Thanksgiving

The gorgeous centerpiece, a mix of bought and found flowers from S.

The tables, decked with Brussels Sprouts, Stuffing "muffins" and mixed plates

Making a wok full of mushroom gravy at the last minute

S getting ready to enjoy his "favorite" American tradition

SO! In the midst of my INSANE 19 person Thanksgiving party, I forgot one thing: to take pictures. It's not really so much that I forgot, but more that I was so exhausted that my brain turned to mushroom gravy. But let me just say, as you can see from these guest-foraged photos, things went well! Here's a run-down:

Number of Prep Days: 3
Number of People: 19
Number of Tables: 2 (but they were equal, no kids table)
Number of Bottles of Wine: 17
Number of Sweet Potato Casseroles: 3
Amount of Mashed Potatoes: 4 Kilos
Loaves of Cornbread in Stuffing: 3
Dinner Time: 8:00 (timing was PERFECT)
Biggest Hits: Miso-Mushroom Gravy, Green Bean Casserole
Least Favorite: Chestnut-Sage-Apple Cornbread Stuffing. Delicious, but should have been served hot rather than room temp. (But there wasn't enough room in the oven...)
Biggest Question: "What do you put the gravy on?"
Biggest Exclamation: "Mampf. This is a great holiday."

SY and me, savoring victory

All in all, I can say it was a big success. And that I won't feel like cooking again until next year. :) Hope you all had as fantastic a holiday as me!!

Jetzt shon wieder!? Thanksgiving

Man, its already Thanksgiving again! This time, come hell or highwater, I'm doing it right!

I know, I know: I say that every year. But this year, no sickness, Belgians, or German disdain for patriotism will prevent me from celebrating Thanksgiving: the holiday of feast, family, and forgetting (either America's history of colonial atrocities or the fact that you Uncle thinks Barack Obama is a Kenyan-Islamic-Fundamentalist-Communist, take your pick.)

 In fact, I decided to go all out and invite like, 20 people over (I think maybe 13 are coming) and arrange to cook a huge buffet. Since most of these people have never celebrated Thanksgiving before they are most likely going to interpret this as an invitation to come over and get drunk on a weeknight, but I don't care! I will have twinkly music, candles, flowers, and green bean casserole and it will be awesome! It won't be exactly the same as in America- ie, no Martha Stewart inspired placeholders, 20 year old handmade turkey paper mache centerpiece, or football- but I will have a fairly decent replica of the event, just 6 hours earlier.

So here's the menu! As you can see from my elaborate preparation list above, it will take some finnagling to get all the necessary ingredients, but I have a gameplan spread out over a week, so everything should come together one way or another.

Thanksgiving 2011
-Salad with oranges (brought by a guest)
-Simple roasted Brussels Sprouts (salt and pepper and olive oil)
-Sweet Potatoes two ways (because I don't have enough casserole dishes to make a huge sweet potato casserole.)
     - 1st way: My Aunt Mary's specialty, with apples, brown sugar, pecans
    - 2nd way: An experimental version- pureed sweet potatoes with miso, maple syrup, cumin, paprika and cinnamon.  Oh yeah, and coconut milk.
-Mashed potatoes with roasted garlic
-Green Bean Casserole, a la T ( no decent mushroom soup here, so I'm planning the following instead. I will do a light roux, add in mushrooms, finely diced onions, a bit of soy sauce and nooch and plenty of salt and pepper. I will toss the frozen green beans in this and top with bastardized french fried onions- Danish onions that they use for topping hot dogs. Will it work?!I will let you know!)
-Cornbread Stuffing (also an invention: veganized boxed cornbread from the USA, roasted chestnuts, dried cranberries, onions, plenty or salt, pepper,. and fresh sage, held together with a bit of  vegetable stock. THEN I am going to grease up some muffin tins and make little individual stufffing servings! I'm hoping this will be like a mixture between bread pudding and stuffing. Total off the cuff experiment due, once again, to lack of baking dishes.)
-Mushroom Miso Gravy, from Crescent Dragonwagon (haha best hippie vegetarian name ever)
-Cranberry Sauce ala Isa, however, I will add a bit of orange zest because I just need to.

