Could it be...Seitan?

Yep, my first vegetarian Thanksgiving dinner comes to you courtesy of the fake meat industry that thrives so that non-meat eaters like myself can indulge themselves without breaking any self-imposed rules.  For the unfamiliar, seitan can best be described as "wheat meat" or a high-protein substance made from wheat gluten.  Wheat's answer to tofu, if you will.

My original plan for Thanksgiving was a vegetarian take on Ina Garten's turkey roulade, but I was afraid that it wouldn't work with tofu no matter how much liquid I pressed out of it.  Plus there was the question of how fake sausage or vegan sausage crumbles would hold up in such an involved stuffing mixture.  So, I nixed that and Googled "vegetarian Thanksgiving" in search of a recipe I wouldn't have to change too much and found it here.

I did change it up, though, because to me the bread stuffing underneath the puff pastry seemed redundant.  Instead, I cooked all the veggies for the stuffing, made the gravy a little thicker and skipped the bread.  This basically left me with a seitan pot pie.  For broth, I used the liquid the seitan was packaged in.  Somehow, the combination of soy sauce and lemon juice tasted just enough like chicken broth to work.  Once it was ready, I put the mixture in a deep-dish pie pan...and here's what the mixture looked like:

...then I covered it over with the puff pastry and baked it per the recipe instructions.  Here's what it looked like when it came out of the oven.

Only having a top crust made the slices a bit harder to cut out, but the flavor certainly didn't suffer!  Live and learn: next time I'll either roll out the puff pastry a little thinner so that it has a bottom crust or I'll buy twice as much.  Something to be thankful for this holiday season - Steve liked it too!

The rest of the meal was pretty easy (pardon the sloppy photography) - green beans cooked in olive oil with salt, tomatoes and crushed red pepper went on last since everything else took longer.  Most of the work involved in making the caramelized butternut squash was the peeling.  (As you can see, I love me some Barefoot Contessa.) 

Likewise for the apple pie I whipped up for dessert - I thought I had a printed recipe but couldn't find it, so I winged it by adding to the eight or so chopped apples a couple of tablespoons of brown sugar and maybe a quarter cup of flour and eyeballed the cinnamon and lemon juice in keeping with my distance memory of making apple pies from scratch.  This was my first in at least five years.  Also yum!

So that was our humble feast.  Now that the dishes are washed and we're on to the Merlot that Steve just picked up the other day, it's time for one of my favorite things to do at Thanksgiving and/or Christmas - watch Babette's Feast!  Waking Ned Devine is another good one to watch during the holidays, I think.  If the library has it, maybe we'll watch Silas Marner for Christmas.  I read it in a couple of days of being snowed in while visiting the fam in Virginia last year and loved it!

Hope you're all having a wonderful Thanksgiving and counting your blessings, because they're everywhere!

Pigeon Pea Soup

I've been feelin' kinda tropical over the past couple of weeks - must be the weather.  Or maybe it's because I happened across a bag of dry pigeon peas that I bought a while back at E.M. Emporium on Two Notch Road that have sat around for months doing nothing.  Pigeon peas and rice is one of my favorite things to eat at Caribbean restaurants, but I've been out of regular long-grain rice for a couple of weeks and keep forgetting to pick up more.  So, I went on a recipe hunt and found this one for pigeon pea soup.  I had to go out and buy the squash, plantain and cilantro, but the rest of the ingredients I pretty much always have on hand.  Unlike with the cassoulet recipe, I did change this up enough to warrant a full report.  True to my disinclination toward meat in hot weather, the end result was achieved as follows:

1 cup dry pigeon peas, soaked overnight (yield: about 2.5 - 3 cups)
5 cups chicken broth
2 lb. butternut squash, peeled, seeded and diced

Sofrito:
3 green-and-red bell peppers, diced
1 large onion, chopped
4 garlic cloves, chopped
1/4 cup olive oil
1/2 cup chopped fresh cilantro
4 shakes (1/2 tbsp?) El Yucateco green habanero sauce
salt to taste

1/2 plantain, peeled

Bring broth to a boil in a 4 qt. pot and simmer pigeon peas, covered, over medium heat until noticeably softer, about 10-15 minutes.  Add diced squash and continue to simmer, covered, another 15 minutes.

Meanwhile, heat olive oil over medium heat in a separate pan.  Saute peppers, onion and garlic with hot sauce until vegetables have softened, about 5 minutes.  Add cilantro, stir well and cook another 4-5 minutes.  Add salt.

Stir sofrito into pigeon peas and squash and cook, uncovered, until some of the liquid has evaporated, another 5 minutes.  Grate plantain over mixture, stir well and simmer another 3-5 minutes or until starch from plantains has further thickened the soup.  Remove from heat and serve.

Post-production review:
The way mine turned out, it should really be called a stew.  I nearly doubled the amount of liquid that it called for at the beginning, but I still had very little in the end and wasn't able to come up with a spoonful of just liquid.  Which was fine, because otherwise I might have needed seconds.  I added the squash sooner than the recipe says to because, having baked butternut squash before, I had a hard time believing that 30 minutes on medium heat without sauteing would be enough.  Turns out that if the squash is ripe enough (and leave it to the Pig to carry them out of season, unlike Earth Fare), you really don't need to cook it as much.  The end result was still okay, but next time I'll assess the condition of the squash before proceeding.

It also turns out that the aji dulce peppers in the original recipe are hard to find outside of Mexican grocery stores.  We have a few here in town, but I also have some very hot habanero sauce and a corner of my backyard overflowing with ripe bell peppers, and it just made sense to work with what I already had.  Don't ever dump the green Yucateco right on your fried chicken like it's Texas Pete.  Really - a little dab'll do ya.  The amount that I used in this soup made for a pretty good approximation of some of the flavors we've enjoyed at places like Old San Juan (behind the Dunkin' Donuts on Two Notch). 

I skipped the final parsley and garlic bit because it somehow seemed redundant - except for the parsley, which was likely to go unnoticed among everything else in this dish.  The recipe doesn't say to cook the shredded plantains at all, but I thought it might make a difference if the plantains could cook just long enough to thicken it up some more and sweeten it a little.  And indeed it did!  Overall, this dish defied my dislike of sweet-and-savory combinations.  Either element would have been great by itself, and the pigeon peas, squash, sofrito, etc. all have potential to be reconfigured as a Spanish-style multi-course meal.  But that's for another day.

The weekend is finally here - hope you enjoy it!