Thanksgiving 2020 Recap!

My favorite holiday has come and gone! I finished my last plate of leftovers for lunch today, and I'm so sad Thanksgiving (or, as vegans like to call it, ThanksLIVING) is over. Two weeks prior to Thanksgiving, my parents and I started a two-week quarantine so we could safely gather for the holiday. We're very lucky in that we have a tiny family (just me, my parents, and my me-maw) and that no one is working in an office or public setting. I've been working from home since March, and my parents are retired. It also helps that my family lives an hour away by car, so there's no need for air travel or road trip pee stops. I know it was tough for so many families to safely gather this year, and I'm grateful that mine was able to.

Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday for two reasons: 1) my family, and 2) THE FOOD. I love to eat, and nothing makes me happier than a big ole plate of vegan turkey and my mama's famous vegan dressin. Here's my plate!

On that plate, you'll find Tofurky with gravy, cornbread dressin, hash brown casserole, vegan chicken & dumplins, corn, green beans, coleslaw, homemade cranberry sauce, and a dinner roll.

Every year, I change up the vegan turkey, depending on whatever roast is new for the year. But so far, Tofurky is still my fave, so I went with an old standard this year. Here's a not-so-great shot of my Tofurky after I'd hacked it all up. Every year, my mom makes me a Tofurky, and she makes turkey for the rest of the family.

The stars of every Thanksgiving at my parents' house are the Cornbread Dressin and Hash Brown Casserole. Both recipes are actually in Cookin' Crunk, but somehow, when I make these dishes, they're never as good as my mama's. For one, she uses white flour for the cornbread, and the Crunk recipe calls for whole wheat pastry flour because I was on a health kick when I wrote that book. So if you try the recipe at home, just use white flour for maximum effect!

We don't typically have Vegan Chicken & Dumplins for Thanksgiving, but this is one of my other favorite meals from my mom, and I made a special request this year. She used the Better Than Bouillon No Chicken broth, and these were perfect.

I was on dinner roll duty, so I made Jackie Sobon's Fluffy Dinner Rolls from the holiday issue of VegNews. These were fluffy (as advertised!) and great! We cooked them a little too long waiting for the tops to brown (the oven was a bit crowded), so they dried out a bit. But it was nothing a generous schmear of Earth Balance couldn't fix. 

For dessert, my mama made a Lemon Cream Pie that was AMAZING! It had a graham cracker crust, a layer of vegan cream cheese mixed with coco whip, a layer of lemon curd, another layer of coco whip, and a top layer of crumbled lemon Oreos. WOW! My mama and daddy don't like pumpkin, so we tend to go non-traditional with the pie every year.

Maynard makes the drive over to his grandma and grandpa's house for the holidays, so he got in plenty of couch time with them.

And we got a nice nature walk in around the woods by their house. I also went for a solo 4.5-mile Tofurky Trot at Craighead Forest Park in Jonesboro before Thanksgiving lunch.

Family photo time! It always takes us forever to get the right angle on these timer shots. I think we'd given up by this point. 

I've been eating leftovers for days! My mom sent me home with so much food! Most days over the weekend, I had big leftovers plates, but I did make a couple of Thanksgiving Sliders using the dinner rolls, Tofurky, dressin', and cranberry sauce.