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Our Local Thanksgivings
We hope you and your families had a wonderful Thanksgiving! At Price-Pottenger, we took on the #LocalThanksgiving challenge in our kitchens and at our tables to share what’s possible!
STEPHANIE
For me in Austin, Texas, it began with a bountiful harvest from my local community gardens, including lettuce and other greens, butternut squash, lion’s mane mushroom, garlic scapes, rosemary, and peppers!
One of the highlights was the lion’s mane mushroom we harvested.
Preparing to assemble the chili and bone broth!
The chili featured deer hunted by my next-door neighbors, with the butternut squash, lion’s mane, and shishito peppers from the gardens!
Bone broth with a base of local oxtail and pasture-raised chicken from my farmers’ market (flavored with non-local coconut, curry, and lime).
When my guests arrived, their local contributions included deviled eggs from the local butcher, home-brewed kombucha, deer sausage hunted by another friend’s dad, and we dressed our garden-harvested salad with local olive oil from Texas Hill Country Olive Company.
In addition to the feast, they all enjoyed checking out copies of the Journal of Health and Healing! We were able to build connections between our local gardens, herbalist, chiropractor, fermenters, and other neighbors. It was a fabulous local food- and health-freedom success!
— Stephanie Welch
NORA
I live on a remote wilderness homestead, 100% off-grid in the mountains of Idaho. Over the last few years of living here, we have been working tirelessly to create the necessary infrastructure to live as self-sufficiently as humanly possible. A goal we set for this year was to have a Thanksgiving feast that was 100% (or as close to 100% as possible) derived from this very land.
The only things that did not come from the land were some of the seasonings, Himalayan salt, gluten-free pie crusts, a few drops of organic stevia for the pumpkin pie, a drizzle of aged Balsamic vinegar, and the duck fat I used to sauté things in (I do have ducks on the property, but I mainly use them for their eggs).
The menu consisted of:
- Rabbit roast (garlic, salt and homestead grown rosemary, prepared in a slow cooker)
- Sautéed broccoli
- Cauliflower mashers with sautéed onions and a squeeze of lemon (from a lemon tree in my greenhouse)
- Lithuanian red cabbage (with foraged crushed hazelnuts, seasoning/salt and balsamic vinegar)
- Pumpkin soup, made with rabbit bone broth
- Deviled duck eggs as an appetizer
- Duck egg quiche (with zucchini, onions, longevity spinach, jalapeños and tomatoes and an organic, GF crust)
- Pumpkin pie (made with a GF crust and stevia drops for added sweetness)
- Homemade/home brewed hard apple cider (made with apples from my orchard)
Needless to say, we were left with a ton of leftovers. But the meal was beyond delicious and it was satisfying on multiple levels. The goal was to know that we could survive on what we raise, grow, forage or hunt/fish on our own homestead, and we fully succeeded. It is a genuine feeling of security that I wish for every one of our PPNF members. Not everyone can “do it all” on their own land, but working with a local community also committed to food sovereignty almost everyone can succeed in establishing quality local food security.
— Nora Gedgaudas
SUSIE
We are fairly unconventional when it comes to our meals, as we are a family with strong individual preferences. Growing up, I remember my mom making 3 dinners many nights as we all ate different things – my mom, a transplant from Seoul, would always have rice and kimchi. My dad, a midwestern guy, wanted steak. And I the mix of the two of them would sometimes eat Korean, sometimes steak, and sometimes mac and cheese!
Now, as a mom, I look back and wonder how she managed to do that with a full-time job, but it was important to my parents that nobody was forced to eat anything they didn’t like. Thanksgiving is no exception. This year, we had a small Thanksgiving with just myself, my partner and my parents. As we drove from Massachusetts to New Jersey to celebrate with my parents, we had two local sources – turkey from a local rancher in the Berkshires and a grass-fed steak from New Jersey. Veggies, plus a piece of wild-caught salmon, were a mixed bag of ingredients from a variety of sources. We enjoyed them all, and everyone happily ate their favorite foods. It was fun to discover some new local sources in the process!
— Susie Arnett
LIZ
Bless us, Oh Lord, and these thy gifts…
Some of the family had already had a turkey dinner so we decided to try something new. My husband, Will, harvested a deer from our farm so we had the tenderloin wrapped in pastured bacon for the main course. I surrounded it with roasted organic locally grown butternut squash, red potatoes and onions seasoned with basil I grew in my garden. We also had a really nice pastured raised ham.
We are so fortunate to have an Amish community around us that uses organic practices for growing vegetables. From them we had beets and asparagus. We bought cranberries from a local organic cranberry farm, blended with oranges and local honey.
For dessert we had a blueberry crisp, not pictured, made with organic blueberries that we picked, the topping was made with pecans, organic almond flour and coconut, a little cinnamon and honey.
— Liz Schlinsog