Favorite Vegetarian Thanksgiving Recipes

My favorite vegetarian Thanksgiving recipes - sides, salads, mashed potatoes, stuffing, main dishes, and dessert. Vegan and gluten-free options.

Does anyone else feel like Thanksgiving is SO early this year?! Five minutes ago it was summer, then the leaves were falling, then we had a bit of snow last week(!), so needless to say, it’s suddenly holiday season! Whether you’re hosting the big meal or you’ve been assigned to bring a salad or side dish, here are a few recipe ideas. This is a short list of recipes that are my favorites right now. There are also tons more listed under the Thanksgiving tab of our recipe index. Start the meal off with this Butternut Squash Hummus. In my…

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Kale & Olive Oil Vegan Mashed Potatoes

This rustic vegan mashed potatoes recipe is made with olive oil, rosemary, garlic, scallions, and kale. A delicious, easy vegetarian holiday side dish!

Thanksgiving is next week, but I’ve been eating mashed potatoes for a while now because blogging life means eating holiday recipes early! I first made these vegan mashed potatoes for a family dinner a few weeks ago. While I was in the kitchen mashing stuff in a bowl, my brother-in-law came over and asked, “What’s in the mashed potatoes?” I said, “Potatoes…” and he said, “No, I mean, what’s the ‘potato’…is it cauliflower…is it parsnips?” He knows me so well. It dawned on me how rarely I make actual potatoes, but we’re changing that today. This Thanksgiving our potatoes are…

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Acorn Squash with Chickpeas & Chimichurri

In this recipe, warmly spiced chickpeas bring out the acorn squash's sweetness, which is perfectly offset by bright chimichurri & lemon yogurt.

Every year in November, I like to post one new vegetarian main dish recipe. I find that Thanksgiving hosts often like to have a special option for vegetarians at their table, especially if they are newer to the family. But what people don’t know is that, for the most part, herbivores are usually just as happy to fill up on stuffing, mashed potatoes, acorn squash, roasted veggies, pumpkin pie, and more. So this year, my “main dish” is doubling as a side dish. Instead of making giant acorn squash halves stuffed with everything and the kitchen sink, leaving me way…

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Creamy Vegan Butternut Squash Pudding

Creamy vegan butternut squash pudding is better than pumpkin pie and is 10 times easier! Just roast, blend & chill to make this wonderful pudding.

Skip pumpkin pie this Thanksgiving, and make butternut squash pudding instead! This yummy pudding is creamy and oh so pumpkin-like, but it’s made with fresh roasted squash. It’s super easy to make – just roast butternut squash, blend, and chill. Here’s how this one came about. A few weeks ago, I made these butternut sandwiches, and multiple tests of this butternut curry. By the end of that week, I had lots of squash parts leftover (particularly because those sandwiches required just the long plank pieces). My first thought, of course, was to make soup. My second thought was to ask…

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Pomegranate Salad with Cider Dressing

This gorgeous pomegranate salad is perfect for the holiday season! Filled with a cornucopia of colorful produce, it's a fresh, festive side dish.

This pomegranate salad recipe is the perfect way to add a little color to any fall or winter meal. As we approach Thanksgiving, I feel like foods become more and more brown. I know – we all love cheesy, bready things, but if I’ve found one calling in life (er.. in blog-life), it’s to find and bring forth the colorful foods of every season. Here, I pack as many as I can into one stunning salad. This pomegranate salad has apples and squash, onions and greens, carrots and kohlrabi, and pomegranates, of course! We flipping love pomegranates. They add vibrancy…

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Butternut Squash Pasta with Chili Oil, Feta & Mint

This delicious and zesty roasted butternut squash pasta is a quick, easy, 10-ingredient vegetarian weeknight dinner.

