Kittens From The Dark Side: Thanksgiving Feast (Vegan!)

I cooked a LOT on Wednesday and Thursday and had fun (though I TIRED myself plumb OUT!)

I tried some new recipes, and almost everything turned out pretty well.

I will start out by saying that I made a few slices of turkey, but they were dry and not too tasty.

If I make turkey again, I will make it in the slow cooker where it won't get dried out!

The sweet potato rolls turned out weird, too, and the recipe has now lost its chance with me.

I've made it three times, and it only turned out good one of out three times.

Here was my list of things to do and when to do them.

First I started out on Wednesday by making two pumpkin pies.

They turned out fairly well, but we were all too full to eat any!

I sent some home with Greg's Mom and step-dad, but I still have a pie and a half in the fridge that probably won't freeze very well. . .

maybe I'll take some to church on Sunday to celebrate Thanksgiving with my team!

Final product:

find the recipe here

Then I assembled the butternut squash soup.

I put all the ingredients in the slow cooker and then put it in the fridge until

Thursday morning, when I plugged it in at 8:30 or so.

Final product:

find the recipe here

Then I moved on to the cranberry orange bread.

This was my first attempt at making this recipe, and it's a good recipe - with a few modifications.

Given a second chance, I would delete or drastically change the method of preparing this bread.

It required squeezing oranges (next time I will buy orange juice pre-squeezed!)

It required zesting oranges (this isn't so bad, but I might buy orange zest).

It required chopping the cranberries (not so bad).

And I mistakenly put on the icing drizzle when the bread was cut and I guess too much of it,

so the bread got soggy after awhile. The taste of the bread was delicious and next time I will leave off the icing altogether.

Final product:

find the recipe here

Then I made up the cranberry sauce and the shepherd's pie.

MMMMmm! Tart and beautifully colorful!

find the recipe here

I can't give you a link to the shepherd's pie recipe because

I sort of adapted a bunch of other recipes into one of my own.

This time I made a really thick vegetable and lentil stew (veggie broth, frozen veggie mix, 1/2 cup of red lentils, spices + corn starch for extra thickening), then covered it all with a layer of mashed potatoes (dairy-free). I baked it for 90 minutes at around 400 in an oven that had lots of other things in it (if it's alone in the oven, it probably wouldn't need that long).

You will also see two sweet potatoes wrapped in foil on the bottom shelf

(along with the weird sweet potato rolls that didn't work out).