I have been meaning to get this blog off and running ever since my wife and I (and our son) went veg about 3 months ago. I suppose it is only fitting the maiden voyage to be that of Thanksgiving recipes, since Thanksgiving is the pre-eminent celebratory food holiday.
First, let's just address the elephant in the room. NO! No, we did not craft some sort of loaf of tofu as a turkey analog. In fact, we generally don't use a soy protein meat substitute in any of our cooking. The vast majority of the world eats less meat, per capita, than we do. Yet, they aren't pre-occupying themselves with turning soybeans into bacon.
Another annoying question? "Do you just eat salads all the time?"
No. We eat exactly what you eat, except without the meat part. Well, check that. We don't eat EXACTLY what you eat. We may go a little further beyond the traditional American meals to find exciting and new sources of sustenance, but pushing one's boundaries should be a culinary objective regardless of your propensity to consume animal flesh.
Here's what we had for Thanksgiving dinner with recipes and cooking instructions following that:
Sweet potato casserole
Cream of onion soup
Stuffing
Candied carrots
Cucumber salad
Tuscany bread with olive oil and roasted garlic
Pumpkin pie
Sweet potato casserole-
This will take you about 90 minutes
Peel 3 large sweet potatoes and slice into half inch thick medallians. Put those along the bottom of a roasting pan and add about a quarter cup of water to keep everything nice and humid while they break down and soften up. Cover tightly with foil and throw those into a 400 degree oven for an hour.
Two minor regrets I had with this. First, I used white sweet potatoes... they tasted great and were super awesome and all that jazz, but if you want something more colorful and eye-pleasing, use yams.
Second, the sliced sweet potatoes will stick to the bottom of the roasing pan. Once they are all soft and mushy, you can scrape them out of there and into a mixing bowl... or you can use a small amount of peanut oil to prevent the sticking. I didn't really mind smushing them up while scraping them out of there... but if you are one to get all verclempt about that, use the oil.
When that comes out after an hour, get those super soft discs into a stainless steel bowl. Add about a half cup of brown sugar, 3 tablespoons of cinammon, and a half teaspoon of freshly grated nutmeg. Smush it up a bit and then add a quarter cup of heavy cream, whisk it into a satin like mass of awesome and pour it into that nice corningware baking bowl thing that's in the cupboard full of other things you rarely use. Cover the top with chopped pecans and some brown sugar and it's back in the oven for another half hour.
Yeah, that tastes pretty awesome.
Cream of onion soup-
This will take somewhere between "a while" and "a long time"... but not as long as the sweet potato casserole. I'm sorry, I suck at recipes and time... and golf.
Slice up 2-3 cups of onions and a cup of celery. While you are doing that, get 2 tablespoons of olive oil hot in a gigantic pan/pot thing (picture). Chop up two cloves of garlic and toss those into the oil. When they just start to brown, put a whole stick of butter in there to cool things down and to set the stage for what is basically the most delicious soup you'll ever eat. You may have a stroke while eating it, but it's worth it. Once your butter is liquified, add your onions and celery. Now would be a great time to bring a reasonable sized pot of water to a boil. Peel and cube two moderately sized potatoes and throw those into a violently boiling pot for 2 minutes. All this time, your onions and celery are getting squishy and probably smell like angel farts. Keep those moving. You want them to get golden, but not carmelized. When your potatoes hit the 5 minute mark, drain them and add them to the onions and celery. Yes, they are still kinda hard, but they are going to finish cooking with the rest of this stuff. Add maybe 1.5 tablespoons of seasalt, 2 tablespoons of fresh ground black pepper, and about half a nut of nutmeg on a fine grater. A note about the pepper... seriously, use a decent amount of this. You are making a super rich cream soup here with a wheelbarrow full of butter in it. You NEED a nice peppery kick to remind you to breathe in between spoonfuls. Don't be a nancy girl about the pepper. Ok, back to cookin'. Add about 3 tablespoons of parsley to this spitting pot of delicious. Measure out 2 cups of vegetable broth (or stock... whatever) and pour that in there... then add however much more you need to just about cover everything. Turn that down to medium and let it simmer for a while. When your potatoes are soft enough to eat like a normal person, you're going to add between a half cup and 1.5 cups of heavy cream. Do this slowly and stop when you have gotten to a nice, thick, off white liquid. Depending on the water content of your onions and potatoes, this amount may vary. Get a small skillet down and start a quick and dirty blond roux. 2 tablespoons of butter, 3 tablespoons of flour and then maybe a splash of olive oil to keep it thin and manageable. Cook that up, constantly moving for about 3 or 4 minutes and then whisk it into the soup. Turn the soup down to low and let it go until you are ready to eat. When it's served up in a bowl, top it with cheddar cheese and start working on your beatification speech.
Stuffing-
Ok, I cheated and use the pepperidge farm bagged stuff. It's basically croutons and you add vegetable stock and sauteed onions and celery and then bake it for a while. If doing it home made, though, I'd use equal parts stale rye bread and fresh pumpernickel. Oy vey!
Candied Carrots-
My wife made these using butter, brown sugar and maple syrup. Just a note on syrup. No matter how old you are, in 150 years, you will be dead. Life is too short to not eat "real" food. Ok, I cheated on the stuffing... shoot me in the face. "Real" maple syrup is on the same freakin' shelf as the flavored corn syrup in the slave-shaped bottle. Don't be a jackass.
Anyway, she cooked all this stuff together and it was awesome.
Cucumber salad-
Cucumber, onion, dill, sour cream and probably some other stuff. My wife makes it... if you want the whole recipe, request it in the comments and I'll tell her to put it up here. It's cool, fresh, and delicious.
Bread and garlic-
Take a whole head of garlic and cut off the top (like you are cutting it in half, but not a whole half). Drizzle on some olive oil, wrap the whole thing in foil and put it in the oven at 400 degrees and forget about it. The interwebz will tell you between 30 and 45 minutes at varying temperatures, but the point is that you are going to let that get nice and toasty and the individual cloves are going to melt down to a jelly-like consistency.
On the stovetop, get a little saucepan and dump in about a half cup of olive oil, 6-8 whole peppercorns, some sage, basil, coriander, thyme, and rosemary (italian seasoning) and some coarse ground sea salt. Put that on super hot until the peppercorns start dancing around a little (basically, bring the oil up to sautee temperature). Then, strain that oil through a fine metal mesh thing into a bowl. Brush that on to some thick slices of Tuscany bread, squeeze out your gelatinous garlic cloves that spent 45 minutes to an hour in the oven, and spread them onto the bread like buttah!. Put those slices of bread in the oven under broil for a hot minute... you aren't really making toast so much as you are drying the bread out to make it crispy... so be neurotic and watch it close and pull it out when it's still white.
Pumpkin pie-
Frozen box thing that we baked but didn't eat because there was so much other food.
Seriously, this food was Rick-diggity-iculous. There was absolutely ZERO yearning for the carcass of a genetically modified breast-meat carrying pack animal, nor were we missing a yellow-brown sauce made from it's rendered fat and internal organs. We didn't even have to be jackaholes and try to replace that factory-farmed protein with a brick of curdled bean sweat. It was awesome just the way it was.
