What we ate for Thanksgiving dinner

Mr M convinced me to relax some of our food restrictions for Thanksgiving. Not sure that's going to happen again- my intestines aren't too happy. We were gluten, egg, and soy free, but we still ate potatoes, tapioca, corn and corn products, and sorghum.

I bought the ham from the Honey Baked Ham store and the gravy was Imagine brand. Both are gluten free. Mr M really wanted a HB Ham so we went that route instead of the traditional turkey this year. While pricey, there was zero stress when it came to preparing it. You let it sit on the counter for a half hour or so before you eat, and then you eat it. Sooo simple! I did purchase a turkey from the grocery store because it was a great price, but it's sitting in the freezer- we'll probably have it for Christmas.

The mashed potatoes had coconut milk and Earth Balance soy free "butter" in them.

I made the cranberry pear sauce using this recipe, and there was no questionable ingredients in it.

I made the frog eye salad using my MIL's recipe that I adapted to be more within our limits- tapioca pearls instead of acini de pepe pasta and a flax egg instead of a real egg in the custard- I'll post the recipe soon now that I have it (finally) figured out.

The oranges in the jello are still on the iffy list, but I sure do like them :)

I made the cornbread and sausage stuffing mix using this recipe. I had planned on making my own corn bread from scratch, but I couldn't find gluten free cornmeal so I used Bob's Redmill gluten free cornbread mix. I've used it before and it's super easy to make, but the mix also contains sorghum flour, which makes my intestines really unhappy. Better the sorghum than gluten contamination, though.

I was going to do some green veggies- salad or something, but we eat lots of vegetables and we decided to take a break for the day :) Do olives count as veggies? Mr M insisted that Thanksgiving wouldn't be complete without some olives.

We also had blueberry pie and vanilla ice cream and  a pumpkin bread trifle. Yummy! I found the blueberry pie recipe here and the vanilla ice cream recipe was adapted from this recipe.

I used this recipe for the pumpkin bread trifle, which isn't super attractive-looking, but did taste good.

Everything tasted yummy, and while my intestines weren't super happy, my stomach and throat didn't bother me (if I'd eaten eggs or gluten they would have), so I'm not complaining too much. If it was just my intestines, I might fudge things more often. Unfortunately, the mental fog comes back if I eat foods that don't agree with me. So it's probably a good thing I don't fudge on a regular basis. I'll have to decide if it's worth it do this again come Christmas. It does make meal planning easier, and as long as we don't go anywhere LMS and I can be close to the bathroom. Hmmmm....

Grilled elk tenderloin

While I was laid out on the couch last night (I think it's highly unfair that I have to endure painful monthly cramps when none of my other lady parts seem to be able to work properly) Mr M made a really yummy dinner.

He grabbed an elk tenderloin from the freezer, defrosted it and then rubbed some salt on it and let it sit for awhile.  While it was sitting, he put a butternut squash in the oven to bake.

Mr M briefly rinsed the salt off the meat, then brushed on the fauxmato bbq sauce that he had made a couple weeks ago (I still need to do a post on the fauxmato sauce). He then tossed it on the grill to cook.

When the squash was done he scraped the flesh and pureed it in the BlendTec, using some canned coconut milk to thin it.

When the meat was done, he sliced it and we sat down to a dinner of grilled elk tenderloin and coconut squash puree. The elk was a smidge salty (he'll rinse the salt off more next time) and the squash a tad runny (he'll use a little less milk next time), but it all tasted soooo good! The tenderloin was so tender and juicy no knife was needed, and the flavor was great. The flavor combination of the tenderloin and the squash really hit the spot.

I didn't get any pictures because we ate it all up so fast :)  I'll try to get some next time, since we will definitely be making this again.

I'm so glad I have a husband who likes to cook and who has taken on the challenge of cooking meals we can eat :)

Is a Blendtec really worth the price?

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After the very first green smoothie, I'd have to say YES.

Our old blender, a fairly decent KitchenAid model that was only a year or two old, just couldn't manage to blend everything up really smooth.

The Blendtec effortlessly blended everything- no chunks or little bits of kale and spinach left behind. We had to do some chewing with the last few smoothies I made with the KitchenAid blender. The Blendtec is noisy, but I don't mind the trade-off. Having fully blended food is definitely worth a little extra noise.

