Yes, I know this is way, way too pre-holiday, but I had an idea, and I'm excited!

So I was catching up on all the foodblogs in the land after getting back from vacation, paying particular attention to the prolific VeganMoFo contingent. As a side note: I'm never sure what to do about VeganMoFo. I'm not vegan, and have no intention of changing this, but I do eat veg and vegan quite a bit of the time, and it's always great to push your boundaries and come up with some delicious new food you really love. Of course, this year we were on birthday vacation, so that pretty much put a damper on that.

Anyway, I went over to Awesome. Vegan. Rad., where I came across a truly fabulous-looking dish of vegan cassoulet from the recipe in Veganomicon.

First of all, I want some of that right now, even though we are still in California and the high temperature today is still 74F. Second, that book is not five feet away on my cookbook shelf. Third, we have a history of hosting vegetarian or vegan orphans' thanksgiving. So, what if we make a massive cassoulet for this year's orphans' thanksgiving?

Rough menu plan, which will obviously change quite a bit with input from other people:
- The above-mentioned cassoulet
- A vegetable soup (carrot or maybe cauliflower-roasted garlic) with potential croutons
- Roasted vegetable melange (sweet potato, onion, radish, other roots)
- Mashed potatoes and mushroom gravy
- Some sort of green component (braised greens; salad; maybe include cranberries here?)
- Another proteiny component (I don't know yet)
- Wine (& maybe some mulled wine this year?)
- Pumpkin pie is obviously required.

Now I'm even more excited for real fall to get here.

AWESOME.