• If you haven’t been reading Katie’s reviews of horror movies (like Hocus Pocus, pictured above) on Don’t Eat off the Sidewalk, you’re missing out. They are golden. I have read every word of every post. My favorite so far is the Chucky one, but I just noticed that she reviewed Poltergeist, which is my all-time favorite—When the bodies float up to the top of the swimming pool? I screamed for 5 minutes the first time I saw that! Also, I was 11—so I can’t wait to read that one! Oh, right, this is Food for Thought Friday: there are links to recipes related to the movie at the end of every post.
• Amanda‘s Kale Salad with Buffalo Tempeh looks so good, I can’t wait to try it.
• Something I love about following the blogs of vegan Portlanders is that I discover places I never knew existed. Like when Kittee posted about Bui Natural Tofu! How did I never know about this place? My son’s favorite food in the entire world is spring rolls!
• I am down for any spin on the Old Fashioned.
• Finally, two recent favorite posts of Stop Chasing Skinny: If You Want to Quit Barfing and Fat Acceptance Saved My Life

With Vegan MoFo in full swing and most participants still posting on the regular, I know that the last thing you need right now is more food writing. Maybe you can come back here Thanksgiving weekend during one of those times when you’ve snuck away from your family for 45 minutes of peace and quiet and you can read these then. Or maybe you’re like me, a true glutton for punishment, and you just can’t keep yourself away. In that case…

• Have you seen Chickpea Magazine? It’s so dreamy.
• Food and Drink Issue of The New York Times
• The Airy Way is doing close-up pictures of food for MoFo. (See photo above for an example.) I am planning to wait until the end of the month and then going through all of them with Milo.
• I don’t even watch True Blood, but I have been impressed by Jen’s commitment to make True Blood themed food for MoFo. I was hoping that all her Tara food would taste terrible, since Tara is just the worst. (Okay, I used to watch True Blood.)
• Beyond Cabbage: 5 Festive Fall Slaw Recipes at the kitchn

How has the first week of MoFo treated you guys? What were your favorites?

• Mark Bittman at NYT: Polls Agree: Food ‘System’ Needs Fixing
• This looks like it could easily be made vegan. It also looks like it belongs in my mouth right now: Dark and Damp Molasses Cake at the kitchn. Just so you know, if you do make it vegan, and you drop it off at my house, that would be super-sweet.
• Vegan Twix Bars at Alice Q. Foodie
• When I saw the pictures of these Ultimate Chocolate Chip Cookie n’ Oreo Fudge Brownie Bars, I nearly spilled coffee all over my computer.
• Are you like me? Do you see every single recipe and think: “I wonder how that would taste with pumpkin in it?” Pull-Apart Cinnamon Sugar Pumpkin Bread is like monkey bread with pumpkin added! You’re welcome!

This is one of those features: Food for Thought Friday. Every Friday morning, I’ll be linking to 5 food-related blog posts I read that week so that you can have something interesting to read on Friday afternoon. They won’t always be their own posts—sometimes I will just tack them onto the bottom of whatever else I’m writing at the time.

• Recipe Headnotes: Do We Really Need Them at the kitchn.
• Magic Sauce Recipe at 101 Cookbooks.
• Jenna linked to this beautiful recipe for tofu “egg” foo yung on Pinterest, and I’ve been thinking about it ever since. It looks so easy! Egg foo yung was one of all my all-time favorite things to order at Chinese restaurants when I was growing up, but I’d never considered veganizing it.
• Portlanders, Northwest VEG is offering Veg 101 Classes, a 6-week series on vegetarianism.
• Finally: Vegan MoFo 2011 banners are here! They are super cute, of course, because Amanda made them!

What are you doing this weekend? Milo and I going to participate in the Sunday Parkways Northeast this Sunday, the last one of the year. I will be rollerskating, so please cross your fingers for me that I don’t eat it repeatedly in front of strangers.

Apartment Therapy’s The Kitchn is the only food blog I read that isn’t written by a single person. I’m not usually into community-style blogs, but this one is such a valuable resource that I continue to follow it and regularly receive inspiration from it. My favorite thing they do are lists and roundups, like: 10 Make-Ahead Breakfasts.

As far as professional food writing goes, I’m a big fan of Mark Bittman and his New York Times blog On Food. Bittman’s food writing is excellent, his recipes are solid (and frequently vegan), and his posts about the food industry are engaging and personal instead of detached and dry like a lot of food journalism. Many of his blog posts are just food-related links, but even still, they’re the best food-related links, you know?

My pal Leela writes about cooking and cocktails at Living Awesomely, and I enjoy every entry even when it’s about food I don’t eat, because she is just so rad, and reading her blog feels like standing next to her in kitchen and chatting while she cooks.

When I met Gena of Choosing Raw at Vida Vegan Con, she said to me: “I have been reading Yellow Rose Recipes since before I went vegan!” and I thought: “Is there any food blog I have been reading since before I went vegan?” Yes, there is one, and it’s Orangette! Molly’s blog is wonderful mix of food and scenes from her life. I can’t wait to read her book: A Homemade Life.

Finally, Joanna the Non-Baker really loves Joy the Baker. Her entries are so bright and cheery and everything she makes looks amazing.

If I only read one food blog, it would be Kittee’s blog Cake Maker to the Stars. I’m pretty sure that you could bottle Kittee and sell her as a cure for depression.

Julie Hasson is my favorite recipe-writer. There, I’ve said it. Her recipes are consistent, flavor-packed, and smart. Seriously, when I’m reading her site or looking through her cookbook, I find myself mumbling: “Oh, that’s very smart,” over and over. I mean, come on, we’re talking about the woman who is responsible for the steamed sausage craze! Thank goodness for Julie.

