All you have to do is look at me and know that I love food. There are some foods that I can bring to memory that I imagine I will never have the opportunity to savor again.

When I lived in Korea there was a dish called Bulgogi, meaning “fired meat.” It is thinly sliced marinated meat then grilled or stir-fried. It was so tender and sweet yet spicy.

In Florida, I loved the boiled peanuts you could buy at the roadside fruit stands. They were boiled in a huge kettle and the stand owner would scoop them out with a strainer and put them in a triple lined paper bag. I know it was not really a meal but after eating nearly the whole bag it felt like a meal.

Finally, I love Mediterranean food. One of the things to look forward to when traveling to Israel is the food. Especially shawarma, which is marinated roasted meat, a variety of picked or chopped veggies topped with garlic or tahini sauce all wrapped in a warm pita.

However, overall the best meal I have ever eaten is a combination of many meals I’ve had on Thanksgiving or Christmas Day. Roasted turkey, mashed potatoes, gravy, and yeast rolls loaded with butter. My mother would make southern cornbread dressing and celery stuffed with cream cheese and olives. She also made ambrosia, supposedly the food of the gods, made with many layers of sliced oranges, sugar, shredded coconut, and maraschino cherries. All this was topped off with sweet potato pie.

Maybe because we only had this meal a couple of times a year it made it special and highly anticipated. Unfortunately, the only thing that is low-calorie in this meal is maybe, the turkey!

I have never been able to duplicate my mother’s cornbread dressing but might have come close. In the past thirty plus years we have had a British Christmas dinner with friends. Still with roast turkey, mashed potatoes, gravy and yeast rolls loaded with butter, but the cornbread dressing has been replaced with Chris’s chestnut stuffing. Different, but awesome in its own way.

I have also experienced a new side dish, new to me anyway, it is called bread sauce. It is made with white bread, milk and spices. It sounds strange but is so good with turkey and gravy. The sweet potato pie is replaced with plum pudding, also known as Christmas pudding. Not a creamy pudding we think of but a combination of dried fruit (raisins, prunes, apricots, currants), suet, bread crumbs, eggs and spice all mixed together, aged and then cooked in a sealed container in a water bath. Plum pudding is something I have never acquired a taste for… It comes out looking like a dark brown to black fruit cake. It is doused in brandy and set afire then served with rum sauce. I do eat it though. I get a very small amount, drench it in the rum sauce and hold my breath and eat. I don’t let my lack of love for plum pudding spoil the day. It is all part of the tradition.

The thing that makes the Thanksgiving and Christmas meals taste even more awesome, if that is even possible, is the fact that over the years I have enjoyed it with many people I love. Everyone knows that everything’s better with loved ones beside you.