Autumn Celebration Feast

Happy sunday friends! As I’m writing this, I’m actually still in a food coma. Lucky for me that I don’t have to leave the couch anymore today, because that would probably be very hard. 😀

 

 

Yesterday we had friends over for a Thanksgiving/Autumn Celebration dinner. To me, it’s always great fun to plan and prepare dinners or other special occasions like this. Back when I was a kid, I already loved looking at the pictures of Home & Garden magazines that my mom had bought. Later, when I discovered Martha Stewart I was hooked on her magazines and actually bought her book about entertaining. My boyfriend always teases me, saying “making it nice” whenever I start getting my Martha Stewart syndrome, but I don’t care, I stand by my little “making it nice” tick. 😀 Don’t get me wrong though, I probably have even greater talent for creating chaos, especially in the kitchen, but I save pictures of that for another time.

For yesterdays dinner I wanted to keep everything plant based, even though my significant other was a bit sceptical at first, understandably since he has always loved the traditional Thanksgiving meals. So I was especially happy seeing him gobble down the food and approving vegan Thanksgiving. I did use eggs for the pumpkin pie though. Not because there aren’t any vegan recipes for it (there are actually a lot of tasty looking ones), but because I still had eggs from the animal sanctuary sitting in the fridge and wanted to use them. As an additional dessert I made a raw vegan pecan pie from the Rawsome Vegan Baking Book, which turned out delicious. But let me start from the beginning and share some of the other recipes and pictures with you.

 

 

As a pre course I made pumpkin maroon soup. It has a lot of flavor and is the perfect autumn soup. You can find the recipe on the blog.

 

 

And after the soup came everything else.

 

 

The Cranberry-Cornbread-Stuffing is a favorite of my boyfriend. The recipe is from, who else, Martha Stewart. 😉 There is no need to add the eggs that are mentioned in the recipe and I also replaced the chicken stock with vegetable stock. Find the recipe here.

 

 

It was not that easy to find a good vegan cornbread recipe. But after some tries and adjustments I now made a lovely one, which I will share on the blog next week.

 

 

Something I love making is mashed sweet potatoes. It’s so simple to prepare and makes a great side dish. I just cook the sweet potatoes and while mashing them I add some vegetable butter, a bit plant milk, finely chopped garlic and salt to taste.

 

 

Instead of the traditional meat loaf I tried a non-meat recipe from the amazing Oh She Glows cookbook. A Walnut-Lentil Loaf! It was so good! You can find the recipe on her blog too.

 

 

Since I never ate cranberry sauce before, I was keen on making it this time around and I found a great recipe on the blog A Cozy Kitchen.

 

 

As a salad I made an adapted version of this recipe from Feasting At Home. A brussels sprouts salad with dates and hazelnuts – such a lovely combination! I used less brussels sprouts and added some mixed salad leafs instead.

 

 

Lastly, mushroom gravy. For this I used another recipe from the Oh She Glows cookbook. Yummy!

 

 

We all loaded our plates to the max. Happy times! 😀

 

 

Oh and I haven’t shown you yet the beautiful bouquet that our friends brought. Thank you again guys! It’s so beautiful and seasonal.

 

As you could see, the food was way too little (caution for irony), so we needed to add some cake and tea on top.

 

 

 

After all this we finally reached the filling limit of our bellies. Afterwards I was glad that I was wearing a skirt, which I could just pull up a little with every course. Pants would have probably popped open. Haha!

 

 

Ok, now after all this food talk, I’m off to the kitchen to get some left-overs. Sending a lot of love to all of you!

 

 

 

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