Happy Thanksgiving!

Happy Thanksgiving friends! Here's to family and friends and cute and fuzzy kitties!

xoxo,
Michelle

VeganMofo 2010: Obligatory Thanksgiving Dinner Post

Ohh, so full!  So much food! I love having leftovers for a week. Well, I'll be saying that for a few days at least, and then I'll get sick of them and order a pizza or something. :)

I made Bryanna's Seitan Tofurkey (which mysteriously isn't online anymore, i don't think? I couldn't find it on her site, since she took all her recipes down, but I had it written down from previous years.), mashed 'taters, stuffing, corn (this where I feel super-smart, and pulled some of the corn I froze from the summertime!), and cranberries. I was going to make roasted brussel sprouts, but I decided to save them for leftovers, to mix it up a bit.  Pumpkin pie for dessert! 

The smell of sage=thanksgiving

VeganMofo 2010: Pumpkin Pie is the best!

It is! It really is! Seriously, my apartment smells so good right now. I should find some pumpkin pie candles or something to keep this aroma going on throughout the holiday season.   I went back to the basics this year, no pumpkin cheesecake or double-chocolate pumpkin fudge cake (whoa I bet that would be good), and just made a plain basic pumpkin pie.  I went with Bryanna's recipe, because it is easy and awesome.   OMG, I can't wait to eat tomorrow!  Happy Thanksgiving those celebrating!  

Some pre-baking action going on.

I put a pan of water in the oven, to prevent the cracks, but that obviously didn't work.

Thanksgiving '09 Foodz + Bust Craftacular

Hello! Hope you had a relaxing weekend with lots of yummy food and catchup sleep! I sure did, and am getting a bit sad-faced that Monday is almost here. I haven't reached the sick-of-leftovers phase yet, so I figured I should post about it now before I am!

I went with Bryanna Clark Grogan's Seitan tofurkey for the main in the roulade style (I super-spiced it up though, with fresh sage, rosemary, thyme, and garlic), roasted brussel sprouts (I shredded them up for extra-yumminess!), corn, mashed taters with mushroom and onion gravy (modified from VCON), stuffing, cranberries (with apples added! BUT, I forgot about them in the fridge, so we didn't get to eat them until the next day, with leftovers!), and Pumpkin Cheezecake Pie for dessert (and soyatoo on top!) with a homemade graham cracker crust. Everything was pretty successful and delicious! We didn't eat until 9ish at night, due to a little underestimation in the timing, but it was all good. Super-happy thanksgiving! Some pictures:







I've also been super-crafting this weekend, preparing for next weekend's Bust Craftacular. If you are in the NYC area on Sunday, December 6th, come say hi!

Neighborhood walks

It was such a pretty Fall day today, that I thought I'd bring my camera along when I went to pick up my CSA and visit the Farmer's Market this morning. Days like this, make me love Brooklyn and my neighborhood. So many people out today, I assume to prep for Thanksgiving this week ('cause I sure was). It must have been community rake day in the park today too, because there was lots of raking going on (and little kids jumping in piles!) I'm super-excited for a 2 1/2 day work week coming up, and for the extra days off work to work on my freelance work and Etsy shop (yes, days off to work more, ha! But I enjoy that kind of work, so it's okay). And to sleep in! Yes! I'm not traveling for Thanksgiving, so it will just be a nice quiet dinner with Nik and I. Hooray for leftovers! I can't decide on whether to make this, this, or the old (delicious!) standby (scroll down to the Seitan "turkey" part). I'm going to make mashed taters w/ mushroom gravy, roasted brussel sprouts, cranberries, stuffing, and Pumpkin cheesecake for dessert. Yum yum, I can't wait! What are YOU making this year?

Happy Thanksgiving!

Hope everyone had a great thanksgiving! I spent mine sleeping in (yessss), cleaning a bit, chatting with my mom, and making a yummy dinner. Nik and I had a nice dinner and we are suuuuuper-full now.

I made Bryanna's Seitan Tofurkey roast, that was waay delicious. I made it last year and loved it, but I did the stuffing roulade variation this year and it was even better! Totally the way to go. I stuck with classic bread stuffing, just like my mom makes. Nik smashed the potatoes and added lots of garlic. I had made the cranberries last night, so they were all gelled and chilled and perfect tonight. I'm not a huge brussel sprout fan, but I think if you roast them with lots of olive oil and sea salt and garlic, they become downright addictive.

Fat-free Vegan's Pumpkin Cheesecake was for dessert. It was super-pretty looking with the layers and all that, but it was kinda meh. It wasn't very "cheesecake"-like, or pumpkin-pie-like either. Too inbetween. It was okay, but not mind-blowing like all the reviews I read would lead me to believe.

