A Vegetarian Thanksgiving

The year 2012 marked the first year that I decided to go full vegetarian on Thanksgiving - no turkey, no butter, no gravy. Last Thanksgiving, I had just begun my vegetarian experiment but I was still flexible when it came to meat that was not raised in a factory farm with no antibiotics or artificial growth hormones. For instance, I was still willing to eat meat if I bought it from the man who killed it in his own backyard. Since my mother always buys our turkeys from a farmer in our town who raises them himself, I was fine with eating that last year. And as I was not yet abstaining from dairy or eggs, all the mashed potatoes and stuffing and the like was not an issue either.

This year, however, I was not so flexible. Having abstained from all animal products with the exception of honey for the past 6 months, I wasn't about to give all that up for some holiday. Unfortunately, this stubbornness was not so easy for my mother to accept as the head chef and hostess of my family's annual Thanksgiving feast. Generally, she doesn't give me too hard a time about the whole vegan thing. She actually likes that she tends to eat more vegetarian meals when I'm around and has said that she always feels better after eating vegetarian than when eating meals of meat and butter and cream. For Thanksgiving, however, she begged me to let up a bit. "Butter is the flavor of Thanksgiving," she told me. "That and sage." While my family tends to be supportive of some dairy substitutes like Earth Balance and rice milk, my mother insisted that our Thanksgiving meal needed to be made with all real butter, since that's just how she's always done it. I figured I could do without the turkey and sausage stuffing as long as there were other side dishes I could eat, but after her butter comment I realized I had to forge my own path this year.

So, I got cooking. I made my own mashed potatoes with olive oil, almond milk, salt and pepper. I made a green bean dish with olive oil, fresh thyme, toasted almonds (and lots of them!), salt and pepper. I made my favorite corn bread recipe for everyone, and I also made a chocolate banana coconut pudding cake. In the end, I convinced my mother to make her non-sausage stuffing (she always makes two kinds) with veggie broth instead of chicken broth and to sauté the onions and celery in olive oil instead of butter. I also convinced her to replace the butter in her famous tangerine & thyme carrots with olive oil as well. So when all was said and done, I had quite a feast.

While my veganism has perplexed my Italian relatives these past few months, my younger cousins have been more accepting of it. Everyone asked to try my "special" potatoes and they all loved them. The corn bread was also a huge hit and my chocolate cake went in about 3 minutes after putting it out on the dessert table. Not only was I able to celebrate my holiday without compromising my dietary habits, but I think I was able to convince a few family members that veganism isn't as radical as they had thought. They learned that I could have my chocolate cake and eat it too - and oh how I did!