Thanksgiving Dinner

Aaaahhh, Thanksgiving!  One of my favorite holidays!  What can be better than a holiday centered around food.  This was our first Gluten Free Thanksgiving.  I was sad at first.  Josh and I had just moved North, away from my family, and even farther away from Josh's family.  I have grown to love many family traditions, and Thanksgiving with out family AND with out gluten and dairy was looking dreary.  And, to top it all off, Josh had to work on Thanksgiving day.  But, with a little help from Betty Crocker, Artisanal Gluten-Free Cooking (by Kellie and Peter Bronski), Silk's soy products, and some elbow grease, Thanksgiving 2010 was a success.  On the menu was:

 Turkey Gravy

 

 Pumpkin Pie

Brined Turkey

 Green Bean Casserole 

Spinach Dip

Betty Crocker Pumpkin Bars

Not pictured, but also included in the meal were mashed potatoes and then GF bread for the Spinach dip.  I was going to make corn bread stuffing as well, but I had made that a couple weeks earlier, and while it tasted pretty good, my time line and oven space were packed.  So I ditched the stuffing.  But here is a picture of it, anyway:

It had a good flavor, but the texture was not my favorite, as far as stuffing goes.  Of course, it was CORN BREAD stuffing, so that makes sense.  It had sausage in it, and was delicious.  But I like my stuffing to be from bread, not CORN bread.  Hence the skipping of it for Thanksgiving.

Let me describe each item from the menu in the oder in which it was prepared.  I started with the pie crust.  This recipe came from the Bronski GF cook book.  It was very tasty.  Only thing I noticed, and that I will have to be careful with next time, is the flour I use.  I grind my own rice flour (then, and now I also grind my own sorghum).  It is WAY cheaper.  I have a hand crank grinder that my wonderful mother in law bought me.  The kids can help by taking turns turning the handle, and I don't have to use my little coffee grinder, which sounds like it is about to die after the third time running.  Also, I can only run 1/4 cup of rice through the little coffee grinder at once, and I haven't ever tried the sorghum in it.  I use to run the rice through the hand crank grinder 3 times in order to get the consistency that I wanted.  But, I noticed, that though the batter felt like it had the texture of sand, no matter how many times I ran the rice through the grinder, when I baked it, I couldn't tell the difference between once through and 3 times through.  BUT, I could tell in pie crusts and streusel topping.  I think it has something to do with the amount of liquid, and there for the amount of moister it has to soak up.  So, next time, I will have to buy Bob's Red Mill  Brown Rice Flour for the flour blend.  Another thing to note is the actual pie filling.  I used a VERY sweet variety of pie pumpkin.  The guy from little farm we bought it from actually said it was the sweetest variety that there is.  The recipe called for 1 can sweetened condensed milk.  We can't have dairy, so I substituted the milk for Soy vanilla creamer.  The creamer tasted sweet enough to me, and I thought, with the very sweet pumpkin pie, we should be good.  WRONG!  It was NOT sweet AT ALL.  But, I was able to rectify the situation with a big bit of soy vanilla ice cream with each bit of pumpkin pie, and it was very yummy.  The crust was still pretty good, just not on the edges where it wasn't touching the pie filling.

Next came the Pumpkin Streusel Cheesecake Bars.  Now, THEY were YUMMY!!!!!!!!!  I am telling you, if you want a SWEET AMAZING TREAT, reach for this Betty Crocker recipe, a box of Gluten Free Yellow Cake and some pumpkin!  This was a free recipe on line, so I feel I am able to post it here.  I also have a link to it at the start of this paragraph.  I changed the recipe a bit, to make it dairy free as well, I included that with the recipe (in parenthesis):

1 box Betty Crocker Gluten Free yellow cake mix

1/2 cup finely chopped pecans

1/2 cup butter, softened (I used vegetable oil)

2 packages, 8 oz each, cream cheese, softened (I used Tofutti Better Than Cream Cheese)

1 cup sugar

1 cup canned pumpkin (I used fresh cooked pumpkin)

1 TBSP pumpkin pie spice

2 TBSP whipping cream (I used Silk Creamer)

2 eggs

1. Heat oven to 350°F. In medium bowl, stir together cake mix and pecans. With pastry blender or fork, cut in butter until mixture is crumbly. Reserve 1 cup mixture for topping. In bottom of ungreased 13x9-inch pan, press remaining mixture. Bake 10 minutes.

