Lizbeth Colocho, 9 (left), and Kierra Palmer, 9 (right), both love helping their mothers cook for the holidays. Lizbeth’s family tradition is making tamales for la Navidad. They remind her of her grandmother who lives in El Salvador. Kierra helps her mother make crawfish dressing every Thanksgiving. Kierra has helped her mother make crawfish dressing forever — that is, since she was seven years old. It takes a really, really, really long time to make–Kierra was emphatic. More than a hour!

Sergio Morales, 9 (left), and Ashley Pineda, 10 (right)

Sergio’s favorite holiday dish is pozole. “It’s sort of like chicken soup,” he explains. His mother makes it every Thanksgiving just for him. She makes the best pozole in the world, full of pork, chicken, corn, vegetables, and chiles and — Sergio has written out her list of ingredients which is more than a page long. However, Sergio likes to eat his pozole without any vegetables. Ashley’s favorite Christmas tradition is helping her grandmother fry up a batch of buñuelos – fritters covered in cinammon and sugar. Ashley likes to eat her buñuelos with fruit on top. She wants to be a chef when she grows up, or a doctor, or maybe both.

Sergio, Kierra, Ashley and Lizbeth are all part of a local program run by the Recipe for Success Foundation (RFS) where they are learning how to garden and cook the veggies that they grow. They are all winners of RFS’s 4th grade Holiday Storywriting Competition.

So what is your favorite holiday food?  What were you munching this Thanksgiving?  From Mobile West, we wish y’all a happy and healthy holiday season. May the food be plentiful and the conversations memorable!