The Thanksgiving Dish That Will Outshine Your Turkey | The Veggie | NYT Cooking

I have to start thinking about a big freaky Thanksgiving main. What are your ideas so far? I don't have any. Ooh. Hi, I'm Tanya. I'm an editor at New York Times Cooking. I write the Veggie Newsletter, and I'm the host of this show. It is, if you can believe it or not, finally time to talk about Thanksgiving. In fact, my ears are burning and the veggie phone is ringing because I think we have a request on the line. Hi, Tanya. It's Emily. This year, I want you to create a great vegetarian main dish. Can you develop something that's a show-stopping centerpiece that everyone at the table can enjoy? I was afraid of this question. So I think a strong vegetarian centerpiece needs three things. Should be a labor of love, i.e. a bit of effort. It should be show-stopping and beautiful, and it should have some sort of interactive presentation element. At Thanksgiving, that usually means carving a turkey in front of everyone, a little stressful. There are infinite ways to go about this. Like last year, I'd like to consult a few of my friends and colleagues over at New York Times Cooking. I have to start thinking about a big freaky Thanksgiving main. The prompt of a final boss main is so scary because no one ever beats the final boss. What are your ideas so far? Well, I had been thinking about like Thanksgiving shepherd's pie, Thanksgiving lasagna. Just basically taking all the sides and going, you're gonna eat them together now. What's the veggie turducken? There's a veg ducken. I hate it. Okay. Well, I was wondering about like a whole roasted cauliflower that you like par roast. Yeah. And then you wrap, maybe not in puff pastry, but like a really beautiful phyllo dough kind of thing where you make it look like a cauliflower bomb. Does anyone like a stuffed vegetable? Stuffed pumpkin? Stuffed squash? A bloomed onion. Or like a fried artichoke as like a centerpiece. Really big onion. A blooming onion holding something. A tiny pumpkin. This is great. This is going well. If I'm capable of reading my own handwriting, I would like to present some of these ideas to you all. Big samosa. Chutney gravy phyllo sage chutney salsa verde. Thanksgiving biryani. Cauliflower wrapped phyllo dough situation. So I'm noticing a trend of things that are wrapped in other things. Which brings me actually to the next point which is stuffed pumpkin slash squash. I think the only challenge there is that you have to think about like the Like, the setup of the Thanksgiving table, like... Are you going to want like 12 people all crowding around your pumpkin? Like we could do like a rice layer that's like seasoned, like an herb rice. Basically like what individual things are packable. Yeah and sliceable. And sliceable and then how do they all taste together. I really like the idea of like a cauliflower filo moment and I kind of want to play around with that and then may the best Frankenstein guy win. Okay it's been what? Two weeks since we did a brainstorm, none of it really made any sense because I was writing down gibberish while we were all talking, but we left the room with things like Bloomin' Onion, Cauliflower Wellington, a lot of talk about stuffed pumpkins. Our fine friends in the studio have allowed me to come in and screw around for a couple hours and we're gonna get it all on tape. So we're gonna stuff three different things with three other different things and see which one reigns supreme. So we're gonna go with a cauliflower pastry situation as our first option. The other direction that I'm thinking is big cabbage roll, i.e. a vegetarian take on a French chou farci. Third option. This is a stuffed pumpkin. I'm gonna try pumpkin stuffed with rice, so almost like a rice stuffing. There is an Armenian dish called Gappama that is like a jeweled rice in a beautiful pumpkin like this, and then the pumpkin is sliced back, kind of like a bloomin' onion, to expose the rice. Stuff inside of other stuff. Stuffed Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving stuffed. I would love to leave here today with... Optimism and hope. Full disclosure, I do not know if this is gonna work. This is the test I'm least confident in. I would like to whole-roast this cauliflower and then create a cauliflower duxelle that will then be enrobed with a phyllo dough that will kind of, like, go around it. And I'm gonna bake it in a cake pan. Gonna season the inside of this with some oil, and then I'm gonna brush the outside of it. Salt and pepper. Oven time. It's nice. I'm gonna pull it, because I am scared of overcooking it into mush. Pretty. Got some nice color on it. We have all of the accoutrement for my cauliflower abomination. Time to make some nubbins. We're in proof of concept mode, right? To kind of go Silicon Valley tech speak with this. This is the one I'm winging it the most on. I wish I had a beer. We're just vibe cooking. And I'm just gonna cook this down and see kind of what happens consistency-wise. Pretty good. This is basically just a glorified cauliflower rice. In my mind, this was different. Let's just kind of sprinkle over just to help this thicken and kind of go roux mode. We're definitely getting some