I like these delightful days between Thanksgiving and Christmas. Fall decorations are still up. I won’t get out the Christmas tree until the first of December, and I haven’t started listening to Christmas music, but I did do quite a bit of internet shopping over the weekend.

We missed our Darling Daughter at Thanksgiving – she had to work on Friday, so she couldn’t come home. Our Strong Son, however, had a long holiday weekend to spend with us. Three of his friends came home with him for Thanksgiving dinner. They were like DD – living too far to be with family and still get back for work on Friday. What a delightful group they were! The conversation around the table was interesting and thought provoking.

I worried a little about how our guests would respond to my slightly nontraditional Thanksgiving dinner. SS assured me that they all embraced an active and healthy lifestyle and that they would be more receptive than average young adults.

I spent a little more to buy a hormone free turkey. I put onions and celery in the cavity before I roasted it, and it was delicious. I cooked cranberries with honey and pineapple juice, and they were just the right mix of tartness and sweetness. The green beans were seasoned with garlic and basil. I made the same pumpkin pie that I made last Thanksgiving, using ground walnuts as a crust. The twice baked sweet potatoes were exceptionally good.

As in years past my biggest BTD compromise on Thanksgiving food was going to be dressing. When DD is home, we have tried several avoid free dressings, that were tasty. But my favorite will always be the cornbread dressing that I ate first at my grandmother’s house and later at my mother’s.

Because my Honorable Husband has dealt with pre-diabetic issues in the past, the BTD Diabetic book says corn (neutral for Type As) is an infrequent neutral for him. I double checked the food lists and was surprised and delighted to notice for the first time that corn, which was always Type O avoid on the BTD, is only a limited toxin on the Hunter diet (though it is still toxic on the Gatherer diet.) That means that the Hunter half of me can feel good about eating something that I was going to eat anyway.

What a Thanksgiving bonus this is! While we will still not eat corn often in our family, we can truly enjoy dressing at holidays. And we will probably have an occasional ear of corn on the cob or a bowl of air-popped pop corn while we watch a movie.

My family always made rather dry buttermilk cornbread. I love sweet, moist cake-like cornbread. I went on the internet to see if I could find a wheat free, cake-like cornbread recipe. I could not. However, I found several recipes that were close, and I combined them – making the best cornbread I have ever eaten.

Here is my Hunter cornbread recipe.
2 cups cornmeal
4 tsp baking powder
½ tsp salt
2 eggs
1 cup almond milk
1/3 cup light olive oli
1/3 cup honey.

Preheat oven to 425 degrees. Spray a 9x9 pan with cooking spray. Mix dry ingredients in one bowl. Mix wet ingredients in another bowl. Combine them and stir fast – just until the dry ingredients are moistened. Pour into the prepared pan and bake until the sides of the bread begin to pull away from the pan.

This is delicious by itself. When you use it with homemade rye spelt bread to make dressing, you have the finale to a healthy holiday feast.