- Jaclyn's Newsletter
- Posts
- Sunday SELF - C. 🦃 A. 🕯️ R. 💌 E. 🍯
Sunday SELF - C. 🦃 A. 🕯️ R. 💌 E. 🍯
Holiday menu following the small farm diet
Jaclyn Kirby
December 07, 2025
Hey 💌
Sunday SELF - C. 🦃 A. 🕯️ R. 💌 E. 🍯
Below are last months faves for Cooking, Art, Reading, and Enthusiasm/ what’s bringing me joy lately.
Cooking Thanksgiving dinner all by myself for the first time ever taught me so much.
The main thing that I can’t get over — every time I make any meal that younger me thought I could never enjoy in my entire life without fear, guilt, and shame — is that ALL these meals are literally NOT even unhealthy when you make them from scratch with only ingredients from small farms.
The small farm diet is what I’m on, and I love that I finally have a label for how I’ve been eating.
Not that I care about labels, but it makes it so much easier to explain because people just don’t seem to get what I mean by ~quality~ ingredients.
So if every ingredient isn’t from a small farm run by people who steward their land in alignment with nature, then I don’t want it.
When we eat this way, we can truly enjoy all these comfort foods while genuinely feeling how nourishing it is.
🧡 I’m going to break down every single thing I made for Thanksgiving to show you how we’ve all been absolutely scammed into outsourcing our cooking to boxes, cans, and premade mixes, which turns all these gorgeous holiday foods into disgusting, unfoodlike products that leave you feeling sick after the meal.
Here’s my ingredient sourcing:
- All produce: from a beautiful local farm that grows their food with zero chemicals: For this meal I got potatoes, onions, garlic, celery, lettuce, spinach, a pumpkin, butternut squash, oranges, pomegranates, lemons
- All herbs: from my home garden (rosemary, sage, thyme)
- All broth: homemade, long-simmered bone broth from previous beef roasts and whole chickens that I’d cooked and saved the bones in the freezer.
- All breads: long fermented sourdough made from home milled einkorn berries.
- All dairy: raw milk from my local farm (simple, simple adjustments at home turned this milk into butter, whipped cream, yogurt, cream cheese, and mozzarella. Eggs from my own backyard chickens (who get organic supplemental feed that is corn and soy free) Plus a soft goat cheese, some cheddar, and Gruyère from a local cheese shop that sources from small farms & authentic Parmigiano Reggiano from Italy that I bought at my food co op.
- Sugars and sweetener: High quality, small farm sourced honey & maple syrup. Occasionally I do use a tiny sprinkle of coconut sugar or regeneratively farmed cane sugar (Which are the only products I use that are not small farm ingredients, but I still try to choose the best source by avoiding the big food company brands.)
When these are your ingredients, literally how can the food not be healthy?
I don’t hold the belief that ancient einkorn berries, grown without chemicals, when milled into flour creates an unhealthy food.
Or that milk, left in tact, from a cow that lives a happy, natural life out on pasture, is unhealthy.
And even sugar, I don’t think is bad for our bodies when sourced well. This post explores a whole new perspective on sugar that I highly recommend checking out.
Holiday food gets a bad wrap, largely because of sugar, but when you eat ancestrally, sugar is actually very healing.
Our gorgeous thanksgiving at home 🏡🤍 spent with my favorite person and pets, enjoying food that we feel best about
Our Thanksgiving breakfast was my husband’s request,
🤎 Sourdough Cinnamon Rolls
- flour & sourdough starter
- milk, butter, eggs
- coconut sugar, cinnamon, salt
For the frosting:
- cream cheese, a splash of milk
- maple syrup, vanilla extract, & a splash of my chai concentrate
Lunchtime appetizer:
💚 Spinach Artichoke Dip
- garlic and spinach from a local farm stand. Artichoke we surprisingly still have in our backyard garden (I boiled them and used the hearts for this, but if we didn’t have them I’d probably just turn this into a plain spinach dip)
- cream cheese, mozzarella, Parmigiano Reggiano, yogurt, homemade mayonnaise (1 egg, EVOO, lemon juice, dijon mustard, salt)
- homemade sourdough loaf cut into cubes and lightly toasted, used to dip!
Drinks!
🍷 Levi’s homemade wine:
- petite sirah grapes he hand picked from an organic vineyard (no other ingredient. just hand pressing, straining, and time sitting)
🍊 Nonalcoholic mimosa:
- oranges squeezed into juice (I shoved the peels inside the turkey so there was no waste!)
