Food Post: My Paleo Thanksgiving

Quick note of explanation- Thanks to the Read it and Weep Podcast and Violet Blue stoking my curiosity, I read Tim Ferriss's 4 Hour Body back in May and started the slow carb diet. I ended up adding in more healthy fats and leaving out beans at most meals after being influenced by a lot of paleo recipe blogs. I've had a ton (well, 33 lbs) of success and would highly recommend it to anybody. I'll probably write a post with more details and resources, but I wanted to get this recipe post out there while it's still the holiday season. I wanted to try a grain free Thanksgiving 1) because it would be interesting and perhaps challenging 2) to keep it low-ish carb (lower than traditional Thanksgiving, anyway) so I could enjoy the leftovers and 3) so I wouldn't feel super sick afterwards. I still do the 4HB style cheat day thing, but I often keep it wheat-free if I don't want to feel like crap all day.

Bird- Herb Roasted Turkey Breast with Pan Gravy from Rachael Ray
I probably used arrowroot instead of flour to thicken the gravy, but I don't remember. The gravy was different and good and the meat was good for a turkey breast, which is never all that great. When I ran out of turkey after a couple days and I still had leftovers of everything else, I did braised turkey legs which were sooo good! That's what I'll be doing from now on.

Sweet potatoes- Sweet Potato Casserole from Paleo Comfort Foods, page 200. It looks like someone blogged it here. I'm loving this cookbook, but there's no yield listed on any of the recipes and that makes planning annoying. The recipe I used to use (from Cooking Light magazine) had huge quantities of brown sugar in it. This one has no sweeteners (they're called sweet potatoes for a reason, folks) but is just as good.

Brussels sprouts with bacon- from Nom Nom Paleo. I don't do the vinegar.

Cranberry apple sauce from Paleo Comfort Foods, p 188. Holy crap, this was delicious! It made a ton, and I was eating this for days.

Stuffed dates from Primal-Palate.com. This is one for the cheese eaters. Sooo good! Not pictured because we ate all them before meal time.

Pumpkin pie from Nutty Kitchen. I burned the crust, but we still ate the whole thing. The ancient gas oven in our place is super uneven and miscalibrated by a hundred degrees or so. The other tricky thing about it is using honey as a sweetener. It's hard to get it evenly distributed in the filling. A lot of the honey had sunk to the bottom when I went to pour the filling into the pie, and there was more filling than the pie could handle, so a significant proportion of the honey in the recipe never made it into the pie. I didn't think it was that big of a deal, but Bryan thought the pie wasn't sweet enough. Some sugar free ice cream made it all better. I'll be experimenting with some other bars and pies at Christmas & I'll keep you updated!

Stuffing- this one's a bit complicated. I made a batch of the almond bread in Paleo Comfort foods (p 116). Looks like someone blogged that recipe here. I tried some before cutting it up into cubes and it was surprisingly tasty! I made a double batch of hazelnut bread from Healthy Living How To. The stuffing recipe on that site is somewhat similar to what I did, and the stuffed squash looks amazing, but I wanted a more traditional less chunky more casserole-y stuffing. I took 8 cups total of almond and hazelnut bread cubes and plugged it into an amalgamation of a couple of traditional recipes from the intarwebs. It went something like this-

8 cups almond flour and/or hazelnut flour bread cubes
1 pound breakfast sausage
3/4 cup chopped onion
1 1/2 cups chopped celery
1 1/2 tsp poultry seasoning
1 tsp sage
chopped apple (I used only a small wedge or two, but will do more next time)
up to 3 cups chicken broth

Preheat oven to 325 F.
Cook sausage and set aside. Sautee onions and celery until tender. Combine sausage, celery, and onions with bread cubes, spices, and apple. I added chicken broth until the mixture held together and transferred it to a large baking dish. Then I added a little bit more until it seemed properly wet. It turned out I added a little too much liquid, but no biggie! I baked covered for about 45 minutes.