My Food: Spicing Up the Holidays
Thanksgiving dinner is one of the most anticipated meals of the year.
Karen Small, proprietor of the Ohio City breakfast-and-lunch spot Juneberry, has felt the frustration that demand generates in a creative cook. She recommends alleviating it with quick, simple additions that won’t cause a mass revolt in the dining room.
For the green salad: Toss sour-sweet pomegranate seeds, feta cheese and pistachios
into a mix dressed with a vinaigrette or oil and vinegar. “It makes it festive and just a little different,” Small observes.
For the mashed potatoes: Peel and chop up a couple of parsnips, then boil and mash them with the spuds. “It adds kind of a crisp, just sort of a brighter taste,” she says of the trick, which she employed at her now-shuttered restaurant the Flying Fig.
For the gravy: Incorporate button mushrooms caramelized in butter and a little bit of olive oil (to keep the butter from burning) and thyme. “You could put the mushrooms on the side, too,” Small suggests. “People could add them before they pour the gravy over their stuff.”
For the rolls: Serve with apple butter, either homemade or purchased at a local farmers market. “It would be awful tasty on a nice, soft dinner roll with some butter,” she says.
For the pumpkin pie: Make a caramel sauce (or buy a premium counterpart), add a tablespoon or two of bourbon, and drizzle over whipped-cream-topped slices. “Bourbon is so American, and it’s Thanksgiving,” Small declares. “So there should be some bourbon there somewhere.”
My Health: Holiday Travel Tips
Changes in time zones, schedules and diet, along with illness, can turn a holiday trip into an experience you’d like to forget. Dr. Matthew Badgett, a primary care physician and lifestyle-medicine consultant at the Cleveland Clinic, and Dr. Peter Pronovost, chief quality and clinical transformation officer at University Hospitals Cleveland, offer these strategies to help.
Vaccinate. Dr. Pronovost suggests checking the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention website, cdc.gov, for the vaccines needed for travel outside the United States. Children 6 months to 1 year old traveling to Europe, Dr. Badgett adds, should get the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine before the usual 12 to 15 months of age.
“Measles is more common in Europe than in the United States,” he says.
Adjust to destination time. “We can really only move our [body’s] clock about one hour a day,” Dr. Badgett explains. “So to move five hours over, it’s going to take five days.”
Dr. Badgett advises resisting the urge to sleep after deplaning from a sleepless overnight flight east. He and Dr. Pronovost recommend getting out in the early morning sunlight and exercising, perhaps by taking a walk. Dr. Badgett adds drinking a caffeinated beverage and engaging in social interaction.
“Try to make it until 6 or 7 p.m. and then crash,” he says.
Eat healthy. “Circadian-rhythm disruption affects bowel movements,” Dr. Badgett says. “You’re doing a lot of digestion when you’re sleeping.
Dr. Badgett avoids exacerbating the problem with airport and roadside fast food by packing fiber-rich nonperishable items — nuts, seeds and dried fruits, for example. Dr. Pronovost ensures he remains hydrated by carrying a water bottle he fills before boarding a flight.
Once you’ve arrived at your destination, get on a regular dining schedule. “Timing breakfast at breakfast time is the most helpful,” Dr. Badgett says. “It helps anchor your rhythm to the morning.” And try to approximate what you normally eat. A good start, Dr. Pronovost says, is ordering steamed or roasted vegetables with meals.
My Home: Properly Decking the Halls
Broken ornaments, wreaths missing more than a couple of decorations, worn accent pillows, hopelessly stained table linens — they’re the unmistakable signs that your holiday dcor needs to be refreshed or replaced. Jane Marquard, co-owner, vice president and lead designer at Maison Maison Interiors in Rocky River, and Carley Porter, marketing manager for W Design in Chagrin Falls, note a few of this year’s trends to consider when decking your own halls.
Eggplant, slate blue, olive and tobacco. Marquard found the deep, rich colors seen at Fall 2024 fashion shows employed separately in ribbon and faux flowers and combined in throws and upholstery sporting an old-is-new-again pattern: plaid. She’s combined them with natural materials and themes — hunter-jumpers embroidered on cocktail napkins, table runners sporting a stirrup print — to create a luxurious-yet-understated look she calls “western-European high country.”
Porter describes a more traditional variant of burgundy and hunter green with touches of black rendered in plaids and buffalo checks. “In Hunting Valley, Gates Mills, it’s very equestrian,” she says. “So we always love to incorporate a cognac leather.”
Velvet. The go-to fabric for cold-weather holiday dressing is being stitched into table runners, accent pillows and upholstery. “It gives a certain richness to a tabletop or to … furniture,” Marquard says.
Feathers. Marquard reports that feathers in shades of gray, brown and white that look like they could have been picked up from a forest floor are being tucked into wreaths, floral arrangements and Christmas trees, embroidered or printed onto upholstery, applied to napkin rings, and even embedded in the glass of votives and vases.
Mid-century retro. According to Porter, the feathering of Holiday 2024 is evidenced in the trend’s feather tree. She describes other characteristics such as soft, muted pastels, rose gold, tinsel and jolly, rosy-cheeked Santas. “It could come off as kitschy,” she says. “But we’re doing it in a very tasteful, understated way.”
If the trend can’t be incorporated in the home’s main tree, Porter suggests using it to decorate a small tree in an unexpected place such as a powder room.
My Earth: Recycling Large Household Items
I’ve got to get rid of some of this stuff!
It’s the thought that passes through the minds of so many people as they retrieve seasonal decorations from the clutter filling closets, attics, basements, garages and spare rooms. One of the most convenient ways to keep those items out of a landfill is to drop them off at a Goodwill donation center.
There are some things, however, that even Goodwill does not accept. Colleen Porter, director of marketing for Goodwill Industries of Greater Cleveland & East Central Ohio, gives a few examples of those larger, harder-to-haul items. We add suggestions for recycling offered on the Cuyahoga County Solid Waste District’s website, cuyahogarecycles.org.
Tube TVs. It’s one of the few electronics Porter says Goodwill won’t take. According to the Cuyahoga County Solid Waste District website, “televisions are very difficult and expensive to recycle because of the heavy metals and glass.”
How to recycle: The Cuyahoga County Solid Waste District hosts seasonal events for Cuyahoga County residents to recycle TVs. For more information, log onto cuyahogarecycles.org. Best Buy recycles tube TVs 31 inches and smaller in store for $29.99 per item. (Limit two TVs per household per day.) Log onto bestbuy.com for more information.
Large appliances. Goodwill stores do not sell appliances larger than a microwave or dorm-size refrigerator — “a stove or a full-size refrigerator, a dishwasher or things like that,” Porter says.
How to recycle: Check with your community about setting out a large appliance for recycling during bulky waste collection — or pay the fee charged by the store delivering a new appliance to have the old one removed. If the appliance is still working, consult one of the charities listed on the Cuyahoga County Solid Waste District website’s “Appliances” tab about donating it.
Mattresses and sleeper sofas. “It’s against the law to resell mattresses,” Porter explains.
How to recycle: There are currently no local recycling options for mattresses. However, the Cleveland Furniture Bank will accept used mattresses in good condition for reuse. Call 216-459-2265 for more information.
