Happy Vegetarian Thanksgiving With A Fantastic Vegetable Pot Pie Recipe

Thanksgiving is not a festival I grew up celebrating. To tell you frankly, for most of my life, I didn’t even know it existed. However, 2008 was an extremely special year for me. It is when I got married. I know it is very un-feminist to say it, but I felt that marriage made me whole, in some ways it even made me anew. What things my life before had found, went missing. What things my life before has missed, were found.

My life was suddenly filled with so much warmth. I looked for every reason to celebrate. When our Indian series of festival for the year ended with Diwali, I turned to the US’s – Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas.

2008 was also the year when I started getting fascinated with food. Mr B and I experimented with a lot of cuisines and we loved recreating them in our kitchen.

And we lived in Chicago.

So Thanksgiving meant to me spending time with my “new” family (Mr B and I). It meant Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade. It meant gearing up for the cold cold winter ahead.

And Thanksgiving meant food.

But there was a problem.

Turkey is the centre of a Thanksgiving feast. A Thanksgiving meal without turkey wouldn’t be the same. And I am kind-of-vegetarian. I might be able to taste non-vegetarian food once in a while; however, I surely can’t cook it.

So I looked for a dish that could be almost as grand, as filling, and as elaborate as turkey, and yet be absolutely vegetarian. As I looked for a turkey-alternative, I remembered a warm serving of vegetable pot pie that I had at the Yellowstone National Park cafeteria. I looked for a recipe online and tried it. For Thanksgivings that have come since, I kept making edits to the recipe making it more and more “mine.”

This recipe is true to the spirit of Thanksgiving because it is elaborate and requires couple of hours in preparation and cooking. It is grand enough to hold the centrestage at a vegetarian Thanksgiving dinner. And when served warm, it is divine.

This vegetable pot pie has three parts to it – the crust, the filling and the pot pie itself. Yes we will be making our own crust because this is a Thanksgiving recipe and we have to go as elaborate as possible!

Let’s start, shall we?

Vegetable Pot Pie for Thanksgiving

The Crust

We want the crust to be the best part of the dish. We want it to be buttery and flaky and all kind of good.

What Would You Need

2 cups all-purpose flour

½ teaspoon salt

½ teaspoon baking powder

1 tablespoon crushed black pepper

1 tablespoon chopped coriander leaves

½ cup butter – cold just out of the fridge

2 egg yolks

¼ cup buttermilk

How To Go About It

Take flour in a mixing bowl.

Sprinkle in salt, baking powder, black pepper and chopped coriander. Toss everything well together.

Add in butter. It is very important that this butter is cold when you add it in the flour. Using cold butter leads to flaky crust.

Dice the butter and incorporate it in the flour by rubbing it well with your fingers. You can use a fork as well to mix butter and flour together. As the butter is cold, it will be solid, so you can even grate it in the flour.

In a separate bowl, whisk buttermilk and eggs together.

Pour the buttermilk and egg mixture into your flour bowl.

Knead the flour using the buttermilk and egg mixture.

Keep kneading till you feel that the whole dough has come together. If the dough remains dry and looks apart even after kneading, just add a splash of water and knead some more.

Make a nice ball and cling wrap the dough.

Put the dough in the fridge for an hour or two before you start working with it again. You want the butter to get cold again for the flakier crust.

The Filling

What Would You Need

1 small squash

2 carrots

1 small cauliflower

2 medium-sized potatoes

3 tablespoons unsalted butter (2 tbsp for onions and 1 tbsp for roux)

7-8 garlic cloves

2 medium-sized onions

250 grams mushrooms

1 teaspoon thyme

3 tablespoons all-purpose flour

2 cups vegetable stock

½ cup full cream

1/3 cup frozen peas

1/3 cup frozen corn

Olive oil

Salt to taste

Crushed black pepper to taste

Red pepper flakes to taste

How To Go About It

Peel and dice all vegetables. It will be better if all the diced/cut vegetables are of approximately the same size. That will ensure that they all cook evenly.

We don’t want to “cook” the vegetables per se. We want to roast them. Yes you can roast them in the oven as well. However, I prefer to layer all vegetables on a wide enough pan and do the roasting over the gas.

Lay diced potatoes, carrots, squash and cauliflower in a pan and mix in salt and pepper and a generous amount of olive oil.

Keep the gas on medium high flame. Let the vegetable sit for 4-5 minutes before you give them their first toss. When you do you should be able to see them getting slightly browned.

Let them sit for another 2 minutes and toss again, another 2 minutes and toss again. Just repeat this cycle till the vegetables get brown roast layer on all sides.

Dice onions and chop garlic. Wash and slice mushrooms.

Heat a pot over medium-high heat and add butter. Once the butter melts add in garlic and onions together. Season with salt, pepper and red pepper flakes. Saute everything in the pot for a about 5 minutes till onions caramelize.

Add in sliced mushrooms to the onions as well. Cook mushrooms till they are tender but hold shape as well.

Add in thyme. Thyme is an essential in the dish, there is no other herb that can give this dish the flavour and the aroma that thyme does.

A pot pie filling needs roux to make it thick and ‘stew’ey. You can make this roux in a separate pot. I prefer making it right in the same pot as onions and mushrooms.

Scooch over the onion and mushroom mix to one side of the pot. Add in butter and let it melt.

Add in flour to butter and cook both together for about a minute.

Pour in vegetable stock to your pot and stir everything well.

As the stock come to a boil, bring your gas down to low. Let the stock simmer for about 10 minutes. The stock would thicken up by this time.

Remove the pot from the gas. Add the vegetables that we roasted earlier. Add in yogurt, corn and peas. Gently fold everything together without mushing any of it.

Set the filling aside and let it cool.

The Pot Pie

What Would You Need

The filling

The crust

1 egg

1 tablespoon water

How To Go About It

Preheat oven to 180 degrees C.

Take out the chilled dough.

Place it on a lightly-floured surface and roll it out. I roll out the flour till it is ½ cm of less thick. You can increase or decrease this thickness depending upon how much crust you like having with your pot pie.

Take out the baking dish in which you want to finally assemble your pot pie in.

Pot pies can be made in two ways. One way is making it with single crust. In this way, you just fill your dish with the filling and place the pie crust over it and bake it. The other way is to make it in a sandwich fashion. You place one crust at the bottom of your pie dish, you add your filling on top of it. And then you top the whole thing again with a pie crust. Both of the ways taste equally good, so you can go for either.

I prefer the sandwich way of making the pot pie. Therefore I cut two circles from the dough that I rolled earlier. One circle was 1 ½ inch + the diameter of the base of the baking dish. The other circle was 2 inches + the diameter of the top of the baking dish.

Place the first circle (with size 1 ½ inch more than the base of the baking dish) in the dish first.

Place it in the preheated oven and let it cook for 10 minutes.

Take the baking dish out and fill the bottom pie crust with filling.

Prepare and egg wash by whisking together an egg and a tablespoon of water. Brush the inner and the top outer sides of your dish with the egg wash. Egg wash will help the dough stick better to the dish as the pie cooks.

Cover the filling with the second crust (with size 2 inches more than the top of the baking dish). Pinch the sides towards the wall of the dish to seal the pie.

Brush the top of crust with egg wash.

Make slits on the crusts for steam to escape as the pie cooks in the oven.

Bake the assembled dish in the oven at 180 degrees C for about 25-30 minutes. You will it is done when the crust will have a glowing brown hue to it.

You have to, have to eat it straight from the oven. It is the warmth of the dish that makes it worth eating on a cold Thanksgiving night.