The Complete Idiot's Guide to Vegan Eating for Kids - M.s.j., Dana Villamagna [68]
Keeping the Holidays Happy
It’s wonderful to be able to celebrate holidays vegan-style, but attending nonvegan holiday gatherings can get complicated. All the food looks extra-good, and your child may feel like the party isn’t a party unless he can sample the appetizers and indulge in the sparkly cookies and creamy pies. Investing time to explain to him what he can and cannot eat and why, and making a couple of his favorite vegan dishes and desserts to add to the party table, goes a long way toward making holiday parties a fun experience for everyone.
Holidays are a great time to host a party and introduce family and friends to the best of vegan fare, or to keep it simple and celebrate as a family alone. Our family’s favorite holiday meal includes appetizers of vegan polenta with fresh basil and tomato dipping sauce; an olive, fruit, and nut tray; and hummus with black-olive-and-rosemary soft breadsticks. For the main dish, we serve barbecued tofu with cranberry relish. Rounding it out are sides like mashed potatoes, sweet blended buttercup/butternut squash, corn on the cob, and crescent rolls. For dessert? Pumpkin cheesecake.
Kids love it when you incorporate color themes into holiday meals. Here are some ideas to add some color:
◆ For Christmas Eve, serve red sauce pizza and green salad.
◆ For the Fourth of July, go for a veg cookout with red (strawberry), white (vegan cream cheese), and blueberry dessert bars.
◆ And don’t forget the bright red box of vegan chocolates on Valentine’s Day! (Our favorite is made by Rose City Chocolatiers—www.rosecitychocolates.com.)
That’s So Vegan
Find an entire list of vegan Thanksgiving-style recipes at vegweb.com/index.php?board=304.0.VegWeb.com is one of the most comprehensive veg recipe sites in the world.
Keep your kids in the holiday mix with traditions. Host neighborhood potlucks for other veg or veg-friendly families. Try your hand at veganizing old family favorites. You may be surprised at how close you can come to making Grandma’s famous wedding cookies taste exactly like hers but without the dairy or eggs.
And while holidays are a primo opportunity to show off vegan skills, it’s also smart to take some of the focus off of food, gifts, and big-money events for your kids and move it toward family time. That way, when they go to the relatives’ for a holiday, food won’t seem like the end-all, be-all of the event.
Crowd Pleasers
Unless you live in an intentional vegan community, it’s pretty safe to say that most of your kids’ friends, classmates, and neighbors aren’t vegan. So you need a few crowd-pleasing standards for omnivorous kids you feed during play dates, sleepovers, potlucks, parties, and barbecues.
For a quick omni/veg mixed play date or sleepover dinner, meat substitutes are the winner because many of them are barely distinguishable from the animal-based version. Vegan chicken nuggets, chicken patties, or burger crumbles for chili or tacos are great choices. Pair them with some fun-shape pasta served with vegan butter and vegan Parmesan cheese. End with some fruit or Tofutti Cuties for dessert, and you’ve got yourself a thumbs-up meal! If you want to avoid meat analogs, other good bets are the Tofu Dunkers with dipping sauces (recipe in Chapter 13), A-B-Vegan Soup (recipe in Chapter 13), or any of Amy’s Kitchen’s brand veg meals. If all else fails, there’s always peanut butter and jelly!
Potlucks, parties, and barbecues are fun because most people at parties, including kids, are usually more apt to try new foods, and discussion often centers on tastes, ingredients, and recipes. Our Everything in a Blanket appetizers (recipe later in this chapter) will fly off the trays at your next party. Bring the Barbecue Tofu (recipe later in this chapter), which is easily transportable and tastes good hot, warm, or cold,