Thanksgiving Day

 

It is Thanksgiving Day in Philly.  The recipes for the week are from a Gourmet magazine cookbook.  Our wine for the main meal is a Neyers Merlot which went well with bread and mushroom based dishes.

 



We started with breakfast.  I made an omelet for Tommy and a tofu scramble for me using smoked tofu, greens beans, broccoli and cauliflower.  I had a piece of the seeded bread spread with the persimmon cranberry sauce. I had detox at breakfast.  I am not sure if it detoxed anything, but it is a good earthy tea with anise, licorice and dandelion root.

 



For lunch we started with a salad.  It was the same salad mix we have eating the last few days of spinach, carrot, tomato, avocado and cucumber.  I topped it with some of the endamame dip and some olive oil.  We had a piece of seeded bread on the side.

 

For the main course, I did make a turkey for Tommy.  It was seasoned with a miso butter between the skin and meat.  Tommy pronounced as the best turkey meat he has ever tasted. I am glad he liked it, since he will be having some at every meal for the next few weeks.  I made a basic turkey gravy with the juices from the turkey, a veggie stock I brought from home and some flour.

 

Turkey







My main course was a Eggplant, Tomato and Chickpea Tart.  The filing was sauteed in a skillet and added to layers of phyllo dough for baking.  The recipe called for 4 individual tarts,  but the lack of cooking utensils led to make one large tart.  The phyllo behaved well, but I did not have a brush to spread olive oil over each layer.  I used a paper towel, which worked okay. For my gravy. I had a barley mushroom gravy.  I roasted a mix of shiitakes, portobellas, and white mushroom with the barley.  The stock was made with the mushroom stems and parsley.  The veggies were removed, then I added the barley. I sautéed some carrots, onion and celery then started adding the stock.  I also added some wine and tomato paste. The stock was continually added and heated until thick.  The pic is the tart with the gravy.





 

For dinner that night I made an Onion Porcini Stuffing.  The bread was a couple of sourdough loaves. Dried porcini mushrooms were reconstituted in hot water.  White mushrooms, onion, celery, shallots and carrots were sautéed with garlic, thyme and sage.  The veggies were added to the toasted bread, then the mushroom water was added.  All of this was baked together.  We served the stuffing with gravy with a salad and some Pouilly Fume.

Stuffing

Oldies

So I pulled a couple of recipes for today from an old microwave cookbook.  The book came with the microwave we had in our condo back in the early 90's.  

oatmeal

I started the day with a fruity oatmeal.  It was not very different than an oatmeal that I would normally make. The oats were cooked with dried apricots and a lot of spices - cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, and cloves. The difference was that the recipe called for butter, I used Earth Balance.  I really could not tell it was any richer than my regular oats.  It was a good breakfast.

spinach  salad

Lunch was a spinach salad from the Well Seasoned cookbook. This was an old cookbook that had belonged to my mother. It was one of those books that was a fundraiser and the recipes were submissions from people knowledgable of the charity. 

The salad recipe called for spinach, bacon and a hard boiled egg.  I substituted tempeh for the bacon and smoked tofu for the egg.  The salad used a hot dressing made with apple cider vinegar, water, salt, sugar, and pepper. 

One of the items at dinner was a veggie burger.  I made it from peas, cauliflower, sunflower seeds and almonds.  Everything was pulsed in a food processor,then patted into a burger that was broiled in the oven.  I topped it off with some of the pineapple curry sauce.

soup

Also at dinner, was a soup from the microwave cookbook.  This was a traditional vegetable soup.  Carrots, potato, tomato, celery, onion, spinach, basil and parsley were cooked in vegetable broth.  This was a nice hearty soup for a cold day.

The tea for the day is labelled as a detox tea.  It is an earthy tea made with chicory, dandelion and licorice.  I don't know if any detoxing happened, but it has a rich nice taste.