of that mush texture. Sounds bad, but that's kind of what we want, right? You want to try my mush? Yeah, I'm tasting like all of the elements, but they're not really integrating yet. Yeah. I almost wonder if it needs just some water and like a little bit of simmering time to just bring it all together a bit. All right, let's see what's going on here. I don't hate that. The miso helped. Let's just see what happens here. One more for good measure. It's actually pretty good. It's not overtly any one flavor, but I think that's okay. So a traditional Wellington would have a pastry. This is not even remotely close to a traditional Wellington and I'm taking many a creative liberty. Let's put about half of this in here and we'll kind of like pat it around. I have to think about how I wanna do this. It's not gonna stick. Okay, pivot. I'm going to put more. On the bottom, I'm going to put the cauliflower in, and I'm going to tuck it around the sides. It's weird. It's a little avant-garde, but it could be something. Moment of truth. Let's see what happens. Have the beginnings of potentially something, but I don't know that it's my something. Flop. The duxelles, there's not enough of it to kind of save the cauliflower from reading dry or the phyllo from reading dry. The phyllo is too fragile. I do now wonder like if we had done this as puff pastry if it would have worked because I also think it needs some richness. This could have legs even as like a more traditional cauliflower Wellington. I think this iteration is not our special guy. What am I afraid of? Everything. I am afraid of ruining the one good pumpkin that we have. I just realized that this doesn't have a stem. Wait, I did it on the wrong side. I meant to do this side. I'm just going to keep going. There we go. Whoa. That's a pretty color. We're in the main frame, but I'm just going to kind of dig around. I didn't really know how much space would be in this pumpkin. This is a fairytale pumpkin. I'm just trying to scrape off some of these kind of, like, pulpier, stringy bits because nobody's going to want to eat that. You know what I just realized? I needed the top. Cause then like when you would serve it, right? You would serve it with the stem. Can you guys show Adam right now? Look at what he, look at this man. He makes my coffee, he rearranges my pumpkin. Oh my God, did he do it? I mean, it's not like a hundred percent perfect, but it's close. Oh, he's a little stuck now. Okay, we're just gonna not touch that for a minute. I'm just gonna parboil some rice. You don't wanna take it too long cause you don't want the rice to overcook in the pumpkin. I'm going to just brown this whole stick of butter and then onions. Add to the brown butter about half of this maple syrup. I'm just gonna kind of eyeball it. Traditionally, the rice is studded with nuts and dried fruit. We're gonna kind of go in that direction but add some more autumnal, traditionally American Thanksgiving flares and flavors. Sage and parsley, cooked herb flavor, just some more aromatics with the rice. Sage is not traditional, I'm just doing Thanksgiving vibe. Mmm! Oh, that's so good. Tastes like pancakes. I could drink this with like a straw. I kind of want it in like my coffee. This is like putting on sunscreen to make sure you don't miss a spot. This all is not gonna fit in that pumpkin, I'll tell you that right now. But this is why we test. Measure with your heart. Wow, that's really good. Mm, this is fire. About half. I think this is gonna be so delicious. What's better than like a jeweled rice? Try this. It's like not even, it's like par-cooked, but. Right? Let's stuff this guy. This looks so fire. We're gonna use about half this rice, which is okay. Give me the baby. Bring me the child. And we're gonna christen him. Oh, my God, it's like a puzzle, except for I'm the stupidest person alive. Oh, there we go. Okay. Oven. It's been in the oven for an hour 30, so I'm gonna pull that, I'm gonna bring it over here, and we're gonna investigate what is happening. It smells so good. I wish we had Smell-O-Vision. Get a load of this guy. We got access to Thanos' spatula. I'm excited and I'm a little scared. It's so soft, oh my god. I'm going to take the lid off and then we're going to cut into the pumpkin and hopefully the wedges will kind of unfurl really nicely revealing a beautiful pool of rice. Wow. Something that we didn't do for this test, but that, if we go in this direction, I would like to do, is I would love to serve this with something a little crunchy on top. Also, there would be a shower of fresh parsley over top. It is show-stopping. It's got a carving element. It's got a pumpkin element, which is very right for the holiday. It's really good. After two hours in the oven, it's not as... It's not as overtly maple buttery as it was when we tasted it before it went in. So I actually would probably reserve a little bit of the maple butter and drizzle it over top. All right, I'm gonna try the pumpkin because that's the thing I'm kind of most curious about. Mm, that's really nice. I want this to be really kind of assertive in flavor. So I wanna like punch up the herbs. I wanna punch up some of the savory qualities. There's some stuff I wanna