Vegan recipes for Thanksgiving dinner
Vegan recipes for Thanksgiving dinner
I’m going to assume you’re having a meat-eating family coming over for Thanksgiving dinner. That’s because that’s the toughest crowd.
They don’t really know what to expect and half think they’ll end up with a bunch of kale and carrots.
That’s why I decided to keep it as traditional and familiar as possible.
Our vegan recipes for thanksgiving dinner are the following:
- heartwarming pumpkin soup
- green beans and mushrooms casserole
- mashed potatoes with roasted garlic
- roasted parsnip puree
- roasted vegetables
- cornbread stuffing
- vegan sloppy joe’s
- cranberry sauce
- chocolate Bourbon pecan pie
Roasted pumpkin Soup
Use what even pumpkin or squash you want. I prefer a butternut squash but whichever works fine.
- 1 large butternut squash, peeled and cubed (seeds removed)
- 2 potatoes, peeled and chopped
- 3 tbsp. extra-virgin olive oil
salt and pepper
- 1 tbsp. vegan butter
- 1 onion, chopped
- 1 large carrot, chopped
- 1 tbsp. fresh thyme, or any Mediterranean herbs
- 1 qt. vegetable broth
DIRECTIONS
- Preheat oven to 400º. On a large baking sheet, toss butternut squash and potatoes with 2 tablespoons olive oil and season generously with salt and pepper. Roast until tender, 25 minutes. If using a microwave instead of oven: same fork the pumpkin on both sides. In a shallow plate with a bit of water in it microwave on high for cca 10min or until soft.
- Meanwhile, in a large pot over medium heat, melt butter and remaining tablespoon olive oil. Add onion and carrot and cook until softened, 7 to 10 min.
- Add roasted squash and potatoes and pour over veggie broth. Simmer 10 min, then using an immersion blender or a regular blender, blend soup until creamy.
- Serve garnished with thyme.
Green beans and mushroom casserole
Creamy mushrooms and crunchy green beans make a great combination with pretty much any side dish. And it’s quick make and ingredients are cheap. What’s not to love?
salt and pepper
- Preheat oven to 375°. In a large skillet over medium heat, heat oil. Cook onions until slightly golden and tender. Remove from skillet and place in a medium bowl. Toss with Panko until coated and season with salt and pepper.
- In a large ovenproof skillet over medium heat, heat oil. Add onions and cook, stirring occasionally until tender. Add mushrooms and green beans, season with salt and pepper. Cook, stirring often, until mushrooms are golden. Stir in garlic. Put in a bowl.
- Melt tablespoons of butter in the same skillet over medium heat. Whisk in flour and cook until golden. Gradually whisk in milk and stock and bring to a simmer. Cook until thickened, about 4 minutes. Remove from heat then add green bean mixture and toss until even combined. Transfer mixture to a medium casserole dish.
- Bake until warmed through and bubbling around the edges, about 20 minutes. Top with “fried” onions and bake 10 minutes more until golden.
Mashed potatoes with roasted garlic
A clever upgrade of a regular mash potatoes. Garlic makes everything better and your mother will ask you for the recipe, I’m pretty sure of it.
DIRECTIONS
- Preheat oven to 400°.
- Drizzle olive oil over top of garlic and wrap in foil. Bake until golden and soft, 43 to 45 minutes, then set aside.
- Meanwhile, add potatoes to a large pot and bring to a boil. After about 20 minutes, check if potatoes are soft, then drain. Leave potatoes in a pot.
- Add butter and sour cream. Cover with lid and leave butter to melt. Add garlic and mash the potatoes.
Roasted parsnip puree
Another vegan side dish that we don’t appreciate enough. Cheap, easy to make and incredibly delicious.
- Preheat oven to 400°. Place parsnips on a large baking sheet and drizzle with 2 tablespoons oil. Season with salt and pepper. Cut off top of garlic head and drizzle with remaining 1 tablespoon oil. Wrap tightly in foil and place on a baking sheet with parsnips. Bake until parsnips are very tender, 40 minutes. Garlic should be golden and very soft; if not, place back in oven and continue to bake another 15 minutes. Set aside until cool enough to handle.
- Place parsnips into a large bowl or food processor. Squeeze each clove of garlic into bowl with parsnips. Add milk, butter, and thyme and blend until smooth. Season with salt and pepper.
Roasted Vegetables
Very straight forward and no need to follow a recipe. You got this!
Throw together veggies you like, use a bit of salt, pepper, herbs and olive oil to garnish them slide it in a preheated oven (400 degrees F).
After 15 min of baking turn the veggies then bake for another 15min or until tender. Voila.
Cornbread stuffing
Either you love or hate stuffing, Thanksgiving calls for it. Personally, I don’t like stuffings because I don’t like the taste and there’s an aweful lot of work to make it. However, if you or your guests do enjoy stuffing then cornbread stuffing is a good option.
salt and pepper
DIRECTIONS
- Preheat oven to 400° and grease a 9″-x-13″ baking pan generously with cooking spray. In a large bowl whisk together cornmeal, flour, sugar, baking powder, baking soda, and salt.
