Author: vegansneedsauce

The food was good. Maybe too many carbs, but we were super excited about making pasta. And bread. And gnocchi. So it just kind of happened. I did my best to surround all that with vegetables. Whatever, it’s the holidays, we’re not usually so indulgent!

My mom did all the bread, the pasta, and the gnocchi. I made pretty much everything else, or we worked together to complete the recipes. (I also made the vegan butter we used, Miyoko Schinner’s recipe from Homemade Vegan Kitchen.)

Antipasti

• Baked ricotta (Kite Hill + a scoop of Miyoko’s double cream chive, with lemon zest and olive oil, inspired by this)
• Roast romanesco cauliflower with cippollini onion agrodolce (modified from Crossroads cookbook)
• Pesto foccacia (from VeganBaking.net)

Primo

• Savory pumpkin-stuffed ravioli with sage brown butter and toasted black walnuts
• Sweet potato gnocchi, also with sage brown butter
• Braised broccoli rabe with garlic

I don’t really have a recipe for any of these. The pasta dough was Vegan Homemade Kitchen; the filling was me absolutely winging it and doing a decent job. To be honest, I don’t even remember what all I put in there. The gnocchi, my mom’s first attempt, was based on the recipe in Crossroads, IIRC.

Secondo

• Seitan roulade with a sundried tomato glaze and stuffed with eggplant, pesto, and homemade croutons (inspired by this roulade from Vegetarian Times)
• Potato gnocchi with homemade basil-walnut pesto
• Kale and cranberry beans (based on a recipe from Crossroads calling for butter beans instead)

Dessert

• Pumpkin parfait (from Crossroads, minus the ginger syrup)
• Biscotti with black walnuts, dried cherries, and lemon zest (modified from a recipe in Vegan Cookies Take Over Your Cookie Jar)
• Cocoa-hazelnut medallions (Nutella-inspired and warped from this recipe)

The photo of that parfait is garbage, but it was pretty lovely. What you can’t see in the blur is the layer of gorgeously moist spice cake, pumpkin mousse, coconut whipped cream with vanilla bean, and almond-pumpkin seed brittle. It was like a deconstructed pumpkin pie and it was fan-fucking-tastic. The other two were as tasty as they look.