Category Archives: Holiday Recipes

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Holiday Dish for Vegans, Vegetarians, and Omnivores Too!

If you want to make a dish that will win enthusiastic applause from your family and guests during these holidays, look no further than this colorful plate of Roasted Butternut Squash with Greens. Foodies of every persuasion—regardless of food preferences and sensitivities—will ooh and aah when they taste this exquisite special-occasion dish (even if I do say so myself! After all, it was a gift to me from Annapurna, the goddess of food.)

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A Chocolate Valentine’s Menu

In the spirit of my periodic tribute to the 2000 movie Chocolat, today I offer readers this divine recipe for Roasted Root Vegetables with Chocolate Glaze. It’s just one in a series of dishes I’ve been developing over the years to imitate the chocolate-themed meal in one of movie history’s great food scenes!

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Black-Eyed Peas Fives Ways for a Lucky 2023

As we turn our attention from Christmas to welcoming the new year, it seems fitting to offer yet another recipe for lucky black-eyed peas. Drumroll please… for African Black-Eyed Pea Stew!

It’s the rich peanut butter and spices that make this African style of cooking black-eyed peas so delicious—though that doesn’t mean spicy hot, at least not when I make it.

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An Elegant Vegan Christmas

If you’re a vegan or vegetarian cook who wants to dazzle your holiday guests with an exciting new dish, I have a couple of delicious options for you today: Savory Vegetable Rolls or their variation, Root Vegetable Casserole. I started experimenting last week to create something interesting for our first dinner guests since the beginning of the pandemic. We had all decided having dinner together was worth the small inconvenience of—oy vey!—taking rapid Covid tests. It was, and this entrée was a major hit!

Today’s recipe options demonstrate how you can play with a basic recipe and create a dish that suits your palate and time constraints. For example, you can also create this dish as a layered casserole, which will be easier and faster than making the rolls. The rolls are not difficult, but they do require extra steps.

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Healthy Comfort Food for the Holidays

If you have trouble choosing between the pumpkin pie or the chocolate cake on the Thanksgiving dessert table, these vegan and gluten-free Chocolate Glazed Pumpkin Squares will help you satisfy both desires in a few delicious bites! Let me warn you that these are no ordinary cookie bars because they are infinitely rich and moist. A few bites may be just enough. Even so, they qualify as healthy comfort food, in my humble opinion, since they are made with fresh, whole foods.

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You Don’t Have to Be Jewish to Love Kugel!

This year Labor Day and the first evening of the Jewish High Holiday season happen to coincide on September 6, which calls for celebratory food—like this utterly scrumptious Updated Noodle Kugel. Whether you’re going to a Labor Day potluck or preparing food for Monday’s Erev Rosh Hashanah family dinner, the beginning of the Jewish new year 5782, this dish will be a sure crowd pleaser.

I developed this recipe especially for my friends and readers who follow a gluten-free, lactose-free diet. And let’s be honest: as I approached my birthday, I was craving favorite childhood dishes that I hadn’t tasted since I went gluten-free!

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Some Much-Needed Luck for 2021

Today I offer you a different twist on a must-have traditional dish for January 1: Curried Black-Eyed Peas. In the Southern United States, to eat black-eyed peas with greens on New Year’s Day is considered a culinary talisman to bring good luck and good fortune in the coming year. Sadly, the dish is thought to have been brought to the US from West Africa through the slave trade, but it survives today as a symbol of hoped-for fortune and abundance to come—and because it’s delicious.

Although my previous black-eyed pea recipes reflect Southern cooking, I decided to add a new twist to this celebratory dish and offer you a version that reflects traditional Ayurvedic cooking through a mélange of spices. You can decide whether the dish packs a hot punch or is simply flavorful with the artful use of spices.

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Thanksgiving Sides Your Guests Will Never Forget!

For vegetarians and vegans, Thanksgiving is all about the traditional mouth-watering side dishes, and of course, I’m all about making them as healthy as they are delicious!

Today I’ll point to all of my favorite holiday sides and introduce you to a new recipe: Reimagined Green Bean Casserole.

When I was young, in the ’50s and ’60s, cooking for convenience was all the rage, and there was no cornucopia of fresh vegetables readily available in grocery stores. I can’t fault my mother for her frozen spinach with canned mushroom soup—though just the thought of it now makes me cringe! Even then, I had no taste for such food. I learned to love vegetables only when I began cooking with my college roommate, Ellen Brock, who grew up picking fresh veggies out of her mother’s garden.

But there was nothing wrong with the idea behind my in-laws’ green bean casserole with canned mushroom soup and canned onion rings. The potential is there for a great dish. I invite you to expand your culinary imagination with this recipe.

This Reimagined Green Bean Casserole is a vegan and gluten-free dish made with fresh ingredients: green beans, caramelized onions, fresh almond milk (if available), fresh ginger, and shiitake mushrooms

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All Things Pumpkin… Continued!

Have I told you that I love fresh pumpkin  (see Spiced Pumpkin Pound Cake)? As the holiday season moves toward its peak, what can be better than a fresh Puréed Pumpkin Soup. The markets are still filled with sugar pumpkins, the sweet edible pumpkins used for pumpkin pies and all things pumpkin.

Pumpkin, like squash, is one of the favored foods of Ayurveda because it is so easy to digest. It’s ideal for vata and pitta. For watery kapha, it’s still fine if balanced with warming spices. I’ve chosen cinnamon, cardamom, allspice and fresh ginger—

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