Our Favourite Things
Dispatches from a plant kitchen
Happy Thanksgiving Weekend to our American neighbors and friends! We’re north of the 49th and have already celebrated our Thanksgiving in Canada, but it’s a great excuse to have another feast for us!
We are busy in the restaurant all weekend (life of a small restaurant owner: Always be working weekends!) whipping up our trademark vegan food for our local community, but we wanted to take a few moments to 1. share one of our favourite Thanksgiving leftover recipes, and 2. Share a few thoughts about this time of year.
Cherish those around you…
Not everyone has the opportunity this weekend, because of work, or because their people are too far away and travel is difficult - and too often because people have passed on.
If you have the opportunity to spend time with the people who are important to you, I hope you made the effort this weekend. Drink some wine, laugh, share stories and take pictures.
If you don’t have the opportunity, then I hope you can at least reach out and talk to your people, maybe have a zoom call, then throw on some music and celebrate the memory of those that can’t be with us anymore. Don’t sweat the feast and just make your favourites! Maybe just jump right to the vegan turkey sandwich!
We are fortunately to still have our parents to celebrate with, but we know that time is short. Unfortunately life is busy (we are homeschooling small business owners!) and sometimes we all need a little reminder to focus on the important stuff right in front of us.
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Our Thanksgiving Menu
We just launched, so haven’t had the time to put together recipes for everything we do prepare for Thanksgiving (just wait for the Christmas season though!) but we thought we would share what the holiday menu looks like at the house of a Vegan Chef:
Field Grown Turkey Roast - baked in the oven with broth, onion, celery and carrot (click here if you want to see our ‘Churkey’ product)
Roasted Root Veg - Carrot, parsnip, turnip, squash, beet, celery and garlic roasted with spices
Mashed Potato - Classic, although we usually throw a sweet potato or two into the mix for the color!
Maple Glazed Yams - Slice those yams thin and bake them with a maple cinnamon/nutmeg (brown sugar, lemon juice, oil, molasses and a dash of salt!)
Apple Rosemary Stuffing - Sage is classic, but this is better :)
plus all the fixings! Salads, buns, cinnamon cranberry sauce, etc.
And of course dessert! In our house this is usually Cheezecake and sweet potato pie!
We have a couple of families (rafters?) of wild turkeys that live near us (right in the city!) and that’s where turkey belongs! :)
Our Favourite Leftover Recipe…
This is it! Everybody knows about the Thanksgiving soup, or sandwich. Some of you may have even played around with a stew or casserole using your leftovers. But how many of you have taken all that feasting goodness and turned it into a pizza?
No? You’re seriously missing out!
Thanksgiving Leftovers Pizza
No ingredient list here - and don’t be afraid to customize this bad boy with whatever you have at hand, the key flavours come from the bread, gravy, yams and cranberry sauce - everything else is gravy. Actually the gravy is the actual gravy in this recipe, everything else is the… icing!
Step 1. drop your fav. premade crust on the counter or make your own
Step 2. Smear a healthy amount of cold gravy on the crust (no marinara on this pizza!)
Step 3. Here’s what we add next, but you can customize: Shredded turkey, Maple Yams, Spring Mix or Spinach or Rockets (whatever we had for salad!)
Step 4. Cheeze it up with your fav. We use Daiya shreds and occasionally make our own cheeze (but that’s a lot of work!)
Step 5. Cook for about 10 minutes at 400 degrees. Take out of oven at your preferred crispiness!
Step 6. Cut the pizza up and add a dollop of cranberry sauce to each slice *
Step 8. Take pictures, because you are going to want to share this with your friends!!
*If you are a cranberry fanatic like yours truly, you can start by adding a layer of cranberry to the crust, then spreading the cold gravy on top of that!
That’s it! If you try it and share it on SM, tag us, we’d love to see it!
#ValiantsHotMess
May your tables be full of food, friends and family and your pants elastic this weekend!