What is our vegetarian equivalent of a feast’s centerpiece?  What is our veggie Rib Roast?  Our equivalent of Duck a l’Orange?  Our trussed-up golden bird wearing those frilly mini chef-hat thingies on its legs?  For as much as being vegetarian has going for it, our feast tables are missing a coup de grace, a piece de resistance, a chef-d’oeuvre, and other long winded French phrases.

So this vanesscipe is here to fill that void in the middle of your Special Occasion table, to take center stage on your crocheted potholder, to replace the big hulking suckling pig with an apple under its schnoz.  When I was growing up, a Special Occasion often meant some Frenchy dish with a rich sauce to ladle in the crater of a mountain of creamy and cream-laden mash potatoes.  It meant the triumvirate of French food additives: butter, cream, and wine.  And heck, if one doesn’t do it, use ‘em all.

This vanesscipe is a vegetization of a recipe my mom used to make on medium-special occasions.  Not a Thanksgiving, not a birthday, but maybe for a softball match won or a closet well-cleaned.  It’s no Tofurky centerpiece, and that’s a good thing.  It’s a rich and elegant main course that yields a scrumptious sauce to ladle over the lightest, fluffiest mash potatoes.  It gets its luster partially from the butter and cream, but also from tarragon, a subtle but fragrant and elegant herb that really classes up this dish.  Hopefully it will so impress you and your carnivorous friends that they won’t even notice that your Special Occasion table is missing a huge suckling pig.

Serves: 6 as a main dish
Time: 35 minutes

1 yellow onion, chopped
3 cloves of garlic, minced
butter or olive oil
3 8oz boxes of chicken-style seitan with the liquid, cut into bite sized chunks
3-4 carrots, cut into ½ inch chunks
2 potatoes or parsnips, cut into ½ inch chunks
1 Tbsp flour
1 bunch fresh tarragon (or 2 Tbsp dried)
1 veggie bullion cube dissolved in 1 cup hot water
3/4 cup heavy cream
salt
pepper

Sauté the onion and garlic in a little butter or olive oil until wilted.

Add the seitan, carrots, potatoes or parsnips, and ½ of the fresh tarragon. Sprinkle the flour over and stir to coat.

Add the veggie broth and simmer for 10 – 15 minutes.  When the parsnips/potatoes and carrots are almost cooked, take out the seitan and veggies and reserve in a bowl.

Boil the remaining liquid down until very thick then stir in the cream and heat until almost boiling.
 
Return the seitan and veggies to the pan and heat through.   Stir in the remaining ½ of the tarragon, reserving a little bit to sprinkle on top of finished dish.  Add salt and pepper to taste.

Turn out into a beautiful serving dish, dust with the reserved tarragon, and enjoy your veggie masterpiece.  Serve with mash potatoes to induce fainting.

• Mixed olives and cornichons
• Crudités plate
• Cheeses and grapes

Salad:

• Crisp green romaine lettuce salad with arugula, tomatoes, cucumbers, homemade croutons and a simple mustard vinaigrette

Soup:

• South African Butternut Squash Soup. Stephanie made this wonderful soup for our Foodbloggers Potluck and I can’t stop thinking about it. It’s slightly untraditional for a Thanksgiving meal, but the squash makes it very autumnal.

Grain/Starch:

• Wheat Berry and Apple Salad
• Wild Rice Salad with Orange Slices and Walnuts
• Garlic or Traditional Mashed Potatoes. This apple gravy from A Veggie Venture looks pretty awesome.
• Chipotle Mashed Sweet Potatoes. I agree with Lisa - yes to sweet potatoes, no to marshmallows!