2. In large bowl, beat cream cheese and sugar with electric mixer on medium speed until smooth. Add remaining ingredients; beat until well blended. Pour over warm crust. Sprinkle with reserved topping.

3. Bake about 35 minutes or until center is set. Cool 30 minutes. Refrigerate about 2 hours or until chilled. For bars, cut into 6 rows by 4 rows. Store covered in refrigerator.

I can not say it enough, THEY WERE YUMMY!  Truly!  Now I make these whenever I want to take a treat some where.  There is no way anyone will ever guess they are gluten free.

Next was the turkey.  I used a brine and I also put white wine in the pan to cook with the turkey, per the recipe in Artisanal Gluten-Free Cooking.  The meat was so juicy, and the white wine gave it a nice flavor.  The white wine also made the gravy taste so good.  The only think about the recipe that I didn't like was how long it wanted me to cook it.  I should have trusted my thermometer, but because the recipe told me to cook the turkey on it's back for the first 2 hours, and then flip it, I was afraid that maybe the thermometer might be off.  So the breast meat was a little dry at the top, mainly because the skin got stuck to the pan because I did not have a rack for it to sit in.  I issue that has been since remedied.  The turkey was SO good that it was GONE in one meal.  Yeah, you heard me, all of it gone!  It was a 17.5 pound turkey, and my family of five (oldest 6 years old) gobbled it down like no bodies business.  I was a little bummed by this.  I love left overs.  

As for the gravy (getting a little out of order now), I deviated from the recipe a bit.  Where I come from, gravy is CREAMY!  The recipe from the Artisanal Gluten-Free Cooking did not call for any milk.  I was appalled.  How can a gravy recipe NOT call for MILK!?!?!?!  So, I added some silk soy milk.  I use the organic, unsweetened kind, so things that aren't supposed to be sweet, don't turn out sweet.  It works great.  I also added a little corn starch to give it a thicker texture.  I think I may have used a little too much, as you can see by the picture above.  But that white wine; finer licking good!  Definitely made the gravy my favorite part of the meal.

The spinach dip was a disaster.  I used a recipe I got from on line.  It called for WAY too much basil.  I usually use Knorr Spinach Dip, but not any more.  It contains dairy.  Bummer.   So, I am still on the look out for a good, dairy free, spinach dip.  But, of course, Josh loved it.  But he likes basil.  Too bad, because I am never making it again.  The bread I made to go with it, I have made before.  I have made this before.  I put a link on it to the blog I did about it.  It was tasty.  When we ran out of mashed potatoes, I pulled a Great Grandpa Clayton move, and poured gravy on some bread chunks.  Mmmmmmmmmm!!!!!!!!!

And of course we can't forget the mashed potatoes.  You just CANNOT have Thanksgiving with out mashed potatoes.  I got this recipe from Artisanal Gluten-Free Cooking, but I had to change it a bit to make it dairy free.  I used soy creamer instead of evaporated milk, and I also used regular russet potatoes, instead of Yukon Gold.  I love Yukon Gold, don't get me wrong, but I had russet on hand.  It turned out just fine, but I only eat mashed potatoes so I can eat GRAVY!

Lastly we have the green bean casserole.  This was a bit difficult.  I should have planned a head and made the fried onions the day before.  But I didn't.  I got the recipe from glutenfreemommy.com.  I was going to post pictures of the process, but Gluten Free Mommy already did that.  So here is the finished product.  I have them sitting on the top ledge of my stove, on a brown paper bag.  They were so yummy.

It was quite difficult though.  I had to cute them thinly, which I did with the help of my Pampered Chef Ultimate Mandoline.  Of course, mine is not new and fancy like the model I linked to.  Mine is from 2003.  But, although it is on it's last legs, it worked very well for slicing the onions nice and thin and uniform.  Then I had to soak them in the milk.  (Note here, save the milk.  You can use it in the actual recipe for the green bean casserole.)  Then I had to dreg them in the flour mixture, which was part soy flour, part tapioca starch, I think.  I can't remember now, for sure.  Then came the frying.  This got kind of messy.  By the time I was done frying all the onions, the oil had tons of brown soy flour mixture at the bottom.  VERY GROSS.  But I had a nice supply of onions for the top of my green bean casserole.  But then I had to make the cream of mushroom soup.  I kind of looked at a recipe before I started, and then I just did it on my own.  I took a ton of dairy free margarine, a half a pound or so of fresh chopped mushrooms and a half a cup of chopped onion.  I sautéed that for 5 or 10 minutes.  Then I added the soy milk that the onions had been soaking in, and let the get nice a warm.  Then I took a little bit of soy milk and two tablespoons of corn starch (mixed together really well) and poured it in, and let it cook until it was thickened.  Then I added some salt and pepper.  Ta da!  Then I mixed the soup and the green beans, 1/3 of the fried onions, and some more pepper together in a casserole dish, and cooked it for 35 minutes.  Then I put the rest of the onions on top, and let it cook for another 5 minutes.  And then it was done.

