Happy Thanksgiving!

I love food. Good food. Not drive thru fill-your-gut-but-feel-like-crap-5-minutes-later type of ‘food’. Real nourishment. The kind that feeds your tummy AND your soul. In today’s daily post, we are asked to “describe a favorite childhood meal. The one meal that was a treat, meant “celebration” or was pure comfort!”

Meal prep was fun in our house. My mom loves to cook and taught me to love it as well. Some of our best family conversations were around food preparation, at the dinner table, and sometimes the coffee table where we ate dinner. I remember conversations over potato peeling, chats over veggie chopping, as well as being asked to grab some ingredients from the garden for dinner that evening. There is nothing fresher than your own backyard garden!

The best, yummiest, celebratory meal has always been turkey day. It’s the day of the perfect bite. My perfect bite. Like most families, we have certain food traditions around the holidays. My favorite Thanksgiving foods are always the same; white meat turkey, mashed potatoes, corn, stuffing, and a roll. A tiny little morsel of all of these ingredients perched atop that piece of bread create the perfect Thanksgiving bite. I love that bite. And I recreate it every year, even as an adult.

While I don’t do the canister stuffing anymore, and opt for healthier versions of what we prepared when I lived at home, I loved this last Thanksgiving when we prepared all dishes from scratch and my mom and I and some friends were gathered once more in the kitchen. We’ve been fortunate to live close to my family this tour and have created wonderful memories for our children with them. I love that even as time goes on, we can continue to pass on our love of all things cooking, but in a healthier direction.

That perfect Thanksgiving bite is my favorite, partly for the food itself, but mostly for the memories made in the preparation of that bite.