And then to top it off my friends are bringing pumpkin pies and chocolate pies. I would say, that is a Thanksgiving!

If you are planning your own and need inspiration here are some posts from Thanksgiving pasts with lots of links to recipes and treatises on vegan Thanksgiving.
Last Minute Thanksgiving Ideas
My Veg Thanksgiving
More Thanksgiving Tips

So, wish me luck kids! And good luck with all of your own Thanksgivings, whether you are hosting or dragging your family to Grandmother's house: I hope its great!

Song of the Day: Future Islands- Balance

Vegan No-Fo

Well, I guess its time to admit that the end of Vegan Mofo was a big fail for me. This can be attributed to two factors:

A.) I was in England for 5 days, graduating from my Masters program. And although I thought this might make for exciting blogging material, I couldn't find anything to eat in that country! All I had ate the entire time were atrociously expensive french fries and beer. Even the one fancy vegan restaurant I singled out (Mildred's, in Pickadilly Circus) was freakishly closed the one night I made it there. But all was not totally lost, because I did indeed graduate, from Canterbury Cathedral which was lovely.

B.) Upon return home I promptly developed a horrible flu that kept me in bed for a week. During this time I missed Thanksgiving (AGAIN) and the last week of Vegan Mofo, in which I consumed nothing but oatmeal. But again, there's a silver lining, because I lost 10 lbs, just in time for the holidays, and kept all of the luscious food that was intended for Thanksgiving to dole out over the next few months.

Including the canned pumpkin that I have already put towards some delicious pumpkin pancakes from Vegan Brunch, topped with a dollop of cranberry sauce. Next stop, pumpkin cinnamon rolls, yuuuum.

In spite of the disappointing last couple weeks, I find it difficult not to be excited now: its Channukah, I have a lot of fun Christmas markets and parties to go to in the next few weeks, and soon I'll be in my parent's kitchen in the USA, cooking up a storm of my vegan favorites. And to make up for all the missed posting, I'll try to be vigilant about posting my holiday creations this year. Latkes, tamales, and tofu benedict, oh my!

So now back to my regularly scheduled blogging, and I look forward to drooling over what all you lucky Americans had for Thanksgiving dinner!

Song of the Day: AC/DC -Back in black

Thanksgiving!

It's almost Thanksgiving, one of my favorite holidays! Last year at this time I was in Belgium, choking back tears at a 12€ buffet at some stupid posh nightclub where I couldn't eat anything except a martini. Not this year, my friends! Although Germany doesn't "do" thanksgiving, I am going to have a real American one in my little apartment and try to convince people that green bean casserole is really delicious. (Failing that, I will just eat it all myself.) Luckily, my Mom is meeting me in London in a week so I can get her to bring a few essentials that are hard to find here in 'Schland.

As I usually do, I thought I'd do a round-up of ideas for all you celebrating Thanksgiving with your families who still don't know what vegan is. (Or pretend not to know and try to serve you gravy anyways.)

Speaking of Gravy, Tofu Mom over at More Than Tofu and Sprouts is doing a whole month of gravy for VeganMoFo, with lots of varieties (like mushroom and miso gravy) that would be perfect for the occasion.

As for a centerpiece, if you are going to an omni Thanksgiving do as the vegans do and bring a few sides and your own gravy, and maybe put in a request that the mashed potatoes or sweet potatoes be vegan. But if you are hosting your own, or want to have turkey-less centerpiece to impress, there are a few options. How about Hickory Smoked Apple Cider, Maple Syrup and Bourbon Glazed Tofu Lollipops from What the Hell Does a Vegan Eat Anyways? Or you could try the gorgeous Seitan en croute from 1,000 Vegan Recipes.

As for desserts, this Chocolate Pumpkin bread pudding from the NY Times looks pretty kick ass, and cranberry chocolate tartelettes from Mihl is a classy choice.

