I do find that having a dish that you make only once a year, or even once a month encourages me to forget. At which point I end up in a routine of making the same thing over and over. To help me get over this, I put together a holiday recipe zine a couple of years ago. It didn’t completely capture my repertoire at the time, and I have added dishes since, so this would be a good time to add to it, yeah? Perhaps I could expand it with my recipe series and my comic about cumin pumpkin.

The quintessential foods that whisper ‘holidays’ to me are:

• Cumin roasted pumpkin which is such a devil to make, I drew a comic.
• Kapusta, a warming cabbage stew that was always on the table at the Wilsey’s Christmas eve party, where my Dad took us every year.
• Ginger bread, cake, cookies, whatever
• Fruit cake
• Stuffing because I never make it any other year
• Green bean casserole, the canned way, but not with mushroom soup because that’s verboten in my house

What are your quintessential holiday foods?