And that was the BIG meal.  It took me 10 hours total.  I think next year I will definitely have to think ahead a bit, more than  just brining the turkey the night before.

Costa Rican Slaw

Cabbage, red cabbage, carrot, beet, cilantro, olive oil, apple cider vinegar, honey, salt and pepper.  WOW!  I wasn't brave enough to try the beet, I admit.  And I accidentally put parsley instead of cilantro in it.  So, that affect the over all taste.  But over all, it was pretty tasty.  I really like cabbage salads.  I use to make an oriental cabbage salad with Ramon Noodles, but can't do that any more.  This wasn't quite as good as that, but it was still good.  It seems silly to go into much more detail (like rating it).  All the ingredients are fresh, so you can't really keep them on hand that easily.  And it is quite simple.  I used my food processor to shredded it all.  At the time I only had a tiny little food processor, and it was kind of hard, but  now I have a regular size one, and I don't think I would have a problem with it.

Just more proof that there are lots of different kind of things you can eat, even if you can't have gluten and dairy. Artisanal Gluten-Free Cooking is a great book.  It has lots of diverse recipes.

Corn Bread

Another home run from Artisanal Gluten-Free Cooking!  If I could only make one bread, I would not feel deprived if this was it.  So delicious and satisfying.  It was also super easy to make.  Mix, pour, bake and wa-la!  Perfect corn bread.  We actually made this again when my mother was visiting, and we used Truvia sweetner, because she has sugar allergies.  She used a 1 to 1 ratio, and you are supposed to do 1 to .5 ratio.  But the cornbread was the BEST I have ever tasted.  It was so sweet and yummy.  So, if you want a sweet kick, double the sugar!

On to the recipe rating:

*Difficulty: 5 out of 5 stars

     

*Time: 5 out of 5 stars

     

*Price: 4 out of 5 stars

     A whole batch (9x9 pan) cost $2.62 .  If you get 9 pieces out of it, that is almost 30 cents a piece.  Not bad, for gluten free.  4 stars because the price is going to have to be MIND boggling good to get 5 stars.

*OHA: 5 out of 5 stars

     I totally had everything I need to make this.  And actually, this has become a very easy back up plan for dinner.  I can whip this up quickly, and add it to dinner, with ease.  Now, I just have to keep honey on hand.

*Yum Factor: 5 out of 5 stars

    Moist, sweet, corny!  Perfect!

*Over All Rating:  4.8 out of 5 stars

Gluten Free Goop!

Alright, here it is.  For the first time, my very own gluten free recipe!  Goop!  Just like momma use to make, except...different.  I have missed the days of quick meals ever since fast food places became OUT of the question.  I miss the days when the clock read 5:00 and Josh would look at me, after a long hard day, and say, "what's for dinner" with a tone in his voice that I knew meant he was hoping to help me out by taking us all out for dinner.  From the quick calls to the pizza place that delivered, to the McDonald's drive through, our quick and easy dinners are no more.

I do have a few "quick" meals hidden away, but they have cost a pretty penny.  If you want to buy a box of gluten free, dairy free mac n' cheese, you are going to pay 20 times the cost of regular mac n' cheese.  That's right $6.50 or more.  And it tastes alright, but it's not the same, and I dare say, NOT worth the cost.  So I also have bags of pre-made GF pasta.  I boil some water and then I heat up some canned spaghetti sauce, and I have myself dinner, but that gets pretty boring after awhile too.

So, on this particular day, I decided to make GOOP.  I had recently mastered the art of GF/DF cream of mushroom soup, which is the main ingredient in GOOP, so I gave it a try.  Here is what I came up with, and it was pretty tasty, although, I have to say, I missed the cheese!