pull back on, but I feel like this is like so in the right direction and it's so pretty. Like, I think that is, like, indisputable. Nearly 4 o'clock, union rules state that we have to cut our crew in 30 minutes. I'm just kidding. I am not going to be able to blanch and assemble our chou farci and get this beautiful Savoy cabbage going, but I am going to start working on our filling because being able to kind of taste and iterate on that, I think, is the most important component, similarly to what we did with the cauliflower duxelles. So let's rock and roll. I am going to brown our tofu. A choux farci is a, one, it's kind of a large format cabbage roll. I would also liken it to a cabbage-draped meatloaf. So we're kind of doing a big vegetarian cabbage roll, but with some more autumnal flavors. Mmm, that smells really good. Okay so our mushrooms, getting nice and saucy, they smell delicious. Proportions-wise, don't think I have enough filling for the chou farci. Boop, boop, boop, boop, boop. As you can see, we did not finish our three-test mission, but we got about 50% of the way there with the chou farci. As you can tell, the filling is basically done. So far, tastes kind of fire. Some takeaways from today. You can pan to my little cauliflower friend over there. He is not who I thought he was. I know exactly what's wrong with it. I don't know if It is worth correcting all of the shortcomings of it. I think, considering how jazzed we all were this morning over the pumpkin, I think we have our answer. I don't know that anything can beat, essentially, a Bloomin' pumpkin. I have a lot more work to do. My final recipe is due to my editor in, like, 2 1⁄2 weeks. When you see me next time, I will be, hopefully, less oil-splattered and more secure in my recipe direction. I'm tired and I'm ready to go to bed. Okay, so since I last saw you, I returned home to further experiment with our pumpkin centerpiece. And I think we've landed somewhere really delicious. But I have a few pumpkin related thoughts. So we had a calabaza that was 6.37 pounds and not all the filling that we made in that round fit into the pumpkin. Then when I went home to test, And find a pumpkin on my own. The smallest pumpkin I could get was 8.87 pounds. Filling was perfect, outside was cool, too much pumpkin. So I think the sweet spot is somewhere in between 7 and 8 pounds because you want to ensure the pumpkin is big enough for all the filling. We really don't want to have to bake off any of the filling on the side if we don't have to. Okay, so we're gonna start our filling. We have the general framework of that Armenian stuffed pumpkin dish that we talked about during the testing phase, Armenian Ghapama. We've incorporated elements of Persian Aras Polo, which has dried fruit and lentils and rice. And we have also Mujaddara, which has crispy fried shallots on top. But we have a few traditional American Thanksgiving flourishes like cranberries and apples and sage. When you were carving this pumpkin, you're kind of carving around An inch away on all sides from the centerpiece. Is it hot in here or is it just me? Oh, I see. This is quite a fibrous one. My op. You wanna save this, cause this is gonna be the lid. This is the hardest part of the whole recipe. Everything else is kind of a breeze. So I'm just kind of scraping a thin layer of flesh out. Cause you don't really need all that pumpkin. And I'm going to put the rice in to this water to part cook. And it's okay if there's a little water left because there's not really a lot of liquid in the pumpkin itself. So if these have a little bit of water clinging to them, it's okay. It'll actually help things cook and kind of get fluffy. We are going to dry toast some walnuts to get them that kind of nutty toasty flavor. I'm just going to put this in here and now we're going to cook our leeks. The leeks are looking perfect, or the leek, rather, is looking perfect. You've got some nice browning on the edges. They're well-softened. The green is popping nicely. So I'm going to call this done. And we're going to use the same pan to melt our butter. We're going to brown the butter because it gives it that, again, kind of nutty, autumnal flavors. You're going to cook this butter until it's melted, the milk solids are browned, and that foaming kind of starts to subside. Hello? Does it sound like an echo? Does it sound like I'm in a cave? We have fun here. Mmm, brown butter, and no milk solids left behind because those are the kind of nutty toasty bits. Bro, that smells so good. I'm gonna chop two tablespoons of sage. That's two fat tablespoons. The filling is basically done. So we're gonna add our dried fruits. We've got our fresh parsley. This is half of a cup. And then we're gonna peel our apple and then dice it. Throw it in the bowl. I'm going to season the inside of this. There were recipes that I read as I was doing my research that brushed the inside that I guess I didn't clock when I first was playing around with this format. And when I first tried the pumpkin on its own, I was like, oh, this could be a little bit better seasoned. And then as I was doing further research, I was like, of course, they glazed the inside of the pumpkin. Filling time. So we're