Meatless Monday: Thinking Beyond the Turkey

Thanksgiving Day will soon be here. Omnivores, vegetarians, and vegans alike are thinking about vegetables — whether as the centerpiece or as the sides for their Thanksgiving Day meal.

Last week I proposed the rutabaga for your consideration. 

This week I’m sharing the recipe for my Thanksgiving dinner contribution for the second year in a row— Acorn Squash Casserole. This is a dish of my own invention, devised when I had some excess acorn squash late in the season and, after much flipping through cookbooks and searching the internet, I could not find a recipe I liked . 

It was featured as a Meatless Monday recipe on March 26, 2012. The post in which I bragged about my fame has received one of my highest page counts (fast approaching 1000), with readers from all over the world. I guess I’m not the only person who ever wanted to make a squash casserole! I encourage you to visit the Meatless Monday page, where you will find the nutritional information for my dish, and to explore the site, so rich in valuable content.

Here is the recipe as I submitted it to Meatless Monday. I’ve been making it ever since, and I haven’t changed a thing. [Sorry, vegans, I don’t have substitutions for the dairy products.] It can easily be halved, doubled, or tripled and can be either a centerpiece or a side. 

I hope you’ll give it a try. 

Acorn Squash Casserole

Ingredients:

• 2 acorn squash
• Olive Oil
• 1/2 cup plain whole milk yogurt (Part skim may work, but do not use nonfat.)
• 1 small yellow onion, finely chopped
• 1 Tablespoon unsalted butter, melted
• Black pepper
• Parmesan cheese

Preparation:

• Preheat oven to 350°.
• Halve the acorn squash. 
• Remove the seeds.
• Brush the insides with olive oil. 
• Turn upside down onto an ungreased baking sheet. Roast in the oven until tender. (Begin checking after 30 minutes.) 

• Oil a 1 1/2 qt. casserole.
• When the squash is tender, scoop out the insides. 
• Combine the squash with the yogurt, onion, melted butter, and freshly ground black pepper. 
• Turn the mixture into the prepared casserole. 
• Top with freshly grated Parmesan cheese.
• Turn oven up to 375°. 
• Bake until bubbly, approximately 25-30 minutes.

Happy Monday! 

Have a great week. And a wonderful holiday. Eat well (but not too much).

I often blog on food, food issues, or gardening on Monday in support of Meatless Monday, one of several programs developed in the Healthy Monday project, founded in 2003 in association with Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Communications. Meatless Monday’s goal is “to help reduce meat consumption 15% in order to improve personal health and the health of our planet.”

Saturday Short Subjects: T-Day Tips

Thanksgiving Day is a few days away, and I have a feeling that some of you are still working out your menu details and pulling together your shopping lists.

Here are a couple of links to help you come up with the tastiest, healthiest, and best for the planet menu possible.

• First, take the Slow Food USA quiz. Do it between now and Monday, and you will be entered to win a turkey “raised with care” from Whole Foods. And, if you are like me, you will learn a thing or two.
• Second, check out the Environmental Working Group’s Holiday Kitchen page. 
• Third, once you have your ingredients on-hand, you will want to prepare them safely. I found this page through a link at the FDA. The Holiday Food Safety Success Kit has videos, tips, activities, ideas — all the tools you need to ensure a healthy meal for you and your guests.
• Finally, once your meal is done, you will want to take care with your leftovers. This USDA page outlines everything  you need to know on that subject.

Remember that even if you are not cooking for this holiday, these tips make sense for every meal.

Happy planning. Happy feasting. 

Why Saturday Short Subjects? Some readers may recall  being dropped at the movie theater for the Saturday matinee — two action-packed feature films with a series of short subjects (cartoons or short movies, sometimes a serial cliffhanger) sandwiched in between. Often the short subjects were the most memorable, and enjoyable, part of the morning. That explains the name. The reason behind these particular posts is that we are all short on time. My Short Subject posts should not take me as long to write or you as long to read (or try).

Meatless Monday: 11.28.11

Meatless Monday? I confess, not for me and mine today. We cooked a small turkey on Thanksgiving Day this year. Two guests helped us eat about half of it. We were out of town for two of the next three days. The remains of the feast are in the fridge.

A large part of the mission behind ontheroadtogreenness is to share tips for wasting less while still living well.

I certainly don’t want to waste this turkey, so today I’m turning the carcass and all the meat still clinging to its bones into turkey soup, just as my parents taught me. All non-vegetarians or vegans, read on for the recipe.

