still alive - be thankful!

I know other bloggers have gone far longer than a week without a post, but I am not normally among them so it feels like forever.  I hope you'll excuse my absence, considering how busy I've been preparing for Thanksgiving and Black Friday - or I should say it like this:

1. the first Thanksgiving (or holiday at all) that I've hosted in my own home!
2. the first Black Friday I've worked retail in fifteen years.

Fortunately, both went off pretty well, yet both were fairly stressful in the days leading up to them.  Additionally, I just haven't felt like I had anything interesting to say.  I realized recently that one of the reasons I've found blogging to be so much fun and so fulfilling in the first two years of this little blog was because I was still learning how to cook new and interesting things, so I was always trying to make something I hadn't made yet so I could come up with a unique post.  Over the last several months, I've found myself perfectly happy to repeat "favorites" from the last few years, and although I only rotate recipes every few months, I still didn't have anything interesting to say about making "this" dish again.

Here is a quick recap of my Celebrate Vegan mini-menu:

The two pasta dishes (Pasta with Shallots and Chard and Pasta with Red Peppers and Basil) were just like I remembered them - relatively easy with a ton of flavor.  Neither of them made as much as I thought I remembered, but believe me, with Thanksgiving coming up, there was no place in our fridge for leftovers anyway.

I made one new recipe from the book I wasn't able to make before because it needed tweaking for Mister's intestinal safety, the Jambalaya and it was quite tasty and fake-meat-alicious!

So let's switch gears.

There's a lovely song by Josh Groban (which you can hear a beautiful cover of here) with the following lyrics:

Some days we forget to look around us.

Some days we can't see the joy that surrounds us.

So caught up inside ourselves, we take when we should give,

So for tonight, we pray for what we know can be,

And on this day we hope for what we still can't see.  

It's up to us to be the change,

And even though we all can still do more...

There's so much to be thankful for.

I'm thankful for a great many things, not the least of which being how well my first Thanksgiving as the cook and hostess turned out!  Here was our menu:

When my parents arrived, we set out mixed olives, veggie crudites with Muhammara (from Celebrate Vegan) and store-bought dill dip (thanks, Mister), and Spanakopita (from The Accidental Vegan).  The main course was a Torfurky Roast which Mister has wanted since his first non-meat-eating Thanksgiving and I was thrilled to be able to give it to him.  Alongside the Tofurky was mashed potatoes, roasted broccoli, and my mom's becoming-famous salad, then dessert was Apple Pie with Vanilla "ice cream" by So Delicious.  Dad brought two delightful bottles of my favorite wines - Apothic Red and the 2009 vintage of Georges deBoeuf Beaujolais-Villages, as well as a four-pack of mini-champagnes "for after work."

Oh?  You wanted a picture parade?  Okay!

I began my preparations on Monday or Tuesday night, starting with the Muhammara dip since it would taste the best after sitting in the fridge for a few days.  I figured it was best to make it the same night we had Pasta with Shallots and Chard since my home already stank of an onion sibling (and since I already had the book out).  After simmering three chopped red peppers with a chopped onion and sliced garlic for an hour, I dry-toasted some walnuts,

And then placed everything in the blending machine...

and pureed it until it was mostly smooth and homogenously orange.

After it cooled a little, I scooped it into a "tupperware" and stuck it in the fridge, to be forgotten until Thursday.

Wednesday night, I intended to make the spanakopita because I've found that it sticks together better if it's made the night before it's eaten.  So I chopped up a shallot to substitute for the revolting onion in the recipe and sauteed the onion and spinach while the lentils cooked.

Added the brown lentils (I'm not actually sure why, either)

and then a big heap of crumbled feta tofu,

and stirred it all together.

This is where it gets fun.  By the time I started making this, I'd only worked one eight-hour day at work (the others went long in preparation for Black Friday) and after that 8-hour day (of being one half of the sales force, since one person got sent home with an eye infection) I had a 2.5 hour hair appointment (oh, how I missed you, Candi KaBoom!), so I really wasn't on my most... "with it" behavior.

I realized after all the work of assembling the spanakopita, including gluing sheets of phyllo together with olive oil while listening to the darkly angelic voice of Amy Lee through my earbuds, that I had missed one step of the two-step process required to preheat my ancient oven.  So, finding (at 2am) that my oven was still cold after it was "preheating" for 30 minutes, I covered the spanakopita with plastic, put it in the fridge and went to bed.

It came out just fine when I baked it the next morning.

Then came the piece de resistance.

Mister's long-awaited Tofurky Roast, complete with wild rice stuffing.

I put it in a little Corningware casserole dish and surrounded it with quartered potatoes and carrots, then poured half of the sage marinade over it and stuck that puppy in the oven.

It's not a real puppy, by the way.

appetizers - from the top: Muhammara, Dill dip, olives

more apps: Spanakopita, crudites

The Torfurky, all basted and roasted and ready to eat!

Sides: mashterpaters, roasted broccoli, and the canned
cranberry "sauce" Mister insisted we needed

I realized in a panic a few days before Thanksgiving (and a few days after I constructed the menu) that I had completely neglected to get/make gravy.  In an incredible (and incredibly fortunate) coincidence, my dear Mama Pea posted this recipe to save my butt.  It was good and easy to make in a pinch, but a little too thick to become a regular occurrence in our home, so next year we'll think ahead and find something a little more pourable.

