Despite our growing taste for culinary diversity, the fourth Thursday of November ministers a dictatorial feast that few of us are willing to defy. Pull a roast beef out of the oven on Thanksgiving Day, and you’ll incite gasps from guests who will forever remember your meal as sadistic and depressing. Eliminate the mashed potatoes, and watch the traditionalists plot their revenge against the low-carbers at the table.

Perhaps one year in this lifetime I will cheat myself out of the conventional carved-turkey feast and hang with the iconoclasts to sample their bill of fare, which, based on recent surveying, includes everything from mock meat and pork stew to stuffed gourds and over-the-top gourmet sauces. But when I do, the chances are high that I’ll have a turkey thawing in my fridge alongside a container of good old-fashioned cranberry jelly.

The Gay & Lesbian Times asked the question: “What is the most unusual Thanksgiving dish you’ve ever made or been served?” Below are some of our favorite responses.

“As a dinner guest, it was cranberries, celery and cucumber, all soaked for a couple of days in liters of Absolut Vodka. It was quite tasty. And being a former Absolut and cranberry drinker, it was right up my alley. Very good. You could taste everything that was in it and we all got quite a buzz.”

“I’ve made a very unusual Thanksgiving dish throughout my hippie and yuppie years that works for both environments. It’s a recipe called Sweet Potato Surprise that I found in a natural foods publication. It includes bananas, pears, chopped nuts and minced fresh ginger, plus lime and apple juices. The ginger gives it a subtle flavor that’s hard to figure out. It’s a fruity dish, and people have actually asked me for the recipe.”

“Last year some friends invited me over for Thanksgiving and said they were giving the meal a ‘gay twist.’ I’m not sure what’s so gay about duck stir-fry, but I definitely missed my turkey and gravy. Dessert was some fru-fru tower of sponge cake and strawberries. It was all very good, but I ended up going to Rudford’s the next day for a full-on turkey dinner with all the fixings.”

“I spent one Thanksgiving in South Carolina visiting friends and the dinner was unusual in that they used grits and pork fat in many of the dishes: green beans and cheese with grits; a grits-bread stuffing; and then there were just grits if you wanted them. Being a native New Englander, the flavor and ingredients were completely different to me. I liked what I ate though, as I’m pretty hard pressed to ever turn away food.”

“One year, my grandmother made chocolate biscuits with lumpy chocolate gravy for dessert. It was just horrible. Another year, my mother tried cooking a Mexican Thanksgiving — turkey tamales, which didn’t exactly work. Instead of using masa inside the cornhusks, which she didn’t know how to make, she used tortillas!”

“When I was a vegetarian some years back, I made a tofu turkey dinner and let my imagination run wild with the side dishes. Someone had told me that by adding tofu cheese into the mashed potatoes it would make them taste buttery. But it didn’t. I had also mixed sun-dried tomatoes and red wine into a bean casserole, which didn’t work out. And I don’t even want to talk about my sourdough bread stuffing with warm balsamic vinaigrette.”

“I had sort of a potato dish once that had the consistency and texture of bugs. To this day, I don’t know what was in it, but it was kind of crunchy with little black things throughout. It tasted okay, but it was early on in the relationship with the person who made it, so I didn’t want to question it too far. I’m a big fan of garlic mashed potatoes, which is what I make now for Thanksgiving.”