GF/DF Cream of Mushroom Soup

Ingredients: (everything is DF and GF)
4 tbsp margarine
1 to 2 cups chopped mushrooms
1/2 cup chopped onions
4 tbsp corn starch
3 to 4 cups soy milk
salt and pepper

Directions:
1. Melt margarine over medium heat.
2. Add mushrooms and onions to margarine and saute' until soft, and fragrant.
3. While the mushrooms and onions are sauteing,  mix corn starch with 1 cup of milk.
4. Add corn starch/milk mixture to mushrooms and onions, and stir.  I used a whisk.
5. Slowly add rest of the milk, and stir until thickened.  Add as much milk as you need to make it the consistence you want.
6. Salt and pepper to taste.

GF/DF Goop


Ingredients: (everything is DF and GF)
2 bags of pasta (about 2 pounds or less)
2 pounds ground beef
garlic salt
minced garlic
salt and pepper
Cream of mushroom soup from recipe above
1 bag of frozen corn, or your frozen vegetable of choice. (as little or as much as you like)

Directions:
1. Boil water in a big pot and cook pasta.
2. While the pasta is cooking, cook the ground beef over medium heat until brown, add the seasonings before the beef is completely done, maybe half way through.  Once the meat is done, drain, and put back in the pain, and add the frozen veggies.
3. Drain pasta, put back in pot.
4. Add soup, meat/veggie mixture.
5. Heat on medium/low heat until veggies are done.  You may need to add more milk, to get desired consistency.

If you are GF but can still have dairy, feel free to add cheese!  :)

Chicken and Waffles with Maple BACON Gravy

The number one reason to buy Cooking for Isaiah by Silvana Nardone--her waffle recipes!  The woman is brilliant!  Seriously!  Who would have thought to use a waffle iron to make bread?!?!  Not me, by any means.  And while I don't like a couple things about her cook book in general, her stuff TASTES good!  She is a dang good cook, I will give her that much, and this recipe is PROOF!

I was a little nervous to try this recipe.  I know it has BACON in it, and you can't go wrong with that, but it turned maple syrup into a gravy, and something didn't seem right about that.  I put my fears and wariness to the side, and went all out with this recipe, not changing anything.  Okay, well, I changed one thing.  I didn't have any chicken breasts WITH the skin.  Eeewww.  I mean, don't get me wrong, I love chicken skin, just like anyone else, but why add the calories?  Especially when you can get skinless and boneless chicken breasts for $1.78 per pound at Walmart.  This affected the recipe slightly, and the cooking time, and probably the over all texture of the chicken, in the end.  But it still tasted AMAZING!

OH!  That's right.  I forgot about a little mistake a made along the way...I made this about two and a half weeks ago.  I had forgotten that the way she writes her recipes is kind of confusing.  She lists her ingredients on the left side of the directions.  Cool.  But then she will say, "...whisk together the eggs, vegetable oil and 1 1/2 cups milk..."  So, I quickly look at the ingredients list, and add all the eggs, all the oil and ALL of the milk.  Of course, the ingredients list says that 3 cups of rice milk is needed.  So, guess what I just did to the waffle batter?  Yeah, SOUP!  Haha, the funny thing was I didn't realize I had done that until step 4, when I needed to add milk to the gravy.  And then it made sense.  I thought the batter seemed runny, and it took a lot longer to cook than the recipe said it would.  Oh goodness.

So, now, when I am using Cooking for Isaiah, I triple check the instructions, which is rather annoying.  But this recipe is definitely worth it.  The waffles have dry mustard, paprika and fresh parsley for seasoning.  They tasted so good.  (My kids loved them, and wanted just the waffles by themselves, too bad I couldn't have sneaked some healthy veggies in them or something.)  The chicken was easy to cook, and didn't take very long at all.  The gravy...now THAT was the icing on the cake!  It had BACON, maple syrup and a hint of cayenne pepper, which ended up making it a bit too strong for the kids, but made Josh and my taste buds very happy.

Here is Josh, eating his second helping, HIS WAY.  He made that puppy into a sandwich and licked his fingers when he was done!  I didn't have a second helping, but I did eat another waffle, just by itself.  YUM!

The rating on this recipe is 5 stars out of 5 stars!  It really doesn't matter how much it cost, or how difficult it was or even how many calories were in it, IT WAS WORTH IT!

