The holidays are upon us! And while many of us are trying to eat healthier...often cutting out sugar, wheat, dairy, meat, even cooked food (!) for health purposes, sometimes our friends and family, who we love to gather with at this time of year, are not.
While it can be difficult to be around for many reasons: we may crave our old foods, or we may have given up something that we feel *everyone* should give up, I find it best to take a non-confrontation and non-judgmental attitude over the holidays, both with ourselves and our friends and family around us.
Over the years I have discovered some things that help:
1. Not making a big deal about different ways I eat. I find that even if I don't make a big deal about it, other people usually do. I just (try to) smile. This is not (necessarily) the time to convert others to my lifestyle!
2. Help in food preparation. It is nice to offer to make a vegetarian gravy, for instance, and vegetarian gravies can easily be made gluten-free by subbing potato starch for flour as a thickener.
3. Offer to make or just bring a dish or two that I know I can eat. Squash stuffed with rice and veggies looks beautiful, tastes delicious, and is often a hit with vegetarians and traditional eaters.
4. A big salad is often a healthy addition to a holiday feast, and not so very unusual (though sometimes lacking) so make and bring one!
The picture above is of a
Raw Food Cranberry Sauce, which is delicious. It is gorgeous served in orange halves (the photo doesn't do it justice, it really is gorgeous!)
Cranberries are extremely high in vitamin C and A, and full of phytonutrients. When we do not cook them all their nutrition is preserved. To make the sauce above, I simply:
Juiced 3 oranges, saving the juice to add to the sauce and saving the orange halves to put the sauce in.
In a high speed blender (I use my vitamix), put
- A package of fresh cranberries (washed)
- Juice from the 3 oranges
- 6-8 dates, pitted
- 1-2 Tbsp raw honey
- 1 tsp cinnamon or pumpkin pie spice
Blend and fill the orange cups.
They are topped with
Candied Pecans, which is simply chopped raw pecans mixed with maple syrup (not raw) and pumpkin pie spice. You can also use walnuts or even wild black walnuts if you have those around. (Here is a
video of how we crack our black walnuts.)
I bet everyone at the holiday table will enjoy these!!
Happy Holidays!
In health,
David and Melissa Sokulski, L.Acs.
This year in May we made dandelion wine. We gathered a gallon of dandelion flowers,
Infused them into a strong tea, added sugar and boiled the tea with oranges, lemons, raisins and cloves.
We added yeast and fermented for weeks, bottled and left them to ferment for weeks more, until finally corking. .
We left the wine to sit until solstice, then we tried it. It is delicious: sweet, spicy with a kick. To keep the wine medicinal, the trick is not to drink the whole bottle at once! A common dose which cleanses the liver is a tablespoon to a small wineglass.
Some Europeans believed fairies were involved in the process of wine making: turning bitter medicine like dandelions into sweet wine. There is something magical about it! Herbal wines can be made from all sorts of herbs: roots and bark are decocted (boiled) into strong teas while flowers and leaves are usually infused (steeped in boiled water.)
It's a nice way to remember the freshness of spring during the darkest time of year.
Happy holidays and happy new year!!
