Thanksgiving

Let me walk you through the experience of eating a fresh gougère. It's surprisingly light as you pick it up, almost insubstantial and still hot from the oven. The crispy shell crunches as you pull it open, releasing a puff of savory steam. Then you hit the middle: soft, eggy, and indecently cheesy. Two bites and it's gone. You're going to want to make a batch of these soon, trust me.

Ingredients
 

From Chef Mark Reinfeld's menu for A Holiday Vegan Feast:

Our friend Brian Beadle is kind of a finicky eater -- he’s a meat and potatoes man. You could say he is sort of a "spuds specialist." His mashed potato recipe is fairly standard but his trick is to slip tiny pats of cold butter down into and throughout the hot potatoes when they are in their serving dish. The butter melts into hidden pools buried deep in the mashed potatoes to be discovered with each delicious forkful.

Baking the galette on a pizza stone ensures a very crisp bottom crust. But a baking pan or cookie sheet will work just fine too. Patch any little tears in the crust with extra pieces of dough and smooth them with a wet finger so the juices won’t leak out of the galette. Don’t fret when you are folding over the dough; if the edges are a little rough, they will only add to the rustic character of this delicious dessert.

We came up with this soup years ago simply by using two things we always have plenty of at Thanksgiving: turkey stock and leftover mashed potatoes. Now we make even this when we don’t have leftover potatoes. This soup is quite delicate and soothing after all the Thanksgiving gluttony.

We use browned flour, cooked until it is the color of a wooden spoon, to add rich deep flavor while it thickens our gravy.

We prefer the sweet flavorful flesh of the kabocha squash over any other pie pumpkin. The chestnut-like texture of this pie makes it especially toothsome.