New to Gluten Free and Beyond

It has been 15 days since my last post, and I have made 17 recipes from two different cook books.  One cook book I have mentioned before, Artisanal Gluten-Free Cooking by Kelli and Pete Bronski; the other cook book I have not mentioned yet, but I have been eager to try some recipes from: Cooking for Isaiah  by Silvana Nardone.

My original intent for starting this blog was to make myself start trying new recipes.  The idea came when I got a cook book I ordered in the mail called Gluten Free Girl and the Chef by Shauna James Ahern and Daniel Ahern.  I saw the book online and I was super excited about it, but when I got it, and started to flip through the recipes, I was shocked.  "Millet Tabouleh" and "Watermelon Gazpacho" and "Umbraian Lentils with Duck Confit" and "Rabbit with Mustard".  Really?  Yeah, that sounds great: "Okay, Andrew, go sit at the table while I dish you up some rabbit with mustard; that's a good boy."  No, I don't think so.  Thankfully, I had the Artisanal Gluten Free Cooking book, and I started on those recipes.  But anyway, my idea was to cook all the recipes in the books, and blog about them, and in the end write a cook book review, so that other people would know what they were buying.  I am sure there are several people who are going to read this blog and think, "Oooooo!  Millet Tabouleh!  How exciting!"  Or, "Man, I have been looking for a good GF watermelon gazpacho!"  But as you have noticed, trying those recipes are not top priority.  No, I needed some down to earth, easy to make meals, and quick!  I didn't know how many more times I could feed my kids beans and rice before I was going to go crazy!

My intentions have expanded a little now.  The more I write and the more I research, and the more I cook, the more I realize that there is a slough of information out there for people needing information on a gluten free life style.  I am new at this, I can not offer any one any real information.  But I have realized that there is something of value I can offer.  Experience.  If you go to Google and type "gluten free recipes" you will get (and I quote Google) "About 506,000 results".  I have personally been to probably 20 gluten free blogs so far.  I know there are a ton more, but I can only read so much with all the cooking and cleaning I do, plus dealing with the kids running around the house.  But if you are new to the gluten free life, and you are struggling with what books to buy, and what blogs to follow, fear not!  I have struggled to.  And this blog seeks to review all the information out there, and help you decide just what it is YOU want to do.  Because we can all follow the Artisanal Gluten Free Cooking to the letter, or we can follow the Gluten Free Mommy blog to the "T", but neither of those things are us.  My life is different from their lives.  And your life is different from mine.  So...this blog is more of a guide through the floods of gluten free information and knowledge.  And fortunately it is also quite entertaining.  Don't worry, you are not the first one to ask what "xanthan gum" is.  You aren't the first one to have problems reading labels, or baking GF bread.  And don't worry, you will not be the last.  Good luck on your adventure.

As for the 17 recipes I haven't blogged about...I am still uncertain of what to do.  It is a lot of catching up to do.  Maybe I will just start fresh tomorrow, and post one a day starting tomorrow, and when I come to a day when I don't have time or energy to make a new recipe, I will pull one of the ones out that I have already made, but haven't blogged about.

PHEW!  It is nice to not have the pressure of catching up on my shoulders anymore.  Thank you all for your continued support and for joining my on my GF journey!

Lemon Loaf

Finished product.

Mess from trying to juice the lemon with out a juicer....I am open to better options, with out having to get a juicer, obviously.  I also ended up spilling some of the fresh juice, and having to get out my not so fresh juice...this reminds me of a Dr. Seuss book.  "...try Finny's Freshest Fish, French Fried..."

I do have a zester....but my lemon wasn't looking to good, I should have made the lemon loaf sooner.

This is the lemon loaf in the oven.

I was not impressed with this recipe.  I am WAY behind on blogging, and so I am not going to take the time to rate it and all that.  I will say that I had to use an entire bottle of poppy seeds, which were $4.32 a bottle!  And if you ask me, they recipe called for WAY to many of them.  All I tasted was poppy seeds, and not enough lemon.  Josh loved it, of course.  So, as you can see, the Artisan Gluten Free Flour Mix is a great mix.  It works just like regular flour.  We have yet to eat something made from it and think, "ewww" because of the textrue of the bread, or taste.  If I don't like the recipe it is because of something else.  Haha.  The Artisanal Gluten-Free Cooking book by Kelli and Pete Bronski is awesome.  :)