While New Yorkers have created a lot of great holiday meal traditions--that whole "Chinese food on Christmas Eve" thing was totally ours--Thanksgiving has always been sort of a hodgepodge. If New York is a melting pot of culture, we might need a little more salt when it comes to figuring out how to take the Thanksgiving meal from home and transport it here.

Or we can just give up and order a turkey from Trader Joe's.

Either way, the whole Middle Eastern-fusion TexMex Chesapeake Vegan Thanksgiving thing isn't going to cut the cranberry sauce this year. Meditate on some of these New York-inspired (or -created, or whatever) dishes and think about how you ... well, how all of us could be putting a little more effort into this whole holiday instead of annually fleeing the city and going home to mommy.