I love being able to delight my family with holiday treats that include a twist. Traditionally, my family would serve sinfully delicious ice cream in special dishes reserved for entertaining. The kids would sit at a special table, fully decorated for the festivities. I get giddy just thinking about melding tradition with new recipes and décor that are more on trend and appropriate for my family at this time. We all grow, change and develop, and this year I will be cooking and entertaining without using dairy. The beauty of this type of change is that you don’t have to alter much in order to change a lot. Using the right products, traditional dishes can be morphed and elevated to something exquisitely better than the original. That’s what growth is about.

 Stroganoff is one of those dishes passed along for generations. A comforting, hearty winter meal, I envision my grandparents dining in front of a roaring fire while watching the snow fall. The only issue for me is that traditionally, it is meats (and leftovers) that are turned into stroganoff. My husband despises turkey, and I want to entertain over the holidays with elevated dishes that give a nod to the past without using the double creams favoured by generations past. In order to satisfy all of my goals, I decided to alter the original recipe to include a variety of mouth-watering mushrooms, replace the dairy with Silk Almond Beverage and present everything inside a delectable puff pastry cup that uses no dairy.