November is here! November is here!
Twenty-eight days until Hanukkah and Thanksgiving and fifty-five days until Christmas. This year ends is sixty-one days. These countdowns make a good chunk of me want to run around in a circle, screaming and waving my arms in complete senseless panic. The remaining parts are jumping up and down with excitement and a “”bring it on” mentality. Ready or not, the holidays are upon us.
Typically I begin a new month with my dinner menu for the month. November and January, however, are our detox months. After inhaling more candy than I care to admit in October and more cookies and delectables in December, November and January are good months to cleanse. We don’t detox the entire month, just somewhere between fourteen and twenty-one days.
For November, my husband and I will do the Reboot Your Life 14-day detox. Check out the reboot options at www.rebootyourlife.com. Vast amounts of fruits, vegetables, juice, olive oil, seasonings, coconut water, herbal tea and not much else. This reboot has gnarly moments as your body adjusts from the candy binge but you feel great as you progress through the two-week process. After fourteen days, we’ll decide if we want to continue for another week. Sometimes we do, sometimes we don’t. I’ll keep you posted.
The hardest part of this diet is planning, shopping and preparing different food for the kids while you’re drinking your blended herbivore dinner. We find it philosophically wrong to feed them processed frozen food while we eat as pure, clean and organic as possible. We will incorporate our soups and veggie dinner options with their meals and stock up on the fruits and veggies they enjoy. Their meals will be protein and whole grain loaded as well.
You’re on your own this month. Go forth and cook.
As you know, I have huge disdain for magazines that only publish five dinners a week menus. Magazines have let me down again this month, specifically Bon Appetit and Martha Stewart Living. Both magazines, BOTH, promote serving Ocean Spray Cranberry Sauce from the can on Thanksgiving. Both magazines have published multiple recipes for cranberry sauce or cranberry relish over the years, why now are they simultaneously promoting the canned variation?
Don’t get me wrong, I was raised on the canned variety. My mom would jiggle the jellied mass out, slice into perfect thin, even circles then fan the circles on a bed of lettuce. Since I have been hosting Thanksgiving for over 15 years, I make fresh cranberry sauce. Berries + sugar + water = sauce. Easy and delicious and lots of it. Plus, fresh doesn’t have that tinny-straight-from-the-can taste. Yet, I always buy a can of Ocean Spray cranberry sauce for that last turkey sandwich or plate of leftovers that outlasted the batch of homemade cranberry sauce.
One of my favorite mantras that I say to my kids – “Just because you can, doesn’t mean you get to.”
You “can” go to a grocery store or restaurant and have the entire Thanksgiving meal prepared. I don’t subscribe to food magazines that supply recipes to be told to buy a can of pre-made. I find this shameful. A simple case of doing the job you’re paid to do. Provide recipes, not grocery store aisle numbers. Provide dinner menus for thirty or thirty-one nights, not skimp and provide twenty.
As I climb off my soap box (which I have been waiting weeks to climb upon), I apologize for no monthly menu. I don’t get paid to post menus. This blog is based on my whims, my adventures and my reality.
My reality is to clean up my diet and body, be healthy and well so I can totally gorge on my entirely homemade Thanksgiving dinner and then take a nap.
I am thankful for you, my faithful readers. Thank you. Magazines, not so much.
multi-hyphenated-me 