A Holiday Salad to Remember: Cranberry-Orange-Avocado with Maple-Glazed Walnuts

This past winter, I was part of a 3-month, residential, personal development program for young adults.  One component of the program involved cooking for one another.  We were split into cooking groups, and each group was responsible for two meals over the three months.  My cooking group lucked into cooking Easter dinner, and decided, in order to accommodate all the food restrictions in our group, to cook a gluten-free, vegan meal.

The cornerstone of our main course was my rice dressing recipe, but we still needed a couple of veggie dishes.  We ended up opting for glazed carrots, and this salad recipe, which was recommended by one of my other group members.  The recipe features mandarin oranges, glazed walnuts, craisins, avocado, and blue cheese (which we decided to omit, since half our cooking group had dairy allergies).  I expected the salad would be tasty, but I was shocked how amazingly it turned out.  It was completely devoured, and even people in our group who hated walnuts with a fiery passion went back for seconds and thirds.

The Best Rice Dish ever (And It Just Happens to Make a Wonderful Holiday Dressing, Too!)

In my Thanksgiving post, I mentioned that my parents have been celebrating the three major turkey holidays* (i.e. Christmas, Easter and Thanksgiving) with the same group of friends since well before I was born.  Over the 25 years or so this tradition has been running, some recipes have been developed, perfected, and cemented in tradition.  One of those includes a brown-and-wild rice stuffing that my dad's friend developed years and years and years ago.  Many of the regulars at our holiday dinners are wheat-sensitive, so a long while ago it was decided that a rice alternative to a traditional bread stuffing would be a good move.

*My family and our friends tend to not eat a lot of red meat.  So while I realize ham or lamb are often traditional for Easter, our family definitely goes for turkey instead.  And pumpkin pie is served at all three holidays, because it's just that good!

While this dish found its origins in a turkey stuffing, it goes well and beyond just a holiday side dish.  Full of nuts and fruit, it has enough bulk and protein to be the main dish at a holiday dinner (and I've certainly used it as such, to great acclaim), and enough sweetness to make a killer breakfast food.  A chef-to-be friend of mine has developed a rice-cooker version, using slightly fewer holiday-specific spices, and she uses this recipe as a side dish all year round.

I've tried to stay true to the original spirit of the dish, while also modifying it to be fully vegan and gluten-free.  And being me, I've upped all the flavour notes just a bit.

A Much-Belated Thanksgiving Post

Turkey

This year's Thanksgiving was a momentous one, for a couple of reasons.  For starters, it was the first year ever that I haven't made it to my family's traditional Thanksgiving Dinner.  My parents are part of what they call "orphans holidays" - three couples and their kids who don't have extended family in the area, and who celebrate Easter, Thanksgiving and Christmas together every year.  This tradition predates me (the oldest of the kids), and it's become such a well-oiled, perfect machine that we barely have to think about it every year.  The food is almost always the same (the veggies change up a bit, and occasionally we add a seasonal dessert), and while we occasionally invite other "orphan" friends in need of a place to go for the holidays, the core people are also pretty unchanging.  So I was a little sad when I ended up having to work on the Sunday evening and missed out on the traditional family dinner.

Stuffing, salad, potatoes with gravy, and yams

But everything was alright!  Because from the moment my roommates and I moved into our epic new house, I knew that I wanted to host Thanksgiving Dinner here.  I love to cook for people, and I enjoy entertaining; and now I finally lived in a house big enough to do both!  And two of my roommates hail from different provinces and don't have family to celebrate with, so we wanted to make sure everyone had a chance to celebrate Thanksgiving.  So we invited a bunch of close mutual friends, and then all of us went about making our own traditional Thanksgiving dishes, taken from our years of family celebrations.  In the end, it was a wonderful celebration with good food and great people; and we all got a chance to honour our own Thanksgiving histories while also moving forward.  I felt so incredibly grown up cooking and hosting my OWN Thanksgiving Dinner, with the close people in MY life - somehow, knowing I was capable of putting a holiday dinner on the table proved to me that I really can handle some of the big changes in my life.

Pumpkin apple soup

And the best part?  How low-stress we all were!  We started cooking on the Friday, and by Saturday afternoon (dinner was Saturday evening) we were taking naps, relaxing, leisurely getting ready, and enjoying some fine cheeses.  Our washing machine overflowed, a couple of glasses got broken, and our coffee machine exploded; and yet, beyond a couple of harried 5 minute intervals, everyone was calm and having a good time.  I call that the true measure of holiday success!

Apple pie

The Menu
Appetizer: five kinds of fancy cheese, exotic crackers, and some red pepper jelly
Soup course: Pumpkin-apple spice soup!!!
Dinner: turkey, brown rice dressing*, baked yams, garlic mashed potatoes*, gravy (turkey or vegan*), succotash, cranberry-orange salad*
Dessert: apple pie, vegan-gluten free pumpkin pie* (both homemade, of course!)

All the starred recipes were the ones I had a hand in, and I'll address them in other posts to follow.  And I hope that all of you had an absolutely wonderful Thanksgiving dinner yourself!