VeganMoFo 2017 #30: Veganomicon for the Holidays

30th: Practice run a dish for Thanksgiving, Christmas, or another upcoming holiday

It really isn't long until the holidays are here! And as an Australia, I mean until Christmas is here, as we don't have Thanksgiving. Two months to go, though the shops have been selling Christmas stuff for the last several weeks. I decided to make a holiday-themed dinner from Veganomicon, the original one. I know there is a new edition that has just come out, but I am still old school and stuck in the past with my treasured old copy.

Caramelised Onion-Butternut Roast with Chestnuts: The idea of roasting and peeling chestnuts from scratch does not appeal to me, I don't think the end result is worth the effort, but I had found some packaged chestnuts for cheap in an Asian store ages ago and I needed to use them up, so this seemed like a good chance. The recipe calls for a pound of chestnuts in the shell, I had 250g of ready to use chestnuts, which was enough for me. I always find chestnuts oddly textured. For this casserole, onions are roasted in a pan (mine never did go brown and crispy, but they still tasted good) and then are mixed with butternut, chestnut, white beans and herbs and baked. At the end, a herby breadcrumb mix is put on top and baked until golden. This is a fairly easy casserole if you don't have to fiddle with the chestnuts, most of the time involved is baking time. And it ends up with a nice sweet flavour, with a bit of salt from the topping. The recipe says it serves 6-8, but I would say it serves 4.
Rating: :)



Holiday Cranberry Sauce: This recipe calls for apple cider, and in Australia our apple cider is alcoholic and fizzy and not at all what this recipe wants. I always think of cider as being spiced, but I did some reading and it seems like a lot of cider is just unprocessed apple juice? So I used some fresh pressed cloudy apple juice from a bottle for it. The recipe claims to make 5 cups, and I didn't want that much, so I scaled it down to 1/3 of the recipe but ended up with less than a cup. I used the agar powder option, and I used frozen cranberries. I found this to be a very tart sauce, on its own I was not a huge fan. It did go well with the sweetness of the casserole, but I don't think I'd make to to plonk on top of a roast dinner.
Rating: :| on its own, :) on casserole



And here it is all together! I served it over some wilted baby spinach and brown rice, and with some roasted Brussels sprouts.



Cute Kitty Photo of the Post - Month of Sahara



Sahara and our kitty Christmas stocking. This was last year, which was her last Christmas.