- In another large bowl, whisk together milk, sour cream, flax eggs, and melted butter. Add wet ingredients to dry ingredients and stir with a fork until just incorporated.
- Pour batter into prepared baking dish and bake until top is golden and a toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean, 20 to 25 minutes. Let cool completely then crumble into large pieces and transfer to a large bowl. Grease a large baking dish with butter and reduce oven temperature to 375°.
- In a large skillet over medium heat, melt butter. Stir in onion and celery and season with salt and pepper. Cook until soft, about 8 minutes, then stir in garlic, sage, and thyme and cook until fragrant, about 1 minute. Remove from heat and toss with crumbled cornbread. Season with salt and pepper.
- In a small bowl, whisk together flax eggs and veggie broth. Pour over cornbread mixture and toss to coat, then transfer to prepared baking dish. Bake until toasted on top and hot throughout, about 30 minutes.
Vegan sloppy Joe’s
A golden classic and everyone’s favorite. Vegan sloppy Joe’s are quick and easy to make. Fingerlicking good and a sure bet to make your savvy guest happy.
Nobody say’s no to sloppy Joe’s even if they’re vegan.
INGREDIENTS
- 1 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
- 2 cloves of garlic
- 1/4 onion
- 1/2 red bell pepper
- 1/2 green bell pepper
- 15 oz canned or cooked lentils (400 g)
- 1 1/2 cup tomato sauce (250 g)
- 2 tbsp tamari or soy sauce
- 2 tbsp tomato paste
- 1 tbsp cane, coconut or brown sugar
- 1 tsp sweet paprika
- pepper
DIRECTIONS
- Heat the oil in a frying pan and add the veggies (chopped). Cook over medium-high heat until golden brown, stirring occasionally. Add more oil or water if needed.
- Add the rest of the ingredients, stir and cook for about 10 minutes or until the sauce thickens.
- Serve the filling over the buns, add your favorite veggies ( red cabbage, carrot, fresh chili peppers and avocado slices work well together) and enjoy.
Cranberry sauce
IF we put turkey off the table, we have to keep a cranberry sauce. Thanksgiving signature sauce.
salt
- In a small saucepan over low heat, combine sugar and water until sugar dissolves. Add cranberries and cook until they burst, cca 10 minutes. Stir in orange zest and a pinch of salt.
- Remove saucepan from heat and let cool completely, then transfer to a resealable container and refrigerate.
Chocolate Bourbon pecan pie
This one is so good you’ll want to skip dinner just to get to it. And I wouldn’t judge. Chocolate pecan pie, upgraded with a proud, American Bourbon.
- Preheat oven to 400°. In a large bowl, combine and whisk flax eggs, butter and sugar. After fully combined, stir in flour, milk, bourbon, and vanilla. Add pecans and chocolate chunks and stir until fully combined.
- Blend a pack of digestive cookies in a blender, add butter and whisk until fully mixed. this is your pie crust.
- Pour filling mixture into prepared pie crust.
- Bake 10 minutes, then lower oven to 325° and bake until top no longer jiggles in center, 40 to 50 minutes more. Let cool completely before slicing and serving.
These amazing vegan recipes for thanksgiving dinner will make your dinner a great success 🙂 They cover a wide variety of familiar, traditional Thanksgiving dishes that will surprise your family and probably, won’t even notice they’re eating vegan. At the end of the day, their bellies will be full.
And a happy turkey running around.
If you liked what you’ve read, please leave a comment bellow. Your comment help to push this post so more people can read it and find the info they were looking for.
I also have a growing Facebook group called “Vegan for Beginners” that you can join for more recipes, help and support and is just in general a perfect place to chat away.
Till next time,
Katya
This was an excellent post on vegan recipes that can be used for the traditional Thanksgiving meal but I think they can be used at any time of the year as well. They all look delicious and I would be proud to serve them at any time of the year. Thanksgiving as a vegan can be a hard time but these dishes will definitely brighten the eyes of the beholders.
I agree with you that we should opt out of the turkey thing, as it is a cash cow for the big corporations that often abuse the animals prior to slaughtering them for our use on that day, and a lot of times I have seen massive waste that goes on when food is thrown out because there is simply too much that cannot be consumed,
I am a huge lentils fan. I eat them at least two to three times a week and my dishes are favorites with family and friends. It would be nice to prepare them in new ways so the taste does not get old. The sloppy joe recipe will do just that. This is possibly going to be another favorite, they look really good (and the taste is there too I am guessing).
The pie sounds also like a dish that everyone can enjoy. Mention bourbon as an ingredient, and immediately I will have some converts to that dish. This recipe calls for a tablespoon only of the alcohol, so I do not have to worry that my guests will go home under the influence either.
Thanks for thinking outside the box to come up with some vegan recipes that anyone can get behind and serve for Thanksgiving or any time of the year really. I have bookmarked the page and will be back to read more, I think you have a lot of great ideas for us.
Hi Dave, thanks for leaving your comment.
I’m super glad you’ll find use of some recipes, specially the sloppy Joe’s! I really put thought in this, because I wanted to be something that everyone loves 🙂
Bourbon pie got me as well, rich flavour and easy to make.
