Christmas Dinner

We decided to do something less traditional this year for Christmas Dinner, though we still wanted a more elaborate than normal meal. For that, The Voluptuous Vegan is a perfect book. We've had this cookbook almost since it first came out but we rarely use it. I know many of you out there love this book and there are some great and fairly simple individual recipes in it, but to me a lot of it just seems too involved for everyday use. Maybe I'm stuck on the fact that it's organized by menu. For special occasions that's great, although I think I prefer cookbooks that are organized the old-fashioned way (main dishes, sides, sauces, etc.) with menu suggestions maybe in a separate section at the back.

At any rate, it was fun picking out our Christmas menu from The Voluptuous Vegan, and though it took a while to make, it came out fabulously delicious in the end. We made chickpea crepes with mushroom and cauliflower filling, horseradish cream, balsamic marinated beets (golden beets in this case), and maple-roasted acorn squash.

We could definitely see making a simpler meal out of this in the near future. The crepes were fairly easy to make and if you did those with a simple filling and the horseradish cream that'd be a much quicker, and still fabulous meal. The horseradish cream in particular was excellent. Just mix silken tofu, lemon juice, canola oil, rice vinegar, salt & pepper in a food processor, then add minced red onion, fresh dill and prepared horseradish. We may well make this again soon with the leftover fresh dill, but this time thin it out a bit more and use it as a salad dressing.

Well, another tasty vegan Christmas dinner is history and we hope you all had some scrumptious food no matter what holiday you do or don't celebrate.