Holiday Menus

It's rather late in the year to be posting a here's-what-we-had-for-Thanksgiving menu, I know, but work with me here. These recipes will be just as pleasing on a holiday table or to go with all that New Year's Eve champagne, right? Right? All of the links below are vegetarian, and many are vegan or vegan-izable.

Clockwise from top left: cranberries simmering, citrus for cake, the best sweet potatoes ever, veggie dip, and gougères

* Pre-Dinner Sustenance *

White Bean Dip with Crudités

It's dead easy to cook your own beans, so there's no need for canned as long as you plan ahead. Besides, most can linings contain BPA (note: link leads to a PDF), and nobody wants that on the menu. Use only half or even just a quarter of a garlic clove if you don't want your loved ones keeling over when you breathe on them.

* On the Table *

Fennel and Cheese Gougères

This recipe sounds more involved than it is. Really. It actually takes minimal effort, and the results are phenomenal. I'm going to be making this a lot, especially since you can prepare the dough ahead of time and freeze it for later.

Vanilla Mashed Sweet Potatoes

I kid you not, I could eat these every day for the rest of my life. Every. Single. Day. It's a good thing I made a half batch for Thanksgiving, because Amaury and I would have polished off every last bite of the whole recipe, licked the bowl, and had no room for anything else. I'll be experimenting at making this with soy or almond milk, because cream is a bit rich for eating this every day forever.

Chèvre and Garlic Bread Salad

This was on the menu for Thanksgiving, but I forgot to make it until the moment the cobbler (below) came out of the oven… and at that point we already had more than enough food on the table anyway. We threw it together the next week instead. The bread gets soggy after a while, so don't make more than you'll eat in a night.

Vegetable Cobbler with Fresh Herb Biscuits

I think I preferred last year's main dish—stuffed acorn squash—especially in terms of aesthetics. But the cobbler was hearty and well seasoned. Use a bit less garlic and broth than what's called for.

* For Dessert *

Cranberry Royale Sorbet

Perfectly tart and refreshingly light after you've filled up on sweet potatoes. The recipe isn't online—the link above leads to a site where you can order a pint—but seriously, buy the book if you have an ice cream maker. The salted caramel ice cream recipe I posted earlier this year comes from the same source.

Citrus Gingerbread Cake

Normally, I prefer one-bowl cakes. Who'd choose to spend their valuable time washing dishes when they could be eating cake? I'm willing to put out a bit more effort for a holiday, though, and this cake didn't disappoint. The orange and other citrus flavors blend well with the gingerbread spices. The online recipe has a few "?"s where there should be numbers in the ingredients list, but here's what's missing: 1/3 cup sugar, 1/8 tsp baking powder, and 1/8 tsp salt for the cake, and 1/3 cup orange marmalade for the sauce. We had a lot of frosting and sauce left over… I'd recommend halving those parts of the recipe (or make twice as much cake!). The sauce was pretty runny for my liking, so I'm planning to simmer and reduce it more next time.

Sequoia cones are about the size of a chicken's egg, but they grow into the largest living things on our planet! See Amaury down in the bottom right photo? If giant sequoias are giant humans in a parallel universe, I don't think Homo sapiens would even reach as high as their toenails.

We eschewed the consumerist insanity of Black Friday in favor of working off those extra helpings of sweet potatoes at Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks. National Geographic must have been paying attention to our plans, because the issue with the cover story on giant sequoias arrived in our mailbox just before we left! You can read the article by David Quammen here.

Salted Caramel Addiction

France, as it turns out, is not the most vegetarian-friendly nation on our little blue planet. On honeymoon there last month, Amaury and I often found ourselves scanning the menus at two, three, zut alors, sometimes four restaurants before finding one where I could eat.

Thankfully, crêperies are 1) très commun en France and 2) always have fromage-filled, viande-free options for non-carnivores. We ate crêpes almost every other day! After a savory galette au sarrasin (buckwheat crêpe) washed down with un kir or cidre, we'd turn our attention to the dessert menu. And nearly every time, I found myself ordering un crêpe au caramel beurre salé—a crêpe with homemade salted butter caramel.

