Thanksgiving food

(I know this is late for Thanksgiving, but wanted to post in advance of any Christmas or New Year's meals people might need ideas for!)

Thanksgiving has its drawbacks--it's based on a misleading story and it has turned into a tradition of killing and eating turkeys and then watching the news about people duking it out over stuff on sale (I know of more people who make fun of black Friday shoppers than who actually go shopping, which is kind of just as bad?)

I will take any excuse to cook a big meal once or twice a year, though. But our family Thanksgiving tradition, if we ever have kids, will be to explain what actually happened when Europeans came to the 'new world' here, and also how life was much better for turkeys before that time.

This year, we ordered a few vegan smoked goose packages from May Wah and cooked those along with a ton of other dishes:

Too much for one photo!

I'll try to list the dishes from top to bottom: We've got cranberry sauce, sweet potato casserole, store-bought rolls off to the side there, gravy, brussels sprouts, smoked non-goose, stuffing, and green bean casserole. And lots of wine, of course!

Everything but the bread was homemade--and the stuffing was an herbed bread so we also skipped a few steps on that. I'll share all the recipes we used here, as well as tips for the stuff we came up with.

Cranberry sauce: I halved this recipe from the Food Network since we bought a small carton of cranberries.

Sweet potato casserole: From my mom's blog -- I've never had a Thanksgiving without these, even though I used to hate this dish & still am not too keen on sweet potatoes.

Gravy: A recipe a lot like this one, but we added nutritional yeast.

Brussels sprouts: The recipe for pecans and brussels sprouts from Bianca Phillips' Cookin' Crunk!

Smoked vegan goose: I marinated it in vegetable broth, soy sauce, and plum sauce and then rubbed it with rosemary and sage, then cooked for 20-30 minutes. The plum sauce flavor was really nice.

Stuffing: This recipe from Anything Vegan--I wasn't sure how much bread I used in comparison to theirs, and maybe should have added more broth in some places. It was really good, we just had a few dry pieces.

Green bean casserole: I veganized the Campbells recipe. I sautéed mushrooms then added 1 cup vegetable broth and 1 cup soy creamer to make the cream of mushroom soup, and unsweetened almond milk for the milk. I would add flour to the cream of mushroom soup, since it wasn't quite thick enough, but it was good!

And we had pie too -- I used the recipe from Isa Chandra's Vegan Pie in the Sky. Always turns out well, but unfortunately we used store-bought crust that happened to be vegan, and the crust was terrible! The pie was best eaten outside the crust as a pie-pudding in this case.

More photos below:

Another angle

Crowded plate!

Pies... and wasted crust!

Enjoy your own holidays, whatever they may be, and stay warm!