Grain-free Thanksgiving!

This year I prepared my Thanksgiving dinner over the course of several days. I wasn't home to eat it on Thanksgiving day, but I wanted all my favorite dishes, and experimented with a new one. My Thanksgiving feast included a free-range, organic roast turkey, Brussel sprouts in cheese sauce, Danish red cabbage, Guy Fieri's whiskey glazed sweet potato and apple casserole, and a crustless pumpkin pie. I also had Trader Joe's cranberry-orange relish, which I buy every year.

I made the Danish red cabbage on Monday after school as well as the pumpkin pie without a crust. After school on Tuesday I baked the turkey and made the Brussel sprouts with cheese sauce. On Wednesday morning I made Guy Fieri's recipe for the bourbon glazed sweet potato and apple casserole. Each individual dish came out perfectly! On Thanksgiving I had a feast at a friend's house and didn't eat any of the food I'd prepared. Today I ate a complete meal, and the plate was very colorful!

This morning I cooked the carcass of the turkey and made a nice soup, adding carrots, onions and celery to the broth once it was made. I enjoyed that for lunch.

I don't recall what I made last year for Thanksgiving, but I had just started going grain-free at the time and a lot of it was a struggle. Now, I have many favorite foods which are grain-free, so it's not very much of a struggle. Visiting family or friends for Thanksgiving dinner can be a bit of a challenge since there are a number of traditional dishes that I cannot eat. However, as I have said to many of my friends over the year, I haven't starved yet! There's always food I can eat.

Making/Using Blanched Almond Flour

Several months ago I blanched a lot of whole almonds and put them into the freezer. Today I turned them into flour. It took very little time, in fact, it took less time than it did to turn the blanched almond slices I bought at Trader Joe's into flour. It is counter-intuitive! I fully expected that it would take longer (more seconds) to turn the whole almonds into flour than the almond slices. Wrong!

Now I have more blanched almond flour to use in making delicious banana-nut muffins and other goodies.

An interesting discovery in all of this is that muffins and other baked goods made with blanched almond flour heat up perfectly in the microwave. The texture doesn't change and isn't ruined the way baked goods made from wheat flour is.

I did order a whole case of almond paste from the American Almond Products company. I didn't trust myself to make it correctly, and I have many recipes that call for almond paste. I made a batch of "kransekage" cookies the other day. These are amongst my favorite treats. I want to make a almond paste chocolate torte again for the holidays. I tried it last year and it was delicious. There are also recipes for frangipane that requires almond paste.

The adventure continues!