going to go for two teaspoons. Give this a mix. But like, look at how beautiful and bejeweled this is. And then I'm going to sprinkle over with about two thirds of the butter. And then we're just gonna put it in the pumpkin. You wanna kind of like pat it on the ground and compact it that way. But you don't wanna press it because you want the grains of rice to remain fluffy. You wanna fill it just until you get to the base of the lid. I think there's more room for filling. So we took a break and we made another batch of filling. I think this is going to fit in here. So I'm gonna put it in here. This is my favorite part where I try to remember which way it go. Glaze her. Just do this on the sheet pan right before it goes in the oven because otherwise you are going to be fighting for your life against this slippery little guy. And now we will roast her. While our pumpkin is in the oven, I'm going to prepare two thirds of our topping. So we have a Crispy fried shallot. We will have crispy fried sage on top as well. And then we'll chop a little bit more parsley to sprinkle over top fresh. Don't discard your oil. The oil that you will have after you prepare all of this will be like a shalloty sage oil that is delicious and you could use to prepare some of your other vegetable side dishes on Thanksgiving. Thinly slice your shallots. You could do so with a sharp knife or you can do them on a mandolin as I'm gonna do here. You can also Buy crispy fried shallots at the store. I will not fault you for doing that. It's Thanksgiving, do whatever you want. While the oil is getting hot, I'm just gonna start kind of prepping these sage leaves too. And you're just leaving them whole. I'm just pulling them from the stems. Let me go ahead and check the pumpkin. Okay, so basically what I'm experiencing, I'm pushing in and it's sliding really easily here. And then about midway through, I'm feeling just like a touch of resistance. It's going in like with ease, but I want there to be almost no pushback. In the recipe, I say to go for about two hours. You might need 210, 215. You really want an easy, easy time stabbing this guy. Okay. Yippee! The way to get the crispiest shallot is to draw out the most amount of moisture, and that happens best when you do it gradually. I don't want them to get too crispy, they're like perfectly golden, so I'm going to take these out now. I'm going to kill our heat. Some of these are getting really crispy because they're so nicely thin. I'm just going to drain them on this plate, but as they rest on the paper towel they will continue to crisp. Yummy! Bring the oil just back up to a little bit of heat because we're going to do the sage in just a second, but I'm just going to season these with a little bit of salt. These will go really fast, so they'll start to kind of curl and wither. And they will bubble and as the bubbling subsides they're ready. I basically just count to 30 and then they're done. Finish them with a little bit of salt. And I heard the timer go off so I think our pumpkin is ready. We have beautiful pumpkin that is steaming. You can't tell from the back but she's also been stabbed many times. We are just letting it rest to cool down because it's very hot. And then what we're going to do is we're going to transfer it to a very very large serving platter and then we will carve into it. What will happen is big blooming onion style pumpkin. The filling will kind of spill out over the pumpkin wedges. We'll top it with our shallots, our sage, and also our chopped parsley, which I have in the fridge, and then we'll be ready to eat. Eat. Ooh, ah. You're looking at this probably thinking, Tanya, wow, so beautiful. How do I eat it? I'm so glad you asked. I'm just kind of pulling. The pumpkin is so tender that a wedge will just reveal itself. You will definitely have like a little center piece of pumpkin when this is all said and done and the rice will kind of spill into the crevices. That's fun. That's part of it. You could also stand to serve some crispies on the side in a little bowl so that you can also garnish to your liking. Ha, ha, ha. It's so good. Let's check the goal list. A labor of love? Show stopping? Look at him, what else is there to say? And then we have our carving presentation moment where you saw kind of slicing into it and as you cut into the pumpkin, it blooms and it's beautiful. But I think we miraculously managed to check every box. This is sort of a jeweled rice and lentil stuffed pumpkin with fried sage and fried shallots. And with the help of a lot of really Inspiring conversations, some very very important research, we ended up somewhere that is like so much more exciting than where I thought we would end up. I think the best part of a centerpiece like this is one that is Up for interpretation, but gives you a roadmap to make it your own. Suck it, turkey. Thank you for joining me on this journey. I can't wait to labor over it again next year. I'm not really sure I will be able to top this, and I don't know that I want to. But in the meantime, you can find this recipe and plenty more dishes for your Thanksgiving table on New York Times Cooking. Oh, yeah, buy my book, Veg Everything, out now. Have a happy Thanksgiving.