Veggie Thanksgivings, Minus the Tofurkey
a.k.a. It’s Not All About Ersatz
I went vegan in 2004 sort of on a whim, and it stuck for 8 years. Now I’m back to plain-old lacto-ovo vegetarianism, but I’m still not eating meat. During that time, I broke away from the annual tradition of paying $600 or more to fly back to the Midwest: Fighting through airports, delayed and missed connections due to the inevitable bad weather, only to result in having slim pickings at the Thanksgiving table finally lost its appeal.
Instead, I’ve been hosting my own vegetarian Thanksgiving for the last six years — 2013 will be the seventh. Enough people have asked me for ideas of how to make gravy without drippings, and what to serve instead of turkey as the centerpiece of the meal, that I thought I’d just write it down in a nicely shareable format.
So, here you go: Thanksgivings à la Nori, which means no meat, lots of work, and very full bellies.
Appetizers
If you’re anything like me, not everything will be finished when your guests start arriving. I kind of like this, actually — I find it kind of depressing to have everything all finished, and then be sitting around waiting with nothing to do. Better to have people trickle in as you’re stirring gravy, and have the end of cooking overlap with the beginning of socializing. (And if you’re really behind, suddenly you have extra pairs of hands.)
But they’re going to arrive hungry, because that’s the whole point. You’re going to need to have something for them to munch on.
One approach here is just to ask your guests to bring the appetizers. It’s kind of perfect, because (a) it doesn’t interfere with your overarching meal plan (if you had one), (b) it by definition shows up when they do, and (c) it frees you up to focus on the main attractions.
If you’re going to make the appetizers yourself, don’t spend a lot of time on them. (Though I am really, really tempted by the cheddar-cranberry gougères from today’s NYT.) Don’t spend time fussing with mini-quiches, or anything that requires folding or individual assembly. Rather, make a couple of interesting dips, put out some chopped veggies and crackers, and hand your guest a drink and a canapé knife and let them go to town.
Here are a couple of my favorite dips, both vegan. Both come together really quickly (minus the roasting of the beets & potatoes, which you can do ahead of time), and they provide a nice contrast to each other. Just make one batch of each — it’s tempting to double, but you’ll be eating the leftovers for weeks.
- Puréed White Beans with Fresh Herbs
- Roasted Beet & Garlic Purée — to this, you should add 2 lemons’ worth of juice, and 1/2C -1C tahini. Trust me. Everyone loves this despite its weird color.
Main Dishes
Let me just get this out of the way: No one is going to miss the turkey.
Thanksgiving is all about having a million dishes on the table, and cramming your plate as full as possible. Even at an omnivore’s feast, turkey is going to be only one of the options.
I have the same philosophy about vegetarian Thanksgivings that I do about any big meal: You don’t need to replace the missing meat with anything particularly show-stopping (unless you want to, of course). Over the years, I’ve tried making crazy labor-intensive roulades with chestnut filling and homemade puff pastry; baby pumpkins stuffed with sautéed veggies in a pumpkin-curry sauce; phyllo triangles of mushrooms and tofu topped with a delicata-porcini sauce , the eggplant chermoula from Jerusalem — all of them were good, but I’m not sure any of them were worth the labor involved. You can absolutely pick one slightly fancier thing and vary that year to year, but I don’t think anyone’s going to notice if you just don’t.
Instead, focus on the “side” dishes — the mashed potatoes, the stuffing, something green (or two somethings green — it’s nice to have a lighter element to this heavy meal), and something orange.
With that in mind, here are some of my favorite “sides” — which together, I assert, totally comprise a meal.
Stuffing
This is your brown-and-starchy category. I have two favorites:
- Lemon Barley “Stuffing” With Shiitakes, Hazelnuts and Chive Butter. The NYT published this in ‘09, and I’ve made it just about every year since. It’s not really a stuffing, and I like that about it — it’s more of a grain-heavy salad. So delicious. I used vegan butter (Earth Balance) for the butter it calls for when I was vegan, which worked just fine.
- Classic stuffing. There’s this one with apples and sage from Epicurious (just omit the sausage), which my friends made at Febgiving a couple of years ago, which was delicious;or you can just go super basic and do what my mom’s always done. Here you go:
Mom’s Basic Stuffing
Quantities below that feed ~8 people as a side dish.
- ¾ C onion (“one big one”)
- ¾ C celery
- ½ C butter (can obviously use Earth Balance or olive oil instead)
- 1-2 quarts (~1 loaf’s worth) bread, cubed
- Walnuts (1/2 C or less)
- Salt & pepper
- “Fair amount” of sage & thyme; “less” tarragon
- ½ C or more veggie stock (use the roasted veg stock from Bittman)
- Optional: 2 eggs (mixed into the stock); pats of butter on top
Cut bread into slices; get it nice & stale for a couple of days, then cut into cubes.