OTRTG Turkey Soup

• Place the turkey carcass into a large pot. You may need to break it into pieces. [Try to save the y-shaped bone, or furculum, in the breast so you can wish on it once it is brittle and dry.]
• Add cold water to cover.
• Add several peeled carrots, several stalks of celery with leaves, and a large onion stuck with two cloves.
• Heat to boiling over medium flame.
• After a minute or so, skim off and discard the scum which has risen to the surface.
• Add 1 tablespoon of dried rosemary, a teaspoon of dried thyme, 8 black peppercorns, a bay leaf, and a few sprigs of fresh parsley.
• Lower heat and simmer until the vegetables are tender and the turkey meat begins to fall off the bones.
• Lift the carcass onto a plate. 
• Place a colander over a clean pot. Pour the remaining contents of the soup pot through the colander into the new pot.
• The next couple of steps are a bit messy. Pick as much meat off the bones as you can. Add back to the strained stock. 
• Next, sort through everything remaining in the colander. Chop the carrots and celery, as well as the onion if you wish, and add to the stock along with any bits of meat you find. Be sure to remove the small bones and bay leaf; try to remove the cloves and peppercorns. 
• Add salt to taste.
• Add some frozen peas and cook just until tender.
• In a third pot, prepare a box of small pasta (such as tubetti or elbows) according to the directions for al dente.
• Serve the turkey soup over the pasta in individual large bowls, and top with a generous amount of freshly grated parmesan cheese.
• A crisp baguette is a good side for this dish.

For me, this is the best part of the Thanksgiving feast, except of course, for the pie.

Enjoy your soup, and please come back next week for the return of Meatless, Meatless Monday.

I often blog on food or food issues on Monday in support of Meatless Monday, one of several programs developed in the Healthy Monday project, founded in 2003 in association with Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Communications. Meatless Monday’s goal is “to help reduce meat consumption 15% in order to improve personal  health and the health of our planet.”

Meatless Monday: As American As Pumpkin Pie

Once you learn the history of pumpkin pie in America, you may come to wonder, as I do, just why we don’t use “pumpkin” rather than “apple” in the phrase “as American as apple pie.” Pumpkins are indigenous to the New World and were clearly part of the first Thanksgiving feast declared by Gov. William Bradford and held in Plymouth Colony in 1621. Apples, on the other hand, came from the Old World; the Pilgrims planted apple trees soon after they arrived, but only the crabapple was native to North America.

The Pilgrims were probably not familiar with the pumpkin when they landed on the shores of what is now Massachusetts in the 1600s. But they soon learned of the many ways the Native Americans put the pumpkin to good use, including roasting of long strips of pumpkin on the open fire for eating, and drying strips of pumpkin for weaving into mats. Early on the colonists recognized the value of this fruit. Edward Johnson of Boston wrote in 1630,“Let no man make a jest at Pumpkins, for with this fruit the Lord was pleased to feed his people to their good content, till Corne and Cattell were increased."

They would soon invent uses of their own, such as stewed pumpkin. Pumpkin pie most likely evolved from the colonial custom of slicing off the pumpkin top, removing the seeds, filling the insides with milk, spices, and honey, and then baking the pumpkin in hot ashes. There was neither pie crust nor bread at these early celebrations; the first wheat harvest and flour were years away.

Thanksgiving became an American tradition. George Washington formally declared the day a national holiday in 1789. By the early 1800s, pumpkin pie (or at least a cousin to what we know as pumpkin pie) played a starring role in the day’s menu. Pumpkin pie had by now become a custard of pureed pumpkin, “rich milk,” eggs, and spices, baked in one crust until the filling had set. 

American poet John Greenleaf Whittier was so fond of pumpkin pie that he composed a long poem extolling its virtues. Here is an excerpt from The Pumpkin (1850):

… Ah! on Thanksgiving day, when from East and from West, 

From North and from South comes the pilgrim and guest … 

What moistens the lip and what brightens the eye? 

What calls back the past, like the rich Pumpkin pie? …

… Then thanks for thy present! none sweeter or better 

E'er smoked from an oven or circled a platter! 

Fairer hands never wrought at a pastry more fine, 

Brighter eyes never watched o'er its baking, than thine! 

And the prayer, which my mouth is too full to express, 

Swells my heart that thy shadow may never be less, 

That the days of thy lot may be lengthened below, 

And the fame of thy worth like a pumpkin-vine grow, 

And thy life be as sweet, and its last sunset sky 

Golden-tinted and fair as thy own Pumpkin pie! 

In his encyclopedic tome American Cookery, published in 1972, James Beard prefaced his classic recipe for pumpkin pie with these words: “In the eighteenth century this, like all one-crust pies, was called a pudding. Yankees preferred the recipe made with pumpkin, while Southerners preferred sweet potatoes. Spices were not included until clipper ships made them a more common commodity, and molasses or sorghum was used as part or all of the sweetening.” Beard's modern recipe offers a variation, the use of evaporated milk as an alternative to light cream. This substitution was not yet an option in the 1926 when the Springvale National Bank in Maine published its complimentary pamphlet What to Cook and How to Cook It, which contained three recipes for pumpkin pie, all using fresh milk.

