If there’s one thing I don’t like about Thanksgiving it’s the stress that goes into making the holiday “perfect.” Hint: it’s about being with friends and family, being grateful and in the process hopefully eating some delicious food. But too often we’re hung up on what has to be served.

Over on Foodie Underground, a story of why turkey will not be served in my family anytime soon inspired a full turkey-free Thanksgiving menu, complete with eight vegetarian, partly vegan, mostly gluten free recipes to get you from appetizer to dessert.

I could barely get past positioning the wings under the heavy carcass in the roasting rack. I am not a vegetarian, but I rarely prepare meat and quite frankly I was almost convinced that the thing was going to get pissed that I wasn’t treating it well, come back to life and start pecking at my face. Thanksgiving stress level successfully upped a notch.

My mother kindly positioned the bird, we did the roasting rigamarole, basted it every 45 minutes and come dinner time we had the iconic Thanksgiving dish.

But the Brones kitchen has always been devoted to simple foods that seem complicated, not the other way around. And don’t let anyone fool you, for the amount of work, at the end of the day, turkey is kind of a boring meat. So a few rounds of basting in and The Turkey had quickly turned to The F*cking Turkey (TFT for short).

Read the full story and check out the menu here.

Illustration by Johanna Kindvall.