Sauté the onion & celery in butter until really soft. Add in bread cubes and walnuts, toss. Add seasoning to taste and stock until it’s soft enough. If using the Allan Friedman method, mix 2 eggs into the stock first, to give the whole thing a bread-pudding-y feel, and dot the top with pats of butter.
Put in a baking dish; bake at 350 covered in foil for 20 minutes, then at 400 uncovered for 20 more.
Mashed Potatoes
The recipe I’ve been using for years is from the Cornucopia cookbook (if you, as a vegetarian or vegan, are ever in Dublin, this is the only place you’re going to want to eat). It calls for adding in some parsnips to your traditional potatoes, and of course lots of butter (read: Earth Balance). I have never gone wrong with this, except perhaps to make too much.
Green Things
It’s nice to have something on the lighter side to cut through all that starch. I almost always roast 2-3 lbs of Brussels sprouts (EVOO, S&P, roast at ~400F for 20ish minutes), and then grate some lemon zest over them. Easy and delicious. This salad of grated Brussels sprouts looks similar; I might try it this year.
Kale is always in season around Thanksgiving. I’ve been really enjoying this kale salad from Smitten Kitchen recently; it might make an appearance this year.
Orange Things
I actually haven’t historically included a “something orange” at my table in years past, but just might include one of these this year:
- Roasted Butternut Squash and Red Onion with Tahini and Za’atar (haven’t made it, but Ottolenghi is never wrong)
- Warm Butternut Squash and Chickpea Salad from Smitten Kitchen — I’ve made this several times for non-Thanksgivings and it’s always been really well received. My only worry is it might be a bit protein-heavy, what with the chickpeas. Sure, there’s no tofurkey in this meal, but trust me, you’re getting plenty to eat already.
- Mom & I made this sweet potato gnocchi with sage & brown butter for Christmas dinner 2012. It wasn’t as labor-intensive as I’d feared, and it tasted absolutely amazing. Might be a nice orange element for a Thanksgiving table, too. (Does Earth Balance brown the same magical way that butter does?)
Garnishes
Gravy
I’ve tried all the vegan gravies over the years: Mushroomy ones, soy-sauce-y ones, and everything in between. They all come out funny. My notes from 2010, when I tried the Candle Cafe Cookbook’s gravy say “meh, too soy-saucy and not exciting enough.” Finally, I tried just doing what my mom has always done: making basic roux and adding some really flavorful stock. AMAZING.
Because you’re not using drippings from a roasting pan (I’m convinced that the main reason omnivores roast turkeys is for the drippings), you’ll need to create your own flavor in the stock. Avoid store-bought, which is going to suck and be too salty anyhow. It’s easy enough to make your own really delicious stock that there’s no reason not to, especially since this is going on top of everything.
I recommend Mark Bittman’s roasted vegetable stock, from How To Cook Everything Vegetarian (a really great reference, if you don’t already have it).
Once you’ve got the delicious stock, the rest is really easy: make a roux of equal parts [vegan] butter & flour (my mom says 1T each per 1C of stock, but I’ve found that a better ratio was more like 1T butter ::1T flour :: 0.5C stock — otherwise you’ll be reducing it too long), and gradually stir in a lot of this stock. Et voilà, delicious veggie gravy.
Cranberry Sauce
Everybody wants some, but nobody wants more than a spoonful or so. Therefore, whatever you do, ONLY MAKE A HALF BATCH. I like this cranberry relish from my college friend’s mom (do add the port it questioningly calls for), but seriously, halve it. Don’t worry about the extra cherries you’re throwing out — use them to infuse vodka for your New Year’s party, or something. Because what are you really going to do with two cups of extra cranberry sauce?
Desserts
Vegan Options
The nice thing about being back to eating eggs and dairy is that they make Thanksgiving desserts much, much easier. Especially the classic T-day dessert: during all my years of hosting a vegan meal, I never found a good vegan pumpkin pie recipe. The pie would come out with a slight chalky mouth-feel (if I used arrowroot, as is the one from The Joy Of Vegan Baking (otherwise a great book); or Ener-G Egg Replacer, which does so well otherwise in egg-free cakes), or wouldn’t hold together if I tried flax seeds. You just really need eggs.