Looking for a full-on Menu? Over at the PPK Isa posted Thanksgiving in an hour a few days ago, but if you have more than an hour, peruse the rest of the recipes including 3 ingredient cranberry sauce and chickpea cutlets. Yum! VeganYumYum also had a full menu a few years back with a creative stuffed seitan and a yummy green bean casserole. For the more adventurous, non-vegan websites also have excellent ideas, many of which are veganizable with a few tweaks. (Earth balance for butter, no brainer.) Epicurious has a huge selection of recipes and videos at their Thanksgiving headquarters. And over at 101 Cookbooks there are also a handful of luscious ideas, including shredded brussels sprouts and apples, one of my faves.

What will I be serving? Well, I'm going traditional all the way so as not to confuse the Germans. (Well, traditional in my household. I guess we will also have to argue about politics the whole time if I really want tradition.)

My (tentative, very tentative) menu
-A simple salad of roasted Beets, walnuts, and mixed greens
-Green Bean Casserole (with imported vegan cream of mushroom soup!)
-My Aunt Mary's simple and fabulous sweet potatoes w/ apples, pecans and brown sugar
-Fluffy roasted garlic mashed potatoes
-Mushroom and shallot gravy (from Eat, Drink, and Be Vegan)
-Roasted brussels sprouts
-Chestnut stuffing
-Cranberry-orange sauce
-And EITHER chickpea cutlets or homemade seitan, depending on whether I can get my Mom to bring some vital wheat gluten.
-For dessert? Natch, pumpkin pie, provided by my friend Kat who doesn't mind making them from scratch (unlike myself, who finds pies nerve-wracking enough w/o the pumpkin roasting element.) Maybe a chocolate pudding pie as well, if I can find the right kind of soft tofu.

Now, this will be a challenge with my tiny kitchen and limited heating space. But I can't take another year in Europe without a proper Thanksgiving and I can't afford a plane ticket, so its worth a shot!

What are you guys cooking up for the biggest food holiday of the year?

Broke Food: Pancakes!

I love Belgium and all, and I don't mean to be a bratty American, but oh man, was my Thanksgiving ever LAME! 12€ (which is twice my daily budget) for mashed potatoes with pumpkin in it and some lingonberry sauce at this terribly hip club for ex-pats. I would have made something myself, but not having the money nor apartment space to cook for everyone, I decided to go where everyone else was going...bad idea. Next year I'm having a real Thanksgiving, come hell or high water, and I will even get a you-tubed version of this year's Macy's parade and some football americano...

I was consoled, however, by a) free drink tickets and b) fantasizing about what glorious good eats I will cook up over my brief sojourn in the USA over the holidays. Not only will I have access to all my lovely cookbooks and pantry staples, but my little brother will be in residence as a sous chef... and you know I will be cooking up some latkes, pot pies, brunch goodies, plus all the goodies I missed on Thanksgiving. So, there's that to look forward to. Plus all the mouthwatering food in the blog-o-sphere... as usual, Team Vegan does not disappoint.

AT ANY RATE... still as poor as a Charles Dickens/ Victor Hugo character, so have been subsisting on many boring and simple meals such as oatmeal and lentils (but not together.) The next few blog posts will explore some new dirt-cheap meal alternatives, and though I still have no camera, I eat these items often enough to have a million pictures of them.

SEE?
Pancakes!
I never realized before how little time and money it takes to make pancakes from scratch. When you don't have any fruits or veggies, a little flour and soymilk and you still have something great. More importantly, when you do have fruits and veggies, you can transform them into something really special (and more crucially, filling and leftover-producing.) Here's my standard recipe (approx, as have no great measuring tools yet), plus variations:

1 C. flour
2 tsp. baking powder
pinch salt
3/4 C. soymilk
1 tbsp. sweetener
1 tbsp. oil or melted margarine

-Combine all ingredients in a bowl and stir until "just mixed." (You can also do the seperate bowl for wet/dry ingredients thing, although my research suggests this does not matter so long as you assemble your ingredients promptly.) Drop by the ladleful onto a medium hot greased skillet. Serve with syrup or whatev.