(Amaury, by contrast, almost always chose Nutella or some other form of chocolate for his sweet crêpes.)

Brittany is justly famous for its salted caramels, and the other regions of France we visited have helped spread the word. Salty-sweet and sticky-chewy or pourable (hot and saucy?), I couldn't get enough of them. Still can't, though now that we're back home in California, it's harder to feed my addiction.

Chocolate-dipped salted caramels would certainly satisfy, of course. But while delicious, they are rather a lot of work to make. Enter my new favorite cookbook: Jeni's Splendid Ice Creams at Home (if your local bookshop doesn't carry it, try here). It's stocked with recipes for baked rhubarb frozen yogurt, sweet basil and honeyed pine nut ice cream, riesling-poached pear sorbet, and innumerable other unexpected flavors. Best of all—to my mind—is the page on salted caramel ice cream, here called "salty caramel."

Obviously you're going to need an ice cream maker for this one. If you've been thinking about buying one, take my advice and take the plunge. Nothing tops homemade ice cream.

First you're going to want to get your ingredients prepped and ready to go. Don't try to measure the cream, burn the sugar, and read the next step in the recipe all at once. Ain't gonna fly.

In a medium mixing bowl (enough to hold 1 quart of liquid with room to spare), use a fork to mix together 1 1/2 oz. (3 Tbsp) cream cheese and 1/2 tsp salt. This will be easier if you give the cream cheese time to soften up a bit on the counter first.

Measure 1 1/4 cup heavy cream (whipping cream) and stir in 2 Tbsp light corn syrup. 

In another trusty Pyrex cup, measure out 2 cups whole milk. Not skim. Not 2%. Whole milk. 

In a small bowl, use a fork to whisk 2 Tbsp of the milk with 1 Tbsp plus 1 tsp cornstarch.

Put the milk next to the burner you'll be using, and put the cream and cornstarch mixtures on the counter on the opposite side of your chosen burner. Put the cream cheese bowl next to a trivet on the counter. Trust me, this arrangement will make your life easier and potentially avert tragedy.

Now for the fun part: Pour 2/3 cup white sugar in a large stockpot (4 qt.) and give it a shake to evenly distribute it on the bottom of the pan. Turn on the burner to medium heat (slightly lower if your stockpot is a dark metal like the one below). 

Resist the urge to stir until the sugar is amber-colored and melting all around the outsides and only a small circle of white sugar remains in the center. At this point, start stirring with a heatproof spatula, pushing the melted sugar towards its solid brethren in the middle. Keep at it until all that sucrose is a beautiful copper brown and starting to bubble and pop.

Remove from heat and caaaarefulllly pour in a bit of the cream, about 1/4 cup. It's gonna sizzle like crazy—picture how baking soda and vinegar react, only imagine the vinegar is boiling hot—so don't put your face over the pan! Stir well as you slowly pour in the rest of the cream a bit at a time. 

Put the pot back on the burner and add the milk. Bump the heat up to medium high and bring it to a roiling boil. As soon as it starts to bubble, set the timer for 4 minutes. Now, the eponymous Jeni of this cookbook doesn't say to stir at this step, but she doesn't specify not to either, so I give it a whirl every minute or so just to be safe.

When the timer goes "Ding!", move the pot off the burner again and stir in the milk/cornstarch mix. Return to heat and cook for another minute.

This next step is easiest if you have a kitchen helper but can be done all by your lonesome. Slowly pour the caramel mixture into the bowl with the cream cheese, whisking as you do so. If you're on your own, alternate whisking and pouring.

Add 2 tsp pure vanilla extract—none of that cheap imitation crap–and put the bowl in the fridge until cold. If you're feeling impatient, nestle the bowl inside a larger bowl full of ice.

Fire up your ice cream maker, pour the cold ice cream mixture into the pre-frozen canister, and let it run just until the sides begin to freeze (about 25 minutes in my machine). If there are clumps of caramel or cream cheese in your mixture, strain it through a sieve as you pour it into the machine. When it's ready, scoop the ice cream into a container and allow to freeze for several hours before serving. Makes 1 quart.

Oh, and do your dishes.

Printable recipe behind the cut...