Thanksgiving Recap

So who’s out Black Friday shopping? Not me, I’ll be heading to the gym this morning! It was a very small Thanksgiving for us with just my mom and her dog coming over and he quickly claimed our couch.

Miko didn’t mind, he spent most of the evening in the kitchen offering his clean up services.

While Skipper was happy to mooch some extra attention.

Yesterday we spent the day making an absolute mess of our kitchen multiple times trying a lot of new vegan recipes and products while having fun.

My mom even brought an extra vegan rice side dish from Trader Joe’s that we ended up not needing because we had too much food already!

And hubby was kind enough to take on most of the cooking for us and did and awesome job!

The first product we tried was the Trader Joe’s Turkey-less vegan roast already stuffed with stuffing and packed with vegan gravy.

It roasted in the oven for an hour, but held together nicely and sliced beautifully for presentation.

My plate was disgustingly full!

We had the green bean casserole recipe from the Peas and Thank You book – it was good, but adding the vegan sausage was overkill, I’d probably leave it out next time. And it was a bit complicated with fresh chopped mushrooms and a long ingredient list that I had to buy specially for this recipe. But still very hearty and tasted much like the traditional stuff.

We also had the mashed potato recipe from Veganomicon – it was great with steamed potatoes mashed with simple ingredients most vegans already have on hand.

Since hubby is a gravy fanatic, I also grabbed Tofurky gravy to try along with the vegan gravy in the Trader Joe’s roast and they were both good to us, hubby had no complaints about either.

And we had the 365 Organic Vegan Stuffing from Whole Foods which was super easy, the basic instructions was to cook the stuffing stove top with water and oil, but we used veggie broth and added fresh herbs which was great. I haven’t had traditional stuffing in ages, so this was a fun and easy way to have it and something I would do again.

The Trader Joe’s vegan roast was actually very good with a realistic meat like texture that wasn’t too chewy or rubbery. For $10, it was totally worth it and we still have plenty of leftovers after feeding three.

I also made my raw vegan cranberry sauce adding chia seeds to thicken it up more.

Finally we made this raw vegan pumpkin pie for dessert, but I let hubby do most of the preparing this time. :-)

I’ve made this pie a few times, it’s one of my favorites for the holidays that’s simple, fast, and a fun way to use a fresh pie pumpkin. But we did things a little different this year pureeing the pie filling mixture to a creamy custard texture in the food processor and adding a little maple syrup to sweeten it more, forming it in a small cake pan with a removable bottom, and making the crust just the bottom layer tightly packed. Then placed it in the freezer to serve mostly frozen.

It ended up being like a mix between a pumpkin cheesecake/ice cream cake and very good!

Somehow the three of use absolutely stuffed our fridge with leftovers too, yikes!

I guess I will be going through it today and deciding what to freeze.