SFoodie's series asking some of our favorite San Francisco food people about the dish they just can't celebrate Thanksgiving without.
Laura Beck, author of SFoodie's Week in Vegan and an editor of vegan supersite Vegansaurus, turns seriously cookaholic for Thanksgiving, even though the guest list doesn't stretch much longer than her vegetarian sister and her meat-eating parents. The meal's centerpiece: vegan pumpkin lasagna.
Beck: I grew up in a family that wasn't super focused on food and cooking, so we always had a generic Thanksgiving celebration. The bird was always dry, and I was never super into it.
Now I make a vegan pumpkin lasagna every year that I think is amazing. The thing is my parents are super picky about vegan food in the way that they're not picky about regular food, you know what I mean? With regular food their standards aren't all that high, but then they're Michael Bauer when it comes to vegan food.
Anyway I've made the lasagna every year for the last 6 years. It's based on a recipe that's on VegWeb.com. Sometimes I roast the pumpkin and purée it, or I use regular canned organic pumpkin. Regular lasagna noodles, and I use Dayia, this great vegan cheese that melts and stretches, made from cassava root. It melts! And stretches. I get it at Whole Foods. There's also tomato sauce ― I make the tomato sauce, sometimes I use Gimme Lean, which is like a vegan sausage. I do spinach and carrots in it, sauté them up together and use a little vegan cream cheese to add some creaminess to it, and do it all up in multi layers.
And actually the past couple of years I've kind of taken over Thanksgiving in general for my family, because nobody likes to cook. So my family has had a vegan Thanksgiving by default, just with mashed potatoes and stuffing. And then I do the lasagna, a seitan roast, and I do this tofu pumpkin mole dish ― just do it in the crockpot. I do a stuffed acorn squash ― like fancy food from the '90s ― five desserts, so there's just tons and tons of food: I go crazy. And there aren't even that many people there!
Other Thanksgiving essentials in this series:
-Jonathan Kauffman's Brussels sprouts with prosciutto
-Jun Belen's stuffing balls
-John Birdsall's braised turkey legs with polenta
-Roger Feely's relleno negro
-James Freeman's wonky turkey roasting, lots of coffee
-Marcia Gagliardi's giblet gravy
-Irvin Lin's green bean casserole
-Bridget Batson's steak, then stuffing
-Russ Moore's sticky rice and Chinese sausage stuffing
-Liza Shaw's pumpkin cheesecake
