The grand finale

Before the moment is lost for good, I have to tell you about my third and final Thanksgiving dinner.

We had originally planned to work and eat at Cafe Gratitude, who was putting on a free dinner in exchange for helping out that day at the restaurant. It sounded like fun, but cut into our gym schedule (shallow, huh?), so we were staying open to other possibilities, too.

On Wednesday night, to celebrate the four-day weekend, we went to a favorite place of ours, Merit Vegetarian, in Sunnyvale. The owner, Sam, recognized us from our many previous visits and came over to say hello. We told him about Cafe Gratitude and he mentioned that a friend of his in The City also owned a vegetarian restaurant and that he had been helping her prep for the Thanksgiving blow-out she was putting on.

Golden Era Vegan Cuisine -- located in the Tenderloin, just a short walk from our beloved Millenium -- offered a four-course vegan meal for just $25 dollars (that's half of what Millenium was charging)! And it was terrific!

We started with a savory pumpkin soup, flavored with a little curry and a lot of hot pepper. It was as smooth as silk. Non-dairy cream soups such as this one this never cease to amaze me -- how do they achieve such a glorious texture with no butter or cream?

From there, we enjoyed an entirely serviceable dinner salad with field greens, shredded cabbage and carrot, and a nicely tart vinegarette.



The third course was simply beautiful:

Faux meat fascinates me the same way that dairyless cream soups do; how do they do it? Nancy, Golden Era's owner, gave us a rough overview of how they made the faux turkey, but all I took away from it is that the outer skin, which tasted remarkably like the skin of a turkey, is made from tofu-skin wrappers. On my own, I surmised that the 'meat' was seitan (she said tofu, but it really didn't taste like or have the texture of tofu) and that the stuffing was regular old stuffing that would have been happy on just about any Thanksgiving table, vegan or otherwise.

Seitan, if you're interested, is the base of a lot of faux meat. It's made from something called wheat gluten. What that is and where one buys it I don't know, but it makes for mighty tasty fake flesh. But back to the dinner...

Being as I'm never one to shy away from dessert, I gladly took on the fourth course, a pumpkin cheesecake. It had the same tanginess of a dairy-based cheesecake and the spiciness of a traditional pumpkin pie. I feel certain that an omnivore wouldn't have felt that he was missing a thing.

Actually, there was one thing missing for me: the weight gain that invariably accompanies the day after Thanksgiving. My weight stayed exactly where it had been the day before. I didn't miss a thing!

BTW, we asked Nancy if they were planning a dinner for Christmas. She said they were considering it, but hadn't reached a final decision. So make a point of calling her (415/673-3136) and telling her to do Christmas dinner, too!

Vegetarian birthday dinner

My birthday is today, but we started celebrating this weekend with a special trip to Millennium, arguably San Francisco's best vegetarian restaurant.

Millennium is acknowledging the economic crisis with a special Frugal Foodie Menu. For $39 dollars, you select an appetizer, main dish, and dessert from a subset of the regular menu.

I started with a refreshing nectarine salad. It was a very delicate dish with butter lettuce, sesame seeds, and a fresh creamy lemongrass & ginger vinaigrette. Aaron's sweet chili-glazed tempeh was popular, too, seeming to show up on every table.

Both entrees were showstoppers. Recently, we discovered a delicious vegan Vietnamese-style crepe at Merit vegetarian restaurant in Sunnyvale, so when we saw it on Millennium's menu, we had to try it. With mung sprouts, sunchokes, cubes of firm seared tofu wrapped in an amazingly eggy-flavored crep

e, it's definitely something new (to me, at least).

I opted for the French fingerling potato roulade, which is something like potato strudel, in a beautiful orange puddle of carrot puree. Haute comfort food!

In my book, the appetizer and entree are nothing more than an excuse to kill time while waiting for dessert. We shared two desserts, rice pudding and dark chocolate vegan cheesecake.

The rice pudding had just the teeniest hint of hot pepper that I could only taste at the very end of each bite -- something like a culinary peck on the cheek. Almost every dessert came with a little scoop of a sorbet or ice cream, which I really liked because it didn't force me to choose between a cakey dish or ice cream. A sherbet of pluot and Pu-erh came with the rice pudding. Pu-erh is a kind of tea, but it was wasted on me; I really couldn't identify its taste. Really, the plum and apricot stood out more.

My own dish, dark chocolate cheese cake, was delicious, but a far cry from cheesecake. It tasted like a very dense chocolate cake with a melted chocolate bar on top. The winning taste in this dish was the blackberry coulis. Very seductive taste with the dark chocolate!

To mark the occasion today, I'm planning a little trip to Sugar, Butter, Flour, a really fun bakery in Sunnyvale that has a big selection of individual-sized desserts. Watch out!