My “Thanksgivukkah” Menu- a bit early but at least I’m prepared!

So this year, Hanukkah and Thanksgiving happen to occur at the same time. Hanukkah starts at sundown on Wednesday the 27th, and since it goes on for 8 nights, Thanksgiving will co-occur. My family doesn’t really celebrate Hanukkah as much as we used to (I think my dad, who is Jewish but not really religious married my mom so he could celebrate Christmas at times, hehe, although we don’t really celebrate Christmas that much either…)

Anyways, my family has some traditions around holiday time that are difficult to break, despite being a vegan and/or not really being into the actual holidays themselves. One is that we try to have Potato latkes the first night of Hanukkah. But since everyone ends up eating a lot on Thanksgiving, and we’ll be doing tons of cooking on the first night in preparation for Thanksgiving, it kind of makes more sense to have potato latkes with Thanksgiving food. Someone on my facebook called it Thanksgivukkah, and I thought that was funny, so I decided to call this post that.

I end up making a lot of separate foods that I make for myself and feast off of for the rest of the week, since my family is not vegan along with me sadly. So for the past three years I have been making my own Thanksigiving menu that people can eat from if they want to, or not.

This year I am making:

Baked Potato Latkes from the Happy Herbivore Blog

A healthy green bean casserole (I may need to put some vegan fried onions on top too, we’ll see…)

Tofurky  (I think I am getting a coupon from purchasing a limited edition thanksgiving shirt from Compassion Co., so I really want to do this this year!)

and for dessert:

*edit* I was going to make some pumpkin pie squares but ended up choosing to make the Eat To Live Cookbook’s pumpkin pie because it seemed like a healthier choice–Eat To Live Cookbook is my newest (and healthiest) cookbook I own.

Look out for my reviews of these recipes, hopefully on Thanksgiving day or the day after! Let me know if you decide to make any of these as well, and then let me know what you thought!

Foodie (Photo) Friday is back! (sorry it was absent for a bit…I was still cooking though!)

Hey there!

I am still recovering from the weekend where I was very busy…I cannot believe it’s been a week already since the start of the Ladies Rock Camp. It went really well, especially the food, from my standpoint.  Well of course everything went well, but I was focused most on making sure the food was great, and I think it was.

Anyhow! I think I am going to play catch up a bit.

This week I made some Hawaiian Toast (Page 44) for breakfast and Texas Beefless Skewers with Chipotle Peach Glaze (Page 140) from Betty Goes Vegan, pizza english muffins and easy monkey bread (from the Vegan Stoner Cookbook, haha) with a friend, a really good salad several times, and a jackfruit/northern beans “tuna” melt. I don’t have pictures of the monkey bread and pizza English Muffins, sadly…

In weeks prior where I did not get to post, I also made:

  • a Cheezburger Pie from Betty Goes Vegan
  • Cupcakes for my birthday (on October 29) from Chloe’s Kitchen–the spice ones

and other stuff too, but that I apparently did not take pictures of or remember. Ooops.

Here are the details and evidence:

Northern bean/Jackfruit un’tuna melt…
photo (73)recipe here 

Bye bye, chickpea untuna sandwiches! This combination beats chickpea faux tuna sandwiches by a landslide! So good and a close flavor from what I remember! I didn’t add any salt and it was recommended to me to not use a whole lemon. I did not use the frying step as listed because it seemed fairly redundant. I just broiled some bread with spinach, tomatoes, and daiya cheddar on it and then put the still hot sandwich mixture inside. The un’tuna salad tastes good when cold the next day, too. Also, I don’t know how this makes just two sandwiches! It makes about 4 for me. If I piled the amount it’d take to halve the recipe on the bread, it wouldn’t hold it all. But this is probably one of my favorite recipes using jackfruit I’ve tried so far.

I rate this recipe:

4bananas1

Hawaiian French Toast from Betty Goes Vegan Cookbook

photo (72)

This cookbook has so many amazing sounding recipes, especially for breakfasts. This one immediately caught my eye when I read it. It has both a tropical and cheesy flavor to it, and works out really well when you follow the directions as instructed. I would not change anything about it! It’s so yummy. My non-vegan brother gobbled it up, and I don’t even think he likes French Toast type things much, but no complaints…This definitely deserves a 5 good banana rating!

5bananas

Texas Beefless Skewers with Chipotle Peach Glaze from Betty Goes Vegan

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I used Gardein Beefless tips as directed for this recipe. It looks almost too real, which is slightly scary for me. They were oh so tasty, though! I made some cilantro lime rice with corn in it (a frozen prepared bag, haha) to go along with it and it was delicious! When I shared this picture on facebook, it seemed to get more “likes” than usual…I do not know if maybe it is because it looks so convincing as a fake meat, or what, but yeah…It was also pretty quick and easy to make. I am finding that most of the recipes I have tried so far in this cookbook are, which is great and a huge plus for me. The only thing I would recommend with this particular recipe that wasn’t mentioned in the book is to have a baking pan on the rack underneath in case the juices drip out…it was needed and I thankfully thought of it before it was too late…

4bananas1

Cheezburger Pie from Betty Goes Vegan

photo (71)

 Well, this was amazing. I used Whole Foods Brand burgers and did not defrost them and they worked fine. The Bisquick and the ener-g egg replacer make this almost quiche-like…which I was very impressed with. I have not been too keen on ener-g egg replacer powder until I used this cookbook and particularly this recipe. I ate it with ketchup, dill relish, and yellow mustard. It was comforting. Amazingly, when I calculated the nutrition facts  it was fairly decent  (at least calorie wise, I was thinking this would be really intense). Visually it is appealing too as you can see, haha!

5bananas

Finally, I amnot going to review them because I’m mostly tired now, but I will leave you with some pictures of the cupcakes for my birthday on October 29 which I neglected to blog about. They were from Chloe’s Kitchen.

photo (68)

photo (70)