My fave was our local Jersey Buff turkey! My dad cooked it for 7 hours- the skin was crispy, the bird was falling apart & it gave off a lot of fat! I took all the bones to make broth. I'm also a HUGE gravy fiend; I put that ish on everything.

Well.. pumpkin pie. Always the pumpkin pie. This year it was made on a little farm in New Hampshire and driven down, the weight somewhere around 111lbs, and was nothing but delicious. Hello! :) The pumpkin was harvested there, pie baked in the farm kitchen, and was comprised of 5 ingredients. Perfection.

I will admit, tho, this year it was a toss up between the pietastic treat and oysters that were roasted inside the bird.

Can't decide..

Locally-raised heritage turkey legs! (including the thigh)

This year we chose to stay home and my chef husband & I didn't want to roast a whole turkey for the two of us.

They were moist, but not full of water & deliciously gamey.

I felt very Primal, grasping the drumstick, while gnawing on the meat...juices dripping...

Spent Thanksgiving writing a thesis paper so I made a crock pot dinner for myself. Bought 2 free range turkey legs, organic acorn squash and some onions.

Cut up the squash into bite size pieces and put that at the bottom of the crock pot with some onions. Sprinkled some cinnamon, salt and pepper. Topped that with turkey legs that I marinated for 12 hours in cumin seed and garlic mixture. Poured a tiny bit of water and apple cider vinegar over the top.

Set on high for 2 hours, low for 3 hours.

It tasted awesome! The drippings from the turkey made the acorn squash taste delicious. The turkey legs were perfectly fatty.

My favorite thing was the taste of our turkey after using my free range homemade chicken broth in the bottom of my roaster pan and stuffing my free-range turkey with grass fed butter under the skin. It's so nice not to have to use other stock and powders now that I know how to make bone broth. Tastes much better.

Home grown roasted turnips topped with buttery sauteed chanterelles (gathered from the forest and my garden). Yummy!

I wasn't super into the Thanksgiving food this year which was probably a good thing as I didn't go for my usual 2-3 plates of food.

The best paleo (or at least primal) dish on the dinner table: someone made brussels sprouts with cream and bacon. Really nice side option and one I'll try and incorporate into future thanksgivings and probably future regular meals too.

Our host made a delicious chicken soup as a first course - it did have tortellini in it and I did indulge. I also had two way more flagrant cheats I'd like to mention here and I consider both of them worth it. One was my first ever glass of Coquito (a puerto rican drink with rum, eggnog, coca-cola, cinnamon, nutmeg, etc) and the capper was a large piece of peanut butter cup cheesecake. Both were homemade by other guests and especially having run a 5k thanksgiving morning and having started hill sprints this week - I REGRET NOTHING!

Eat the Whole Animal Sweet Potato Pie.

Basically, it's sweet potato pie (sugar free, etc.) but instead of using megadoses of "paleo" alterna-flour for the crust, I used mostly the roasted sweet potato skins (blended up in a food processor) and butter/coconut oil (plus a dash of almond flour).

The result was not crusty really, but it was definitely very yummy, held the pie together, and added some very cool texture without the concentrated dose of nut/coconut you usually get with the faux-flours.

Resurrecting to share my CRACK dish of the year: sweetpotatoes with maple-bourbon sauce.

Yowza I ate so much of this I actually started getting the classic SAD post-meal nappiness!

http://www.bonappetit.com/recipes/2012/11/sweet-potatoes-with-bourbon-and-maple

FYI, we made this with the pale/whitish/yellow sweet potatoes instead of orange and I think that worked well because they are not as sweet, and the syrup is very potent.

i just made some sauteed salmon and zucchini. a usual dinner dish. was too sick for thanksgiving this year.

Might sound funny but I think my favorite thing was the cranberry sauce. I have a great recipe for bourbon / orange cranberry sauce (also includes shallots and black pepper), and it was just fantastic. This time of year I feel low in vitamin C so it was probably satisfying that craving too. I ate it on top of everything, and even had a few spoonfuls straight.

It made me realize that I really like cranberries and wonder why I only have them like this once a year, I think I will start making this on the regular. Have a package of cranberries sitting on the counter for this right now in fact.