my accidentally vegetarian Thanksgiving
25 November 2011
How was your Turkey Day? Did you over indulge in food and then sleep the afternoon away? Cause that’s totally what I did. It’s tradition, come on.
My family didn’t get here as early as I expected so I went ahead and started the butternut/sweet potato lasagna while they were on the road. Man oh man, this was tons of work. I doubled the recipe, since it was the main course for four [including a teenage boy]. That meant cutting an entire squash and four sweet potatoes. My arms felt like I’d spent 10 hours in the weight room. Seriously. I also used boiled noodles to ensure that none were crunchy, which are a total pain to make since you can only do a few at a time. What felt like Literally hours later I was ready to make the actual lasagna. I used ricotta cheese as the bottom layer and subbed cream cheese/cottage cheese/sour cream for the mascarpone [and saved like 15 bucks]. Since it was a holiday, it was totally worth the work but geeze, this is not a recipe I would be making on any given work night.
While the lasagna cooked, we prepped the salad & made these super yummy & insanely easy green beans. Finally, dinner was done and everything turned out delicious! Even my reluctant brother liked it enough for seconds! While he’s sixteen and would likely eat anything, this is actually saying something because he was totally complaining about the lack of meat. It wasn’t until Thursday morning that I realized we were having a vegetarian holiday. Oops. Oh well, it was still really great and enough work to make up for not roasting a turkey.
I made all that? Say what?
-A