Recipe tinkering did not end with the use of evaporated milk. The most recent tweaking of the recipe came about with the need to provide a vegan option. The most common solution involves the substitution of silken tofu for the cream and the eggs. 

For more pumpkin facts, please pay a visit to my blog post on the pumpkin from late October last year.

And for the back-story on how Thanksgiving came to be celebrated on the fourth Thursday of November, check out this link.

One great thing about pumpkin pie is that it has just one crust, so it’s a little harder to eat too much. So enjoy a slice of a time-honored tradition. Just go easy on the whipped cream! Have fun, and have a great holiday!

I often blog on food or food issues on Monday in support of Meatless Monday, one of several programs developed in the Healthy Monday project, founded in 2003 in association with Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Communications. Meatless Monday’s goal is “to help reduce meat consumption 15% in order to improve personal  health and the health of our planet.”

Meatless Monday: The Challenges of an Indigenous Feast

With Thanksgiving less than two weeks away, I’m sure many of you have started to plan your holiday menu. But have you ever stopped to consider how restricted your menu would be if you decided to use only the ingredients available to the Pilgrims and the Native Americans on that very first Thanksgiving Day?

Professor Devon A. Mihesuah, an enrolled citizen of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, oversees the American Indian Health and Diet Project (AIHDP) at the University of Kansas, a project “devoted to recovering the health of indigenous peoples.” As part of her work, she has compliled a detailed list of foods indigenous (native) to the Western Hemisphere (AKA the New World).

Upon perusing this list, you will soon learn that while turkey with cranberries could indeed be a menu possibility, there could be no butter for basting, no sugar to sweeten the berries, no flour for bread (for stuffing) or pie crust, and no apples for pie filling. You may also note the absence of the cow, the pig, and the chicken, as well as the presence of a number of things such as milkweed and mink that most of us no longer regard as food. Many of the foods on this list, including potatoes, squash and tomatoes, traveled from south to north over the course of many years. This list covers a broad geographic area; not all the items were available in what is now Massachusetts on that day in 1620. Click on any of the orange-colored items to learn more about them.

Through links at the side of the same page,you can find foods indigenous to smaller geographic areas and and the Choctaw tribe [there is however, no link for the eastern seaboard].

Dr. Martin Reinhardt, Anishinaabe Ojibway and Assistant Professor of Native American Studies, has been laying the groundwork for an ambitious challenge, the Decolonizing Diet Project (DDP). Beginning in March of 2012, along with a cohort of students and colleagues, Reinhardt will eat only pre-contact, indigenous Anishinaabe Ojibway foods for one year. To honor Reinhardt’s work, Professor Devon Mihesuah of the AIHDP recently posed a mini-challenge — A Week of Eating Indigenous Food, which ran from October 31 through November 6 — and blogged about her experiences.  Dr. Reinhardt accepted the challenge and described his experience on the DDP site. 

If going indigenous proves too big a challenge [it is for me] and you decide to stick with a more modern menu, a good source for inspiration is the recipes posted by Slow Food USA.  Or check out Slow Food’s US Ark of Taste, a catalog of over 200 delicious foods in danger of extinction. By promoting and eating these products, such as heritage turkeys, you can help to ensure they remain in production and on our plates. 

If you have never cooked but want to give it a try for the holiday, my advice is to start with something small. Cranberry sauce is pretty simple. You can follow the recipe printed on a bag of cranberries (which you can find in the fresh produce section), or check out this site for some more ideas. 

Have fun, and have a great week! 

I often blog on food or food issues on Monday in support of Meatless Monday, one of several programs developed in the Healthy Monday project, founded in 2003 in association with Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Communications. Meatless Monday’s goal is “to help reduce meat consumption 15% in order to improve personal  health and the health of our planet.”

Meatless Monday: Thanksgiving Successes, Near Misses, and Discoveries

I’m particularly happy to observe Meatless Monday today after attending two bountiful Thanksgiving feasts with turkey as the main event, featuring some two dozen kinds of pie for dessert. My friends and family do love pie. Today I’m still in recovery.

As a guest bearing food to these feasts I had several dishes to produce. The request for Feast One with friends on Thursday was for a rich cranberry tart featured in Yankee Magazine some years back. Its ingredients include a crust made with sugar, two sticks of butter, and 3/4 cups of walnuts. Upon this crust 6 oz of blue cheese is spread, and then topped with cranberries cooked in cherry preserves and brandy until they’ve popped. It looked beautiful and we were able to turn it onto the glass serving plate without any damage. More importantly, it tasted great. Success.

With Feast Two, the Friday family celebration, there were a number of near misses.

