All my posts as of late have an “&” in the title. I will try to find time to post more often and avoid the “ands”!
Last week I wanted to make a big pot of deliciousness. It’s definitely chili weather here and it’s been at least a year since I last made chili, so chili it was. I use this as my basic veggie chili go-to recipe. If you follow the recipe you’ll have a tasty, meaty omni-friendly chili, and it’s great for variations. It’ll taste good pretty much no matter what you do to it. I’m trying to stay away from processed food though, so instead of faux meat I diced a huge sweet potato and tossed it in.

To go with the chili I made my whole wheat cornbread and wilted some arugula.

On to Thanksgiving! This was my first Thanksgiving with bf’sfamily, so I didn’t want to get to crazy with the “weird” vegan food and I stayed fairly traditional.
When I made the cornbread above I doubled the recipe so that I could make cornbread stuffing, using this recipe from Vegan Chef.

This was very tasty! Everyone else kind of looked at it funny, but that’s fine – more leftovers for me! The only thing I might change next time would be to use a little less parsley and green onion, and a bit more broth to make it all mush together.
The best green bean casserole, from Fat Free Vegan. This was a hit with everyone. Well, at least everyone who likes green beans.

Robin Robertson’s Cranberry Relish. I’m not a huge cranberry sauce person, but I got two bags for 99 cents, and this recipe looked really interesting, with additions like shallots and red bell peppers. I liked it a lot, but it’s still not something I can eat a lot of.

My cashew miso gravy. So good.

It’s very hard to get a decent picture of just gravy.
My plate. BF’s mom left some potatoes on the side for me to mash with Earth Balance and soy milk.

For my “entree” I made seitan cutlets from VCON. I have to say, I’m not digging them very much. It might just be that I left them too thick, but the texture turned out so rubbery I have a hard time eating them. For this meal I cut one in half to make it thinner, coated it in flour and pan-fried it. It was pretty good this way, along with gravy and everything else on the plate. I’m not sure what I’m going to do with the rest of them that are currently stashed in my freezer though.
Here’s another view of my plate, just because I think the picture turned out better.

For dessert I made Pumpkin Pie Brownies from The PPK, which I have been wanting to try for over a year.

They were really easy to make and the texture turned out great, but I thought they weren’t sweet enough, which is odd for me. Normally I think desserts are too sweet! The recipe called for bittersweet chocolate and I used unsweeted, so I’m sure that took a little sweetness away, but I was very surprised. They were kind of an “adult” dessert, where the bitterness of the chocolate comes through. If I make them again I will definitely add more sugar, maybe some chocolate chips in the brownies and whipped cream for the top. Then I think they will be stellar.
In the spirit of Thanksgiving, I am holding my very first contest! Well…it’s not really a contest…more like a giveaway. I am approaching 1000 approved comments, crazy! To thank you all for continuing to come back and read (even when I’m only posting once a week), I will send a package of sweets to whomever posts the 1000th comment! I won’t say how close I am – it may not even happen for this post. But I will announce the winner when it happens.
Lastly, I only took two lunches for last week’s shortened workweek, so here they are.

11-24 better than cream cheese & pumpkin butter sandwich on wheat,
celery & carrots sticks, banana pieces, candy cane jo jo’s

11-25 sweet potato chili, cornbread, wilted arugula, a clementine
I hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving and is getting into the holiday spirit!