Southernish-Style Vegan Thanksgiving

We had Thanksgiving on Saturday this year, and it doubled as Christmas with Jen's mom. I figured I'd put the menu on here, because it was a darn good meal. I, as per usual, didn't take any photos of anything I made. But you can be sure that it looked completely professional and gourmet. Yeah.

The main dish, I guess, was the VegNews Mac 'n' Cheese. It turned out as expected. That's a pretty solid recipe. If you haven't tried it yet, I suggest it.

I also made Southern Fried Cauliflower and a bit of Southern Fried Seitan. I use this recipe, which is just written for seitan. When making it with cauliflower, I roast the cauliflower at 400 degrees for about 15-20 minutes and let them cool off before proceeding with the rest of the recipe as written.

Some vegan blue cheese dressing to dip the deep-fried goodness into. And some Franks Red Hot sauce.

Collard greens 'n' rice.

I also made these baked sweet potatoes that I like. I've never written the recipe down, but basically it's cubed sweet potatoes baked with margarine and pretty much equal parts chili powder and cinnamon (but maybe a bit more cinnamon). And then put marshmallows on top during the last ten minutes or so. But I forgot the marshmallows at home, so it wasn't nearly as good as it usually is. Oh well.

For dessert, I made pumpkin soy cream. For second-dessert, I made the VegNews/Chloe Coscarelli creme brulee.

It should be said that my sister-in-law helped with a bunch of prep work and I would have had to start a few hours earlier if I didn't have her help. She also gave me one of her two kitchen torches, so I'm thinking creme brulee might be a more regular thing at our house (which means once or twice a year, probably). Ooh, or torch-roasted marshmallows for kitchen-s'mores (which is just s'mores without the campfire).

Halloween Photos

Some Halloweenish photos.

Carving a pumpkin with auntie Jessica.

Carving pumpkins with Lisa and Dan.

Halloween night. The squirrels added their own little touch to the pumpkins.

The neighborhood gang.

I forgot to "Boo!"

For the past four years, I've written a Halloween post in which my children dine on the flesh of innocents. This year, I apparently took a break. I'm sure the innocents will thank me later.

At any rate, you can read the previous years by clicking on this here hyper-text.

Speaking of holidays, Nathalie VanBalen, author of "Garlic Onion Beet Spinach Mango Carrot Grapefruit Juice" has a new coloring zine out called "Happy Thanksliving." Here's a sample page from her blog:

You should order it now so it will arrive in time for your kids to color it for Thanksgiving.

And speaking of "Garlic Onion Beet Spinach Mango Carrot Grapefruit Juice," VanBalen often puts free coloring sheets on her blog, often of the characters from the book. I printed out the two she made for Halloween this year and the kids colored them. Here are a couple that Anna did.

Thora:

Yellow Spotted Snails: 

Both of these are unfinished. Pretty much everything of Anna's is unfinished unless every single speck of white on the paper has been colored in. 

And here's Liam's Thora: 

So yeah. Good times. 

And a happy belated Halloween to all. 

VegKins Halloween Party!

OK, so I forgot my camera. I didn't get any photos of our Second Annual VegKins Halloween Party, but my friend (and fellow VegKins coordinator) Celeste did. So go check out the photos over at her blog, Growing up Veg. It was a blast.

You know what? I've never actually explained what VegKins is on this blog. I should really do that some day. 

The Halloween That Was

Well, it's the middle of November. I've failed miserably at VeganMoFo, my son is sick with the pukes and I have a folder on my desktop titled "Halloween" that's been staring me in the face for a while now. 

I'm officially bowing out of VeganMoFo. It was fun while it lasted, but it didn't last long enough. Maybe next year I'll go back to a more traditional food-based theme. 

So, here are some photos from Halloween. Get comfortable. There's a lot. 

Vegkins had a Halloween potluck party the weekend before Halloween. I didn't have much time to take photos, so here are the two that I got of Liam in his bee costume: 

 

And this is the only one I got of Anna in her duck costume. The thing on her back is the duck head that she wears like a hood. You'll just have to trust me that it was cute.

We went to North Dakota for Halloween to celebrate my eldest brother's 40th birthday. It was a surprise party, Star Wars themed.

Here's my family. Leia and 3PO made some cute kids, huh?

My costume was ... um ... a little tight.

And the kids when wild.

Cousin Joe rocked the lightsaber.

Cousin Zach rocked the blaster.

Cousin Ella rocked the hair and the lightsaber.

There was a time, not too long ago, that the blasters and light sabers would have bothered me. But I'm fine with it now, and I actually see it as a potentially positive outlet and exploration. Which reminds me, I need to finish reading Killing Monsters and then write a review of it. 

Zach and his dad, Jango Fett.

My sister-in-law is nothing if not creative. Check out the ice in this punch bowl.

Cousin Henry was one of three Yodas.

My brother Mike won the award for most creative costume.