I'm all relaxed now with some Adult Swim on. Yaay good food and cartoons. :)

What to feed non-vegans

I have a thanksgiving-style potluck tomorrow at work, and I always get a bit worked up about what to bring. I usually stick with desserts, except for that one year I made stuffed mushrooms with tofu cream cheese and spinach. It was the first time that I had EVER made them, and I forgot two very important things A)how much mushrooms shrink and how downright dinky and minimal they looked, and B) oohhhhh the excess water that comes out of them and stays in the pan. I didn't look at them before I gave them to the woman in charge of the shindig, and only realized in the line of 90 other people, that my mushrooms were swimming in their own juice. Oh the horror. So yes, I stick with desserts. Easy and usually a hit. Last year I made pumpkin-chocolate chip cupcakes and maple-pecan cupcakes, which were gobbled up without the knowledge of their veganness. Mwuahaha. Anyways, this year I decided to make something with apples in them (because as I have mentioned a bajillion times before, I have a bajillion of them that I need to do something with). My mom had sent me this groovy recipe cut out of the newspaper, for an apple-pear tart made in little phyllo dough cups and I thought that might be good for a potluck. I set the recipe aside this morning, but somehow completely lost it. It just vanished! So I improvised. I've always liked cranberry paired with apples, (and bonus for ultimate thanksgiving-ness of the foods) and I've worked with phyllo dough enough times to feel okay preparing it for other people.

Cran-Apple-Pecan Phyllo Cup

Preheat oven to 400 F

Makes 24 little cuties, using two mini-muffin pans

Ingredients:
8 Sheets of Phyllo Dough
About 1 cup of Earth Balance, melted (this is approx., I have one of those huuuuge tubs of the stuff and I just cut some out)

3 apples, coarsely chopped
Cinnamon
Sugar
a little water

a quarter of a 12oz bag of cranberries
a little water
1/2 cup-ish of sugar

Directions:

1) Using a pastry brush, brush EB onto one half of phyllo dough. Fold unbrushed side onto brushed side and brush some more. Do this one more time, so that you have 4 layers of phyllo dough, all brushed with EB inbetween layers. Using a pizza cutter, cut into 6 equal squares. Fit each square into your mini-muffin pan. I squished down the sides to make a more stable crust (I have to bring these with me onto the subway tomorrow morning!!), but they look pretty cool all wild-like sticking out. Brush with more EB, if the top is looking a little dry. Here's where I ran into a little freakout moment: I put them in the oven, and when I checked them five minutes later, they were all puffed up!! I quick took a small spoon and kinda pushed them back down carefully, and that seemed to do the trick. So yes, watch them carefully!! Bake until lightly browned, about 10ish minutes.

2)Make some applesauce!! I just throw the apples, a few splashes of water, a few shakes of cinnamon, and a handful of sugar in a pot and boil/stir. When the apples are tender, I use a potato masher and mash away at them.

3) Make some cranberries!! I always scoff at the back of cranberry packages, when it calls for 1 cup of sugar. It always seems like waaaay too much sugar for how many cranberries there are, but then I tastetest and remember how SUPER-TART those little buggers are. So yeah, in goes more sugar. I just add until my lips don't purse anymore at the taste of them. Boil until water is evaporated/absorbed, and pop those cranberries with a fork or something.

4) I let everything cool for a bit before I assembled. I was scared of what color it might be if I combined the applesauce and cranberries, so I played it safe by just layering (totally prettier) them and topping with pecans.

FYI, I totally doubled the amount of applesauce and cranberries I used and just combined them in a dish for dinner tomorrow!! (also, the color was actually not pukey-pink looking and kinda pretty)

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After all that, I made some Quesadillas. I used FYH Cheddar, Kale, leftover sweet potatoes, a clove of garlic, and a some random shakes of spices (pepper, thyme, paprika) in a whole wheat tortilla. I was super-patient about cooking it at low heat in a covered pan, so that the FYH cheese would have a chance to get all melty, and it was well worth it!

Thanksgiving spread

The whole shebang:

Cranberries made with apple-raspberry cider and walnuts:

Candied-lime Sweet potatoes: (from Vegan Yum Yum)

Bryanna's Soy and Seitan Roast with Mushroom Gravy: (recipe)

Mom's stuffing is the best stuffing ever:

Heart-shaped Apple Galette from Veganomicon

Fields of color

productive thanksgiving

Don't eat my friend

I adopted Luna from the Farm Sanctuary. She's so cute!! Someday I will make it there to visit all the animals and see this wonderful place, but for now, this is the least that I can do.

"In 1986, Farm Sanctuary began its annual Adopt-A-Turkey Project. This unique effort has saved thousands of turkeys from the slaughterhouse, and encouraged millions of people to be kind to animals. This Thanksgiving, hundreds of families are feeding turkeys, instead of eating them, by adopting feathered friends who live at Farm Sanctuary.

Special holiday celebrations are held at Farm Sanctuary’s shelters in Watkins Glen, NY, and Orland, CA, where turkeys are the guests of honor, not the main course. Farm Sanctuary staff and volunteers prepare a buffet of squash, cranberries, pumpkin pie, and other vegetarian treats, and the turkeys have the pleasure of stuffing themselves."

(...)

"Like all animals, turkeys experience pain and suffering, yet they are specifically excluded from state and federal animal protection laws. As a result, turkeys are subjected to intolerable cruelty at factory farms and slaughterhouses across the United States. But Farm Sanctuary is working to change the tragic status quo, and the Adopt-A-Turkey Project, which encourages people be part of a new holiday tradition, is a critical part of this effort."

Adopt a turkey