I just started reading Bonzai Aphrodite a couple of weeks ago when Sayward and I were on the parenting panel together at Vida Vegan Con, and I’m already in love. The next time that I have a whole afternoon to kill,¹ I predict that I will spend it reading every single entry she’s written.

Amey of Vegan Eats & Treats is a new friend, and she writes just how she talks, which is to say with awesome energy and enthusiasm. I love Amey! I know you will, too!

My sister-from-another-mister Jenna’s blog good good things is a mixture of her own recipes, restaurant food porn, other people’s recipes, and pictures of her cute kids thrown in for good measure. I get excited every time that I see she’s written something, which is always a sure sign that I’m hooked.

¹ That could happen, right? Surely I will get sick eventually and have to stay in bed for a whole day or something?

my couch

This is a photo of my corner of the couch. It’s where you will find me almost every night at 8 PM, under my quilt, reading a book. This simple routine has been grounding me over the last few weeks. Matthew joins me after a bit, and then we will watch a movie or the latest episode of whatever TV show we’re currently obsessed with, but the 30-45 minutes where I am just reading in silence is priceless and one of the nicest parts of my day, second only to the 10 minutes every morning after Milo wakes me up, when we lie in bed snuggling and giggling.

Thinking about having a wedding that represented who we are made me want to hunt down a set of photos from a wedding that was going around the internet this summer, so here they are. Aren’t they so inspiring and beautiful? Doesn’t everyone seem insanely happy to be there? It would be nice to be a part of something like that, even though that particular something isn’t right for us.

I like what Matthew wrote about running and coffee over on his Tumblr.

Sweet Sweet Life is one of my favorite blogs, because it’s so consistently optimistic and joyful, and one of the few home design-y blogs which embraces color. This blog post about choosing to home school her 11-year-old daughter really inspired me with it’s braveness. We have often discussed giving Milo the same option some day, since the social aspect of middle school was self-esteem-destroying for both Matthew and me and we would would have preferred to have skipped that whole part, if given the choice.

Abby took some beautiful pictures of my ‘hood that made me fall in love with North Portland all over again.

This post about her son’s newfound love of vinyl over at SouleMama made me smile a whole lot.

my vegan Thanksgiving; photo by Katie Jane Marggraf

I had my first vegan Thanksgiving in 2001, and I showed up at my parents’ house armed with recipes I found in dark corners of the internet, recipes I’d never tried before and was just sort of hoping would work. I ended up with a pumpkin soup that tasted like dirt (literally) and a cranberry walnut salad made with store-bought seitan. If I remember correctly, I ended up eating rolls and tossed salad and feeling pretty sorry for myself.

Obviously the options are a lot better now, and because of that, you might find yourself facing the opposite problem: there are so many recipes to choose from, and you’re not sure which will become your “standards,” because there is no way that you can make all of them.

I don’t recommend trying a recipe for the first time on Thanksgiving day—even if it’s from a cookbook author or blogger whom you trust—because that day will be filled with distractions, and multiple people competing for oven and stovetop space, and those conditions aren’t ideal for following a recipe for the first time. The safest bet is to do a test run: make the dish at least once in the week leading up to Thanksgiving, just so that you are familiar with the timing and the steps.

I also don’t recommend using all new recipes this Thanksgiving. If this is your first vegan Thanksgiving, and you’re responsible for the entire meal, it’s probably a better idea to focus on one or two new dishes, and use your standard easy favorites (mashed potatoes, roasted vegetables, a tossed salad) to fill out the rest of the meal.

Finally, and most importantly, Thanksgiving isn’t the time to mess with the classics. You heard about some great new mashed potato method and can’t wait to put your nephew in cleats to give it a whirl? Great! Try it another time! If you decide then that it’s better than your current recipe, make it that way a lot in the coming year and then debut it at next year’s Thanksgiving.

Here are the recipes which I’ve used, and with great success:

• any of the recipes from the Thanksgiving section of my zine, Potluck Mania, obviously, but if you only try one for this holiday, make it the Mushroom Dressing;
  
• If you try two, make the Coconut Sweet Potatoes, because they’re crazy delicious and so easy that you can assign all the work to your clueless cousin;
• the Roasted Garlic Mashed Potatoes from Yellow Rose Recipes is my go-to mashed potato recipe;
• The Best Vegan Green Bean Casserole from Fat Free Vegan is always a hit, though I’m sure that the recipe Isa just posted today is also great, I just haven’t made it;
• I like simple vegetables at Thanksgiving, since everything else on the table is usually heavy and calorie-dense, so I make roasted brussel sprouts (brussels tossed with olive oil, salt, pepper, and a little paprika and roasted in the oven until crispy) and a green salad with apple slices, dried cranberries, and caramelized walnuts tossed in a balsamic vinaigrette;
• I make a seitan roast which is my standard chicken style seitan recipe, but uses Brian McCarthy’s Vegan Turkey Roast method. I baste it before baking with a basting liquid that is 1 tablespoon olive oil, 1 tablespoon tamari, and 1 teaspoon liquid smoke;
• I don’t usually make dessert at Thanksgiving (someone else always does!), but I’ve happily eaten Smlove Pie and The Millennium Cookbook’s Pecan Pie¹ at vegan thanksgiving potlucks.

Have a happy holiday!

¹It was brought to my attention in a comment that Todd X lifted “his” pecan pie recipe from The Millennium Cookbook. I’ve made the correction.