Vegetable Sides:

• Fresh cranberry sauce with orange zest
• Stuffing, dressing, whatever it’s called
• Iowan Broccoli Casserole (Yes. It has Velveeta cheese. But whoever said Thanksgiving had to be gourmet? Couldn’t be easier. Or worse for you.)
• Veggie Pot Pie
• I also liked these fresh, zingy ideas from last week’s New York Times: Brussel Spouts with Lemon Zest
• Braised Red Radishes

Main (“Meat”):

• Balsamic-roasted Seitan with Cipollini Onions from Peter Berley’s Fresh Foods Fast

Or

Chicken-style Seitan with a Tarragon Cream Sauce with Parsnips and Carrots

Rolls and French Bread

Dessert:

Pumpkin Pie

Apple Crumble

This is a dish that falls squarely into the category “Ugly but Tasty.” Oh you sneaky chefs, you know what I’m talking about: One of those dishes you love to make and eat in the privacy of your own home or to stash silently in an opaque Tupperware and nip out and wolf down at lunchtime. Dishes that smell delicious, but look… well, rather like an unattractive lumpy mess.

This Ugly but Tasty dish, Panade, is adapted from adaptations from other bloggers who seem equally smitten with this homely sloppy-spoon casserole. Orangette does a wonderful ode to bad bread made good and it’s quite the revered dish in What the Hell Does a Vegan Eat Anyway’s pantheon of amazing vegan dishes. At first sight I thought: stale bread, lots of onions, some greens, more time in the oven than I care to spend waiting in my apartment, so strange, so plebian, so ugly… it has to be good.

Serves: 6
Time: 40 minutes prep time plus 2 hours sitting silently in a low oven

Artichoke Panade (adapted from various sources*)

Kale: Wash the kale well and knife the curly leaves away from the kale stalks. Chop roughly. Add a little olive oil to a large wok/pot and heat the kale over medium-low, turning often, until wilted, about 20 minutes.

Onion and Artichokes: Add some olive oil to a skillet/wok and cook the onions over medium-low heat, turning often, until wilted.
Drain the cans of artichokes and squeeze each heart lightly over the sink to get rid of any excess liquid. Chop and add to the wilted onion to heat through.

Bread: Dice the bread into 1 inch cubes. Doing this the day before would make the bread staler and give the casserole even more texture.

Liquid: Heat the broth, milk, and/or white wine to equal 3 cups in a saucepan until almost boiling. Add a dash of salt, a splash of soy sauce, a generous few grinds of pepper, and the nutmeg.

Putting it all together: Layer a 9×13” sized casserole thusly: 1/3 of the bread cubes, ½ of the kale, ½ of the onions and artichokes, the second 1/3 of the bread, remaining ½ of the kale, remaining ½ of the onion and artichokes, remaining 1/3 of the bread cubes on top. Pour the hot liquid over carefully, trying to soak every bread cube. Sprinkle the cheese over.

Don’t take the layering so seriously, it’s supposed to be unattractive.
Here’s an alpha-illustration:

Cheese
Bread cubes
Onion and artichokes
Kale
Bread cubes
Onion and artichokes
Kale
Bread cubes
[liquid soak through all]

Top with a piece of foil and bake in a 250 degree oven for, yes, 2 hours.

*adaptation credits include Paula Wolfert and the Zuni Café viaWhat the Hell Does a Vegan Eat Anyway, more Zuni Cafe via Orangette, and more Paula Wolfert via the Seattle Times

I suppose I’m feeling sentimental because my mom visited me this past weekend.  She’s on her way home now, maybe flying over the mountains of Pennsylvania, or crossing that just-big-enough-that-you-might-mistake-it-for-an-ocean Great Lake Michigan.  She lives outside of Chicago where the family grew up and I, as regular readers surely know, live in Big Bad New York City.  The flight is only a touch over 2 hours but boy does it just feel like a long way home sometimes.

Mom flew in for just the weekend under the general premise that it’s her 59th birthday and what she really wants to do is to spend time with her daughters.  Life has been busy for me, last week especially so, and I hardly had a chance to look forward to mom’s visit let alone do those things that I, like everyone else, like to do to impress upon my mother that I lead a clean, safe, and adult life.  You know, things like clean my room, change my sheets, buy toilet paper, hide the bong, etc. Kidding, mom, kidding.  Anyway, I still can’t find it from when I hid it in college.

