Breakfast: Thanksgiving Day! I remind myself to be especially mindful today. This is a challenge and so difficult on this day of hypocrisy. I describe some of my angst around the holiday in this article I wrote a few years back. We give thanks for all the good that we have and we celebrate with a precious, tortured, slaughtered, innocent life on our plates. We celebrate our gratitude for the abundance of the harvest that the Native Americans helped the Pilgrims produce and then we slaughtered as many of them that we could and put the rest on reservations. Fast forward to today and we are still torturing the Native Americans, threatening what remains of the environment we have left them, with our greedy thirst for more environmentally destructive oil. I am proud of their courage in protesting the Dakota pipeline and everyone who has joined with them in support. Then we went for a brisk walk around downtown Los Gatos. We thought we get a tea at one of the local coffee shops but our rebellious yet admittedly elite attitude had disdain for the chain shops, paper cups and uniformly, pale clientele. We passed and got in the car to search for something more appealing.
Lunch: My suggestion was to go to the next town, Saratoga, to go to the Big Basin Café. We hadn’t been there at all this trip. We like the earthier, rustic, hippy-like atmosphere of this place. Rather than a sweet treat, I tried the Vegan Pie, a savory Mexican-spiced Polenta dish. It was fabulous and I made a mental note to make a recipe for it when I returned home.
We both ordered tea with steamed Soy Milk, in porcelain, not cardboard/plastic cups. I took a couple of sips and felt sick to my stomach. There was dairy milk in my tea. I gave up dairy almost 30 years ago but its disgusting taste is unforgettable. I brought our cups back and the barista blurted out that he was not told that we wanted soy milk. I could tell he felt bad. And I felt sick. He made us new teas with soy milk, but the sickness and sadness lasted for hours. We still need to be vigilant when ordering our beverages with nondairy milk to make sure we get what we want. For those that can’t eat certain foods the restaurant world must be a scary place. People make too many mistakes.
Dinner: We ate well for Thanksgiving. There were all of the omnivore favorites that I prefer not to mention but Gary’s family went out of their way to make sure we had lots to eat. Gary’s brother-in-law veganized his favorite risotto dish, omitting the prosciutto and substituting vegetable broth for chicken broth. It was delicious. Gary helped with the cooking and saved some potatoes for us so they didn’t get mixed with cream cheese and butter (yuck!). Our clean potatoes were fantastic. Gary’s sister brought lots of kale that Gary steamed, she also brought Tofu that Gary baked, and she made an extra sweet Sweet Potato dish. Very sweet!
Of course, we had seconds.
Gary’s sister also brought us vegan cupcakes from Icing on The Cake when she picked up the cake for her daughter’s birthday which fell on Thanksgiving this year.
