This is one of my absolute favorite Thanksgiving dishes. For years, I had felt that my vegetarian nephew (who now eats meat because he’s in the restaurant business but ate none from age 11 to age 22) got the short end of the stick at Thanksgiving. Sure, he could eat all the side dishes, but that just didn’t seem very celebratory. And there were usually at least a couple of other vegetarians at the table each year who were in the same fix. So when senior food editor Alexis Touchet developed this elegant vegetarian main dish for the 2003 Thanksgiving issue, I decided to give it a try. It was the hit of the meal—delicious, unusual, hearty but not too filling. When we pushed back our chairs, there was still plenty of turkey on the table, but the lasagne had long since disappeared. Now it’s a standard for me. And besides, it reminds me of Calvin Trillin’s adage that the true national Thanksgiving dish should be not turkey but pasta carbonara. —John Willoughby, Executive Editor
Pinterest
