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.