VARIATIONS: You can pretty much put anything in pancakes, which makes it ideal when you have like, 1 rotting pear on the shelf. You may have to adjust the liquid or flour, but essentially you just need to chop something into small pieces and figure out appropriate accompaniment. Examples...

Apple Onion Curry Pancakes - cut up an apple and a small onion and add to the mix, ommiting the sweetener. Add in 1 and 1/2 tsp curry powder. Serve with mango chutney and soy yogurt.
Banana Oatmeal pancakes- Replace 1/4 of the cup of flour with oatmeal flakes. Mash in a banana with wet ingredients. Add in a dash of nutmeg and cinnamon. (I've also made this with a rotting pear, and it was great.)
Cowboy Corncakes - Recipe here!

Pumpkin or squash pancakes- make like the banana pancakes and add in mushed leftover pumpkin or squash. This one can be sweet or savory depending on what's on hand.

I secretly suspect you can make almost anything into pancakes, and I intend to try it more as I get more and more desperate. Carrot pancakes? Mushroom pancakes? Brussels Sprouts pancakes? Why not... Yes, on my gravestone, please write: "Here lies T, she made everything into pancakes."

Song of the Day: Trude Herr- Ich will Keine Schokolade

Last Minute Thanksgiving Ideas

Well, they don't celebrate Thanksgiving in Belgium. I guess this isn't all that incredibly strange, since nothing about the colonist/Native American encounter has any real parallels in Belgian history, but still, I'm a bit disappointed. Its even a school day! Apparently an ex-pat club is having a big thanksgiving dinner at this fancy night-club with a menu including "pumpkin mashed potatoes." What? Come on Europeans, you're doing it wrong.

Anyways, here's what would have been on the menu at MY dream Thanksgiving.

1.) Glühwein!

A favorite in Christmas Markets in Germany, this is basically mulled wine: hot wine with spices and a little rum. Its totally delicious and a great start to the meal. My boyfriend's famous recipe is HERE. (Incidentally, hope to be enjoying that in Berlin in a few weeks!)
Another holiday cocktail? The Zombie, a trashy tiki classic with lots of holiday elements (cinnamon! citrus! rum!).

2. Roasted Golden Beet Salad with Beet Happening Dressing

Thinly sliced golden beets tossed in a simple marinade and roasted in the oven, then served over spinach salad with pecans with the leftover marinade as a dressing. Delicious, seasonal and gorgeous.

The dressing/ marinade:
Combine in a food processor: 2 chopped shallots, 1/3 C. Balsamic vinegar, 3 T. maple syrup, pinch of salt and pepper. Drizzle in 1/3 C. Olive oil until blended.

3. Aunt Mary's Sweet Potatoes

A vegan version of my Aunt Mary's sweet potatoes have been my thanksgiving favorite since... oh, forever? So simple and delicious, and a great alternative to the marshmellow covered southern-style dish.

Apple-Pecan Sweet Potatoes

2 (big) Cans Sweet potatoes in syrup
Brown sugar
2 Apples
Soymilk
Earth Balance
Pecans

1. Preheat oven to 375. Pour out your sweet potatoes, reserving a few tablespoons of the syrup. Mash them in a medium casserole dish with the syrup, a little soymilk, and a tablespoon of brown sugar. (Whip 'em if you feel like it.) Next, slice your apples into thin, lengthwise slices, and cover the sweet potato mixture. Last, roughly chop the pecans and mix them with a fork with about 2 tablespoons earth balance and 1 1/2 tbs brown sugar. When this mixture is crumbly and the pecans are fairly coated, sprinkle this evenly over top of the apples. Bake until brown and bubbly on top.

4. Roasted Garlic Mashed Potatoes and Mushroom Gravy
People are devoted to their own mashed potato recipes, so all I have to contribute is that, to fancy things up, I like to add a whole head of roasted garlic into the mix when I blend the potatoes with earth balance and soymilk. And it just wouldn't be the same without Dreena Burton's mushroom gravy recipe, although I have to say I can't find the recipe online. I suspect it wouldn't matter, because like meat gravy, everyone is convinced that THEIR mushroom gravy is the best. (Dreena's really is though!)

