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Hello Oh my, is it really almost Thanksgiving? Don't get me wrong. I love Thanksgiving. I love planning the Thanksgiving feast. You think having
company over for dinner takes a lot of planning, try cooking for 600. I know that's not fair. I do it for a living. AND I definitely do it by choice. As I've said more than once, it feeds my soul. | |||
| HEIFER INTERNATIONAL |
DID YOU KNOW.... |
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 Heifer International is another organization I am really passionate about. Upon research you'll find this organization is full of integrity. Heifer's mission is to end hunger and poverty while caring for the earth. For more than 60 years, Heifer International has provided livestock and environmentally sound agricultural training to improve the lives of those who struggle daily for reliable sources of food and income. And since 1944, they have helped 48 million people through training in livestock development and livestock gifts that multiply. Every gift of an animal provides direct benefits such as milk, eggs, wool, fertilizer, as well as indirect benefits that increase family incomes for better housing, nutrition, health care and school fees for children. Recipients pass on the gift of offspring of their cows, goats and other livestock to others in an ever-widening circle of hope. Heifer currently works in more than 57 countries, including the U.S. What I especially like is that a single mother or family isn't just given a cow or an ox or goats or chickens and left to figure out the animal's care and how to utilize the animal's particular gift to them. There are classes that must be taken before the animal arrives AND the recipient must agree to pay it forward. When they are given a cow for example, after the calf is born and the family has milk, future calves are given to another family in the village so they too can begin a path towards independence and they also pay it forward to another neighbor. The cycle has begun. Now more cows are born, more milk is available cheese and yogurt can be made & sold and more cows are bred. Two other programs Heifer International supports are WiLD, Women in Livestock Development and a literacy program. It has been shown that educating the women of the village does more for family stability as well as benefiting the village than giving directly to the men. Women are proving to be very savvy entrepreneurs. A little education goes along way. A woman who can't read, can't write and is vulnerable to being conned and taken advantage of. Generally speaking, the women's choices are made from a nurturing standpoint with the children's & family's well being at the core of their choices. For as little as a one-time donation of $20.00 you can gift a flock of chickens, geese or rabbits to a family. One Christmas, instead of gifts to my family, I donated goats, llamas and cows in their name. We have so much and it felt really good to do something knowing it would positively change a family's life forever (although, I'm not sure my young nephews liked it very much at the time).  |
 Most everyone knows a little about 17th Century Thanksgiving traditions. But did you know.... What foods topped the table at the first harvest feast? Historians aren't completely certain about the full bounty. Some of the foods that were available to the colonists at that time included wild fowl (which may have been swan not turkey) venison, lobster & seal. I sure wish I'd known about seventeenth Century Table Manners when I was a kid. The pilgrims didn't use forks; they ate with spoons, knives, and their fingers. They wiped their hands on large cloth napkins which they also used to pick up hot morsels of food. Salt would have been on the table at the harvest feast but pepper was something that they used for cooking and wasn't available on the table. A person's social standing determined what he or she ate. The best food was placed next to the most important people. People didn't tend to sample everything on the table (as we do today) they just ate what was closest to them. Serving in the seventeenth century was very different from serving today. People weren't served their meals individually. Foods were served onto the table and then people took the food from the table and ate it. All the servers had to do was move the food from the place where it was cooked onto the table. Pilgrims didn't eat in courses as we do today. All of the different types of foods were placed on the table at the same time and people ate in any order they chose. Sometimes there were two courses, but each of them would contain both meat dishes, puddings, and sweets. Our modern Thanksgiving meal is centered around the turkey, but that certainly wasn't the case at the pilgrim's feasts. Their meals included many different meats. Vegetable dishes were not a big part of the feast. At that time of year, many vegetables weren't available to the colonists. The pilgrims probably didn't have pies or sweets at the harvest feast. They brought some sugar with them on the Mayflower but by the time of the feast, the supply had dwindled. There were no ovens so pies, cakes and breads were not possible. The foods eaten at the harvest feast would have seemed fatty by today's standards but the colonists were more active and needed more protein. People tend to think of English food as bland. But the pilgrims used many spices in their sauces and their meats including cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, pepper, and dried fruit. In the 17th century, cooks improvised. There were no measuring spoons and few recipes. The best way to cook meat and just about anything else was to roast it. Someone was assigned to sit and turn the spit to make sure the meat was evenly roasted. So as we get ready for our Thanksgiving feasts, let's be thankful that we have sugar, butter, ovens and pies. And even more thankful that the kids will have silverware and that we'll get to eat more than what's been placed near us on the table. Pass the gravy please. |
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