A Very Vegan Thanksgiving

For almost every year of the past 24 years that I have been celebrating Thanksgiving my family has made ravioli. When I was younger my great grandmother would actually keep me home from school in order to help her make them. For the past decade or so though I have been a vegetarian, so I’ve only been able to share in the cheese ravioli. And for the past four years I’ve been enjoying a vegan Thanksgiving meal with my girlfriend, which is even more delicious because we make it together.

 

This year my family decided to take the easy round and order a complete cooked dinner from the store that I work at. My girlfriend and myself are the only two vegetarians of the bunch so we make our own separate meal. Normally this would begin with a trip to the store to buy a frozen Tofurkey ball. In past years this was great; earlier in the year however we started attempting to make our own seitan (the top left and top right in the picture) and we love it. So this year we decided to make our main dish instead of letting someone else.

The deliciousness that was this year’s meal began with homemade stuffing (bottome left of picture) made with hearty flax bread, celery, carrots, and shallots as well as diced apple. Making stuffing from a mix is just never the same as using bread that you’ve toasted yourself and then added freshly cooked veggies and stock. Adding diced apple is something that we tried a few months ago that we really enjoyed. After we added the broth and let the bread soak up all of the tastiness we sprinkled some Cheddar Daiya Cheese all over the top and baked it in the oven.

This stuffing was also the amazing interior of our main course – seitan wrapped in filo dough. We laid out a piece of filo dough and placed our seitan pieces that had been sliced in half and then filled with stuffing. These wrapped pieces of warm deliciousness were then baked until golden brown. When we cut into these on Thanksgiving Day there were amazing. Not exactly the same as having Tofurkey as a turkey substitute but that didn’t make them any less delicious.

Mashed potatoes (bottom right of picture) are always a given when it comes to this meal. We tried something new this year for our mashed potatoes. Generally we begin by boiling the potatoes and then adding vegan butter and almond milk until creamy and smooth. This time however, we decided to bake the potatoes instead of boiling them. This kept the entire dish a little bit lighter than usual which was a good change. And the final piece that made this meal complete was the roasted Brussels sprouts and kale. The crunchy pieces of kale tossed with quartered Brussels sprouts that were in no way soggy were a perfect side.

Dessert is something different all together and was an amazing combination of pumpkin and chocolate in the form of a muffin. This is our go-to recipe for dessert greatness and comes from one of our favorite vegan cookbook writers: Isa Chandra Moskowitz. If you haven't made anything that she's written about then you are truly missing out.