Ditto pecan pie. The last year I went back to Wisconsin for Thanksgiving, my dad tried to make me a vegan pecan pie, substituting (I think) Ener-G Egg Replacer for eggs. He’d used a pre-made pie shell in its flimsy tin, so when it came out of the oven and he set it on the sideboard, the molten corn-syrup-and-corn-starch-and-pecan goo oozed over the side. He instinctively scooped it up with his bare hand. When he came to meet my bus from Chicago that year, his hand was bandaged. I felt so guilty. Moral of the story: Don’t attempt to veganize pecan pie.
I just went back and looked through all of my planning docs (which I keep in Google Drive — think of them as cheat sheets, shopping lists, timetables, and postmortems of how each dish was received and what wine not to buy for next year, all rolled into one), and the only vegan Thanksgiving dessert I’ve ever made that both I and others liked was a chocolate-pumpkin bread pudding from the NYT in 2010. (This is now included in a whole set of vegan dessert recipes.) I think an apple crisp would also work really well here, or just a straight-up apple pie. Both crumble and pie crusts take really well to using Earth Balance instead of butter, after all.
If you’re making a new recipe (this is in theory true for everything here, but especially for desserts, which I’ve found have the greatest room for failure), try it out before the big meal. Bring it into work, or invite some friends over for whiskey and your attempt at a coconut-chocolate-gingerbread, or whatever recipe you pulled out of the latest VegNews. Give them enough whiskey that they’re compelled to be honest. And if it sucks, or falls apart when you take it out of the oven, play it safe and stick to something with apples or the above-linked bread pudding.
Things With Eggs
Vegetarian Thanksgiving desserts — the kind where you can use not only butter (which tastes good, but doesn’t add much to the chemistry of the dish), but also eggs — come out so much better, in my experience.
I’ll be making a plain old pumpkin pie this year (or maybe the NYT’s brandied version). Last year, I made this gingerbread cake (which I tried unsuccessfully to veganize the year before). Delicious.
Drinks
You’re going to want something to wash it all down.
Wine
First of all, you’ll want wine. Figure 1 bottle per adult, if it doesn’t matter if you have leftovers (personally, I never mind a spare bottle of Mourvèdre on the shelf). People always say to get a mix of white and red — Asimov comments this year that, for this meal, you want “whites that drink like reds, and reds that drink like whites” — but who drinks white in winter? If your friends do, rock on. Mine don’t.
Cocktails
I love a good cocktail, and it’s fun to be able to offer your guests something interesting while they’re eating appetizers and watching you finish up the gravy. Anything will do, but consider that festivities usually start in the early afternoon, and people will want to hang around and drink all night — so maybe something that’s very “spirit forward,” as they say, won’t be your best bet. Rather, aim for something that’s at least half some non-alcoholic ingredient — you don’t want people falling asleep (or over) before pie.
This post I came across recently has a bunch of ideas for cocktails that could be made “big-batch” style: put them in a punch bowl with a ladle, and you don’t have to worry about prepping each drink individually. (Which is fun, but time-consuming, especially if you’re still finishing up meal prep.)
Here’s one I made up earlier this year for a Thanksgiving-like event, that I served all day, going through at least two bottles of rye (for ~20 people, mind you). I call it the Hodag.
The Hodag
- 1 oz. rye (I use Bulleit, but any rye will do)
- 1 oz. cardamaro (or other dry Amaro — I like this one because it’s pretty low-proof, and on the cheaper side, at ~$20/bottle)
- 1 oz. orange juice (get your garnish before you juice the orange — much easier that way)
- Dash cardamom bitters
- Orange peel, squeezed on top and rubbed around the rim (or, if you want to get fancy, flamed)
Mix all ingredients except the orange peel in a mixing glass, or shake in a shaker — I’m not religious about how you combine them. Pour this over one giant ice cube in a chilled double old fashioned glass. Garnish with an orange twist.
Resources
One of my favorite sources for Thanksgiving-appropriate vegetarian dishes is the NYT’s annual feature “Well’s Vegetarian Thanksgiving.” They’ve been publishing this feature since at least 2010, and it’s a great place to start. (It’s also just a fantastic place to trawl through for veggie winter recipes — you may not want to feature a butternut squash/sage flatbread on your holiday table, for example, but it’s an amazing weeknight dinner.) Here are links to the years they’ve done them: 2010, 2011, and 2012. (2013 is still being revealed this week.)
Oh my god, I appear to have written a small novel. (My friend Emily will tell you that I am “clear on [my] preferences.”) Hope the above was useful; please let me know if you’ve found excellent vegan desserts that I’ve missed above, or chime in with any other suggestions.
Happy no-Turkey day!
