It is holiday time again.  To say that our family is a foodie family would be an understatement of vast proportions.  We live the food industry. We subscribe to more cooking magazines than most family know exist.  We watch cooking shows on TV. We have cookbooks from almost every ethnicity on earth and can cook from some of them.  One of my favorite cookbooks in entitled “White Trash Cooking”.  Our holidays are defined by our menus.

My favorite meal, hands down, is Thanksgiving.  It consists of Roasted turkey, cornbread dressing, giblet gravy, green beans, mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce, fruit salad, dinner rolls, and pumpkin pie.  There are very few variations from this menu.  I always cook a slightly larger turkey than we can eat and we make way more dressing than that.  These two items are critical for late night snacking, and meals in the days following.  Dressing, my wife makes the best cornbread dressing in the country.  No, there are no damned walnuts, oysters, or any other foreign matter in her dressing.  It consists of cornbread, biscuits, onions, celery, Swanson’s chicken broth, crushed sage and salt and pepper.  I usually hope the green beans get eaten that day at lunch because they serve no purpose on a late night dinner roll slider containing turkey, dressing, a little dab of cranberry sauce and a spoon of gravy.  Hot or cold, a damned fine snack.

Christmas dinner usually follows the dark meat menu.  That is, prime rib roast, maybe a leg of lamb, or a pork roast.  Some roasted potatoes and other root vegetables.  Mandatory green beans along with some au jus gravy, dinner rolls and a dessert  of some kind.

New Years day is almost always chips, dips and finger food.

Easter Sunday consists mostly of leg of lamb, mint jelly, roasted veggies.

You can almost always tell what season it is by what we eat.  I like it that way.  I like tradition and I dont normally like surprises.  There are things that are just too good to be changed.

Chewey Cowan