A bowl of mashed potatoes, next to soup and stuffed mushrooms.

Thanksgiving has a reputation for endless brining methods, divisive side dishes, and argumentative relatives. It’s no wonder hosting can be stressful. Unless you’ve got The Right Stuffing, that is. This series is devoted to all things related to the Thanksgiving meal, and it will help you create dishes that appear on your table year after year—even if it can’t help you manage your relatives.

The traditional Thanksgiving menu is not exactly vegan friendly (or even vegetarian friendly). Nearly every dish contains cream, butter, eggs, or turkey stock, and the whole thing is centered around a large, dead bird.

This can leave vegetarians, vegans, and lactose-intolerant folk feeling less than thankful, which is not the mood one wants to cultivate amongst one’s guests. In my experience, most vegans are more than willing to bring a few dishes that fit their diet, but you can make your meat-abstaining and dairy-avoidant friends feel welcomed and loved with just a few tweaks and supplementary dishes.

In previous years, I’ve drawn heavily from the following recipes and hacks. My sister is allergic to dairy proteins, my boyfriend is lactose-intolerant, and two of my very good friends are vegan and vegetarian. I’m not worried though. I got this, and so do you.

Perhaps Sir Beef would have a problem with this, but I say poppy-cock! Mushrooms are superb: filling, full of texture, plentiful, affordable, and extremely juicy when cooked. Let’s wrap those suckers in a blanket of vegan puff pastry.

Surprisingly, vegan puff pastry is way more prevalent than you might think. The butter version is more expensive and you can bet that most commercially made puffs are actually made with oil or vegetable shortening, unless it explicitly states butter. Pepperidge farm has a frozen, boxed version that contains no animal products, and so does Jus-Rol. When you check your local grocery store’s freezer section for puff pastry, turn over to the ingredients to find out. Try this recipe from the Kitchn, and don’t worry about the egg in the ingredient list—it’s to egg wash the top of the pastry, and you’ll be fine without it.

This mushroom-heavy casserole is high on deep, developed flavor and low on glop. It’s creamy, savory, and full of alliums (onions, shallots, and garlic!). Making the soup base requires a bit more effort than opening a can, but you can make it a week ahead of time, then keep it in the fridge for easy assembly on Thanksgiving day.

Speaking of mushrooms, they will also make for a filling side dish loaded with umami and opportunity. Stuffed mushrooms can be made using your readily available white button or baby cremini mushies, or make individual main courses with large portobellos. Just pop out the stem (reserve them) and you have the perfect vessel for any combination of chopped herbs, nuts, vegan cream cheese, bread crumbs, or beans. Don’t forget to chop up those stems as part of the mixture. Line up the empty mushrooms on a foiled and oiled baking sheet, and pack them full of your mixture of choice. Depending on how big they are, bake them for 20-40 minutes in a 350°F oven.

Brining is not just for the birds! Soaking a whole head of cauliflower in salty, sugary water before roasting it infuses the whole vegetable with flavor, turning your cauliflower into a wowiflower. I use a 10% salt brine, as recommended by Matty Matheson, but take heed: You’ll want to make sure the brine cools fully before pouring it over the cauliflower, and make sure to use sea salt for the brine—I brined cauliflower with iodized salt a while back and it was a bit too salty. (And that’s saying something, because I am obsessed with salt.)

Vegetarians and vegans often get the short end of the stick when it comes to presentation, so give them something pretty to look at, and make it tasty. This fanned delicata squash dish is—in addition to being very beautiful—glazed with miso, brown sugar, a fresh hot chilies.

Did you know that you can make comforting, cozy, creamy vegetable soups without any cream (or any dairy, for that matter)? All you need is (a lot of) fat—like, at least half a cup of olive oil—vegetables, and your favorite vegetable or chickpea broth. Sauté the veg in the fat, then blend them with the stock in a high-powered blender and season to taste. It’s so easy, you barely need a recipe, but or course I have one.

Eggplant parm sounds like a no-brainer for a vegan main course, but what about the cheese? Luckily for us, modern food science has reached incredible levels, especially when it comes to vegan cheeses. Check out the non-dairy section of your grocery store and likely you’ll find at least two vegan mozzarellas in there. Once you select your plant-based cheeses, whip up this bright and tangy, ultra-simple vegan marinara to enrobe your juicy eggplant slices. Smother in melty, non-dairy cheese, and bake it according to the recipe directions.

I originally developed this elaborate stuffed kabocha dish four years ago—what is time?—as a sort of vegetarian answer to the Turducken. This thing is packed with carrots, mushrooms, shallots, and herbs, but it’s the whole head of roasted garlic that makes it special.

Yes, there are plenty of frozen vegan roasts out there, but very few feature mock duck and mock goose, the latter of which is designed to crisp up and give your roast a crackling skin. Make it if you’re serving a gaggle of meat avoiders, and be sure to prepare the stuffing and gravy. What is Thanksgiving without stuffing and gravy?

Don’t overthink it: A pot of warm, fragrant, comforting lima beans will be welcomed by all (especially if you have any Southern vegans in attendance). Limas make their own gravy and rarely need more than salt and pepper, but you can make yours extra special by simmering them with a bouquet garni of seasonal herbs, along with a whole head of garlic.

Leaving Brussels on their stalk makes for a stunning, completely vegan centerpiece. I mean, just look at it. Making little cross-sections in the sprouts ensure the maple glaze gets deep down into the vegetable, and that glaze is good. When it’s time to serve the sprouts, slice them off with a sharp knife or hold the stalk perpendicular to the table and carve them off, churrascaria style. It requires slightly more effort than serving already liberated sprouts from a serving bowl, but nowhere near as much as carving a turkey.

I don’t have a “proper” recipe for vegan mashed potatoes, but you don’t really need one. With all of the recent advances in vegan technology, you almost have too many options. You can add fat and body with coconut cream, buttery flavor with Miyoko’s vegan butter, and emulsify everything together with vegan mayo (I like “Just Mayo”).

But the real hack doesn’t lie in the substitutes, but the extras: Roast two or three heads of garlic until they’re dark and stick, then mash and fold the sweet and tender cloves into your spuds. Top the whole thing with vegan parm and shove it under the broiler for a few minutes to create a crisp, savory crust.

Who says Thanksgiving can’t be an international affair? One of the most minimal, but flavorful, Thai dishes I like to whip up is Galam bplee pad nam pbla, or large strips of cabbage stir fried with plenty of garlic, oil, and fish sauce. Replacing the fish sauce is easy to do. To make it deliciously vegan, substitute the small amount of fish sauce with a vegan option like tamari, soy sauce, or this vegan fish sauce. It’s an affordable crowd pleaser that, thankfully, has few components and takes minutes to cook and plate.

Claire is Lifehacker's Senior Food Editor. She has a B.S. in chemistry, a decade of food journalism experience, and a deep love for mayonnaise and MSG.

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