Thanksgiving - gluten free, corn free, potato free, and still tasty!

We had a very tasty allergen-free Thanksgiving dinner at home this year. Although we were only having one guest over for dinner, I decided to go all out with making dishes because I wanted all the "fixin's," but also so I could test out some allergen-free recipes for upcoming holidays. I must say, I feel the dinner was a success! Everything was very tasty. However, it took a LOT of prep time (1 hour Tuesday night, 3 or 4 hours Wednesday night, 3 1/2 hours Thursday morning), and it certainly wasn't a low-fat meal! (Allergen-free ingredients are rarely low in fat.) But since I was so happy with how the recipes turned out, I thought I'd like to all the ones I used in case anyone else is looking for allergen-free dishes for the holidays.

Just a note to anyone cooking for someone with food allergies - if corn is a problem, check the ingredients of ANYTHING canned or otherwise packaged. Orange juice that has any ingredient other than oranges will contain corn products, as will most canned foods that have any ingredients other than the intended food and water. Same with half & half, brown sugar, butter (don't use margarine), olives, fried onions,

Kendra's Gluten, Corn, and Potato-free Thanksgiving:

Roasted Turkey

Stuffing - I added a couple stalks of celery, a couple cloves of garlic, and extra onion powder and garlic powder

Turkey Gravy - the drippings from our 10lb turkey gave us just about 2 cups of liquid for this.

Green Bean Casserole - the general recipe is one that Chris and I have adapted over time, but this year I had to make the cream of mushroom soup from scratch, and get special fried onions. Below is our recipe:

1. 4 cans (15 oz) of italian cut green beans
   
2. Cream of Mushroom soup, this one comes with an additional post of instructions to explain the technique. In hindsight, I should have cooked this longer to allow it to thicken more, and added more salt; our cream wasn't as thick as we like it for the casserole.
   
3. Thai Fried Onions (from the Asian grocery store)
4. Cheddar cheese - 1 cup
5. optional - green olives or kalamata olives
   

• In a 9 x 12 casserole dish, mix green beans and enough cream of mushroom to coat the green beans (usually 2 cans Campbell's Condensed soup, this time it took 12 oz of homemade soup)

• Sprinkle fried onions across the top to cover
• optional: sprinkle olives on top
• Place in oven at 350 degrees for about 20 minutes
• Sprinkle cheese on top, put back in oven until cheese has melted.
• Enjoy!
  

Cranberry Sauce - this I could have gotten from the can, but this recipe looked so easy, and I got some organic cranberries for cheap, so I wanted to give it a shot. Very tasty!

Chebe Cheese Rolls - super yummy! I prepared these on Tuesday night and froze them, popped 'em in the over 35 minutes before dinner time.

Pumpkin Pie - directions from the can of Kroger pumpkin
Pie crust - Pamela's Amazing Wheat-free Bread Mix (directions on the side, makes two pie crusts)

I would be mourning the loss of other thanksgiving staples like mashed potatoes and corn casserole (which I had the BEST recipe for) if we didn't already have too much yum-tastic food on the table. Our guest did bring mashed potatoes for her and Chris to eat, so they didn't miss out. She also brought a tasty sweet potato casserole that was safe for me to eat (hers just had orange, butter, and brown cane sugar), and there are plenty of recipes for gluten-free sweet potato casserole out there, but the tricky thing for me is making sure all the ingredients are corn-free too, so this year I decided not to put the time into it myself. Maybe next time.

Then this afternoon after Chris cut all the turkey meat off the carcass, I started some turkey broth for use in future recipes. It's really easy to do, and doesn't take a lot of maintenance. I followed the general idea of this recipe, but didn't add the veggies... just water, turkey carcass, salt and pepper.

Tasty fun times!

SF Galleries

Last post for the night! I decided that the "arts and crafts" post for San Francisco needed to be separate from the other post.

One of the things Chris and I love about traveling is checking out museums and galleries. While we didn't do nearly as much of that in SF as we did in New York, we did see was lots of quality stuff. Of course the SFMOMA was great times, and we especially enjoyed their new exhibition of Martin Puryear's work. The ladder to the left is pretty much the only thing we could take a photo of, because it was in the lobby. No photos allowed in the actual exhibit, of course.

We also hit a couple of gallery shows, one at Gallery 1988, where I fell in love with the artwork of Yoskay Yamamoto (left), and Chris fell in love with the artwork of... just about everybody, so I'm sure he'll post about it eventually. For more info about the show, check out 1988's blog.

Then we made our way to the Plush You show at DoublePunch, which was just plain crafty fun.

And I think Chris gets just as excited about street art as he does about anything in a gallery... the boy took a TON of photos on Haight street. Here are just a couple of them... of course he had to take a photo of the huge Shepard Fairey mural.

San Francisco!

Last weekend Chris and I had our "last hoorah," a vacation just for the sake of a vacation without any worries of childcare. We decided to take a trip to San Francisco - a city I love but haven't been to in 10 years, and Chris had never been. Chris was also always dismayed to say he'd never been to California, so we were able to mark that one off his "to do" list for a while.

Our friend Chip and his wife Bethy live right in downtown SF, and they were awesome hosts, letting us crash with them and actually taking the time to take us around town. We walked a LOT, rode lots of public transportation (subway, busses, trolleys, and cable cars) and had a very good time. Some of the highlights:

Lombard Street

Gotta love the sea lions

Does anyone know what this is? We couldn't figure it out, and we were standing on it.

The Bluebottle Cafe made this crazy "syphon coffee" that took forever but looked awesome. We just got normal coffee, because syphon coffee was too pricey. But we enjoyed watching them make it.

And the obligatory pics of me and Chris

another compost update

So with the first trimester sickness, followed by a second trimester vacation, followed immediately by a bad cold, I've been WAY slack on posts. Sorry 'bout that. Pretty much all I've managed to keep up on is my facebook status, and that's only because I can update in from anywhere on my blackberry when I'm waiting for something to happen. Anyways. I plan to make up for it by posting three blogs right now. Two here and one on the baby blog. So there.

I meant to post this ages ago, but my mini composter didn't work AT ALL. Chris finally had enough of it (when I couldn't stand the smell I put him in charge) and he did some research, and decided to pick up a 5 gallon bucket and dump all of it in the bucket. He also told me that for now on, we have to cover our compost with dirt every time we put more in there, so it doesn't get to wet. (We lucked out and got three big planters full of dirt from a freecycler, so we actually have dirt to dump over the compost now). This has worked to kill all the maggots and get rid of the odor, but the compost doesn't seem to be breaking down very quickly this way. Today I had to pot a couple of things (an avacado plant I'd been sprouting from seed, and some other random stuff) but I couldn't find any compost that didn't have big peels and veggie chunks in it, so I didn't use much of the compost in my planting, which was a bummer. But Chris got a second bucket to start composting in, so that the current compost can sit and do its thing and we won't keep adding new chunks to it. Of course, now that it's cold I don't expect it to do much breaking down. I guess only time will tell. Still. What a ridiculously long experiment!