Thanksgiving Menu

I'm posting this menu mainly for my own benefit. We'll be cooking a small meal for four people, with very little prep work. We didn't find any fresh corn at the farmer's market (out of season, right?) so we scraped our favorite creamless creamed corn recipe. And I'm still debating what to do with the organic cranberries I picked up, since they're not my favorite. Any idea how to make them delicious without using a ton of sugar?

First Course

Butternut squash soup 

(recipe from Vegan with a Vengeance, or similar)

Homemade bread

Green salad
(leaning towards this one from Vegan Soul Kitchen)

Sides

Persimmon, pomegranate, and walnut salad

Brussels sprouts roasted in garlic oil

Mashed potatoes and mushroom gravy

Main Course

Rustic white bean and sage casserole 

(from Veganomicon, with cauliflower instead of mushrooms and starring Rancho Gordo's famous Vallarta beans) 

Dessert

Vegan apple pie (K.'s mom's recipe)

with non-dairy vanilla ice cream

And just for fun, here's last year's Thanksgiving recap.

Thanksgiving recap

After a travel-filled year, Kristen and I decided to take it super easy over Thanksgiving, fix a smallish meal at home and then spend a couple of days in the snow-capped Southern California mountains (<-- still weird).

At the last minute, we ditched our idea for a tofu-sweet potato "loaf" (mercifully, most likely) and split the ingredients up into a black bean-sweet potato salad with fried sage adapted from Steve Sando's cookbook and Roasted Rosemary Tofu from the always excellent Vegan Soul Kitchen.

I made another batch of Creamless Cream Corn which has been on my mind semi-daily for a year, and to go with our mashed potatoes, Kristen whipped up a batch of Isa's Savory Mushroom Gravy, which totally stole the show... But isn't that always the way with gravy? Yum, it was good.

And we had a really nice time in Idyllwild. The weather was clear and beautiful but sooo chilly! Dinner at the Mountain was kind of amazing...possibly the best piece of salmon I've ever had (I'm an occasional pescetarian in case that's confusing). And if you didn't believe me about snowy SoCal, here're some pictures!