Next year?

That's right!  It seems my parents enjoyed themselves enough to consider sharing the holidays - with any luck, that means I will always host Thanksgiving and they can have Christmas :)  In any case, thanks to my hard-working dishwasher and helpful husband, it didn't take all that long to clean up after dinner, allowing me to get to bed by nine(ish) since I had to be up at 3am to go to work.

In case you were wondering, Philadelphia is incredibly quiet and peaceful (and dark) at 5am.

how Anne Rice helped me make spanakopita

I'll tell you what - I don't care if it makes me a geek - I like Anne Rice.  I like her books, I like her storyline, I even like her personal life (what I know of it).  I love how descriptive she is and how she has helped me to broaden my vocabulary and taught me the names of two of my all-time favorite bands (which may also tag me as a dork: Savage Garden and Evanescence).  There are times when I read her words through the eyes of a grammar snob and think of how absolutely horrendous her writing is from a technical standpoint, but she isn't teaching English class, she is trying to paint pictures with words, which she accomplishes flawlessly.

Like many people, I imagine, I was introduced to Anne Rice in 1994 when Interview with the Vampire took up movie screens across the country and discussions between bigger geeks than I took up basements and Denny's all around the country, arguing about how much better the book was than the movie.  The book?  I was a teenager in 1994 and although I had always had a love for reading, I had such limited free time that when the option was to read a book or watch a movie based on that book, the movie won every time.  It wasn't until a few years later, when I discovered "the book" in my college library, of all places, that I grew to truly love Anne Rice.

I read "the book" and finally understood two things.  First, I understood why people who read the book before seeing the movie were almost universally disappointed in it - there was a great deal more detail in the book which elucidates parts of the story that don't quite connect in the movie (or would have connected better).  Also, the actors appeared miscast when compared with the images she creates for them in the book - although I will maintain with my dying breath that no one could have pulled off Lestat the way Tom Cruise did, Antonio Banderas and Brad Pitt should have swapped parts, at least in terms of the physical descriptions she provided.  However, she paints a stronger picture of Louis's character than what Brad Pitt portrays with his beautiful pout and I regret to say this, but he didn't do the character justice.  Nevertheless, this is not a book review - I'm actually going somewhere with all this.  The second thing I learned was why so many of my friends loved reading her books, which resulted in me working my way through the magnificently interwoven Vampire Chronicles, and then discovering her one-offs, like Violin and Cry to Heaven.

That leads to my second time reading through The Witching Hour, part one of a trilogy of books about the Mayfair Witches (supposedly).  I read through it several years ago but discovered at the end that it was part of a series.  The series was 20 years old, so I had considerable trouble locating the other two books.  Just this summer, I came into possession of both, so I'm starting over.  I'm nearly through this book, but it took a while.  I thought I could get through it in the week between jobs, but it is 1,043 pages long.  To give you an idea, that is about half the length of the Bible.

Here is the connection: how do you get people to read a book that is over one thousand pages long?  By using small print and reaaaaallllly thin paper so it looks like a normal-sized novel from the outside.  This is how Anne Rice helped me make Spanakopita from The Accidental Vegan.  Finally.

The most daunting thing about spanakopita (and baklava and tiropita, etc) is working with phyllo dough.  I think it's kind of deceptive to actually use the word dough because there is no human way to get dough rolled that thin.  How thin?  Probably a middle ground between the thinness of the rice paper used to print older Bibles and the paper Anne Rice uses to make her books seem surmountable.  I will admit, I was surprised at how easy it was to work with the phyllo sheets after getting myself so worked up about them.

I've determined that the reason they didn't freak me out is because I've spent weeks now turning fragile, super-thin pages in this never-ending saga of three hundred years and thirteen (spooky!) generations of witches.  As such, I was not too concerned about tearing these fragile sheets of "dough," rather, I just carefully pulled them apart and gently laid them atop one another.  It was great fun "painting" each one down with my bowlful of oil.

The recipe makes 12 squares and we each had three.  It was a fun and tasty dinner and we each gave up on trying to eat like civilized people (with a fork) within minutes of the flaky top exploding all over our plates.  I was a little concerned about the filling, since I kind of felt like I should have used the tofeta marinade from Vegan on the Cheap, but I had already used my Tofu Xpress to squish all the liquid out of both the spinach and the tofu, so I didn't feel like investing even more time to let the tofu marinate and then have to press it again.  Fortunately, the spices from the spinach-garlic mixture penetrated the tofu during the baking process - which smelled absolutely divine, by the way - and resulted in a tasty, almost-feta flavor and texture.


Mister was thrilled with his little Greek wife making spanakopita for the first time (I was just pleased as punch that it wasn't awful) and we both enjoy it from time to time.  Although this certainly will not regularly enter any kind of dinner rotation, it's good to know it's not that difficult to make.  I will probably give it another go in a couple of months and introduce my family to the glory of Greek finger foods at Thanksgiving.