Near miss number one involved the Butternut Squash and Wilted Spinach recipe recently featured in my blog about binging on beta carotene. By now there were high expectations for this dish: failure was not an option. The recipe is quite simple, and I had made it before, so you might wonder what the problem could have been. Here goes. What I learned last week is that butternut squash is not as easy to find as it was a month ago. With no whole butternut squash in the fresh produce aisle, I bought organic butternut squash peeled, cut, and shrink wrapped with a sale date of November 27, on sale at a reasonable price in the refrigerated section. But when I went to use the squash on the 24^th, I discovered long, delicate, strands of black mold growing in both packages. Luckily I had four cups in the freezer, left over from a very large squash I had previously roasted, and access to a microwave, so the dish was saved. There were no leftovers. This was a dish nearly everyone loved (except the vegans).

Now might be a good time to mention that only omnivores (and one guy who only eats white vegetables) attended Thursday’s feast, but Friday’s guests included vegetarians and vegans. The vegans posed a challenge. While we knew the vegetarians would pass on the turkey, gravy, and stuffing cooked in the bird, we knew the vegans would also pass on both my squash dish and my celeriac gratin. And on the potatoes if we mashed them with milk and on the pies if the crusts were made with butter or if the filling included eggs or dairy products. So we offered more kinds of cranberry sauce, and plain roasted vegetables and potatoes mashed without milk or butter. I had just started mashing the large pot of spuds with some potato water when my husband took over and I ran off to set the table. At dinner I simply could not get over how great these vegan potatoes tasted. And then I learned the secret: one head of garlic and 1 and 1/2 sticks of Willow Run margarine! Although no animals were harmed in making this vegan dish, I am sure a few humans would be if they had this on the menu every day!

Now on to the dessert course. For my vegan-friendly pie, I turned to an old Shaker recipe. Shaker Cranberry Pie (from The Shaker Cookbook by Caroline B. Piercy) called for sugar, flour, vanilla, raisins, and cranberries (no butter) in the filling. I had long ago switched from shortening to butter to make my crust, but butter wouldn’t do this year. I turned to Betty Crocker for help and found a recipe for crust made with oil. I used organic canola. Because I was using a liquid instead of a hard stick of butter, the crust was very easy to make and it rolled out well. I did find it not as supple when I went to crimp the crust, and I could not be as ornate as usual with my finishing. But all seemed to be going well for a first experiment. So, what was the near miss? Apparently oil crust bakes quicker than the other kinds, at least in a glass pie plate. The crust browned right through my crust protectors! The crusts were a little too brown for my taste, and I think next time I will reduce the heat by 25° and check the pie 10 minutes sooner. It was certainly not the most beautiful pie in the world, but I decided to take it anyway. Imagine my joy when the crust turned out to be flaky, and the filling delicious. It seems this pie was kid- as well as vegan-friendly. To be honest, its flavor and texture called to mind an unfrosted pop tart (one of the organic ones of course!) and was one of the first pies to be finished. I’ll be making this one again.

Now for the error of omission. The vegetarians didn’t say anything, perhaps because they were satiated with cheese. However, the vegans asked about gravy. My sister and I had never considered this request so they had to do without. Next time I suppose we can grab a container of Tofurky gravy, but I’ll be checking online to see if there is a recipe for making my own. Does a hunk of tofu produce drippings if roasted? Any tips from readers would be most appreciated.

And, on to the happy discoveries. We had a stop to make in West Stockbridge before heading home on Saturday — Charles H. Baldwin & Sons where I purchased vanilla (see my blog post on gifts for the cook), table syrup, and some ground vanilla beans. We were told to use these in addition to liquid vanilla to enhance the flavor of baked goods, but I bet I can use the ground beans to make my own vanilla sugar. I’m going to email the proprietor to inquire. I’ll let you know what I find out. If you ever get a chance to visit the store in the Berkshires, be sure to check out the photo booth. For $3 you can get 6 photos in just 10 seconds. The machine talks, too. It’s hilarious. If you can’t visit in person, check out the Charles H. Baldwin & Sons website for all you might want to know about vanilla or to place an order online.

Finally, in time for the next holiday cleanup, my friend Polly gave me a package of Scotch-Brite natural fiber non-scratch scour pads made from the agave plant, part of a new line of green cleaning products from 3M. It would be a lie to say I can’t wait to try these, but I am glad to have them.

Hope your week’s off to a good start. I should return to blogging on Thursday with another list of eco-friendly shopping ideas.

I often blog on food or food issues on Monday in support of Meatless Monday, one of several programs developed in the Healthy Monday project, founded in 2003 in association with Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Communications. Meatless Monday’s goal is “to help reduce meat consumption 15% in order to improve personal health and the health of our planet.