18 main dish ideas for your vegetarian Thanksgiving menu this year. We’re working ourselves towards mid-November and the biggest feast day of the year. Thanksgiving, my friends. And all over the country, meal planning has begun. Last week I featured 21 side dish ideas for a vegetarian Thanksgiving. This week, I’ve got your back on Thanksgiving vegetarian main dishes. Because, let’s face it. If you’re an omnivore, deciding your main dish for Thanksgiving is easy. The religion of ...
Vegetarian Weekly Meal Plan – Week 8
Collecting Recipes for a Vegetarian Weekly Meal Plan I'm always on the hunt for dinner ideas for my vegetarian weekly meal plan that aren't too labor intensive and look like they'll taste great. I mean, really great. If they're a little more time consuming than I want during the week, then I look for make-ahead opportunities so that it comes together quickly at the end of a crazy busy day. When I run across a recipe I want to make, I save it in some way. Usually to Pinterest, and sometimes ...
Weekly Vegetarian Meal Plan + Tips for Omnivores // Week 6
The Theme is Still EASY Vegetarian Meal Plans ... I completed my first week of rehab on my knee this week, and I'm feeling good. To catch you all up, I had a bad skiing accident at a nearby mountain, and severed my ACL. The good news is I have zero pain. The bad news is it will never heal back. My job right now is to get strong. I need all the surrounding stuff that supports my knee, we're talking muscles, ligaments, tendons, everything, have to do their own job and cover for the ...
Vegetarian Meal Plan + Tips For Omnivores // Week 2
Meal Planning Struggles My first week at dinner meal planning (and executing it) was a work in progress. To recap for any of you who missed my post last week on Vegetarian Weekly Meal Plans, I'm starting to plan my dinners out 1 week ahead to get more organized around dinner so I'm not trying to figure out dinner 10 minutes before I make it. This week, some parts worked, and others didn't. The biggest challenge for me was, and continues to be, all those moving parts that never stay still. ...
Spiced Acorn Squash with Charred Poblano Pepper – Cornbread Stuffing
I like to think travel broadens the mind. For a snapshot in time, you sneak a glimpse of another culture, up close and personal. What people eat, how they live, and how they navigate human issues common to us all. We weigh these observations in our minds as we contrast them against our own familiar lives, and sometimes feel the pinching discomfort of a traveler far from home. “Why is there only one person selling train tickets? Holy Jesus, can’t they see how long the line is??” This can be as ...
Fig Basted Roast Butternut Squash with Quinoa, Apple, and Fig Stuffing
We should have more than one day set aside each year to give thanks. Some might declare we should give thanks every day, and I don’t disagree, but I’m actually stating we should have Thanksgiving once a month. Not with all the commercial hoopla of people rising before dawn the day after so they can shiver in dark parking lots to be in line for some amazing-never-to-be-offered-again deal on a big screen TV, thank you very much. I’m talking about quietly setting aside one day a month on ...
Butternut Squash Risotto with Pears and Sage
I was lucky enough to travel in the Czech Republic and Slovakia earlier this month with a small group of 14 wonderful people. We started and ended in Prague, my new favorite city in the whole world, escaped the crowds to travel west to Karlovy Vary (a spa town very near Germany with hot springs everywhere), and retraced our steps eastward to travel through parts of Slovakia very near Poland. It was a fantastic trip, my favorite in a long time, but people, we were in the land of ...
Butternut Squash Panzanella Salad with Apples and Kale
Make an autumn version of a traditional Italian salad with this butternut squash panzanella salad tossed with apples and kale, dressed with an apple vinaigrette. I spent much of September in Italy attending an Italian language school in Treviso, a smallish town outside Venice. For 2 1/2 weeks I ate a ton of pasta, pizza, risotto, and tiramisu (a dessert created by a restaurant in Treviso). The trip was about language, food, and people -- meeting local Italians and making new friends with fellow ...
Farmhouse Butternut – Apple Crumble
Comfort butternut - apple crumble made with butternut squash, apples and ginger. It's still sunny and in the 60's and 70's here in Northern California, but luckily the weather isn't the only thing that drives seasons. Food does too. I crave fall and winter food in November even if we're grilling out back and eating on the deck. And at the top of the list is winter squash; a hearty, satisfying vegetable for a vegetarian meal. But I have a gazillion squash recipes I love and still haven't ...
