We are going to serve a vegan holiday entree this year. My brother Chris’ girlfriend, Laura, is vegan. Chris’ daughter, Alexis, is vegetarian. And it’s how we want to be eating more often than not, anyway. But we don’t cook vegan very often, especially when it comes to the holidays. No. We normally put out a big honkin’ hunk of meat for the holiday table.
Witness:
Over the past five years, we’ve had, clockwise from top left, rack of pork, standing rib roast, beef bourguignon, roast turkey and standing rib roast with porcini-bacon gravy.
This year, we were thinking more along the lines of this. Roasted acorn squash stuffed with wild rice pilaf.
But we don’t want to go blind here, and serve a holiday meal that we’ve never tried before. This sounded like a great idea: Harvest Stuffed Acorn Squash made with brown rice and wild rice, mixed with pecans and cranberries along with vegetable broth and spices like cardamom, cinnamon and cloves, all stuffed in an individual squash. A sweet little entree. Unfortunately, it smelled like a health food store. In a bad way. The other thing I didn’t love was that there’s no knife involved. You’re just sort of rooting around with a spoon for your food, and somehow that makes it less celebratory.
I was really psyched about this as a possibility for our Christmas Eve dinner, but alas, we are moving on. We have an idea, and I think it’s going to be pretty cool. Stay tuned.
