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:
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:
- 4 cans (15 oz) of italian cut green beans
- 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.
- Thai Fried Onions (from the Asian grocery store)
- Cheddar cheese - 1 cup
- 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!
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