Thanksgiving 2011

I want to preface this by saying that I mean no disrespect to anyone who observes dietary restrictions for philosophical reasons.  I was a vegetarian for a while in college and Dave and I kept kosher for a couple years so while neither of them seemed to enhance my life enough to keep it up, I understand the urge that leads people to embrace a particular dietary lifestyle.  It's just that in our house all the dietary restrictions are  driven by health concerns and one way to deal with it is to make light of it.  It's also convenient to have a shorthand way to convey the list of forbidden items to others.

So, describing Nate as a carnivorous soy-free vegan is accurate and useful.  (Now of course we have to add the caveat that he can't have any nuts except almonds, but that is a fairly new addendum and we haven't worked it in yet.)

This year, as I did last year, I made a Thanksgiving dinner that was completely Nate-safe.

It was a soy-free vegan menu - - -  except for the turkey and the bacon.

Here's the menu:

For breakfast:

Mimosas - a tradition Dave and I originated with our first Thanksgiving and have never given up.  Some years it has been cool enough to chill the OJ and champagne in the snow on the porch.  This year we needed some space in the refrigerator.

Dave and I had pumpkin spice lattes (not pictured) and Nate had almond milk hot chocolate while we watched the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade.

I made cinnamon rolls the night before that I could just pop in the oven in the morning.  They were deliciously vegan-ly gooey (No one should EVER confuse vegan and healthy as synonyms)

Dinner:

The turkey - dry brined in a lemon oregano salt crust and brushed with lemon oil while cooking.  A little large for 4 1/2 people, but I wanted leftovers.

Cranberry Agrodolce, the same I make every year since Dave tasted it at our dear friend Bree's house.

Mashed potatoes and gravy (made from the turkey drippings and addictively good - though the brining made it pretty salty and if I did it again I think I'd grind some diuretics into it)

Stuffing (that never saw the inside of the turkey) made from home-made bread, onions, celery, spinach, and home-made stock.

Sweet potato hash with bacon and green apples

Ultimately the star of the show was this coconut pull apart bread - sweet but not too much, tender and moist and so, so fragrant. Nate ate about a quarter of a loaf.

And for dessert:  vegan pumpkin pie (adapted from Pim Techamuamvivit -  recipe to follow in another post)

 We pounced on it!

Hope everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving!!!!

Branching Out

I was overjoyed when I discovered, through a chance encounter, that it would be possible to make my carnivorous vegan son a tasty chocolate cake.  He has eaten many of these depression-era chocolate cupcakes and had a dinosaur birthday cake made from the batter as well.  The frosting, made by necessity with Blue Bonnet light margarine was a little soft with an unfortunate tendency to separate, but all in all the cake was a success.
Given my recent discovery of vegan buttermilk, I felt ready to branch out and Grandma Nancy's birthday gave me the perfect occasion.
I was inspired by a friend from residency and her food/fashion/family blog but ultimately ended up settling on a slightly more time consuming but beautiful plan.
I used a vegan vanilla cupcake recipe I found on line (Note: do not consider the addition of the almond extract optional.  It was amazing.) and ended up using a triple recipe, but I made one batch at a time to keep it from going flat while waiting for the layers to be colored and baked.

 (I learned, actually, that our oven is not level, not that anything in our 70+ year old house is.  The resultant fat-on-one-side-skinny-on-another layers required some engineering skill to layer into a level cake.)
The finished product was supposed to be a rainbow but I got distracted in my ROYGBIV and it was just a colorful hodge-podge instead.

The addition of shortening to the buttercream improved the situation significantly though I lacked the diabetic determination necessary to put enough between the layers to really separate the colors.

A thin layer of chocolate on the outside because I firmly believe a birthday cake without chocolate is heresy, some rainbow candles, and voila, birthday magic.