5. Veganomicon Seitan Pot Pies

An instant classic from Isa and Terry, these pot pies are perfect for when there are just a few vegetarians at the table, and you want to make all the turkey-eaters incredibly jealous.

*****

So no Thanksgiving for me, but at least I will be home over winter break and cooking up a storm with my vegetarian brother. Hope everyone has an amazing holiday week, with a minimum of relatives asking you if you've "given up on this whole vay-gun thing yet." I'll be looking forward to drooling (/sobbing) over delicious pictures in the weeks to come.

In the meantime, here are a few more places to look for vegetarian Thanksgiving guides, just to get even more excited:
The Epicurious Guide
The Times has been super veg-friendly this season, and has a zillion recipes.
Vegan.com's Thanksgiving Feast
Bryanna Clark Grogan's Holiday Recipes

Too too too fast!

Doesn't it seem like it was just Halloween? How can I already be filling out course evaluations and getting ready for finals? I didn't even get a chance to show you guys these awesome brownies I made for the Misfits party.

Crap picture, I know, but these pumpkin-pie brownies (with my own cream cheese topping) were awesome, and not one person knew they were vegan! The recipe is from Isa Chandra Moskowitz's blog (no shocker, her being the queen of decadent vegan sweets.) Chocolate and pumpkin might seem like a weird combo, but its heavenly!

I also recently found my copy of Vegan with a Vengeance. Man, I love that cookbook! I consider it to be one of the three pillars of cheap vegan cooking. The other two are Vegan on a Shoestring and Don't Feed the Bears. All three of these cookbooks, in case you don't know, are jammed with delicious and relatively cheap recipes that are really filling and don't rely on super-fancy ingredients. I also just realized that all three have sort of a punk aesthetic... coincidence? (All three are available on Herbivore.)

Anyways, I'd never tried the mustard-maple veggies from VWaV so I made them for my parents the other night along with some creamed cauliflower.
Wow, these were fantastic. Very gourmet tasting and made a great gravy for the cauliflower. And I already had all of the ingredients in my pantry!

And now things are accelerating quickly towards Thanksgiving. Despite the fact that I've already stocked up on recipes to veganize, it looks like I'll be bringing just one or two dishes to Thanksgiving at my Aunt's so I'll need to choose wisely. It won't be like last year's feast, that's for sure. But on the other hand, with all the work I have coming up it will be nice to let others cook! But in case you aren't in the same boat, here's some great places to look for ideas.

*Epicurious.com has lots of vegetarian menus, but many are heavy on the dairy.
*101 Cookbooks has some great ideas in the archive.
*Here are my posts and recipes from last year.
*And here's the uber-inspiring creme de la creme Thanksgiving from WTHDAVEA.

Enjoy!

Song of the Day: "Too Too Too Fast"- Ra Ra Riot

My Veg Thanksgiving

So after much agonizing about what to make for Thanksgiving, everything ended up coming together easily.

I started off with some Spinach Dip to munch on while cooking and to ply the guests with while they waited for the ornery turkey to be done. I just mixed a garden variety onion dip mix with a container of Tofutti sour cream and a package of frozen spinach, thawed and patted dry. It was perfect with whole wheat crackers.

For my main course, I tryed the NY Times recipe for Roasted Squash w/ Sage Cornbread Stuffing and Vegetable Ragout. I used seitan rather than tempeh, because seitan is more turkey-esque to me. The cornbread stuffing, studded with sage and roasted chesnuts, was very sweet and crunchy, while the stew-like ragout on top was filled with savory leeks, parsnips, carrots, seitan and shrooms. Next time I would have added a little soy sauce or tamari to add a bit more salt to the ragout. It was pretty much perfect though, and definitely centerpiece-worthy.

