a whole lot better than when made in a factory months ago.
2. If we were to be turkey eaters, we could reserve a freshly “harvested” turkey from a local farm for our thanksgiving table rather than one that had traveled for many long miles to reach our table.
3. A rather delicious fresh green salad can be made from fall greens—kale, endive, radicchio— and these can all be easily grown in a container on your porch.
4. You can make your own fresh butter from local organic cream, and if you’re really lucky you’ll be able to access some local wheat and make freshly baked bread to go with it. If not, some squash or freshly dug potatoes will make do…
5. There are actually hundreds of varieties of apples, and the perfect apple pie can be made by mixing just the right varieties to get the perfect balance of juicy sweetness and chewy goodness. Rambo and Rhode Island Greenings varieties are excellent choices—but you’ll have to try your local organic apple farmer to get these varieties. They are not to be found at the corner grocer.

If you find even one of the above ideas inspiring, give this year’s Thanksgiving meal a local flavour. Just as we travel out to the tree farm at Christmas, why not travel out to a local organic farm for thanksgiving? As you choose from the bounty of their harvest for your meal you may find a whole new spirit of thanksgiving emerging. We enjoy rich, fertile land, skilled and devoted local farmers, and the opportunity to reconnect with some of the old ways that have nurtured our people through the ages. Happy thanksgiving y’all. We have much to be thankful for.

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Photo courtesy of guldfisken