Easier than turkey main dishes….Today's post: Monday, 11-19-2018

The best Thanksgivings are about good times with friends & family.

For people hosting Thanksgiving, shopping for, cooking, and serving a turkey and its traditional side dishes, can be a LOT of work and can be very stressful.

Having cold ham slices of good quality and a great tasting vegan protein dish featuring almond meal style “flour” can be dramatically easier to fix.  Then steamed broccoli and grass fed cheese and various salads with extra virgin olive oil and organic apple cider vinegar can make a good meal that will leave you stuffed and well fed.

That can be a feast and take a third of the time to shop for, prepare and serve as the Turkey routine.

Here’s more on these dishes. 

I’ll postpone my November fatloss report until, tomorrow Tuesday because this article may be in time to be of use for shopping today or tomorrow.

(I posted on the health and fat loss reasons to do this last Thursday, 11-15-2019.)

1.  Whole Foods carries Paleo ham slices.  You can pan fry on low temp or bake these and serve hot.   But doing that the day or night before and serving them cold can unpack your prep time on Thanksgiving.  You can serve these plain because there are flavors in other dishes.

2.  There is an almond flour of an almond meal consistency by Bob’s Red Mill that works mixed with Organicville yellow mustard.  (Organicville is the one mustard that has no sugar or HFCS or MSG.  It’s just mustard; and is the only one I’ve found so far that is!)

The next step is to finely dice organic onions and organic tomato and an organic green such as red leaf lettuce.  This can be served in a wide profile dish with a spoon or as a wrap with a romaine lettuce leaf.  This is best served to neat eaters on a large paper napkin because the mustard can stain cloth.

If it’s OK to serve the almond flour in your group, it is a vegan dish!

But this is for a small group composed only of people who are not allergic to tree nuts.  It’s not a good idea for a large group some of whom might have a tree nut allergy.

3.  A second dish or one you can use instead is to cook triple rinsed quinoa that you heat gently in a cast iron frying pan with diced onion that also gently cooks and add extra virgin olive oil.

This one is also vegan.

4.  A fourth dish is to slowly but thoroughly cook several slices of Paleo bacon and then finely dice it and de-rib and remove the stems of collard greens or Swiss chard and cook that on low heat with diced and peeled onion in the pan the bacon was cooked in.  Then add extra virgin olive oil and heat and serve.

Any two of these dishes can work well.

1.  Steam some sliced or diced organic broccoli.  Then put that in a pre-warmed but NOT hot cast iron frying pan and put some diced Kerrygold grass fed butter and cheddar cheese on it.  Then serve small servings while it is still warm but not hot.

2.  Gently cook some diced organic garlic and finely chopped organic green cabbage in a pan that was used to cook bacon before. 

If you want to go vegan, you can use extra virgin olive oil; but the bacon version I find has more flavor.

3.  Set aside some dishes with diced organic lettuces and some varied kinds of pitted olives and some organic apple cider vinegar and extra virgin olive oil & either use each of those in a mix or serve it cafeteria style for those who would like that.

That version is vegan.  But if you have some people who are not vegetarians or are lacto-vegetarian you can include diced Kerrygold grass fed cheddar.  (Their Dubliner version is consistent and easiest to dice.)

This meal in all its versions is free of turkey, wheat flour, and sugar. 

Yet it can be very tasty and filling enough for a feast!