What I learned when I tried to make my blended family a gluten-free, kosher, no-soy, vegan, organic, low-acid, no-dairy Thanksgiving

It was the first Thanksgiving of a second marriage. Our six kids - three his, three mine - would be with us, as well as all four of our parents, three of our siblings, a handful of nephews and assorted family friends.

I had announced early on that I wanted to host Thanksgiving. For the duration of my first marriage, the holiday had belonged to my then in-laws. Thanksgiving - the only secular holiday we celebrated amid the long lineup of Jewish holidays - was parceled out as a consolation for the fact that we spent Passover Seders with my parents.

But now that along with my marriage, I'd left the Orthodox Judaism with which I was raised, Thanksgiving presented a new possibility. With my parents and siblings' families - all Orthodox - each holiday came with an established set of religious practices, a scripted set of laws. For my new husband and his family, who were also Jewish but decidedly secular, these rules felt like restrictive impositions; they didn't want to partake of a religious world in which they didn't believe.

Could Thanksgiving, a day without religious rituals or rules, somehow represent neutral terrain - a holiday for all of us?

The turkey arrived packed in dry ice, in a biodegradable carton, from a farm that sold kosher free-range ethically treated organic birds. Though I no longer kept kosher as strictly as I once had, my kitchen remained exactingly kosher, so that the people I loved would still eat in my house. I hoped that this bird, afforded the finest luxuries, would taste good enough to appease my husband who was critical of kosher meat for its supposedly saltier taste. And in any case, this was the only kind of turkey my sister would eat. She was a lapsed vegetarian, but since becoming pregnant, she had begun to follow a strictly organic diet.

"If you're really a vegetarian, how can you make that?" my 7-year-old daughter asked accusingly as I wrestled this large frozen bird into the fridge. She who ate primarily noodles had declared herself to be a vegetarian at the age of 3.

She had a good point, but I explained that though I believed in being a vegetarian, I wasn't going to impose this choice on the rest of our family. Also I made a mental note: Boil pasta.

"Does this mean no butter?" my husband asked mournfully as I told him what I was planning to cook - according to the laws of kosher, dairy couldn't be mixed with any form of meat.

"Margarine," I offered.

"I don't know that margarine is gluten-free," he reminded me, as his oldest child had celiac disease and was strictly gluten-free.

"I'll find one," I promised. Trying to accommodate everyone's needs, I'd been compiling recipes for gluten-free stuffing, gluten-free corn bread, gluten-free cobbler. Instead of milk, I planned to use soy milk, until I remembered.

"Do you still not eat soy?" I texted my sister.

"Yes! Thank you!" she wrote back.

I had my own health issues to consider too - I was supposed to avoid acidic foods: no onions, no garlic, no tomatoes, no citrus. Another set of ingredients to cross off the list.

"Guess who's going to be in town for the day?" my mother said when she called to tell me what time she and my father would be arriving.

My brother, who along with his wife and eight children, lived in Israel, in an Ultra Orthodox community and no longer marked this day. But regardless of whether he harbored Thanksgiving spirit in his heart, it was a rare chance to see him.

"He might bring his own food," my mother said warily when I enthusiastically said he should join us, worried I would be insulted that my departure from Orthodoxy might render my kitchen not quite kosher enough.

"No problem," I said.

"My brother's going to be in town and coming too," my husband texted me as I walked into the grocery store on Tuesday morning. "And bringing a guest."

"Food restrictions?" I texted back.

"Maybe vegetarian?"

I added his name, with a question mark, to the list of vegetarians, along with my college-aged stepson's Ukrainian girlfriend whom we would be meeting for the first time.

I made my way through the store aisles, checking every label. Organic. Kosher. Gluten-free. Nondairy. I checked each ingredient off my list. In the dairy aisle, I was nearly felled. Gluten-free butter substitutes not labeled kosher. Kosher ones not labeled gluten-free. Kosher and gluten-free ones neither soy-free nor organic. Finally, after a careful search, I found one that, however improbably, filled our every need.

As I began cooking on Wednesday afternoon, the house began to fill up with our parents, siblings, and kids. The gathering had less the air of family reunion and more the feeling of a first date. Our siblings and parents had met briefly at our wedding, but knew each other little, and there were gaps of religious background, of worlds. Our two sets of children came with memories of Thanksgivings past, different versions of the way it was supposed to be.

As I cooked, I concentrated on my list of who couldn't eat what, but started to worry how the gluten-free flour would taste, if the butter substitute I was using would create the right texture, if I could really make an entire meal without onions or garlic. Most of all, I worried about how to ensure that everyone felt they had a place in this new configuration of family.

"I think she might be mostly vegan, not just vegetarian," my husband whispered to me a few hours after my stepson and his girlfriend arrived.

Finally, I had to laugh.

There could be no single menu that would accommodate us all. I decided to make the challah bread stuffing whose recipe I'd been eyeing in the cookbook, relying on the fact that the other stuffing I'd already made had gluten-free corn bread in it. I'd used the last of the almond milk to make a batch of gluten-free sweet potato muffins but unable to bear the thought of yet another trip to the grocery store, decided to use soy milk in the cranberry bread, a lapse which I'd have to warn my sister about. Worried about blandness, I added onions and garlic to the green beans I was sautéing, leaving out a few that I would be able to eat.

I had done the best I could, but in the kitchen and in life, there was no way to satisfy every need all the time. I made a master list of who could eat what, got out the sticky notes and attached ingredient notes to the foil-covered tops of each pans.

The next day, as my husband and I sat next to each other, looking out at our blended, and still blending family, gathered around a kosher, gluten-free, vegetarian, vegan, organic, low-acid, no dairy, no soy Thanksgiving, I relaxed.

At this table, not everyone would be able to eat everything, but everyone would have plenty.

Mirvis is the author, most recently, of the memoir "The Book of Separation."