An Early Thanksgiving Meal and Cooking Video

I love planning for a big festive meal--thinking about old favorites, new ingredients, seasonal treats and flavors. While any day can be a reason to celebrate, I take special joy in Thanksgiving feasts and the last few moments of harvest: the bounty of squash, carrots, parsnips, turnips, apples and pumpkin.

My planning for this Thanksgiving took a different form and came a great deal earlier than usual, but it has yielded more to share with more people. The main dish for Thanksgiving this year, the seitan roulade stuffed with wild rice and figs that you see above, was the focus of my first cooking video for How2Heroes. Now, more than offering you my recipe (posted here), I can offer a step by step video in two parts that takes you through the whole operation: Part One (making the seitan), Part Two (making the stuffing and assembling). While the dish does take time, most of it is spent passively. The active preparation is really straightforward and quick, as I hope is clear in the video. Though my nerves were wrecked by the prospect of filming, I had a great time doing it and I hope the video will prove useful to people. Certainly, there are endless possibilities for variation, especially with the stuffing, which could be anything you like, so feel free to play around. I'd love to hear what you come up with.


The wild rice and fig stuffing is also a pretty delicious dish all on its own. I like to eat it with just some simple baked tofu and a salad. The figs are a perfect complement to the slight crunch and chew of the rice and their flavor is deeply autumnal: subtle and earthy sweet.

To accommodate the filming of this dish, I had to make two roulades, i.e. a huge amount of food, and once it was all made and filling up the fridge, it seemed so festive that we decided to host an impromptu early Thanksgiving feast.

a mix of local purple, red and fingerling potatoes for roasting

Now, I'm almost always happy to do something a little crazy like cook a Thanksgiving feast for twenty people by myself, but I was feeling pretty sensible that day and knew I'd be best off setting myself up to do less work and enjoying the amazing offerings of friends and family in a potluck-style Thanksgiving. Since the night begins to fall around 4pm these days, sadly I didn't get pictures that do any sort of justice to our absolutely mind-boggling quantities of beautiful food.

roasted potatoes with olive oil, garlic and fresh ground pepper

So imagine if you will, our plates all piled high with the roulade, roasted potatoes and fried garlic sage cream, mashed potatoes with chickpea gravy, balsamic marinaded portobello mushrooms, brussel sprouts two ways, one shredded and sauteed, the other roasted with shallots and curry, nutmeg-scented lentils and parsnips, Soy Not Oi stylee cornbread stuffing, agave-sweetened yams, maple roasted sweet potatoes, creamy butternut squash soup, butter lettuce salad with chickpeas and heirloom tomato, roasted applesauce, cranberry sauce, garlic and olive oil roasted beets, spiced hot cider, vanilla-fig martinis and a variety of desserts. Who could possibly say that vegans can't do up the the national day of gluttony?! For other ideas about what to serve on your Thanksgiving, Erik over at Vegan.com has a very useful feature courtesy of veteran cookbook author, Robin Robertson. Robin's full Thanksgiving menu has recipes for every dish, including another stuffed-seitan main dish that also looks great.


Even though I didn't take on the task of making Thanksgiving myself, I feel like I still got the best parts of the experience. It always feels great to put the harvest to use: peeling all the almost-black Rome apples and the rosy Macouns for a roasted applesauce loaded with spices, cutting the last of the fresh herbs and tossing them into my stuffing before tying the rest up to dry in the kitchen, steeping figs, roasting roots, picking another pumpkin off the pile. And to have a house full of people share in the food, that just made it perfect.


I think I performed admirably in keeping my contributions to dinner very calm, but I may have gone a little overboard with dessert, which is to be, you know, expected.


Never one to look past an opportunity to use up pumpkin lately, I passed over the traditional pumpkin pie for a spiced pumpkin and chocolate cake to meet both the demands of the season and of my friend's birthday.


Cinnamon, ginger and a hint of black pepper and cayenne warmed up the chocolate and the pumpkin cake while the layers of fresh apple butter and a rich whipped dark chocolate ganache made for a decadent dessert even before the whole thing was wrapped in chocolate decorated with a pretty fall-colored cocoa-butter transfer and topped with piles of chocolate curls.

I also made a big batch of my Great Aunt Jay's cuccidati. Well, sort of my Aunt Jay's. I've been playing with all of her old Italian cookie recipes, remembering the tins of treats she always seemed to have on hand filled with all manner of cookies. This cuccidati is one of my favorites. It's like a grown up fig or date bar. I've toned the sweetness way down in these, leaving off the traditional sugar glaze and sprinkles and adding a very dark chocolate as well as toasted anise and whiskey to the oranges, dates and figs.


From the other side of the family, a seasonal treat that I'd never had before. On a recent trip to West Virginia for genealogy work, my dad brought back some black walnuts and sent them to me with ample information about how to harvest the nut meat. Let me cut to the chase with this: it's dangerous and definitely involves a hammer, but is well worth it. Black walnuts are an American variety that are not grown commercially; it seems the trees have a bit of a mind of their own about where they'd like to grow. They are much less common than their English counterparts and they taste completely different. There's almost a bourbon-quality to the very strong flavor that is heightened, as with all nuts by toasting.

Just a half cup of black walnuts in this, my first fudge, made the confection into something completely unlike anything I've ever had. I'm looking forward to working more with the pre-shelled black walnuts that I have, so any tips for working with them, please send my way.


A much less labor intensive heirloom treat was also a gift from my Dad. The chinquapin is a kind of wild American chestnut that used to be a significant protein-rich food source which has never been commerically harnessed. Many of the trees that produce chinquapins were destroyed in the blight that killed so many of the American chestnut trees in the 1900s. There weren't enough of these beautiful little nuts to do anything with but eat straight out of hand. Fortunately though, that was no great hardship since they taste like a blend of hazelnut and and chestnut, sweet and rich and just like fall should.

Here's hoping your celebrations of the season are just as perfect as this one!