We haven’t done a Food Network Friday for ages as we were all very busy with VeganMoFo. Kelly picked this time which was a happy coincidence as her newish blog is one that I loved reading during MoFo. She’s also a fellow recipe testing addict and manages to test even more recipes than I do. She picked this recipe from Paula Deen. I love everything about Paula from her accent to her hair to her ability to add extra fat to everything she cooks.
We don’t celebrate Thanksgiving here so the idea of this pie seemed particularly strange to me. I did make quite a few changes, so all I can say is that I kept with the general idea of a pie that tasted like Christmas.
I used tempeh for the turkey, and switched around the vegetables and sauces quite a lot too. We aren’t huge fans of squash and I had some other veg to use up. I also couldn’t quite cope with the idea of creamy cheese soup with cranberries, vegan or not. Here’s what I did:
Finely chopped 8oz tempeh and fried it in olive oil with a splash of soy sauce until golden. Set aside. Chopped and fried 2 large leeks and one small carrot in the same pan. I was going to use celery too but my celery had gone bad. I don’t think I even knew celery could go bad; how long must it have been in there, I wonder?
In a separate pan I made a basic creamy mushroom sauce with onion, about 8oz chopped mushrooms, sage, thyme, 2 cups of soya milk and 1 cup of veg broth, thickened with a cornflour slurry.
Then I added the tempeh to the leek mix and sprinkled in a handful of cranberries – that’s the stage in the picture above. The mushroom sauce was mixed in, and a bought puff pastry sheet popped on the top and the whole thing was baked for about 20 minutes until the pastry turned golden. Sorry, but it’s a midweek work night after a long day of meetings; plaiting pastry can wait for another day.
I served the pie with mashed potatoes and deliberately used plenty of sauce in the pie so I didn’t need any gravy.
Obviously I did make a lot of changes to this dish but I do think I kept to the basic idea. The sage and thyme in the sauce along with the leeks and tempeh did taste like Christmas. I was unsure about the cranberries so I didn’t add too many but I liked the occasional burst of tart amongst the creamy sauce.
Thanks for a great pick Kelly, and don’t forget to see how everyone else coped with Paula’s pie at Vegan Appetite.
Cooking the Vegan Books 
Liz, for my take on this, I’m just going to say “see Liz’s, minus the corn, plus green beans’.
I love your take on this! I too was a little weirded out by the cranberries. They sure look pretty though. Your puff pastry is gorgeous.