Shital's-Kitchen: Thanksgiving Feast

Wednesday, December 25, 2013

Thanksgiving Feast

I am sure you might be wondering where I have been since so long. My apologies to everyone. Putting up my recipe and the fun we had for Thanksgiving was on my to-do list since a long time. With family around and school work, I was just not able to complete this post. I finally managed to share this on Christmas day! A Very Merry Christmas to everyone.

Turkey feast is a traditional way of celebrating Thanksgiving. And, as you know, I would always like to create a similar look and feel in a vegetarian way :) A vegetarian Turkey!! With my husband's family visiting us during that time, we had the ideal opportunity to create a vegetarian feast. Five days of Thanksgiving break were full of fun and excitement with my cute nephew, Erk (9) and niece, Swika (3) here. Erk was super excited about the idea of celebrating Thanksgiving in a Vegetarian way. He was my sous chef, photographer, and a video editor for the day. Here is the picture of him chopping onions :) I will also upload a video, shot and edited by Erk.

Erk using Garlic press.


We first started by making some sides for the delicious dinner.
Oven roasted asparagus, broccoli, and potato wedges.

Snapped off the woody ends of asparagus. Poured some EVOO, sprinkled salt, pepper and added freshly chopped garlic.




Broccoli florets cleaned and ready for EVOO bath.

Mixed in salt, pepper, and chopped garlic, and laid them on a baking sheet.


Potato wedges sprinkled with salt, garlic and EVOO ready to go into the oven.
Baked at 325F for 30 minutes or till done.
In a few minutes the house had a festive aroma of delicious veggies being infused with garlic :)

To start with the veggie filling, heated 1 tbsp. oil in a pan. Fried 1 tbsp. chopped garlic. Sauteed 1 large chopped onion.




I love my little chopper. Super quick!! A great way of chopping and dropping veggies in a pan.

Chopped 1 cup green beans and 1 cup carrots and added to sauteing onions.





Added 1 boiled and diced potato. Added salt and pepper, and I let the veggies sweat and cook for the flavor to blend in well.


We used Mozzarella cheese stick for delicious ooyee gooyee texture with veggies.


Added chopped mozzarella cheese to the filling/stuffing.


While we let the stuffing cool, Erk deseeded an Anaheim pepper and stuffed it with a stick of Mozzarella. This also went into the oven for a delicious and hot side.

We were ready to stuff and shape our turkey.

It all started with thawed pastry dough. Yes, doesn't that sound easy and interesting? I love precut square sheets.

Added a spoonful of stuffing, folded the sides and molded to give a turkey body shape.





Now it was time to create turkey legs :) 

Divided a square pastry sheet into half. I used baby corn to give a stable bone-like look.




Placed the turkey body in the center of the pastry sheet, and joined the legs together.




Here are the baby turkeys ready to be baked :)

Baked these stuffed pastries at 350F oven for 20-25 minutes till they turned golden brown.




We had a bed of oven roasted garlic infused veggies ready, and were just awaiting our stuffed veggie turkeys :)




Out of the oven relaxing :)

We couldn't wait to dig in :)
Stuffed Turkey on the bed of Oven Roasted Veggies!


2 comments:

  1. Sheetal, absolutely love the idea of mini turkey. I am vegetarian too so every thanksgiving I would cook stuffing, green beans, corn bread, potatoes, but had nothing to make turkey. I am definitely going to make turkey this year. Thank you for sharing all the recipes.
    -Aarti

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