Thanks be to dog

We had a quiet Thanksgiving at home, with our new friend. He's very good at sitting under the table without begging.

On top of the table, there was: mashed hubbard squash (with cinnamon, nutmeg and cayenne), cranberry sauce, wild rice stuffing with fig and (Louisiana) pecans, mushroom gravy, beans, an unrecognizable seitan roulade, and (I'll explain) a big bowl of salt.


The seitan roulade and the accompanying stuffing were inspired by the ones in this video by Emilie of The Conscious Kitchen. (I didn't wrap the roulade tight enough, so the seitan ended up expanding too much and the roulade just would not cut into neat slices. But it tasted good at least. I am looking forward to seitan and cranberry sauce sandwiches tomorrow.)

In the bowl of salt hid baked fingerling potatoes (like so). They worked out nice and (as you'd expect) salty.














And for dessert, at long last, pumpkin cheesecake from Fat Free Vegan. Yum!

Gumboish

I came home from NOLA with a hankering for gumbo -- most people get to satisfy this desire while actually in NO, but vegetarians are not most people.

I based this loosely on kittee's recipe for sausage gumbo. I didn't have all the ingredients she calls for (e.g. tomato, parsley, gimme lean) and I'm sure I committed some gumbo faux pas, but it was delicious anyway. (Some of my substitutions and additions included red peppers, some leftover beans, and some soyrizo. I'm sure a gumbo purist would not approve.)

As well as gumbo inspiration, NOLA also provided me with white chocolate chips (thanks to Kosher Cajun). Finally, my Australian macadamias were able to achieve their true destiny:

Butternut lasagna

Out of nowhere, I had a craving for butternut lasagna. Some googling turned up this recipe, which had some nice ideas, like adding rosemary and roasted garlic to the bechamel.

I pretty much followed that recipe (in spirit, if not in actual measurements and details). I used the bechamel recipe from Bryanna Clark Grogan's wonderful book Nonna's Italian Kitchen. I used no-boil lasagna noodles, which soaked up almost all the bechamel, which is fine by me.

The rosemary made this insanely good. Next time I just need to remember to make a bit more bechamel, because I ran out and could only put a too-thin layer on top.

Pizza pie

In St Louis recently, I had some amazing deep dish pizza at a place called Pi. (Hey, even the president-elect agrees.)

Their pizza has a really great, buttery-tasting cornmeal crust. Yesterday I tried to replicate it, which was challenging, because my memories of eating it were a little foggy. They mostly amounted to "Damn, this is good".

I used this recipe, with a couple of changes. I used half AP flour, half medium-fine cornmeal, and 2 teaspoons of vital wheat gluten. I also reduced the oil to 4 tablespoons. It worked pretty well, though it was a little bit crumblier than I was aiming for.



I topped it with a cheeze sauce (of the cashews + nutritional yeast sort) plus a small amount of Follow Your Heart mozzarella (Tagline: It melts!), then some peppers, chard and kalamatas. Not bad. Not bad at all. (Though I'm still dreaming of the Berkeley pizza at Pi.)

What to do with pumpkin

Before I moved to this country, I never would've had this problem.

You see, I have some roasted pumpkin puree, and I don't know what to do with it. Back home, the answer would have been obvious. But this place has opened my eyes to the world of pumpkin desserts, North American style -- I've come a long way since my first, skeptical encounter with pumpkin pie*, in Montreal (7 years ago!). If I hadn't sworn to lay off of the sweets for a while**, I'd be making this immediately. (Maybe I'll be able to hold out until Thanksgiving. Maybe.)

So, maybe pumpkin tortilla soup? Or tofu kabocha pie?***

*My brother, visiting recently, reminded me of how foreign American pumpkin desserts are to our antipodean palate: his comment on a pumpkin muffin was "Tastes great, just like gingerbread, not like pumpkin at all!".

**Don't feel sorry for me. This is but one of the many desserts that have appeared and then quickly disappeared from our kitchen recently.

***Yeah, that's right, I don't care that they call for kabocha squash. It's all pumpkin where I come from.