I had heard great things about the Blendtec and its close rival the Vitamix on a lot of the food blogs I follow, but the cost really made me hesitate. I debated for *months* before finally deciding to bite the bullet and buy a Blendtec. I'm glad we finally did it!

We've used it for making green smoothies, mixing up our ice cream before putting it in the machine, mixing up salad dressing, pureeing steamed squash, and making Nomato sauce (more on that one later...). I'm sure we'll be using it even more as we do more experimenting in the kitchen in an effort to find more recipes we like and can use.

What we eat when we invite friends over

We invited the neighbors over for dinner the other day. They're a cute young couple with a one year old daughter that LMS really likes (and would really like to play with, though she's too young to understand that concept yet). These days it's definitely easier to host a meal than to worry about going somewhere else to eat.

So what was on the menu?
Aidells chicken and apple sausages

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Grilled chicken, marinated in Nomato Sauce (more on the Nomato Sauce later)
Grilled mixed veggies (onion, mushroom, zucchini, yellow squash, broccoli, carrot)
Faux-tatoes (pureed squash)
Real mashed potatoes just in case the squash wasn't well received (and because Mr M really wanted some)
Fruit salad (blueberries, strawberries, kiwi)
Green salad (LMS put this dressing on it)

and for dessert we had homemade peach ice cream, using this recipe.

We ended up with more food than we needed, but we tend to operate on the "rather have too much food, than too little" mind set, especially when we're having company over. We had a good time and all the food was enjoyed, even the squash :)

Birthday ice cream

I had stopped baking by the time my birthday rolled around at the end of June, but I did make some ice cream- coconut ice cream topped with blueberries. I used the recipe I found here but I left out the chocolate. Even without the chocolate, it was pretty yummy.

However, LMS is still upset by the fact that I didn't have cake for my birthday. She has brought it up multiple times, and is quite concerned that I didn't have a birthday cake. Too cute!

Paleo Strawberry Shortcake

I've recently found that recipes that follow the paleo diet are fairly close to what we need to eat. I do have to make some changes and substitutions, but they're fairly easy to do. I like the emphasis on fresh, unprocessed food, and I'm enjoying the opportunity to try some baking, which I haven't done in several months.

I made strawberry shortcake following this recipe. Other than subbing flax eggs for the real eggs, I followed the recipe as written. It is quite dense and not much like your traditional shortcake, but it was still pretty good.

Mr M put strawberries and bananas on his.

 I put strawberries, raspberries, and blueberries on mine.

 LMS just had coconut cream on hers.

What we eat

I've decided to periodically do a post about what we ate on a given day, mostly to demonstrate that we actually do eat well :)

Thursday we ate paleo Coconut Flour Waffles for breakfast. While paleo recipes are, for the most part, within our limits, they do frequently use eggs, which we can't eat. I subbed flax eggs for the real eggs, and they turned out ok, though they stuck to the waffle iron. That could be because I bought a new waffle iron though. I was going to use the waffle iron we've had since we were newlyweds, but then I remembered how super-sensitive I am to cross-contamination and decided that wasn't such a great idea so I bought a new one that still needs to be broken in.

For lunch we had leftover Chicken and Vegetable Lo-Mein that I made for dinner Tuesday night. I really liked this recipe and while LMS wasn't a big fan, I'm hoping that's just because I've been trying a lot of new recipes lately.

For dinner we made Grilled Chicken and Veggies. We only recently bought a grill, so we have a learning curve to deal with. Like the grill basket Mr M picked up at wally world was not the type you need to grill veggies (they all fell through the holes). With some jimmy-rigging we eventually got it to work and were able to eat a very yummy dinner.

We've also been making super easy ice cream using our ice cream maker. I found a recipe for Strawberry ice cream, which is yummy, and I've also made it with fresh peaches (even yummier!). We've been splitting the batch in half - half popsicles, half ice cream. I like the texture of the freshly made ice cream the best- homemade soft serve- yum! The rest hardens up nicely into popsicles that are healthy enough to eat for breakfast. Which we did today :)