Vegan Thanksgiving at the Institute of Culinary Education

A few weeks ago I found myself on the Institute of Culinary Education‘s website, perusing their recreational course catalog when, much to my surprise and excitement, I saw Vegan Thanksgiving listed on the course schedule! I was literally thrilled to see that a Vegan Thanksgiving course like this even exists! Plus, Thanksgiving food is my favorite, so I knew I absolutely had to attend. The Institute of Culinary Education has recently moved into a brand new space at Brookfield Place in downtown Manhattan. (You might remember Brookfield Place from my post on the best plant-based dishes at Hudson Eats, the building’s gourmet food court.) The cooking class was this past Sunday and, you guys, I seriously had such a blast. I went with my friend Kim of brusselsvegan.com and it was such a fun way to spend a Sunday. Our chef instructor was Peter Berley of Fresh Food Fast and The Modern Vegetarian Kitchen. He shared with us delicious recipes and awesome cooking tips. Here’s a recap of the class:

We started the class by going over the entire menu. Then it was time to get cooking. This was our table of fresh ingredients for our Thanksgiving meal.

First up I started chopping vegetables for the roasted vegetable pâté. The pâté ended up being easy to make, smelling amazing and tasting SO good.

The veggies all chopped up, about to go into the oven to roast for 30-35 minutes.

The roasted veggies once they came out of the oven! The smell was mouth-watering delicious.

One of my favorite little tips we learned from the chef was how to make this super easy herb infused olive oil. All you do is add herbs (we used rosemary and thyme) and crushed garlic (you can leave the skins on) to olive oil and heat it all up together on low heat for ten minutes. The smell and the taste were incredible. Despite being one of the easiest things we learned, this is one of my favorite takeaways from this class. It just smelled and tasted so good! I will definitely make this to dip bread in the next time I entertain.We used the herb infused olive oil to add some flavor on top of the crostinis we made for the roasted vegetable pâté.

This was the final result of the roasted veggie pâté. It was a group favorite.

Our salad was a green apple and celery salad with a homemade vinaigrette. I never would have thought I would like a salad like this that much but I absolutely loved it. Our vinaigrette was made with lemon juice, Dijon mustard, garlic, honey, olive oil, walnut oil (but you can use all olive oil if you can’t get a hold of walnut oil), salt and pepper. And another tip we learned from the chef…don’t throw away the celery leaves! We used them right in our salad.
We boiled a huge pot of collard greens and kale for our garlicky braised greens with toasted pumpkin seeds.

Another trick I learned is that yams and sweet potatoes go well with just a hint of heat/spiciness. For our candied yams we added a hint of tabasco. I never would have thought to do that but it tasted quite good! They still tasted sweet overall with just hint of that tabasco heat. We also made a delicious cranberry orange relish. The dish pictured on the bottom of the photo is our garlicky braised greens.

For our main dish we roasted all different kinds of squash that we later filled with our homemade whole grain stuffing.

The stuffed squash made for a beautiful dish. We also made a caramelized onion gravy that we topped it with as well. The squash was so tender that we were able to eat the skins too.

The final spread!

My plate of vegan Thanksgiving deliciousness!

And last but not least to finish it all off we made this pear crumb tart and an apple cranberry tart, served with homemade tofu maple whip. As you can see I was very happy with all of our creations. 🙂

This was the full menu from the class:

Roasted Vegetable Pâté with Miso

Celery and Green Apple Salad with Walnut Vinaigrette

Baked Dumpling Squash with Kamut and Chestnut Stuffing and Caramelized Onion Gravy

Garlicky Braised Greens with Pumpkin Seeds

Candied Yams

Cranberry Orange Relish

Pear Crumb Tart with Maple Tofu Whip

I absolutely recommend checking out the Institute of Culinary Education for future plant-based/vegan classes. You can find their class schedule here. Check under “Healthful & Vegetarian Cooking” for vegetarian and vegan classes. The next vegan class is Chinese Vegan Cooking on December 29th!

If you want recipes or more information for making your Thanksgiving a little more plant-based this year, check out my Vegan Thanksgiving post from last year or feel free to email me at tedisarahblog@gmail.com.

xo,

Tedi