On the side, I had all the delicious dishes that my parents had thoughtfully prepapred with earth balance and soymilk. (After I bugged them about it all day, that is. And swore not to tell my brothers.) We had green bean casserole, Mashed potatoes, and my Aunt Mary's sweet potatoes (recipe here.) In addition, I made the cranberry sauce recipe from Veganomicon which was magic, like everything else in that cookbook. I also made the Mushroom gravy from Dreena Burton's awesome cookbook The Everyday Vegan, which has always come out perfectly the last 20 times I've made it. (Love her, btw.)

All in all, my fabulous meal definitely disproved the notion that vegans have to feel sad and neglected on holidays. And I didn't have anyone trying to ply me with turkey this year, either--- my plate was too full as it was.

After dinner, everyone sat around the outdoor firepit my Dad built last year. My little brother passed around his guitar and we all sang Bob Dylan songs and drank bourbon. Considering the hell on wheels most Thanksgivings are, I can't imagine a better dinner or night!

Food filled weekend

This weekend I had the pleasure of helping my friend Nick prepare a six course meal for 12 people. He's not a chef, but he enjoys cooking so much that he often ends up throwing these big fetes and cooking ridiculously huge pots of jambalaya or beef stew or the like. Such was the case this weekend- he signed himself up to cook a full Thanksgiving dinner for a group of friends. He's insane.

Anyways, the meal was by no means vegan, but as usual I like to pick up tricks that can be adapted and just see what he comes up with. I always get some great new ideas. The first course was these little roasted beet napoleans. They were super easy and I can think of a few ways to make them vegan. Essentially, you are just roasting beats for about 30 minutes at 375 degrees, then taking them out, carefully slicing them, and sticking them in a bowl of red wine vinegar. Then you stack them with sliced rounds of goat cheese. The vegan way? Maybe thin slices of tofutti cream cheese that have been mixed with the green onions? I will have to give it a try- look how dear they turned out. (Oh yes, and use a well cookie cutter to get them perfectly rounded like that.)

Next up was delicious butternut squash soup, the recipe for which is available in every cookbook on the planet. Then, in place of traditional sweet potatoes, we made sweet potato gnocchi with a sage butter cream sauce. They were so awesome. The recipe was essentially the epicurious one except we didn't use the cheese. The process is simpler then you might think. You are essentially roasting and peeling the sweet potatoes, then mashing them up and using them as a base for dough. So you add in some salt, pepper and egg replacer, along with a bunch of flour, then roll it out thin, cut it up into little squares, then roll them off the bottom of a fork. Lastly, you cook them like pasta with the sauce of your heart's desire. They were fabulous.

The rest of the meal was rather meat and dairy filled, but we finished up with these delish pecan shortbread cookies, which are just a hop, a skip, and a tub of earth balance away from being vegan. They were topped with some spiced pumpkin pie filling and a dollop of whip cream- a sort of deconstructed pumpkin pie. I'm telling you, Nick is just full of ideas.

*UPDATE* Urban Vegan has a step-by-step guide to sweet potato gnocchi with a yummy-looking cream sauce. Give it a shot here.

More Thanksgiving tips

The Internet is abuzz with tips on how to make thanksgiving more veggie-friendly! Who needs all that tryptophan anyways?

Epicurious has a great article on vegetarian mains from cookbook author Crescent Dragonwagon. (Thats her name. I shit you not.) Here's what Ms. Dragonwagon has to say:

"You need something visually big and bold enough to stand alongside—or in place of—the bird," she says. "I like to make a stuffed pumpkin. You can put it on a platter and let it be the visual star. It's as captivating and once-a-year-ish as the turkey." And though this dish might not go pound-for-pound against turkey for heartiness, it does take the place of another Thanksgiving favorite: the stuffing, which is probably soaked with turkey stock and off-limits for vegetarians. Moistened with vegetable stock, the pumpkin's apricot- and prune-accented filling is ready for everyone at the table to enjoy. And the pumpkin flesh itself, rubbed with salt, pepper, and brown sugar, is delicious.

