A Dolce Vegan Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving dinner was awesome! Great food, even better people. We ate at my aunt's house and it was a pretty full house. My family of 5, plus my boyfriend, plus their family of 4. I was sad that my grandparents didn't come into town this year. Now I probably won't see them until Christmas :(

Anyways, I brought lots of food and when I got there, I found that my aunt had made roasted root vegetables for me in what she called "an experimental recipe". She sounded worse than me saying I didn't have to eat it if I didn't like it (I say that all the time). It was acorn squash, rutabaga/turnip, parsnip, carrots, roasted in oil and topped with oj. It was pretty good.

Everything I made turned out to be from La Dolce Vegan (by accident). But what a good accident. I made the tofu roast, which is like a homemade tofurky, the kalamata mashed potatoes sans olives, and the merciful miso gravy. It was so good, the best Thanksgiving dinner I've had in a long time. The roast turned out perfectly.

The roast was a great source of stress for me this weekend. First I discovered I hadn't bought enough tofu...I needed two pounds and I had 50 g less than that. So when it came to making the tofu shell, which was supposed to be an inch thick all around, it was much less than that. So I had to use less of the stuffing that the recipe made. But, given my tendency for disaster, it actually went really well. It has to sit in the fridge overnight, so if you make this one, make sure you have time. Then yesterday all I had to do was whip up the basting sauce, transfer the roast to a pan, baste the roast for an hour and a half, and serve! It was all in all, pretty easy.

The tofu shell is well-drained tofu mixed with tamari and sage. The stuffing is veggies, raisins, seasonings, bread and walnuts, and is very yummy.
Here's a picture of it with some of the basting sauce on it, before the oven (you can see the marks from the cheesecloth that the shell was formed in):













And a picture when it was done:

It had a crispy, crunchy outside, and a soft chewy centre, and the stuffing goes perfectly with it. Of course, I smothered it with gravy.

Dessert, the pumpkin tofu cheesecake, was the best tofu cheesecake I've ever had! I've made a few before that tasted way too much like tofu. This one had a chance to be refrigerated for a day and a half before, so the flavours had settled. Mmmm, it was perfect. Everyone else was feasting on apple pie, pumpkin pie and New York style cheesecake. I would've felt so deprived if I hadn't made this. And it was the nicest looking dessert there, since everything else was storebought ;) It had just enough pumpkin and wasn't too sweet. Another Wolffie winner.



Also, I had said I would be using up some pumpkin. Two pumpkin smoothies helped with that, and I used the pumpkin chip muffin recipe from the veganlunchbox blog to use up the rest. The only changes I made were to nix the nuts and add more chips (I used chocolate not carob). These are a delight! Like she says, a great way to get some orange veggies in you. I'll be making these again, for sure. They make a great snack for lunches.



You may have noticed a change with my pictures. The first one was uploaded through blogger, the rest through Flickr. Blogger wasn't going to let me post more than one picture, and I'm fed up. I can't get the same size picture as blogger, but I don't want them too huge. I may be experimenting for the next few posts, bare with me!