- sparkling water (I got San Pellegrino)
*Just those two ingredients give the perfect mimosa feel without alcohol! I drank it just like this around brunchtime
For dinner, I added pomegranate juice ice cubes to this same drink. It gave it a literal sorbet look and taste!
- pomegranates (scoop out the seeds, blend with water or coconut water, strain out the seeds, pour into an ice cube tray)
Dinner:
Turkey
- Sourced from Polyface Farms (I ordered about a month in advance and kept in our freezer to be sure we got a good quality one in time)
- Lathered with butter that’s been mixed with thyme and rosemary.
🥔 Mashed Potatoes
- peeled potatoes, garlic
- bone broth
- butter & a splash of milk
- pepper (option to add other seasonings depending on how flavorful your bone broth makes it)
Gravy
- beef bone broth
- butter
- flour
- pepper
Stuffing
- homemade sourdough bread (for this one I made a sandwich loaf so it’s more of a white bread softness)
- eggs, butter
- chicken bone broth
- celery, onion, sage, rosemary, thyme, salt, and pepper
Sourdough Potato Dinner Rolls
- potatoes
- flour & sourdough starter
- egg
- butter & milk
- sugar
🥬 Butternut Squash Salad
- lettuce, butternut squash
- walnuts lightly roasted in a drizzle of maple syrup
- soft goat or sheep cheese for sprinkling
for the dressing:
- date, garlic, lemon juice, apple cider vinegar, EVOO, maple syrup, nutmeg, cumin, cinnamon, salt
🧀 Mac and Cheese
- homemade noodles (flour, eggs, salt)
- cheddar and gruyere (I got from a local cheese shop who sources from small farms)
- butter & milk
- flour, salt, pepper
🥧 Pumpkin Pie w/ Whipped Cream
- a pumpkin (cut in half and roasted face down, then skinned and blended into puree)
- butter & milk
- flour
- egg
- sugar, cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, ginger, salt
For the pie crust:
- flour & sourdough starter
- butter
- salt & apple cider vinegar
For the whipped cream:
- heavy cream (the fat cap on the top of raw milk)
- sugar
If you didn’t follow the small farm diet this Thanksgiving, start planning for your next holiday meal!
I’m deep in my Christmas menu planning already and the sooner we can prep and freeze things like bone broth, noodles, and bread, the easier it’ll be to make the highest quality holiday meals.
I get so many of my ideas and inspiration from these two newsletters:
Ella’s recipes are the best. The weekend after Thanksgiving I made her leftover turkey pot pie and it was so perfect!
Valerie Ribon I’ve mentioned on here a lot because I get so many ancestral beauty tips and recipes from her.
She’s literally the reason why I now drink hot chocolate (& add gelatin!) at least 3 days a week and feel amazing about it.
Highly recommend diving into their posts.
🍯 Enthusiasm: Propolis Every Day
I used to take propolis every day as an elementary school teacher and I credit it to why I never got sick even while surrounded by sick people all year.
For the past year+ I just stopped buying it because I was going the no supplements approach. With eating only food from nature, I feel healthier than ever so I figured there’s no reason to buy immune boosting supplements. Which I still stand by, however …
Propolis is a magical food from bees, not a synthetic vitamin. And I consume a ton of honey so why would I not also want to take in the rest of the bees’ beautiful creations?
🐝
This honey from Beekeepers Naturals is so incredible because it has propolis, royal jelly, and bee pollen included.
Plus it kind of blew my mind when I heard the founder on a podcast talk about how local honey in the US, unfortunately, is all likely contaminated with glyphosate :(
Because even though the gorgeous local farm that I get my honey from doesn’t use any chemicals on their land, bees travel 5 miles in all directions so with how prevalent pesticides are here, the bees are probably bringing chemicals back to their hive that they’ve picked up on surrounding land.
Now, I don’t let this scare me completely off local honey because I have looked into where my honey comes from and it’s not in a highly farmed area, and local honey is most resonant with your body.
But with how much honey I consume, I figured it’s best to use Beekeepers Naturals at least half of the time. This honey is from Europe and is tested for glyphosate so we can be 100% sure that it has none.
And since I’m buying from them, I also got back on the propolis throat spray pretty much every day and I love it so much.
Propolis is a powerhouse nutrient and I actually feel how it supports my immune system and holistic wellbeing.
It’s also known for being super helpful in boosting fertility, which obviously makes sense because if you’re all-around healthier, then you’re also going to be more fertile.
So if you care about that, it’s definitely something to try :)
🎄💖 How do you want to feel while celebrating the holiday season this month? What are you planning to make, do, or avoid that’ll bring those desired feelings out?
Reply and share your holiday menu and plans with me 🫶
🤍 Jaclyn