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Mixing It Up This Thanksgiving!

We’re getting ready to head up to my parents’ house for Thanksgiving this week. We all pitch in and help with the meal, but my mom is a force to be reckoned with in the kitchen! Her pies are legendary and I can’t wait to over-indulge on Thursday (shhh – don’t tell my doctor).  My…

We’re getting ready to head up to my parents’ house for Thanksgiving this week. We all pitch in and help with the meal, but my mom is a force to be reckoned with in the kitchen! Her pies are legendary and I can’t wait to over-indulge on Thursday (shhh – don’t tell my doctor).  My favorite part of Thanksgiving though, even more than the eating, is actually the cooking and preparing part. Especially when there are a million people crammed in the kitchen and we’re all joking and telling stories about Thanksgivings past. The best. :)

You can always count on the good ol’ carbelicious, high-calorie standbys to be on our menu – turkey, mashed potatoes, stuffing, sweet potato casserole and homemade rolls – but we like to try different foods for the side dishes and veggies each year.

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NatureBox, my favorite monthly snack subscription service, invited me to use some of their healthy and delicious snacks to make a few of our sides dishes. I made a kale salad with their Baked Sweet Potato fries and a roasted asparagus side dish with their Cheddar and Onion Sunflower Kernels. Both were super delicious and passed the Thanksgiving menu test! :)

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I tweaked this recipe for the salad and this recipe for the asparagus. The NatureBox snacks added a little extra crunch to both! Those sweet potato fries were already on my NatureBox favorites list though, so I knew they’d be great in the salad. I seriously could have eaten this whole giant bowl-full myself. YUM.

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Something that I really love about NatureBox is they have more than 100 snacks, so every month I can pick a few tried-and-true favorites and a couple new ones too. Having healthy snacks in new flavors at the ready has practically saved my life this pregnancy. For six months, just the idea of a hot meal made me queasy. I’ve been keeping a few bags in my car’s center console, which has been a game-changer for both me and my kids. No more hangry Komendas!

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Something new and exciting: If you are a US-based first time subscriber, NatureBox will send you a FREE trial box of their most popular snacks by signing up here!
ALSO, NatureBox is giving away TWO six-month subscriptions today! You can enter to win by clicking here, browsing the NatureBox snack list, and then commenting on this post with the snacks you’d love to try. 
Open to US readers only. Contest ends Monday, Dec 1. Good luck! And thank you to NatureBox for sponsoring this post and LGN!  :)
Join the Conversation

120 thoughts on “Mixing It Up This Thanksgiving!

  1. I love your blog and I'm going to keep reading it because I like watching what you do with your cool house. But I am going to scan posts before I really read them now and if they are for Nature Box or Blue Apron or that water carafe or anything that every other blogger has promoted over the last few months, I'm going to skip that particular post. I'm never going to pay a premium to have bags of snacks come to my door, nor bags of uncooked food with a Bigfoot-sized carbon footprint.

    I wish you and other bloggers would be a bit choosier about which sponsored content to pen.

    Like I said, I still love your design how-tos and information and that will keep me reading, but the sponsored posts really bring me down. And they aren't doing a service to those companies any more either.

  2. p.s. I absolutely, 100% support your finding a way to make blogging a paid endeavor. You aren't required to entertain us for free.

    I just think perhaps some curation of which partnerships you choose would be helpful. Paint company sponsorships make sense to me, etc.

  3. Gonna have to agree with the others about the sponsorships. Also, why do these companies never space out the posts? It seems like every blog is doing Naturebox in the past week or so. Would love to see some of your design work on the blog! That's practically free content, since I assume you're charging clients, and you could use some of that stuff for a portfolio, etc. Keep up the good **DESIGN** work!

  4. I want to try all the nom noms, especially those pumpkin ones. And I would love to eat some whole wheat blueberry figgy bars right now. They look amazing.

  5. You seriously want me to list a few? I would like to start at the top of the page and work my way down. They sound wonderful! I can't pick just one. But ok, Chile Lime Pistachios, Mocha Almond Bars, Lemon Tea Biscuits, etc. etc.

    Thank you!

  6. I would love to try the salted caramel pretzel pops and kung pao pretzels. Your Thanksgiving sides look delicious, enjoy the holiday with you family!

  7. Thankfully there are a lot of choices that look delicious! :) I'm going to say that those Roasted Garlic Pumpkin Seeds and the Cherry Pecan Granola sound the best right now :)

  8. Nature Box has fun interesting snacks, but they are pricey and not cost-effective. I would love to enter the contest and try them out, but unfortunately, they don't pay much attention to food allergies or sensitivities. My son has celiac disease. He can't eat any food that has been processed along-side wheat/gluten. So while they offer great gluten-free options, they do so to give lip service to the fad-dieters, but not for the people who could really use safe gluten-free options to be healthy.

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