We are hosting thanksgiving for my family this year and yesterday we hosted my wife’s family for pre-thanksgiving. It was a great opportunity to test out some recipes. All turned out fantastic so I thought I would share. There will be 5 of us doing keto so we wanted some awesome food. On a side note: I found a local grocery store that carries Swerve artificial sweetener. In the past I’ve used truvia but it has some carbs. Swerve hits a 0 glycemic index with 0 net carbs. Awesome! You can find a bunch of other awesome recipes over on /r/ketorecipes – there are currently two pinned posts at the top with holiday recipes.

Appetizer

Cranberry-Jalapeno Cream Cheese Dip Used Swerve instead of sugar and I forgot to make flax crackers so I just pulled out a bag of unflavored pork rinds. Wife says “There is happy in my mouth!”. Also of note from last week: Bacon Ranch CheeseBall.

Side

I didn’t discover this recipe until today so we just did mashed cauliflower with sausage gravy – the gravy was absolutely AMAZING and got eaten by all those carb eating people.

Turkey

I picked up a Masterbuilt gas smoker back in April and I can’t think of anything more keto friendly than smoked turkey! A friend of mine told me that for smoking turkeys you want a fresh (not frozen) one so I grabbed one from Costco and brined it. I was going to spatchcock the turkey but it ended up being too large to fit easily on the racks so I sharpened a cleaver and bisected the bird. Cooked better cut in half anyway. I used a wireless thermometer to track how done it was, I had to leave for several hours and so I pointed a webcam at the thermometer so I could check it remotely. Worked great (the smoker blew out twice necessitating a trip back home).

Ham

This was in case the turkey went wrong. Just a standard spiral ham that didn’t have any sugar in it. We pulled off some of it for us Keto people and then put the glaze on for the normal people.

Desserts

  • CavemanKeto Strawberry cheesecake this was just plain awesome. Seriously better than most “carby” cheesecakes.
  • Pumpkin Cheesecake Made these last year and they were great, worked again!
  • Fat Bomb Cheesecake I had an extra pie crust so I wanted to make another one but I didn’t have anymore pumpkin.  Super simple recipe, worked great.
  • Whipped cream. I put a couple cups of heavy whipping cream into a bowl with some swerve and whipped it for about 10 minutes. Yeah, I ate a bunch of this straight with a spoon. I want some right now.

We also had salad, pickles, olives and other assorted goodies. Between the cream cheese used for all the cheesecakes, the potatoes, the dip and the gravy we used up a little over 6.5lbs of cream cheese this weekend.