Bitching about food and Thanksgiving

[rthstewart]

I've included vegetarians, nut free and gluten-free in my menu planning for decades.  Switch to flavorful vegetable stock?  No problem!  Go flourless in baking?!  No problem!  Provide an au jus rather than just a roux-based gravy?  No problem!  Deathly allergies or sensitivities to red meat, nuts, fish, shellfish, melon (we've got all of these in the family) -- no problem -- you just keep them out of the kitchen.  I've scrounged substitutes for gelatin when making mousse-related desserts.  I can do it all.  My typical approach when accomodating a guest who has a serious allergy is that I just don't bring the offending item into the kitchen at all. 

Granted, the time I hosted a dinner party for vegetarians AND those who didn't eat eggs, nuts, or gluten was... challenging as many of these things substituted one for another.  It was so stressful I wrote about it in Culinary Diplomacy.  For dessert I made something from chickpea paste and a vegan chocolate fondue. 

But... this time... I have a vegan coming to Thanksgiving and I'm deeply resentful.  It's my niece and she's a moron who thinks everything she reads on the Internet is TRUE.  Last year I gave her a huge box of baking supplies -- many of which had significant emotional significance to me --  because she was super interested in learning baking from me.  I printed up a dozen of my favorite recipes and offered to teach her how to make them.  And then she became vegan and this amazing gift I gave her mostly sits gathering dust and when she does try to make something, it is really gross or has an overwhelming flavor of coconut or vegetable shortening.   

So, I'm trying to be less resentful and more philosophical.  Really!  I'm trying to find things that don't all taste like coconut.  I'm trying to not spend a fortune on weird, fake food and manufactured alternatives. So please share your favorite vegan dishes or dessert.  I do not, as far as I know, have any nut or gluten allergies coming, so BRING IT ON.  I have a couple of GF desserts from King Arthur Flour, the one pan chocolate cake, and peanut butter chocolate layer cake, and can do an all shortening pie crust.  Let me know if you've got something else!

Also, the person who usually comes and brings an amazing pork sausage stuffing is not coming this year so HIT ME UP.  Please share your favorite stuffing recipes!!

Comments

[writerkit]

So, I do a *lot* of vegan baking because my now-ex is allergic to eggs and cow-dairy. There's no reason it has to taste like coconut or shortening! (I'm still not sure I can have coconut; I don't use it at all.) There is a lovely product in the grocery store called Earth Balance that's basically vegan margarine and it one-to-one substitutes for butter beautifully and doesn't cost significantly more than butter.

Homemade egg substitute, also works beautifully: Two tablespoons of flour, half a teaspoon of baking powder, half a teaspoon olive oil, two tablespoons liquid (I usually use rice milk). Mix together in a separate bowl; you now have one egg. I don't think it works in mousses (I have never tried) but it's great in cakes and breads!

Take that and some rice milk to substitute one-to-one for milk and you can now make any dessert you want from your normal cookbooks.

It's important to pay attention to texture when you're doing this; you may have to add more liquid at the end, or possibly less, if the texture of the dough or batter is not what you're expecting; the egg substitute isn't always as liquid as an actual egg. But if you know what texture you're trying to achieve it's just a matter of adding liquid until it looks right. But I have a massive collection of cookbooks, none of which are vegan, and I regularly use these tools to make their recipes into vegan ones.

Also this: https://www.thespruceeats.com/vegan-pralines-3371667

This is delicious.

[rthstewart]

I saw your post the other day about the many many cookbooks and the Yockelson Baking By Flavor. I don't have any of hers. I have 4 Rose books, a Flo Barker, a Dorie Greenspan, 2 Patricia Welles, Marcella Hazan (3), King Arthur Cookie, years worth of Bon Appetit and Cooks Illustrated magazines, and a huge file of print outs. I may have a slight problem... I'd not seen that egg substitute before. I've seen the use of flax seed, and actually have some. And I saw a recipe for a vegan chocolate buttercream using the Earth Balance product and thought of pairing that with one of the vegan chocolate cakes on the KA website.
Thanks so much for the good advice!

[writerkit]

I think the person who gave me that egg substitute had invented it herself-- I've never seen it appear anywhere else in discussions of vegan cooking.