Regardless of it’s historic roots, I like to think of Thanksgiving as the perfect official Gratitude Day. Today, I am grateful for good friends and crazy-good crazy-food.

For those of you who are not familiar with the strange custom of stuffing food things inside of other food things, there is a retro recipe called the Turducken. It’s a chicken stuffed into duck stuffed into turkey. Being a vegetarian myself, it’s not something I would personally eat, but I do appreciate the kitsch factor of doing something like this.

To avoid having to take a slice of 3 different pies and a piece of cake, my friend, Charles Phoenix gave us his fabulous Cherpumple – an apple pie stuffed in a pumpkin pie in a cherry pie in a giant cake!

http://www.charlesphoenix.com/cherpumple/

Now vegetables also have nice neat little cavities that you can stuff other things into. Witness the stuffed potato, the stuffed mushroom and stuffed squash. So over the coming holidays, instead of the de rigor veggie turkey or Tofurky, try this vegetable-based creative meal instead. It comes to us from Dan Pashman from the Cooking Channel. It’s a SquashLeekOtato Roast!

http://www.cookingchanneltv.com/recipes/veggieducken-aka-squashleekotato-roast.html

“I realized I could cut the vegetables in half and scoop out the insides, creating a cavity for the next vegetable. I started with the biggest butternut squash I could find, and then looked for vegetables that might fit inside it. Eggplant was a natural choice, then zucchini after that. And to fit into a zucchini? A tiny scallion, obvs. After scooping out the insides—not asuper easy task, but totally doable—I was left with a big bowl of vegetable flesh. So I went #wasteless and decided to turn it all into a stuffing that I could spread between each vegetable layer.”

http://www.epicurious.com/holidays-events/vegducken-best-vegetarian-thanksgiving-dish-article