A Vegan Thanksgiving

I've never been much of a fan of Thanksgiving, and with a huge dead bird and salt oozing in a gravy boat the symbols of the holiday, it doesn't exactly conform with my current diet. Still, there's a bit of nostalgia to reckon with, and, even more, I've been wanting to cook up a pumpkin pie ever since Halloween. So I searched the net and found a couple of recipes: one for lentil "meatloaf", and a couple for kabocha pie (using kabocha, Japanese pumpkin).

The lentil loaf was pretty tasty and chock full of healthy stuff, but it tasted nothing like meatloaf, as you might expect; rather, it tasted like filafel (not at all a bad thing!). It did have the consistency of meatloaf after it cooled, though, and it went well with a tofu gravy I had used as a white sauce for pasta earlier in the week. It lasted a couple of days (as all Thanksgiving meals should), and the best meal I made out of it was when I spread it on bread and poured on some hot salsa.

The interesting thing about the meatloaf recipe is that I used an automatic recipe maker that lets you put in the ingredients you have and get a fair recipe. The site is here.

What turned out for me (note I used tahini as my binder rather than any of the options in the loaf maker above, and I baked in a toaster oven at 1000W for ~45 min):

Lentil Loaf

Ingredients:

2 cups cooked lentils
1 cup cooked brown rice
1/2 cup pine nuts
2 Tbsp olive oil
One onion, diced
One large garlic clove, minced
One large carrot, peeled and grated
One cup mushrooms, cleaned and chopped
One jalapeno chile, seeded and minced
1/4 to 1/2 cup vegetable broth, as needed (I used kombu dashi)
1 heaping Tbsp tahini
1/2 tsp. dried sage
1 tsp. dried basil
1/4 tsp. dried oregano
1 tsp. ground cumin
2 TB soy sauce

Directions:

Preheat the oven to 350º. Spray a loaf pan or 8x8 square baking pan with nonstick spray and set aside (an 8x8 pan makes a crisper loaf).

Be sure to cook rice and lentils before beginning: the lentils should be cooked with kombu (use 5-10in of used kombu) for about 20-30 min.

1. Grind the pine nuts into a coarse meal using a food processor or spice/coffee grinder. Place in a large mixing bowl and set aside.

2. Sauté vegetables in the olive oil until soft. Add to the large mixing bowl along with all the remaining ingredients. Mix and mash together well, adding only as much liquid as needed to create a soft, moist loaf that holds together and is not runny (you may not need to add any liquid if the grains and protein are very moist). Add more binder/carbohydrate as needed if the loaf seems too wet.

2a. Optional: mix together in a food processor for about 3-4 min.

3. Press mixture into the prepared pan and bake for 45 minutes to 1 hour, or until cooked through.

Let the loaf cool in the pan for 10 to 15 minutes, then turn out onto a plate or platter and slice. Serve with potatoes, vegetables, and vegetarian gravy, if desired.

The vegan white "gravy" recipe is available here.

In retrospect I wish I had added a glaze using the following:
10g sliced ginger
1 Tbsp soy sauce
2 Tbsp dashi
1 Tbsp arrowroot powder (kuzu 葛)

Mix them together and brush onto the top of the loaf, and tell me the results! I find this has a very nice "steak sauce" flavor, especially when the dashi is cooked off.

Finally, the kabocha pie was very good, but too sweet. I ended up using cinnamon graham crackers for my crust, which turned out to be the best part. I found the soy milk in the recipe for the crust was far too little: just add more until it is easily malleable. The recipe I used was here, but I (unfortunately) added 1/2 cup of sugar, which was too much. Use brown sugar or beet sugar, not white sugar!