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A Plant-Based Holiday Meal
It’s time for a holiday feast! With “festive” officially allowed back in our vocabularies, you’re not alone if you’re looking forward to a more celebratory holiday this year. While you’re busy being grateful for more (Zoom-less) time with family or enjoying some mulled wine with friends, why not also highlight the joys that elegant meat-free meals can bring?
If you’re thinking the holidays just wouldn’t be the same without your family’s traditional turkey, roast, or ham, these wow-worthy plant-based recipes won’t disappoint. They might just become a new tradition––whether you skip the meat entirely or incorporate some of the dishes into your celebratory meal.
From a seasonal persimmon salad that’ll make you fall in love with the sweet fruit to a crunchy-on-the-outside, soft-on-the-inside, gluten-free vegan stuffing (cooked outside the bird), to an airy pear mousse that reaches skyward with aquafaba instead of egg whites, this plant-based holiday menu looks beyond processed meat replacements. A Mediterranean touch peeks in with an antipasti platter of roasted vegetables. And the pièce de résistance? Tantalizing balsamic-glazed oyster mushrooms on a bed of rich-tasting (but surprisingly light!) caramelized parsnip purée. How sweet it is to be together.
Have a localvore holiday feast!
Here are a few ways to go a little further for the environment and support local this season.
Keep it local
Hit up farmers’ markets, organic stores, co-ops, and your own garden for all the fixings for your holiday dinner. Root vegetables such as parsnips are great local bets; like pears, they keep well for months after harvesting. And even if the weather outside is frightful, herbs such as mint and chives, microgreens, and green onions can survive indoors and in pots near sunny windows, even if they’re not as productive as in summer.
Save for a rainy day
Freeze any leftovers you won’t eat quickly. While these recipes most likely produce many leftovers (you might want to make a double batch of the oyster mushrooms), everything except the persimmon salad can be frozen––even the mousse! So, if it’s looking like you won’t get to those beans, stuffing, or roasted vegetables within four days, stick them in airtight, serving-size or family-size containers to freeze for later. They’ll keep safely frozen indefinitely, but will lose flavour and moisture after about four months.
Return to earth
Compost your food scraps and outdated leftovers. Caring about your environmental footprint doesn’t stop at what you put into your body, so make sure you have a green way of disposing of anything you can’t use. Better yet, keep the bottoms of your green onions and stick them in a glass of water, making sure the bottom of the bulb and all the roots are immersed but with some of the top exposed, and refreshing the water every few days. They’ll sprout and give you endless green onion tops. Plus, in spring, you can transplant the bulb outside!
Buy organic legumes
Nonorganic beans, lentils, oats, bran, nuts, and peas are permitted to be grown with certain amounts of glyphosate, a chemical that’s been linked to cancer. This past summer, Canada’s Pest Management Regulatory Agency proposed an increase in the amount of glyphosate permitted in Canadian food. It was revealed in July that Bayer, the owner of Monsanto, made the initial request.
After public backlash, the government paused proposed glyphosate increases in August, but we’re not out of the woods yet. What can you do? Email the Ministry of Health and Prime Minister Trudeau to let them know that an increase isn’t in Canadians’ best interests. And support organizations including Vigilance OGM (in French: vigilanceogm.org) and Safe Food Matters (in English: safefoodmatters.org), which also list appropriate email addresses and necessary information.
