I love Quorn, but some vegetarians won't eat it, or other meat analogs on aesthetic grounds. For these you'll have to stuff a squash or something.

I am skipping T-Day altogether this year, as the rest of the country refuses to celebrate it with me. I'm off for Cornwall, where I'll probably be having a pasty. Stuffed with Quorn.

Roz, thanks for these wonderful recipes!  Your friend's gingerbread sounds especially worthwhile.  As for your pudding, with the black walnuts, I think I would have to pass.  They have a taste that unaccountably bothers me -- which is odd, because I eat all other kinds of nuts.  At Christmas time, my mother-in-law always sends us a box of her cookies and fudge.  This is not something that we look forward to.  The peanut butter cookies are OK, but the other kind, with black walnuts, I cannot stand.  Oh well.

KathyF, yes indeed, the rejection of faux meat on aesthetic grounds makes perfect sense.  I would not at all mind trying Tofurkey and Quorn, but it hardly seems like there is an urgent and difficult problem that only they can solve.  Are they really helpful for those new vegetarians, recently weaned from meat, who still miss the taste of meat?

On a technical matter: Mushrooms, and other fungi, are of course not vegetables.  In fact, they are more closely related to us, than they are to, say, soybeans.  That is, fungi and animals have a common ancestor that appeared more recently in the course of evolution than the common ancestor of either of those groups and plants.  One may wonder, therefore, if any vegans are squeamish about eating them ...

Thanksgiving in the Castle of Tintagel!  How romantic!  How surreal!  I once spent Thanksgiving in Sorrento, overlooking the Bay of Naples.  Needless to say, food is not a problem in those parts; I forget what I ate, but I am positive it was not turkey.

Chickens are our cousins! So are other sensitive animals! Enough is enough! No more factory farms!

Some of us refuse to eat it for other reasons:

o It contains chicken ova, so it's really no different from tradtional meat as far as animals go.

o The fungus they use in can be allergenic.

o It tastes, as Cartman would say, like ass.

I suggest a Tofurky or -- better yet -- an UnTurkey instead.  They taste better and no male chicks are macerated alive to make them.

It's nice to see that Grist has been more favorible to vegetarians.  A few years ago it I felt honored if Grist made a joke about us.  But now we're getting recipes!  It's real progress.

We buy a Tofurkey every year, but I don't eat much of it because it just feels like too much protein for me.  I don't think of it as a meat substitute because I don't think of meat as food.  Maybe I buy it because there's nothing like a 'mock turkey' to mock the holiday.  

Roz,

Many thanks. Those peaches sound like a good thing to make next summer and put in the freezer for the winter. Oh... ! ripe peaches and bourbon. !

For t-day this year, I and some friends are doing a vegetarian middle-eastern feast. That's right, no pretense of bird anywhere. It will be delightful. We're calling it "T-day" (short for "tahini-day," of course).

My favorite way of doing sweet potatoes is as follows: Cut 'em up. Put 'em in a pan, sprinkling with hot red pepper flakes. Pour a can of coconut milk on top. Cover with foil and bake. It's delicious, easy, unusual, and vegan, though delicious with roast bird (think squash curry).

You could serve a variety of small dishes (called meze) just as they do in...Turkey! You can't escape Thankgiving's reach no matter how hard you try...

Weird

What about my favourite, a good old fashioned nut roast?  Can't beat it.

Yes, it must seem weird that I use canned sweet potato, especially when cooking sweet potato is so easy, but I don't want to anger the ancestors, so I do as they say (on this one day a year...) A nut roast sounds good too. Is there a recipe that you recommend?

Yes, Caniscandida, Quorn et al are very helpful to those of us who don't want to kill animals but can't live without meat.  I've been vegetarian for almost ten years, and had been sliding that direction for another five before that, and I still start drooling at the scent of freakin' McDonalds.  It's a completely uncontrollable, disgusting thing, but I love smell of meat, loved the taste, and would not be able to stay veg without my Quorn chicken patties, Morningstar bacon, and Gardenburger riblets.  I could give a crap that they're trying to resemble dead animals and that's disgusting--they taste great, and that's not disgusting at all.

I know they're not vegan, but a little egg white is orders of magnitude better than a lot of dead chicken.  Yes, the male chicks die horrible, horrible deaths, which is horrible, but for each Quorn pattie you are eating a small fraction of an egg, which in turn is a small fraction of the lifetime output of one chicken, and that's a tradeoff I'm willing to make because I'd go stark raving mad and go out and buy the biggest, juiciest steak I could find if I had to go vegan for more than a couple of days.

Not flattering, but true.

Mihan, I love your idea to do a Middle Eastern feast.  And Roz, meze are perfect for the way we tend actually to behave on Thanksgiving Day, moving about, schmoozing.  The Turks, originally a collection of Central Asian peoples, were brilliant and tasteful borrowers and adapters of most of what was good in the Near East.  "Meze," Turkish tapas more or less, seem to be of pre-Islamic Iranian origin.  Other highlights of the much celebrated Turkish cuisine come from the Levant -- Syria, Lebanon, Palestine -- and especially from the Greek-speaking Eastern Roman Empire, aka Byzantine.

You know, though, sentimental Indian-loving old Yankee that I am, I still feel there should be something obviously Native American at Thanksgiving.  Which is why I would prefer Mexican cuisine to Middle Eastern on this occasion.

Chickens are our cousins! So are other sensitive animals! Enough is enough! No more factory farms!