But what I did have time to do was to make some good, $0.50 per person, bean soup.  I had to buy the veggies on Tuesday because I was going to be too busy Wednesday and Thursday.  I was so stressed I even forgot the beans.  The Li’l Sis thoughtfully pitched in and bought the beans and chopped the veggies Thursday night.  Friday morning I added spices and flipped on the crock pot.   Friday lunchtime I ran out to buy a loaf of bread so I could dash out of work at the stroke of five to get home and clean before Mom’s arrival.  Instead I just crashed out on my bed until her cab pulled up.

It was just bean soup.  It wasn’t anything special.  It was borne of the necessity that I needed something hot, filling, and most importantly, ready when Mom arrived at six when I work until five.  It needed to be cheap so we sisters could splurge on Saturday to take her to one of Manhattan’s finest French restaurants.   It needed to be simple, easy, and something I’ve made and tasted so many times I could finish up with the lights off if I had to hide the state of my unwashed floors.

Mom’s eaten it a million times too but was careful to give the bean soup her fullest compliments.  Yeah, the soup is good in the way that it’s exactly what you’re expecting.  It’s modest, straightforward, and doesn’t hide its homeliness under a topping of mircrogreens.  It’s plain and cheap; it’s what grandma used make when times were tough.

But I think what mom was really saying when she complimented the soup was, “Thanks for taking the time to make me a home-cooked meal.”  Or “It’s really nice to spend time with you, Vanessa.”

Thanks Mom.  It was one of those few times when it mattered much less what we were eating than with whom we were eating it.  It was nice to spend time with you too.

ps. The sentimental nature of this post made me realize it would be a perfect contribution to the “Dishes of Comfort” food blogging event hosted by Ivonne at Cream Puffs in Venice and Orchidea at Viaggi & Sapori.  Watch for the roundup on November 16th or 17th.

Serves: 6
Time: 20 minutes of prep plus overnight and a workday hands-off in the Crock Pot

Crock Pot Bean Soup 

1 bag mixed beans, rinsed
2 leeks, chopped
3 – 4 carrots, cut into coins
4 – 5 stalks of celery, chopped
veggie broth or water and 2-3 bullion cubes
1 tbsp Herbs de Provence
greens, chopped. optional
lemon, salt, and pepper to taste

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I enjoy creative constraints.  I like keeping up with my daily personal challenge of making and eating vegetarian.  Healthy vegetarian.  Healthy, yummy, bodyandsoulfilledwithjoy vegetarian.  But every once and a while I encounter a challenge gets me all pumped up, stretched out, bracing myself at the starting line, the gun goes off and POW: my head whacks the track because my shoelaces were tied together.

My attempts of thinking up a good dish to bring to the NYC Food Bloggers Potluck this past Saturday were a relay of false starts - as if cooking for other foodies isn’t pressure enough!  There was preference noted by a guest for vegetarian food – hey, cool, me too.  Another guest didn’t eat cheese - vegan is cool too. And another didn’t eat nuts – no prob, that’s common enough.  No olives.  No eggplant.  Shoot, someone already had dibs on making a squash dish.  And, drats, soup and chili were already spoken for as well.

All I wanted was to present a hearty veggie dish that everyone could enjoy.  I wanted to inspire, impress, dazzle.  I wanted my fellow NYC Food Bloggers to think, “that Vanessa: not only does she have a wittily-named blog and great hair, she also cooks a delicious, homey, and equal opportunity casserole.”

Ah well. After thinking long and I hard I came up with this Chipotle Sweet Potato and Black Bean Casserole – none of the comprising ingredients were taboo and the result is tasty and even Fall-ish.

I even received compliments in the form of dirty empty tupperware from those hungry savages formerly known as my sisters.  They devoured the leftovers I brought home from the potluck even though they made me shop and pay for own groceries when it was not my turn.  And they didn’t leave any casserole for me.

Serves: 6 (or 2 savage sisters)
Time: 1 ¼ hours

Chipotle Sweet Potato and Black Bean Filling

1 large yellow onion, chopped
olive oil
3 medium sweet potatoes, peeled and cut into 1 ½ inch cubes
2 chipotle peppers plus 1 tsp of sauce (this makes it fairly spicy- add more or less to taste
2 (15 oz) cans of black beans, drained
1 (28 oz) can of crushed tomatoes
½ tsp cumin
½ tsp salt
2 bunches spinach

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