Preparing for Thanksgiving Dinner

It's another wet and rainy November day today in upstate New York. It would be a perfect day to start baking cookies and pies to freeze for Thanksgiving dinner........

Oh wait, the Standard American Diet (SAD)'s version of sweet treats is loaded with harmful, artery clogging, cholesterol building and diabetes contributing ingredients, isn't it? I guess I'll use this time to do something constructive, instead.

So how can those of us who eat mostly healthy, whole, raw, organic, ripe fruits and vegetables do a little advance preparation for the holidays?

We can start now by deciding on menus for over the holidays, and then making our lists and doing the shopping for those items that don't need to be perfectly fresh such as lettuce or fruits, etc. If you do bulk orders online, you will want to leave plenty of time for delivery.

There are some dishes, of course, that can be prepared ahead of time and frozen, even with raw foods. I'm thinking primarily of raw pies like banana-coconut-cream pie, but there are others.

One of the best things about eating raw or mostly raw is that the preparation can be extremely simple and doesn't have to take a lot of time. Of course, you can also get as fancy and complicated as you'd like to, a holiday is a wonderful time to do something special and fancy, but it is not necessary.

Check out my list of recipes and maybe you'll see something different that you'd like to try. I love trying new things, and discovering a new favorite. That "eggnog" is soooooo good - even my carnivorous husband likes it, though he insists it is not eggnog.

Don't forget the presentation, either, when you are serving your dishes. You spent time and energy making them, so you should show them off to their best advantage. I will do an article on food presentation in the very near future.