Thanksgiving Week is Here

[Gerania]

Originally Posted by Cruithne

That's me! My husband eats meat though.

I rarely eat meat, but use dairy. That means that some cows are still being abused.

[mordant]

Originally Posted by Gerania

I rarely eat meat, but use dairy. That means that some cows are still being abused.

I have managed to acclimate myself to unsweetened almond milk (motivated by my diabetes and the need to minimize sugar that is in real milk). I put erythritol in it, which is my go-to sweetener for that and coffee. (It tastes exactly like sugar, zero glycemic impact, but only 60% as sweet per volume and tends not to dissolve quite as well. Expensive too and not useful in recipes that count on sugar carmelizing).

A trick I learned is that I keep a flask of reconstituted nonfat dry milk in the fridge and put a shot of that in a cup of almond milk. The milk solids in that provide just enough of a milky flavor that it really improves the experience with almost no sugar. However, unsweetened almond milk, if lightly sweetened with erythritol, is pretty good on its own. (Sweetened almond milk, aside from having twice the calories, is almost sickly sweet, it's overdone; far sweeter than real milk).

All of this assumes you love milk as much as I do, as to whether it's worth the effort. I do try to drink straight-up water too. Earlier this year I started running all our drinking water through a water purifier (a Berkey model) which has the added benefit of removing almost all pollutants / bacteria and leaving in the minerals. My family remarked more than once on how much better this water tastes. We have a couple of carcinogens in our local water supply that exceed EPA standards; one of them is a side effect of adding chlorine to kill bacteria. So getting those filtered out is also a benefit over time. The unit is low-maintenance; I am going to disassemble and clean it today in fact, it's recommended every 6 months with average use but our consumption rate is a little on the light side and I add a few drops per cycle of a substance that prevents biofilm growth so I can go a bit longer.

As a side benefit: having a water purifier means you can drink melted snow or collected roof water if you have to, it is a very effective and versatile device.

[LearnMe]

Originally Posted by Cruithne

In the UK they have 'Harvest Festival' except there's no big family feast etc. It's in September. It's more just the celebration of the collection of the Harvest and giving to food banks generally held at local churches and schools.

Our family has long had the tradition of catching a movie together at some time during the Thanksgiving Holiday. This year it was "Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery." Shown in select theaters now for only a short time...