Ah, I am enjoying a nice relaxing morning by the fireplace with some very cuddly dogs thinking about going for a run in a bit and thankful I’m not participating in the madness of Black Friday. I know, how un-American of me! But I worked in retail on Black Fridays in the past at an electronics store and it was awful having to get up so early and deal with herds of cranky customers all day. When I saw stores were opening at midnight on Thanksgiving for the sales this year, I just felt sorry for the employees stuck working those hours and not being able to enjoy a relaxing Thanksgiving with their family because of it. No deals are worth that, maybe we need a law that Black Friday can’t start until 8 AM so people can get back to enjoying Thanksgiving. :-)
I spent a good amount of time having fun in the kitchen yesterday prepping food for our small Thanksgiving gathering at my Dad’s. Smaller gatherings are great too because there’s less stress and a good opportunity to experiment with new recipes on a smaller crowd. I did not have a topping for the raw vegan pumpkin pie I was making, but I did have a small box of fresh cranberries in my fridge from our farm box.
I’ve never tried a raw vegan cranberry sauce before, but started looking for inspiration online to see what I could make with the ingredients I had on hand. I came up with this recipe using a tangerine from our tree, but you could use a small orange too.
Raw Vegan Cranberry Sauce
- 2 cups of fresh cranberries
- 1 cup of pitted medjool dates
- 1 tangerine, peeled and chopped
- 1 tsp. of tangerine zest
- 1/2 cup of water, as needed
Place all ingredients into a high speed blender and blend to a smooth and creamy texture. Makes 6 servings.
The sauce is so simple and quick, much faster than boiling the cranberries with with sugar and letting them cool. And I opted to use less water to keep the sauce thick, the texture looks like a sherbert or sorbet and is perfect for scooping onto desserts and into neat piles on dinner plates without running all over the place.
For the Thanksgiving meal, I also brought a ready made vegan quinoa dish I found at Costco as a backup in case I needed more higher protein options, for only $6, it had a lot of servings and was very tasty.
I also make a huge spinach salad loaded with hemp seeds and simple dressing of olive oil, balsamic vinegar, and nutritional yeast.
My plate looked like a veggie celebration with the quinoa dish, salad, and lovely walnut brussels sprouts side dish, very filling while not being too filling.
I had plenty of room for dessert – this raw vegan pumpkin pie recipe I do every year now. I did it a little differently this year as a pumpkin pie tart instead of a traditional pie by using a greased 10″ cake pan to layer the crust as the first layer and the pie filling as the second making thinner, but larger slices. It was a little easier and faster molding it into a cake pan instead of carefully forming the delicate pie crust in a pie pan and the slices felt bigger and looked more impressive even though they weren’t more food.
It made 8 large slices and I wasn’t allowed to take the leftovers home. :-)