Thanksgiving!

We’ll be back to regular programming soon, but first – a Thanksgiving recap.

A year ago we decided to adopt Thanksgiving as a holiday even though neither of us grew up celebrating it. We skip a lot of religious holidays but still wanted to have special days in the year to celebrate with family & friends, and Thanksgiving looked like a great holiday to add to our lives.

This year the theme for the menu was all things American: some traditional dishes like mashed potatoes, green beans & pecan pie, some old vegetarian holiday favorites like nut loaf, and some were new like quinoa, roasted sweet potato and cranberries salad, and homemade cultured cashew cheese (did you know cashews originally came from America?! That was totally new to me).

Here’s the full spread:

In the middle (on the board) is Peter Reinhart’s excellent Wild Rice and Onion Bread. Next to it is cultured sun-dried tomato & basil cashew cheese from Miyoko Schinner’s “Artisan Vegan Cheese” cookbook, and a zucchini-onion dip. Then there’s the mashed potatoes; roasted cauliflower; nutloaf on the far left; a green salad (the bowl on the bottom), some guac (next to the nutloaf) and mung beans (next to the mashed potatoes) that guests brought. At the top left are the roasted green beans, to the right of it is the aforementioned quinoa salad loosely based on this recipe (and we loved it, so it’s a keeper),  a simple pan-roasted tomato & basil salad, and last but not least – gravy (from here).

We used this recipe as a template for the nut loaf with some minor swaps like nuts we had on hand instead of the ones listed and fresh parsley for dried. Daniel made a glaze based on Gochujang (Korean red chili pepper paste for those unfamiliar) instead of a ketchup-based one, and it was awesome. People went nuts for the nut-loaf! (see what I did there? hehe.)

For dessert we made an apple pie:

And a maple pecan pie:

Both are from Isa & Terry’s “Vegan Pie in the Sky”. That is such a great cookbook! The pecan pie is seriously one of the best things I’ve ever eaten.

We had so much fun! The company was great and it was really nice to catch up with people we haven’t seen for a while. There was way too much food, but that’s also traditional, right? And it meant no cooking on Friday, just resting after a week of cooking every night after work in preparation…

Happy holiday weekend everyone!