Vegetarian Thanksgiving

The NY Times has a zillion recipes in their food section, and also quite a few veggie resouces. Here's Denise Landis on veggie thanksgivings:

One view of vegetarian dishes — an outdated one — is that they are too simple, and therefore lack elegance. Chefs like Mr. Tucker disprove this with dishes like the one he created last Thanksgiving: a rich mix of chestnuts, sage and corn bread roasted in squash and mounded with an apple-cider spiced ragout. There were also stuffed baby pumpkins and a roulade of wild mushrooms with seitan (wheat gluten) wrapped in pastry. The pastry was layered with yuba, a tofu product that has a crisp texture when roasted.

The Times Thanksgiving Special

And finally, here's an article written for carnivores about how to make Thanksgiving dinner more friendly for their vegetarian guests. I'll admit, its a little dumbed down. ("Start by sorting out what type of vegetarians you will be serving. Many won't eat red meat, poultry or seafood, but will eat eggs, cheese, milk and other dairy products. Vegans exclude all animal products, including honey.") But, it could be an easy thing to email to Mom or Dad in advance to give them some ideas.

Vegetarians Over for Dinner? Focus on the Sides.

An elegant, herbaceous Thanksgiving

This is the meal I would make if I was hosting a table full of refined individuals... say, Jonathan Safran Foer, Dave Eggers, Naomi Klein, and my political science professors from college.. and wanted to impress and entice. This seems like the kind of adult Thanksgiving food that would inspire great conversations, rather than increasing sleepiness.

Neo-classical Thanksgiving Dressing with Apricots and Prunes, stuffed in a whole Pumpkin

Spicy Glazed Sweet Potatoes (Sub earth balance for unsalted butter, obvs.)

Brussel sprouts with white wine and thyme


Carmelized Shallot and Sage Mashed Potatoes

Mushroom-Miso-Mustard Gravy

Chocolate Pumpkin Pie
(I don't know if I can wait till thanksgiving to give this a try...)

Of course, some NSA organic red wine should be served alongside this feast. I'm currently searching for some good stuff myself, and I'll post my findings.

Thanksgiving Menus

Thanksgiving is a notoriously tough holiday for vegans and vegetarians alike. Family members may be bewildered to learn that you have recently changed your diet. Or, it might be a long-running family joke. Or, like my family, they could be pretty accepting of the vegetarian stuff, but constantly urging you to partake of the dairy filled delights on display. Whether you are avoiding food or relatives, it doesn't make for the most fulfilling holiday.

So why not throw your own? Over the next couple weeks I'll be posting possible menus- perfect for your own feast, or as a chance to pick a few to tote along to the fam's festivities. Trust me, it will be a lot more satisfying than trying to make it on brussel sprouts alone.

Menu #1: Traditional All the Way

This meal (minus the tofurkey, which I ca't justify for just me) is basically what I eat every year. Over the last 5 years, I have slowly (very slowly) convinced my Mom and Aunt to make small substitutions in their age-old recipes that make them more vegan friendly. Amazingly, after trying it once, they have stuck to it! (Mostly because there is literally no difference in taste.) I mean, even when I switched to vegetarian my Mom still used soymilk and earth balance! How awesome is that?

Tofurkey Turkey.

Cranberry Sauce

Commercial stuffing (hopefully with cranberries!) omitting the chicken broth.

Green Bean Casserole using vegan mushroom soup in lieu of Cambells.

Mashed potatoes w/ earth balance and soymilk.

Easy, Fabulous Sweet potatoes a la my Aunt Mary:

2 (big) Cans Sweet potatoes in syrup
Brown sugar
2 Apples
Soymilk
Earth Balance
Pecans

1. Preheat oven to 375. Pour out your sweet potatoes, reserving a few tablespoons of the syrup. Mash them in a medium casserole dish with the syrup, a little soymilk, and a tablespoon of brown sugar. (Whip 'em if you feel like it.) Next, slice your apples into thin, lengthwise slices, and cover the sweet potato mixture. Last, roughly chop the pecans and mix them with a fork with about 2 tablespoons earth balance and 1 1/2 tbs brown sugar. When this mixture is crumbly and the pecans are fairly coated, sprinkle this evenly over top of the apples. Bake until brown and bubbly on top.

And for dessert, Apple Pie and Pumpkin Pie.