Foodie confession: I was a vegetarian for nearly 10 years. During that decade, I ate a lot of terrible, god-awful vegetarian food. But worse than the microwave dinners and portobello mushroom burgers was the onslaught of Tofurkey, the go-to Thanksgiving option of aunts who try to please their picky vegetarian nieces. I'll never truly understand why vegetarian cooking has to mean tofu, seitan, and—worst of all—that gelatinous mixture of "natural vegan flavors" that masquerades as a viable food option come Thanksgiving.

Photo by Chelsea Kyle, Prop Styling by Alex Brannian, Food Styling by Michelle Gatton

Part of the reason I headed to culinary school in the first place was to tackle the awful vegetarian cooking of the early aughts: the overcooked pastas, the cheese fries masquerading as real food. Culinary school coerced me into cooking—and, eventually, eating—meat, but I'm still an advocate for vegetarian cooking. And while today's vegetarian landscape has improved a thousandfold, Thanksgiving still relies on sad packaged mains or, more likely, a mix of side dishes that's meant to add up to a complete dinner, without a centerpiece to focus on.

No more! With a little vegetable finessing (read: weeks and weeks of vegetable finessing), I created a vegetarian main so delicious, so satisfying—and yes, so crazy—that vegetarians will weep with joy. A meat eater may even shed a tear, too. Because the Vegducken is just as ludicrous as turducken—and a lot more delicious. Here's how I did it.

I Stuffed It

Turducken (a chicken stuffed into duck stuffed into turkey) is strange as hell, but at least it makes sense anatomically—each bird has a built-in cavity for the smaller bird to be stuffed into. Stuffing hard, raw vegetables into each other seemed nowhere near as easy. But after doing a little research (where I came across Dan Pashman's veggieducken, which he created for the Cooking Channel a few years ago) 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 a super 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.