Here’s a holiday cooking scenario that I just know you’ve experienced before: You open your favorite cookbook and flip through your favorite dog-eared, food-stained recipes—the ones that your mom and grandmother cooked before you; recipes so familiar you can practically smell the flavors emanating from the pages. So you plan out your Thanksgiving menu to the very last detail, buy all the ingredients and, the night before, start prepping your feast—that is, until the phone rings, and it’s your 14-year-old niece telling you that she’s become a vegan and will not be eating meat or dairy. Can she have Tofurkey instead?
Then your sister calls to tell you that, in an effort to thwart holiday weight gain, she’s converted to a completely macrobotic diet. Your brother-in-law refuses to eat carbs—only protein—so can the presence of bread and mashed potatoes please be minimal? A great-aunt is allergic to pumpkin; someone else can’t have cinnamon. Pretty soon, your perfect holiday menu has become a Tofurkey-laden, macrobiotic, carb-free, pumpkinless mish-mash—and without any cinnamon to top it all off!
Believe me, I have so been there. For years, I catered my holiday dinner menus to the needs of my guests—to the point where there were sometimes two different kinds of mashed potatoes, two different kinds of cranberry sauces (some prefer fresh, some are Ocean Spray canned purists) and even several different main dishes on the table. Then one year, I realized I was about to pull all my hair out—so I took a deep breath and a step back.
Sure, I thought, the holidays are about food—but most importantly, they’re about being together with family and friends. If you don’t cater to everyone’s tastes, what’s the worst that can happen? After all, you’re the one doing the cooking—so cook for yourself and savor tradition. Cook what you enjoy. Focus on togetherness—chances are, once your family and friends see you doing that, they’ll do it, too.
Happy holiday eating,
Judi