Thanksgiving Review!

I hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving that was spent with family, friends, and delicious vegan meals and treats! As promised, I'm here with a review of my Thanksgiving eats.

I'll start with my favorite part of any meal: dessert. I prepared two desserts to bring to my two Thanksgiving meals. I made peanut butter and jam cookies and a pumpkin cheesecake. Both of these recipes are from You Won't Believe It's Vegan!.
The cookies came out awesome. I love how few ingredients are in the recipe, and even better, the fact that all the sweetness comes from maple syrup. These cookies were pretty hefty and very filling, thanks to all the peanuts in them. A winner of a recipe, for sure. A not as awesome dessert was the cheesecake. It looked really pretty when it came out of the springform pan, but I think I might have undercooked this a bit. It was a little mushy in the middle. On the positive side, the flavor of the cheesecake (the pecan and maple crust especially) was really good. I may give this another shot in the future, and add some additional cooking time. So, this was kind of a success.

Now for my entree, wild rice stuffed acorn squash. This started out a bit rough on Thanksgiving morning, thanks to one of my squashes being rotted! Thankfully, Whole Foods is all of 7 minutes away from my house, so I zipped over and got a new one while my lovely husband was helpful enough to tend to the rice while I was gone. Anyway, at the end of the day, this dish came out really well. The squash was nice and tender and the rice, with mushrooms, shallots, and parsley, tasted rich. It looked pretty out of the oven, too. Now, you might remember me mentioning a mushroom gravy to accompany this... well, it didn't exactly make it out of the kitchen. Too make a long story short, I ended up with seriously sandy gravy. I am not exactly sure where I went wrong, but I think I either didn't cook the roux long enough, or boil the roux and the liquid long enough. Either way, there was no way this gravy was edible (which is sad, because the flavor was good), so it ended up in the backyard somewhere. I suppose I will have to take another stab at mushroom gravy sometime when I have more time and no one but myself to feed. To finish off on a happy note, I also made cranberry citrus sauce, which was delicious! Cranberries, orange, lemon, and maple syrup were all this recipe needed to be sweet, tart, and delicious on pretty much everything.

So I attended two Thanksgiving dinners, but I ate so much at the first one at my sister-in-law's house that I only managed dessert later on at my parents house. I know my mom had some side dishes that were vegan, like smashed turnips and carrots and green beans with almonds, so I will have to enjoy them as leftovers.
My sister-in-law had some fantastic vegan fare that I enjoyed thoroughly. The photo of my plate was taken, sadly, after I had scarfed half of it down and only then remembered that I should really have something to post here. Along with the cranberries and stuffed squash that I brought, there were green beans, mashed potatoes, roasted shallots, and sweet potatoes with marshmallows! These sweet potatoes blew everything out of the water. They were ridiculously delicious. She used marshmallows from Sweet & Sara, and she even gave me the leftover marshmallows to take home (full disclosure, they are already gone). I will be stealing her recipe and making this for Christmas, that is for sure!

Overall, I had a great Thanksgiving, surrounded by tasty food and all sides of my family. I am so thankful for them, my wonderful husband, my friends, and really, everything in my life; my list is far too long to try to type out here. I hope your holiday was just as good.