Vegan Thanksgiving

I know I'm hopelessly late with my Thanksgiving post, but let's just think of it as a lovely extension of the holiday and pretend that it doesn't actually feel like Thanksgiving happened a least a month ago already.

triumphant parsnip harvesters

I think it's clear that most American holidays suffer from commercialization, crassification (it's likely that that is not really a word, but you know what I mean), competition (what's the biggest, whose is the best, which is most expensive) and over-consumption of both material goods and food. Thanksgiving in particular suffers these problems in addition to being saddled with a legacy of death and destruction. I'm not of the "but let's just forget about all the bad and get on with the good" school of thought, it does seem important to me to engage with the negative elements of holidays, but that said, I have to own that I'm a sucker for celebration and for traditions and for friends and family and food and fun. Ergo, I am a sucker for Thanksgiving, a sort of qualified sucker, but a sucker none-the-less.

parsnips, cleaned and ready to cook

Thanksgiving is a time that marks for me the coming end of harvest and I find in it cause to celebrate root vegetables, notably, the humble parsnip which is as delicious as it is hard to get out of the ground. Every year just before Thanksgiving, farmer Steve opens up Parker Farms to all CSA members to dig, pluck, cut, and otherwise wrestle the tail end of autumn's bounty out of the earth and so off we go to the farm.

mutant carrots, still delicious

It's a pretty amazing reality check to get outside and gather your food. There's so much labor involved in each vegetable that makes it to your table it's really quite amazing that most of us never have to think about it because all we need to do is buy it. Participating in the CSA keeps me in touch with my food in a way that I never was before. I think about the weather, the soil, the time it takes for each crop to grow, the bugs, the infestations, the worms. It keeps me constantly engaged with the food that I eat. And this final harvest, well, it's one of my favorite things, despite it being cold, muddy, and hard work. The pay off of knowing where each carrot grew and having the sense memory of its slight resistance to being pulled from crumbling dark brown earth--not to put too much on the experience, but it seems to me transformative. It's an obvious thing, but one easy to forget: carrots don't come from bags, they don't come from coolers in a florescent lit grocery store, they come from the earth.

parsley root, a surprising new ingredient

It's easy for me to get caught up in the personal piece of harvesting and to romanticize it--certainly I can't grow all my own food, I can't harvest all of my own food either, I don't have the skill, time, or energy for all that, but it is worth checking in with the experience of taking food from the ground and transforming it in the kitchen and knowing, as the spoon touches your lips, where it all came from. This somewhat meditative exercise is the perfect thing for Thanksgiving.

brussels sprouts on the stalk

So loaded with bags, boxes, knives, scissors, shovels and spades, hats, gloves, scarves, and a two CD set of Punjabi pop music for the road, we went off to the farm to do some harvesting. We cut beautiful tiny brussels sprouts from their woody green stems, gathered bags of baby lettuce, bok choy, spicy mizuna, bright purple kale, and super sweet and tender spinach. Yanked carrots, dug potatoes, pitchforked parsnips, pulled up parsley root, salvaged fennel, selected parsley and dill, wrestled with celeric, sought turnips, and were gifted mushrooms, approximately five pounds of oyster mushrooms that Steve had found on a nearby tree that day--basically this was fungal gold--an amazing present which we did not squander, but did apply in a somewhat decadent fashion to our Thanksgiving menu.

celeric, aka, celery root

Though my own harvesting pales in comparison to this great haul, at home I do have a wall of herbs drying, which I cut from my window boxes. I also like to dry some paper flowers for decorating purposes throughout the winter. Having them all hanging there makes my apartment feel a little more in tune with the season too. These herbs, purple and green sage, thyme, lemon thyme, parsley, and rosemary were all central in our Thanksgiving too.



Sadly, this year's CSA didn't yield much in the way of squash since the field they were in didn't have good soil, but it did mean that I actually got to buy squash this year, which I haven't done since I joined the Parker Farm CSA because we are always up to our eyeballs in butternut, delicata, and pumpkin. I've coveted all the amazing different varieties of local squash at the store, but have never been able to justify bringing them home, until this year. I got these funky little turban squash and a beautifully bright red kuri squash from a farm stand near the Cape, where I also scored some freshly harvested Cape Cod cranberries, straight from the bog.



Loaded with freshly gathered vegetables, fruits (local apples and pears), and herbs, we packed our bags and headed up a mountain and off the grid to a rented house in the Green Mountains, near Mount Ascutney in Vermont. I will use the word "beautiful" and the descriptor "magical" and be very generous with the adjective "idyllic," and none of that can even approach the scenery that surrounded us.



A light crust of snow covered the winding dirt road that we took to get down to the house at Hound's Hollow. A stream ran along the right side of the property and woods stretched along the left. The mornings were full of sunlight and birds and the house featured window seats perfect for reading in while the evenings were full of warmth and flickering fire from a wood stove which we found perfect playing hours of Settlers of Catan in front of.