And his daughter Kate (the newest addition to our ever-growing brood), won the award for cutest. There's a cat in Star Wars, right?

Henry regards Kate.

Henry kisses Kate.

 

Ella tickles Anna.

That night, the brothers rented some ice time and played hockey. We're not a big hockey-playing family. Our school was too small to have a hockey team. But we all enjoyed skating growing up, and tried to play hockey on the small slab of ice the volunteer fire department would make beside the firehouse.

Anyway, it was fun and exhausting and now I sort of want to start playing hockey for fun again.

The next day (which was Halloween), we drove back to St. Paul, but made an extended stop at cousin Zach's to go trick-or-treating. This was in Buffalo, which is about an hour north of St. Paul.

You may or may not remember back in September when I posted photos of some pumpkins in my dad's garden. He carved the kids' names into them with a nail. This is what they ended up looking like. Pretty cool. 

Liam really got into trick-or-treating. We pulled him around in a wagon and he wanted to get out for each house. It was really fun.

In case you're wondering, the kids traded candy at the end of the night. Anna and Liam gave all of their non-vegan stuff to cousin Zach and Zach gave most of his vegan stuff to Anna and Liam.

Anna still doesn't really seem to care about not having non-vegan stuff (and she's not one to keep her feelings hidden, so if she cared, we would know about it). I keep waiting for that to change, but maybe it won't. We talk every once in a while about why we don't eat non-vegan food, and who knows, maybe she actually understands and genuinely doesn't want to eat it.

This is what our pumpkin looked like when we got back home (the one in the middle has a hole in it, created by an industrious squirrel, I think). It was a wet and warm week in the lead-up to Halloween. Now it's freezing and there's snow on the ground. What a difference a few weeks make.

And just the for hell of it, here are more photos of Liam in his R2-D2 costume.

You can see his fake smile in these first two.

I don't think I'll be posting anything else before Thanksgiving, so have a happy one! 

Boo!

Each year on Halloween we here in the Piggy household dine on the flesh of innocents, and this year is no different.

In past years, the kid(s) have feasted on a free range backyard human, conventionally raised store-bought human from the supermarket (2008 was a tight year for us financially) and last year it was backyard cats.

This year, I've been thinking a lot about the idea that if you couldn't kill an animal yourself, then you shouldn't eat animals. So I thought I'd better teach my kids to kill if we're going to keep going with this tradition. It's either that, or stop the tradition. And since you couldn't tear tradition from my cold, dead hands, I guess I have no choice but to teach the kiddos to kill.

So we cornered this bunny in the back yard. First, I set Liam loose, but all he wanted to do was pet the little guy.

Then I asked Anna to kill him for me (I'm squeamish, I'll admit). She didn't want to at first. She asked me how I knew he was a "him" and that's when I realized a mistake I've been making all this time.

"It," I said, "I meant 'it.' Now kill it please."

Reducing the bunny to a thing by using "it" instead of "he" or "she" seemed to put her at a bit more at ease. So she went after "it" with nothing but her bare hands. After an hour of abject failure, I decided to help her out by whittling a spear out of a fallen branch.

Anna looked on quietly as I shaved one end to a deadly point. She finally said, "Isn't that sort of like cheating, Daddy?"

"No, Anna. It's not cheating. It's natural. Our brains evolved the ability to make tools and weapons, which sort of makes it the opposite of cheating."

Then she said something about nuclear weapons and I told her to be quiet while daddy whittled.

Long story short, we had bunny for lunch. The kids weren't big fans of the bunny by himself, so I made some of him - I mean "it" - into a meat smoothie for Anna:

As you can see, she really got into it. These are the piercing eyes of a daughter whose father made her kill a bunny.

I pureed the other parts into a squash tomato bisque for Liam (you know how kids are with texture):

"My daddy wuvs me so much he made my big sister kill a bunny wabbit!"

Who knows what fleshly delights next Halloween will bring...

Happy Halloween!

For the record, Anna's drinking a banana, soy yogurt, hemp seed, flax oil, strawberry, blueberry, spinach smoothie (recipe here). And Liam's eating curried squash tomato bisque. I'll probably post the recipe for that during next month's VeganMoFo.

Anna Wednesday #26 ... and Happy Turkey Day!

Click on the photo up there and you should be able to read Gideon's details (where he's from, what he likes to eat, etc.).


Anna "adopted" a turkey from Farm Sanctuary this year, as she has the previous two years. This year was better though, because she actually picked out the turkey, Gideon, from this page, and she waited and waited for his photo to come in the mail.

When we got the certificate she got all excited about, "the turkey that we feed." We hung it up in her room.

For the Piggy household, it's "Happy Turkey" day, instead of happy "Turkey Day."

And of course, we're still going to gorge ourselves on all sorts of deliciousness (which may or may not be detailed in an upcoming post).

Happy Thanksgiving! (To those of you in the US, that is.)