This is going to be my second plant-based Thanksgiving this year, and I think I’ve learned a lot in the past year about how to work with ingredients and what I can and can not do. As well as should and should not do. In the past six months or so in particular, we have been playing with using less oil in our cooking and that’s been really interesting.
For one, I love how it’s often much, much easier to clean up after cooking without oil, it seems like most things just wipe right out. Who said I needed to add oil just for it to polymerize all over my beautiful bake ware? It seems I do not. No thank you.
This weekend I did a trial run on some awesome stock. The usual suspects: onions, carrots, celery, garlic, herbs and what-not. I can’t believe how “chicken-y” it came out tasting, and without the
teensiest hint of death wafting over it. Nice.
I then cleaned and prepped an outrageous amount of mushrooms and made an out of this world wild mushroom gravy that’s going be the new way to do this. OMG it’s so good. I must have used about five pounds of various types of mushrooms. It was a bit of a splurge, but worth it. I spent $70 on a turkey last year. I have no intention of doing that again. I can buy $50 worth of mushrooms once a year.
To make the gravy, I made two things that were eventually combined. All those mushrooms that you see in the picture, those bad boys all got cleaned and de-stemmed and the stems were set aside. In another bowl I coarsely chopped an onion, then some celery, and a carrot or two. Added herbses to taste, a lot of thyme, garlic and poultry seasoning and those mushrooms stems. In one pot, start cooking down the unholy quantity of myco-love, and in another cook up the celery/onion/carrot mixture. Once the COC mixture is done, transfer it to a VitaMix or other high-speed and let it rip for much longer than you think it should. Maybe add a teensy bit of water. You’ll have to look at it to see how it’s going. That’s your brown gravy “base.” Yes, really. And mine was awesome, so if yours isn’t, I don’t know what you did wrong. And! And! You could be done, but you’re not. You have that gargantuan pot of other mushrooms that you’ve been cooking and now you’re going to combine the two into the best whole foods, plant based mushroom gravy that you’ve ever had.
One can’t just simply eat mushroom gravy. I’ve tried. I call it soup then, but usually someone calls me on it.
So Sunday morning, I made up a trial batch of stuffing that turned out surprisingly well. I’ve been thinking for a while about how I wanted to approach the stuffing, because it’s just not the same without the egg in it, and a flax egg just wasn’t going to cut it. So, since it’s Thanksgiving, I settled on using the Follow Your Heart fake egg, which I can’t eat by itself, but used in baking yields admirable results. So that’s it, the usual toasted bread crumbs, celery, onions, garlic, herbses, half a shredded honeycrisp apple and some almond slivers, and then the stock I’d made on Saturday. I baked it for nearly 90 minutes to get it to set up right. I will probably cook it covered next time and remove the foil for just the browning at the end.
I also did up some nice sous-vide red potatoes to mash that might just be the best mashed potatoes I’ve ever made. They’re a touch too garlicky, which I thought I’d never say, but also so loaded with sage and rosemario flavario that I just can’t stand it. So … happy to have a couple of things nailed down for the holidays and it’s nice figuring out how to do some things in different spots, rather than have everything on the stove.