Had a FANTASTIC Thanksgiving and I hope you did as well!
For the first time, I hosted a Thanksgiving ‘dinner’ at my place, and did almost all the cooking. Growing up, and continuing in that tradition, we tend to serve at 2 PM.

First, my sister convinced mom and I to do a 5k that morning. What a mistake. I walked most of it in an exhausted stupor after being up late the night before baking, baking, baking. Baking tubers, gourds and pie.

The moment I finished the 5k, I walked back to my house to prep and cook the turkey.

Ohhhh turkey. You nefarious gobbler. Everything that could go wrong with the turkey, did.

• In my turkey-ignorance, I couldn’t find the giblets bag. We had to pull the turkey from the oven to get it out
• In my digital probe ignorance, I must have inserted it wrong because the turkey was under done when I took it out
• In my oven operations ignorance, it somehow didn’t get turned back on and we thought the turkey cooked for a few hours, when in fact the oven was OFF.

We ended up cooking the hell out of that jerk of a turkey, but we didn’t really get to eat it. I personally don’t even LIKE turkey. Eff turkey – next year I’m just going to cook a rack of lamb.

Therefore, we feasted upon side dishes! Fortunately, they were AMAZING.
Details of my low carb Thanksgiving below:

• Home made cranberry sauce – SO EASY to make! Never going back to canned. You literally just boil some cranberries with a little water and some cinnamon sticks – cool – NOM.
• Mashed cauliflower & turnip, with smoked sea salt and shredded cheddar. These were a huge hit.
• Mashed pumpkin/yam/winter squash. My god. I just ate some for dessert tonight, after uhm the rest of the uhh pumpkin pie kind of disappeared… to the same place the green beans went. I blame the cat!

• My sister made Brussell Sprouts. They were good but a little under-cooked. I’m going to cook them in some bacon grease tomorrow for breakfast. bwuahahahah!!!
  
  

  Almond Pesto green beans. By the time you read this, they will have been digested.

• Almond pesto green beans – I just quickly made pesto in my food processor with almonds, basil, olive oil and some parmesan. Blanched the green beans, mixed together, BEST EVER. I just knocked off the rest of them tonight for dinner.
• Low carb pumpkin pie – used whole whipping cream and stevia instead of condensed milk and sugar. I made the crust from hazelnut crust meal. I forgot I don’t like hazelnut. 🙁 Pie was fantastic but I’ll use almond meal next time for the crust.

Interestingly, I took a bite of the ‘regular’ pie to make sure it was ok, and spat it out! It was DISGUSTING. Everyone else said it was great and ate it happily – it was WAY too sweet for me. The cranberry sauce was perfect for me as well – too sour for everyone else.

Sugar sure tastes different once you stop eating a lot of it!! Very surprising.

Great company, great food, and then I went off to ANOTHER Thanksgiving and pigged out there, too! LOL

Did you cook anything (or everything??) for your Thanksgiving??

Photographs by Jason Hullinger