Stuart Bradford

No turkeys were harmed in the writing of this column.

For the past three weeks, The New York Times’s Well blog has been collecting holiday vegetarian and vegan recipes from an all-star team of chefs and food writers. The haul has been mouthwatering: among other things, crisp low-fat zucchini cakes; avocado and grapefruit salad; honey-roasted acorn squash; chestnut and apple casserole; and a surprisingly easy chocolate-pumpkin bread pudding made with coconut milk instead of dairy products.

To nonvegetarians, Thanksgiving without turkey may sound like heresy. But shifting your focus from the bird to the rest of the meal can have a surprising effect on both your eating habits and the creativity of your cooking.

“It makes for good eating to reconsider and create dishes that let vegetables play a major role,” said Michael Anthony, executive chef of Gramercy Tavern in New York City.

He has created a vegetarian tasting menu at his restaurant — but not, he emphasized, to attract vegetarians.

“It’s not a way to pull a niche market into the restaurant, nor is it designed to be an escape from regular food,” Mr. Anthony said. “It’s meant to be a celebration of vegetables, and a great snapshot of what’s available in the farmers’ market and what’s growing in family farms around our area.”

Interest in vegetarian cooking is surging, even among those who eat meat. A study published by Vegetarian Times in 2008 found that 3 percent of American adults, or 7.3 million people, are vegetarians, including about a million who follow a vegan diet, eating no eggs, milk, cheese or other animal products. But about 10 percent, or 22.8 million people, say they are trying to eat less meat and increase their consumption of fruits, vegetables and grains.

EatingWell magazine plans a vegetarian cookbook for the spring, said Jessie Price, its deputy food editor. “Our readers keep saying, ‘Give us more vegetarian recipes,’ ” she said. “And it’s not just vegetarians. It’s people who eat meat who want to have more meals each week that are vegetarian.”

Many Americans are still not eating enough vegetables. This fall, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said that only 26 percent of the nation’s adults ate vegetables three or more times a day. A separate report from NPD Group, a market research consultant, found that four out of five American meals did not include vegetables.

The cookbook writer Joan Nathan says the problem is that many home chefs can’t imagine creating an interesting meal without putting meat in the middle of the plate.

“You can get rid of the idea of the turkey as the center of the meal,” said Ms. Nathan, author of the new “Quiches, Kugels and Couscous: My Search for Jewish Cooking in France” (Knopf). Vegetarian dishes, she added, “can stand by themselves.”

Ms. Nathan said that she was still planning to serve turkey this Thanksgiving, but that focusing on the side dishes can make for more creative cooking. “The sides are where you can take risks,” she told me.

Among Ms. Nathan’s vegetarian holiday recipes are an apple-parsnip soup, a baked-squash “cassolita” with caramelized onions, and an Alsatian pear kugel with prunes.

The vegan chef Chloe Coscarelli of Los Angeles and most of her family have had a turkey-free Thanksgiving for the past 10 years. Every fall, she and her mother experiment with new meat-free dishes and work to “veganize” some of the traditional family favorites.

“My family decided it wouldn’t make Thanksgiving any better tasting to have turkey on the table,” said Ms. Coscarelli, whose holiday recipes include maple-roasted brussels sprouts and portobello mushrooms filled with savory lentil-cashew stuffing. “I have served an all-vegan Thanksgiving to the most diehard carnivores, and no one misses the meat.”

Although I’m not a vegetarian, I stopped eating turkey two years ago, mostly because it’s not a meat I enjoy preparing or eating. But that small decision has also changed the way I cook and eat during the fall and winter holiday food season.

Last week I returned from a shopping trip with more than a week’s worth of food. Except for a single package of chicken breasts, my bags were filled mostly with produce and grains. So far, my daughter and I have feasted on a delicious skillet mac-and-cheese dish packed with broccoli, onions and mushrooms; roasted brussels sprouts; a caramelized onion tart; and parsnip-and-apple soup. We still have plans to make an Indian-spiced sweet-and-sour butternut squash; zucchini boats with herbed ricotta; and an unusual buckwheat-and-black-kale dish created by Mr. Anthony. The chicken is now in the freezer because I haven’t gotten around to cooking with it.

Silvana Nardone, who wrote the new “Cooking for Isaiah: Gluten-Free and Dairy-Free Recipes for Easy, Delicious Meals” (Reader’s Digest), has learned that cooking challenges — like having a vegetarian husband and a son who requires gluten-free food — have made her far more creative. Among her creations is a supermoist “double corn” cornbread and gluten-free pumpkin muffins with crumble topping.

“It forced me to be a better cook,” she said.



To see the recipes featured in this column and all the dishes from Well’s Vegetarian Thanksgiving series, go to www.nytimes.com/vegetarianthanksgiving.