Well November evaporated like a desert mirage in the hot sun. Had to use a metaphor for heat seeing as how cold it is outside. And me no likey the cold. So December rolls in like a jolly Santa and it got me thinking about Christmas. Specifically the yummy vegan Christmas recipes that we’ll enjoy with family this year and next.
I was also asked via tweet (follow @VeganValor) if I could do up some vegan Christmas tips so I will. And what’s great about these vegetarian Christmas recipes is that you can still have a jolly Christmas while dining on kindness. I think that is how St. Nick might have liked it.
I’ll be honest with you. We use this template of a vegan Christmas dinner for other “feast” days, most often Thanksgiving. So if you’re looking for vegan Thanksgiving recipes then this will fill in nicely for that too.
Back in the day we used to make seitan roasts from a seitan recipe that required both white and wheat flour. It literally took about 4 hours to make. It was a whole day event. Recently you can buy gluten flour which makes creating seitan recipes even easier. Nowadays we use seitan or Tofurky as our protein or “meat” in the meal.
I’ll call it vegan meat because honestly I want to make it easy for omnivores to transition to a vegan diet and when I was starting out it was handy being able to use familiar recipes and types of menus in order to create a vegan Christmas menu or dinner.
So for those of you who are having a vegetarian Christmas dinner or you’re having guests over who are vegetarian this’ll work. If you’re transitioning to vegetarianism or veganism you’ll be pleased at how easy and familiar this meal seems.
The Christmas dinner menu looks something like this:
Tofurky or seitan roast
roast potatoes
roast butternut squash
vegan gravy
steamed brussels sprouts
Now I’m not making a seitan recipe today, that’ll come in the future. So today’s vegan Christmas dinner is going to be Tofurky roast with the accompaniments.
The roast potatoes are easy. Here’s my recipe for:
Easy tasty, crunchy munchy roast potatoes
2 baking potatoes per person (you want lots extra for the next day or big hungry vegan appetites)
Mrs. Dash
salt and pepper
canola oil
garlic powder
Preheat oven to 350. I chop up the potatoes coarsely with their skin still on. A medium potato will be roughly quartered or perhaps cut into sixths.
I put them into a large bowl and drizzle the oil over them. Then I toss them in the bowl so they all get nicely covered with the oil. Dump them onto a baking tray and spread out evenly. Liberally sprinkle, salt and pepper, Mrs. Dash and the garlic powder on them.
Put them in the oven and cook for anywhere from 2 to 3 hours. I gently caress them ever 30 minutes which means I take them out of the oven and move them around and turn them over with a spatula. Occasionally you might have to drizzle extra oil over them if they start drying out, you can see this easily enough.
When they are well roasted with brown crispy outsides you’re done. Enjoy.
TIP: Creating a yummy vegetarian Christmas dinner like this will require multi tasking. For example the Tofurky will go into the oven with the potatoes, but the potatoes would have been in the oven already for around an hour or so by that time.
EXTRA TIP FOR STUDIOUS VEG*NS: Place the butternut squash into the oven at around the same time as the Torfurky. Both will need around an hour to an hour and quarter to fulfill their yumminess quotient.
Roast boats of butternut squash
I call them boats because that’s what they look like 🙂
1 butternut squash will be good enough for 4 to 6 people
canola oil
Mrs. Dash
garlic powder
salt and pepper
The oven is already preheated and the potatoes are smelling like you wanna eat ’em already. I like to cut off about a half inch or so from the top of my butternut squash and the same at the bottom.
Then cut the butternut squash in half. Scoop out the seeds and discard. Cut each half into 4 pieces to end up with 8. Coat the squash liberally with oil both sides and place on the baking sheet ass side up. In other words you want the skin showing, or at least showing as much as possible.
Shake and bake. Shake on the Mrs. Dash, a salt with a deadly pepper and garlic powder then bake.
Place in the oven and check on them every 30 minutes too. As with the potatoes they might require extra drizzle of oil if they dry out. For the last 20 to 30 minutes place them ass side down.
The skin when cooked this way is delicious. They’ll take about an hour or so. As with most of the cooking here, keep an eye on things as they go. That’ll be your greatest route to success.
Vegan gravy train
There are tons of ways you can make a great vegetarian gravy with the blood and guts and other animal drippings of pain.
1 liter (quart) of water
1 vegetable bouillon cube
Mrs. Dash
pepper
garlic powder
about 0.25 cup of Bisto traditional gravy powder
0.5 cup of water
Seeing a pattern here 😉 I’m all about the easy. Making vegan cooking easy. We want yummy food to eat but we don’t want to take 5 years at Cordon Bleu to learn how to cook it. Capiche?
In a large deep frying pan add the water and the rest of the ingredients and start to heat over a low to medium heat. Around 4 or 5 on the dial out of 10.
In a coffee mug add the Bisto gravy powder to the 0.5 cup of water and mix until the gravy powder is dissolved. Pour this into the pan while stirring constantly with all the other ingredients.
At this time you’ll need to keep stirring your gravy regularly until it is ready. By regularly I mean at least a couple or 3 times per minute. Vegan gravy train should take about a half hour. If it is not getting as thick as you like, add a little more gravy powder or cornstarch to some cold water to mix it up first and then pour into the gravy pan to thicken to your liking.
That my veg*n friends is your key to the kingdom of vegan Christmas dinner taste explosion. I’m assuming you know how to steam some brussels sprouts, if not, you can boil them for 3 to 5 minutes too. As for the Tofurky, just follow the directions and use one of my vegan marinades from the other day.
Merry Christmas everyone and Happy New Year. Be jolly like Santa and kind to the animals (and each other) like St. Nick.
Your friend,
Rudolph the vegan reindeer 🙂