The Internet provides a vast selection of veggie recipes as well as various sales pitches for meat substitutes like tofu turkey to help you make tasty and festive victuals while avoiding poultry, pork, beef or seafood.

"We saw early on there was this niche ... because vegetarians were left out of holiday picture," said Seth Tibbott, president and founder of Turtle Island Foods, which sells Tofurky, made from soy and wheat.

On its Web site, http://www.tofurky.com, you can find out which stores in your area sell Tofurky, or order it online.

Some households with college age kids may be in for a surprise this Thanksgiving. Up to 20 percent of students are vegetarian, according to a 1999 study done by the National Restaurant Association. Parents who send carnivorous kids off to school may find that when Junior comes home for the holiday break, he's changed his diet and won't eat turkey.

That's what happened 15 years ago to Bruce Friedrich, who is now the director of vegan outreach for the animal rights group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA).

"It was my first year of college and I met some of the other college students who were vegetarians," Friedrich said. "I showed up back at home and said, 'No more animal flesh for me.' It was the Thanksgiving of 1987 and my parents had to scramble to find something else, but fortunately it's gotten a lot easier."

PETA's Web site, http://www.goveg.com, offers a link providing ideas on what to serve vegetarian holiday guests. Just click on Guess Who's Coming to Dinner and you can get the tips and recipes for meatless holiday cooking.

KNOW YOUR GUESTS

Before you begin to prepare any dishes, you should ask whether your guests eat eggs or dairy. If you are having vegan guests, they will not eat anything that comes from animals.

The International Vegetarian Union (http://www.ivu.org) defines the different types of vegetarians out there, which can help you decide what ingredients to buy.

The site also has definitions of commonly used meat substitutes like tofu, which is soy bean curd, and seitan, a form of wheat gluten.

Once you know what ingredients to use, you can plan your menu accordingly.

The International Vegetarian Union site has scores of holiday recipes that offer instructions for meat-free versions of many traditional Thanksgiving and Christmas food recipes.

The recipes range from side dishes like candied sweet potatoes and wild rice and chestnut stuffing to meatless main dishes like Pan Fried Tofu and Vegetable and Rice Stuffed Pumpkin. There are also recipes for a wide array of European holiday specialties ranging from Irish Seitan Stew to Vegan Paella.

In a Vegetarian Kitchen (http://www.vegkitchen.com) has recipes for Thanksgiving, Christmas, Hanukkah, Valentine's Day and other holidays.

Turtle Island Foods, based in Oregon, was the first to nationally market a vegetarian alternative for the holidays when it started selling Tofurkys in 1995, its founder Tibbott said.

A vegetarian himself, he came up with the idea of mass marketing a turkey alternative after 20 years of disappointing Thanksgivings without a satisfying main course.

In those days, he said, vegetarians were offered mashed potatoes and peas, "whereas everybody else was having this fabulous turkey."

Turtle Island sold 500 Tofurkys in its first holiday season. Last year, the company sold 104,000 of the turkey alternatives in the last three months of the year, when it does the bulk of its business. This year Tibbott expects to sell about 130,000 during that time.

Another online option is a Wellington - "an elegant display of puff pastry filled with savory native seitan, tangerine yams, cranberry chestnut stuffing ruby red chard, caramelized onions, with shallot mushroom gravy on the side."