Okay, so, I'm in the supermarket and all of a sudden all the things I like to eat are being besieged by people preparing for tomorrow, and although it's 8 AM and usually there would be about ten people grocery shopping this early, there are so many people they've almost run out of grocery carts...so I wonder:  the other 51 1/2 weeks a year when they're not eating Thanksgiving leftovers, what the heck do these people eat?  

To me, "normal" Thanksgiving food is "normal" because it's what's in season and what I, at least, crave in early-winterish weather.  Root vegetables, gravy, pie, etc, seem totally normal to me, not special things you only make once a year.  I didn't buy a single thing this morning that I won't buy again next week or the week after.  SO I have to assume that the people who are suddenly buying all this stuff are usually eating with zero regard to what's in season, and most likely are not cooking much if at all, if their Thanksgiving food needs cause the population of the grocery store, and specifically the produce aisle, to more than double all of a sudden.  It's just depressing, you know?

Willa,

That made me laugh out loud: funny because true! I volunteer at a food coop, and Thansgiving week is always insane, so we always wonder that.

and I have to imagine that the frozen/prepared food manufacturers hate Thanksgiving, because for a few days everyone is actually cooking and eating real food.

Although, as I say that, maybe I should leave out the cooking part.  At yoga class last night, half the people were talking about how they ordered up the entire Thanksgiving dinner (turkey, gravy, trimmings, pie) prepared from Stop & Shop. For $69. I just don't understand what is fun about that.

Well, and while it's true that there were more people buying butternut squash and Maine potatoes today than I've ever seen any other time, I also noticed that the freezer-endcaps had all been filled with premade pies, tubs of Cool Whip, etc.  Also, plenty of the butternut squash being bought was the kind that's peeled and shrink-wrapped so all you have to do is cook it (because peeling a squash is just too hard, I guess).

Oh, and right at the entrance there was an enormous tower of jars of "gravy".  People, seriously? It takes ten minutes to make fresh gravy using soy sauce, veggie bouillon, and cornstarch!

Sigh.

So it's not a writeoff for the prepared-foods business, really.  It's just that people want things that are not only prepared, but specifically prepared to seem somehow homemade.  How very 1950s.

Last week I made a big batch of pumpkin breads (I make the mini-loaves and then eat them, give 'em as hostess gifts, freeze some, etc).  People at work were amazed that I used "real" pumpkin.  More than one person asked "how do you do that?"

Somehow, I prefer it when people admit that it is much easier (and/or more preferable) for them to simply buy a pumkin pie at the store/bakery to those people who buy a pre-cooked pie shell, prepared canned pumpkin pie filling and Cool Whip, and call it "homemade pie."

However, I'm being annoyingly snotty since pretty much my entire Thanksgiving meal will be made by someone else (the lovely folks at the Pinkham Notch AMC lodge) and I will be hiking tomorrow, not slaving over a bird.

Kaela

Yeah, but it's okay, because at least you're not pretending to cook.  I totally agree with you--if people want convenience food, they should be prepared to come clean about it.  Hey, I buy frozen pizza--but I don't kid myself that it's different than getting one delivered, except for aspects like cost.

When I first lived with my fiance, he was astonished to find out what fresh produce looked and tasted like.  He didn't know that cherries had pits!  That totally blew me away.  He's totally reformed now, which means when we see his family we have to suppress snickers when they "cook".  These are people who buy canned potatoes--I shit you not.  What would make someone decide to can a potato, or a pumpkin for that matter, I have no idea--the whole point of these foods is that they store well in their natural state.  I wouldn't be surprised if his father and stepmother don't own a vegetable peeler.  

Then again, I'm guessing the vast majority of American households are in the same boat, judging by how difficult a time I'm having finding a decent-quality replacement for my vegetable peeler, which has finally gone unusably dull after two generations of use.  It seems that they no longer make plain old, simple, non-tarted-up vegetable peelers that are also made of decent, decently sharp steel.  You can buy the expensive "ergonomic" ones that won't peel anything but a carrot, because their protrusions hit the side of any non-carrot-shaped vegetable, or you can by the $3 supermarket ones that will peel any vegetable you want--once, and then they'yre dull (and un-sharpenable).

Oy, I have such a hard life!

Kaela, as someone who ordered his entire Thanksgiving feast pre-made -- albeit from our local organic-food co-op -- I can tell you what's fun about it: Not attempting to baste a turkey with a one-year-old trying to walk between your legs shouting "boo!"

My family's plan for tomorrow:

Get up. Remain in pajamas.
...
Eat.
...
Bed.

Woo hoo!

www.grist.org

I guess I always forget about the challenge of doing anything around a 1 year old.  Also, I'm assuming that the turkey baster and wicker cornucopia weren't the first items to be unpacked in your recent move, so I guess I'll forgive you - this time.

I think it's that I just truly enjoy cooking - not that I don't take advantage of convenience foods (there are frozen Amy's pizza in my freezer as well, and I practically live on Trader Joe's Butternut Squash soup) and not that it can't be stressful, but I usually look at preparing a big meal as a social event, sort of a "the journey is as much fun as the destination" mindset.  It's sad to me that the art of putting together a great meal, and enjoying the making of it as much as the eating of it, seems to be becoming a lost art.

All that being said, I hope you enjoy your organic, pajama-clad Feastival; and you'll have all the more time to play hide-and-seek and airplane with that 1 year old.

Someone wrote to ask if the amount of molasses in the gingerbread recipe is correct and the answer is yes.