My friend runs this fantastic monthly movie watching and discussion group called Javaflix. We watch a movie, then we talk about it, and then just hang out. It’s totally cool. Last week, we watched Blood Diamond (yeah, so freakin heartwarming), but the best part was that there were guests there from Sierra Leone, and they brought some homemade vittles! Whoohoo!
Some simple, yet delicious, fried sweet potatoes. I love me some sweet potatoes. Seriously, my favorite root vegetable of all time.

Again, some simple fried sweet plantains. You all already know how much I freakin love me some plantains!

The piece de resistance? A fish stew… or as they call in Sierra Leone, soup. Yeppers, they call stew soup there. So behold the fish soup. It mostly consisted of sweet and melt in your mouth onions, some red and green onions, and just a smattering of fish thrown in there. It wasn’t as spicy as it looks… it looks more lethal than it was. It was just good. Greasy and delicious. I want to learn how to make this!

I’m not one of these people crazy about thanksgiving. Now I love turkey and mashed potatoes just like the next person, but I don’t need a special day on the calendar to require it. My family never does much for it anyway. And this year, I didn’t even hang out with them. Instead, I had the pleasure of enjoying my first vegetarian thanksgiving brunch with k and c and her immediate family. It was all delicious.

Witness the blueberry french toast casserole that was one of the “brunch” dishes. That be chunks of cream cheese in there. Drool. It was nice and mild, and not too sweet. There was also some blueberry syrup to pour over it.

There were also assorted pastries (bapka and muffins) and this gorgeous spinach frittata. It was so hot that it cracked the plate. Oh, and seeing as how it was brunch, we had mimosas. And by we, I mean mostly me. I believe I drank most of them.

On the “Thanksgiving” side of things, we had roasted acorn squash stuffed with wild rice stuffing. So gorgeous and lovely. I’m not much of a stuffing person, let alone an acorn squash person, but I did enjoy this. Would I ever order something like this in a restaurant? No, but I was definitely game for this on this fine vegetarian day.

I’ve never really had brussel sprouts in my life. I think I tasted one once for the first time in grad school. To me it just tasted a bit sour. I never tried one again. Not because I did not like it, but because I never ordered it out nor did I ever make it on my own. So really, I just never had the opportunity. These were glazed roasted brussel sprouts, and they were delightful little morsels of kid-hated forced-fed veggies. If this is how brussel sprouts were prepared all the time, all kids in this world would love brussel sprouts. Look how gorgeous they are. They tasted gorgeous too.

Of course we had some roasted potatoes. We also had garlic mashed potatoes, the obligatory corn. One of the highlights of the meal for me was the soup – rosemary butternut bisque. It wasn’t much to look at, just an orangey paste, but man, it was beyond delicious. I had two helpings, and I could have had more. I would have ladled it over rice and eaten it for a week. So so good.

And of course we had pies. I brought sweet potato and peach (and by the way the sweet potato pie that I bought at Giant, some of the best sweet potato pie I’ve ever had) and k’s mom made a cream cheese pie. All in all, even without turkey, it was a great feast for the eyes and the stomach.