Happy post-Halloween! I hope you all had a fantastic holiday. Ours was… I guess you could say, a little low key. We worked late and then went to the bar at Whole Foods for drinks and dinner. Because these types of activities are actually really fun when you’re an old married couple like we are :). Another thing that’s fun for us – pasta! But not just any pasta – spicy butternut squash pasta! I’ve been on a butternut squash kick lately, see here and here. For this post, I had originally planed to make a more traditional fall pasta…

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Pumpkin French Toast

This pumpkin French toast is the perfect fall breakfast! Cinnamon fills it with warm, spiced flavor, and a drizzle of maple syrup takes it over the top.

This pumpkin French toast is the perfect fall breakfast! It’s crisp and golden brown on the outside, moist and tender in the middle, and packed with pumpkin flavor the whole way through. It’s super easy to make, so you could whip it up on a weekday, but I especially love it on the weekends, when I can sit back, relax, and savor it. Just like it does in baking recipes, pumpkin puree makes a great egg replacer in this recipe, creating a rich, custard-like mixture to coat the thick slices of bread. As a result, this pumpkin French toast is…

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Sweet Potato Chili Fries

I crave sweet potatoes and chili on cold days, so these fun chili fries are exactly what I want on fall and winter nights. Great for game day or parties!

Once fall hits, I always crave two things: roasted sweet potatoes and chili. So naturally, I had sweet potato chili on my mind, but what I really wanted were big, puffy roasted sweet potato wedges and their deliciously sweet and browned caramelized edges. And that’s when it occurred to me – Sweet Potato Chili Fries! Well… wedges, technically. It’s the best of both worlds, and these little individual servings, topped with a quick slaw and avocado, are so fun to eat! I started with my favorite veggie chili recipe, which happens to be very quick and easy to make. Since there…

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Oyster Mushroom Soup

This oyster mushroom soup is a healthy, healing recipe for cool evenings. It's brimming with flavor from lemongrass, miso & ginger!

One night a week, Jack goes to comedy class, which means it’s the night that I have all to myself. In lieu of doing anything productive, I usually eat toast for dinner in front of the computer and let myself go down a rabbit hole of Youtube videos. I watch what people eat in a day, I watch people who live in vans and make vegan food (#vanlife), I watch people who live in vans and make vegan food while raising young children, and I read the scroll of crazy judgy comments that come as a result of that lifestyle…

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Favorite Fall Squash Recipes

A roundup of delicious vegetarian & vegan recipes featuring winter squash! Great ideas for Thanksgiving appetizers, sides, and main dishes.

It’s squash season! I think fall has a tendency to become “canned pumpkin season,” but there are so many great meals that can be made around fresh squash. Here are just a few of my favorites! Click directly on the photos to go to each recipe. Butternut Apple Cranberry Sandwich My current obsession – I’ve eaten this sandwich multiple times this week. I can’t get enough of those roasted butternut planks with tangy apple cider-marinated cabbage stacked between thick slices of bread. Butternut Squash Turmeric Curry A perfect weeknight creamy coconut curry. It’s easy to make, it’s flexible to adapt…

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Butternut Apple Cranberry Sandwich

This sandwich is fall between bread with roasted butternut squash, apple slices, cheddar, rosemary, cranberries, arugula, & pickled red cabbage.

This sandwich is, quite simply, fall between bread. It’s stacked with roasted planks of butternut squash, a layer of thinly sliced apple, white cheddar cheese, rosemary, cranberries, arugula, and red cabbage that I quickly marinated in a little apple cider vinegar. It’s like one of those next-day leftover Thanksgiving sandwiches… that is, if you had a really colorful Thanksgiving. I made these last Sunday when the leaves were falling, the sun was out, and the air was crisp. I don’t know if it’s that cozy fall chill in the air, but suddenly we’re eating more grains with our meals –…

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Photograph of Jeanine Donofrio and Jack Mathews in their kitchen

Hello, we're Jeanine and Jack.

We love to eat, travel, cook, and eat some more! We create & photograph vegetarian recipes from our home in Chicago, while our shiba pups eat the kale stems that fall on the kitchen floor.