Our Paleo (ish) Thanksgiving Feast!

We've been eating more or less paleo / primal / Weston A. Price around here lately and we didn't want to eat a bunch of stuff we don't normally eat, but we still wanted to have a delicious meal with all of our favorites! Luckily there are ways to adapt many recipes to make them paleo-friendly. Here's our beautiful table right before we dove in.

And here's our gorgeous turkey! I had never roasted a turkey before (though I've roasted plenty of chickens), so this was a new adventure for me. I followed Martha Stewart's recipe for turkey and gravy and it turned out fantastic! I definitely recommend this method of turkey roasting. Our bird was not dried out at all. Instead of traditional stuffing, I stuffed the bird with half and onion, half an apple and a few sprigs of thyme. I also don't truss the bird because it helps it cook faster and the breast doesn't get so dried out.

Along with our turkey we had these coconut flour drop biscuits. They are so yummy!  You seriously won't miss regular biscuits with these.

This is the recipe I used for my cranberry sauce.  Making your own is surprisingly easy.  This stuff is more tart than the canned stuff, but still delicious!

This is not exactly paleo, but way closer than normal pie.  It's my own creation, a pumpkin-pecan pie.  Pumpkin filling with a crumbled pecan topping.  I used this recipe for the pumpkin part (subbing butter for coconut oil in the crust; and I didn't use any coconut milk), and the topping is just butter, crushed pecans, almond flour and a little bit of brown sugar (about 1/6 cup of each almond flour and sugar).  It was SO YUMMY!  I actually prefer this to regular pie.  No, really.

Green beans.  Instead of the usual yuck-of-mushrooms in a can to make a green bean casserole, I just did mine with carmelized onions, mushrooms and tomatoes.  It's not quite the same, but still quite tasty.

Bird fresh out of the oven.  It was cooked perfectly! Hope your holidays were all as good!

Grandma's 100th Birthday

We just got back from our whirlwind trip to Tennessee to celebrate my Great Grandma's 100th birthday. It was a fast but fun trip and I'm so glad I went. I was on the verge of backing out at the last minute since I was sick, and Avery was sick, and I couldn't clear my ears and I didn't want to think about packing or flying. In the end I rallied and I'm happy I have those memories now. I learned a few things about my family, like that Grandma used to ride in a covered wagon (what?!!), some of her first dates were on horseback, and there used to be a town in Arkansas named for my family, established by my Great Great Grandfather. I wish I could ask Grandma more about her life, but her mind is mostly gone. When we first saw her, I said, "Can you believe all these people came to celebrate your 100th birthday?" she said she wasn't 100 yet and when I told her she was, she said, "Well my goodness! I can't believe I lived to be a hundred years old!" I don't know why I'm just now waking up to an interest in her life when there were dozens of years when I could have asked her about it. I have so many questions for her now that will never be answered. The coolest thing happened too: Grandma was in the elevator after her party and a nice woman heard it was her 100th birthday and gave her a hundred dollar bill! She told her to go get her nails done. She was the wife of one of the Cincinati Bengals. So awesome!