Hope you’ll enjoy the dishes!
Katya
Thank you for this post. I appreciate it, not because I am vegan (I’m not) but, because I have a vegan friend that will be coming to Thanksgiving for the first time and I want to offer her vegan friendly options. That said, there;s still going to be a Turkey on the table.
The green beans and mushroom casserole looks amazing and I’ll simply replace my usual casserole with this one instead.
You’re right about garlic. There definitely will be garlic mashed potatoes on the menu.
I might just replace the Stouffer’s stuffing with your cornbread offering too. It sounds delicious and I’m a sucker for cornbread.
As for the main course offering, I’ll give the sloppy joe a try.
Thanks again,
Scott
Hi Scott, I’m glad to hear you’ll give it a go. Although you can make turkey to be vegan, you can usually always tweak side dishes into a vegan options. Leave out the butter and use some other plant oil (for example: olive oil and plant based milk would do the butter’s job), instead of chicken stock use vegetable one, maybe have sour cream on the side so she can avoid it but you can put it on your dish if you want..thing like that..nothing fancy.
Good luck,
Katya
Hi Katya, what a delightful time I had reading and learning from your article. I am not vegan, but vegetarian, and all throughout my married life, my in-laws would try to prepare the most preposterous dishes for me at Thanksgiving (example: soy veggie protein stuffed into turkey mold)!
These dishes you are sharing with us look scrumptious and I can’t wait to try some of them, especially the heartwarming pumpkin soup and the vegan sloppy joe’s (for my husband). And of course, no Thanksgiving dinner would be complete without the green bean and mushroom casserole (that was the dish I always brought to meat-eating family gatherings.)
Thanks you so much for sharing these fabulous recipes! FFS, I never cold understand the appeal of a giant dead bird as a centerpiece when we’re supposed to be giving thanks!
Sue
Hahaah, I know right. But everyone is “Thanksgiving without turkey? WTF?” It’s ok, it’s not the end of the world.
Yeah, I actually checked how the protein turkey mold dish is done, but I think if you don’t eat meat or any animal foods you should just own it and come up with something mind-blowingly delish and make the dinner memorable. Plus, I think that if the roles were reversed – when plant based person would do a protein stuffed turkey, the omnivores would just love cracking jokes over it…I know I would even now 🙂
Katya
Hi Katya, I am so glad to see all this information in one place. Some members of my family are vegan and I am always challenged to find tasty, attractive and nutritious meals for them. The kids tend to like the dishes in which the vegetables are somewhat hidden and I am sure they are going to enjoy the mashed potatoes with garlic, the sloppy joes, and the stuffing. Thank you for this article.
Hi JJ, you’re so very welcome. I hope your family will have a great meal together and that kids won’t make a fuss over veggies 🙂
Katya
Thank you for these great recipes, a couple of (Mashed Potatoes with Roasted Garlic and the Roasted Vegetables) which I do already. The others I will definitely try out, especially that Chocolate Bourbon Pecan Pie. I love anything chocolate, especially dark chocolate.
Personally I am not a Vegan but I do want and like to eat vegan dishes. I am what you call a Flexitarian or Semi-Vegetarian bordering on Pescatarian. I will eat some kind of lean meat about two or three times a month but tend to have fish as my meat source.
I can honestly say that at this time in my life I do not think I can become a full on vegan but can see myself as a Lacto-Ovo Vegetarian. But regardless I do eat a mostly plant-based diet and I will definitely use these recipes for myself and my family this coming Thanksgiving.
Hi Robert, that’s great. You found what feels good for you, and that’s what matters. You can always change and experiment with food 🙂 Moderation and balance is the key.
Best,
Katya
These recipes all look amazing; especially the roasted vegetables and the cornbread stuffing! These meals would definitely fill me up and I most likely will not even miss the turkey not being there. In the recipe for the chocolate bourbon pecan pie, you mention flax eggs? Where or how do I get that? Also plant milk? Can I substitute with almond milk? If not, do you have suggestions as to where I can get plant milk? Plus instead of using straight up bourbon, is there an extract, like rum extract? Except bourbon extract?
Robert
Hi Robert, I’m glad to hear that 🙂 I was aiming for a crown pleaser type of menu. Flax egg is a plant based substitute for eggs – table spoon of flaxseed meal + table spoon of water = flax egg. It binds ingredients together like an egg would otherwise. Instead of flax egg, you can also buy a plant based egg replacer and will do the same job. Plant milk is any milk coming from plants, thus almond milk is a plant milk. Let’s say you have an animal milk: cow’s, goat’s, sheep’s, well any mammal has milk. And then you have plant milk: soy, rice, almond, cashew, coconut, etc. Because it’s vegan or in other words plant based recipe, I use milk from plants and not animal 🙂
I don’t know about the Bourbon and extracts, I know you can get essential oils you can use in reipes but that’s not really what you’re looking for. Yeah, I actually don’t know where to find an extract for bourbon or rum, sorry.
If you have any other questions let me know,
Katya