But we also did get out, hiked around the property, which was also a wildlife sanctuary, and even ventured up Mount Ascutney.

intrepid urban hikers, scorned by locals, did not perish
in under-prepared for hike up mountain

More to the point though, we cooked and we ate.



We brought a food mill, a few favorite cookbooks and this month's issue of Gourmet, which I admit to having greatly enjoyed and found lots of inspiration in, despite the dead turkey on the cover.



But many of the greatest joys of Thanksgiving need no reference books, no recipes, to be enjoyed. November signals the start of citrus season and tangerines are traditional for me at Thanksgiving. There's little better than a bowl full of fruit inviting everyone to sit down and peel one, sharing segments with friends and family. I love the smell that lingers on fingers and the sharp-sweet juice as it bursts on the tongue.



Stuffed dates are another little treat that need no recipe and without which Thanksgiving would be incomplete. My mom says that my great grandmother made them and then my grandmother made them and that she now makes them and so that makes me "the last in a long line of date stuffers," which is at once a wonderful image of the women of my family engaged across the generations in a family tradition and a subtle bit of mom-ish despair that I will never give her grandchildren. We stuff them with toasted walnuts and soy cream cheese (my great grandmother no doubt used marcapone, but well, things change, right?) and roll them in sugar. Simple and delectable. We always go through a couple pounds.



For our Thanksgiving meal itself however, we began with a soup from the aforementioned dead bird magazine, Gourmet. I modified it slightly, but their Parsley Root Soup with Truffled Chestnuts was essentially vegan already. I'd never even seen parsley root for sale anywhere, but figured that going out to the farm I could surely get some to make this soup. I spent about 30 minutes painstakingly gathering woody little roots from the parsley patch at Parker Farms, only to be told by Steve that in fact parsley root is not the root of parsley. Just as the celery root which we eat is not in fact the root of the celery plant which we eat as celery, parsley root is its own species, related to, but not in fact part of the parsley plant. Parsley root looks much more like a small parsnip or a white carrot than the spindly and branchy white roots of parsley the herb. And the taste--it's somewhat indescribable. It is light, presenting the ghost of parsley flavor as the strongest of a combination of full, but soft tastes. With the nutty warm chestnuts on top, this soup was a surprise star of the meal.



We followed the soup with an excellent salad featuring greens from Parker Farms, slices of local pear, maple, garlic and olive oil roasted beets from Terry's garden, candied pecans and walnuts and pieces of tangy rich cashew cheese. Some people choose to dress the salad with a balsamic vinaigrette, but others found the juices from the roasted beets to add plenty of flavor.



Then, in homage to my unceremoniously rejected idea that we have a Moroccan themed Thanksgiving dinner, a simplified version of the carrot spread from Spice, the Oleana cookbook. In this version I mixed toasted coconut and course-ground almond meal right into the pureed carrot base, along with some olive oil and homemade harissa (a spicy pepper condiment popular in Moroccan cusine), creating an impossibly flavorful spread that is delicious on whole wheat sourdough crusted in sesame seeds, which is how we ate it.



I'm sorry for not having been able to honor each component of dinner with its own picture, but this crammed plateful does represent everything we enjoyed for Thanksgiving. In the front you can see our freshly picked brussels sprouts, roasted with garlic and chestnuts, to the right of those is a spoonful of roasted cranberry applesauce with orange zest and brandy, continuing around there is a mahogany wild rice and turban squash patty and right there in the middle is the Moroccan carrot spread on sourdough.



Continuing around the plate from this alternate view we can see roasted garlic and parsley mashed potatoes topped with a ridiculously delicious oyster mushroom gravy, a slice of tri-colored potato torte with cashew cheese and rosemary spinach pesto (from the Artful Vegan), sauteed spinach with garlic and dried cranberries, miso and garlic chive sweet potatoes and finally, a slice of homemade apple sage seitan with chestnut sage oyster mushroom stuffing.



And for dessert, because you know there has to be dessert, even after that much gluttony, red kuri cheesecake with fresh nutmeg and a spiced ginger crust, topped with candied pecans and walnuts.



And an apple pear galette with cornmeal crust.



Which was made even more delicious with a dollop of hand whipped brown sugar soy cream, or with soy yogurt and brown sugar for breakfast the next day.



This feast got us most of the way through our entire time in Vermont, though we did have some wonderful brunches in front of the fire with biscuits and white bean gravy, spiced pumpkin waffles and lots of lots of cranberry sauce. And cookies. On our last day at the house I made a batch of peanut butter chocolate chip cookies. They were gone within a few hours.

And so the crumbs of Thanksgiving are brushed away and my thoughts turn to the next feast...which might be an Indian/Nepalese themed Christmas dinner. It is our family tradition to choose a cuisine and all contribute dishes from that cuisine to dinner, which is a great way to get everyone involved in the cooking and to make it exciting and new every year. If you have any suggestions for our cuisine this year or for dishes, I'm all ears.

Hope you are all full of delicious food and happy and warm. Snuzzle your kitties or hug your friends--be thankful for what you have.