a gluten-free Thanksgiving

It’s November. The big day is coming.

(No, I’m not talking about the election. I do not want to talk about the election. Just vote.)

If you’re gluten-free, you know the day I mean. It’s almost Thanksgiving.

In this house, it has been Thanksgiving since July. I’m not kidding. Since the dog days of summer, we have been baking, tweaking recipes, filming, writing, making pie, and taking photographs of it. For you.

For you.

Thanksgiving is the only national holiday that revolves entirely around food. We bake and cook and prep for days, to sit at a table laden with food, our family and friends surrounding us. Whether or not your meal echoes that famous Norman Rockwell painting, that time around the table together is important.

How are you going to do this gluten-free? You might be panicking. Will I be able to eat anything? Will anyone in my family help me? What will it feel like to sit at the dinner table and not be able to share the meal? Is it all plain turkey and cranberry sauce from now on?

Never fear. We’re here to help.

Let us show you how warm and wonderful a gluten-free Thanksgiving can be.

So you see? It can be an incredible day.

We want to finally let you in on what we have been planning for months.

Thanksgiving Baking with Gluten-Free Girl and the Chef

We have been working for months with Pableaux Johnson, at Blue Crab Labs, to bring you our first iPad app.

People, Pableaux is something else. He’s the best, fastest-talking iPad app developer out there. He’s family around here now. And he has imagined and designed one of the most beautiful iPad apps I’ve ever seen.

In our Thanksgiving Baking iPad app, we show you the ingredients you’ll need in your pantry, the equipment you’ll need for baking, and some tips for how to survive the holiday, no matter how your family reacts to the news that you need to be gluten-free. The essays are lavishly illustrated with photographs that are intended to make you hungry.

But the heart of the app are the baking recipes you need to make this a great Thanksgiving, gluten-free. Here’s what we show you how to make in the app:

° a soft gluten-free sandwich bread
° white-bread stuffing
° cornbread
° cornbread dressing
° dinner rolls
° pie dough
° pie fillings to make apple pie, pumpkin pie, cranberry-ginger pie, and dairy-free coconut-banana cream pie)
° apple-walnut cake
° pumpkin cheesecake with a ginger crust

Each recipe is presented in easy-to-understand format, with plenty of interactive features including video illustrations of everything you need to see. Tap the screen and let us walk you through each recipe’s technique and texture.

We want you to have a successful Thanksgiving, gluten-free.

(p.s. This is only the first in a series of iPad apps we are doing. Next month, the holiday baking app!)

The Thanksgiving Baking app is done. We’re just waiting for Apple to approve it. Come on over to the launch page for the Gluten-Free Thanksgiving Baking app and put down your email address. As soon as it’s in the App Store, you’ll be notified so you can download it and start baking.

But this is only a temporary glitch. We’re so excited about this I can barely type these words. We just can’t wait to share this Thanksgiving Baking iPad app with you.

videos.

Before the opportunity to create the iPad app arose, we could think of nothing more joyful than to create Thanksgiving videos with Debra and Rod Smith of Smith Bites Photography.

We love these two people. They have become family to us as well. (We feel pretty lucky that, in creating material for you for Thanksgiving, we found new people we’d love to have sitting at our table.) They get us. They’re kind, sharp, funny, and just good folks.

So, for two weeks in August, Debra and Rod stayed with us, here on Vashon Island. Whenever Lucy was at school, we shot videos in our kitchen. We made roasted turkey in 90-degree weather. We made roasted cauliflower three ways, made cranberry chutney with orange zest, mashed potatoes, stirred up gravy, whisked up a butternut squash soup, and dressed up store-bought hummus to make a quick appetizer to serve before the big meal. We made cornbread and cornbread dressing, sandwich bread and white-bread stuffing, and pie. Lots of pie. We made turkey cottage pie with the leftover turkey, plus turkey hash and turkey in lettuce cups. There were quarts of homemade turkey stock in our refrigerator.

(One of my favorite memories of being with these wonderful people was the afternoon we broke for lunch after making mashed potatoes and gravy. We four sat down at the table outside, poured gravy into the bowl of potatoes, and dug in with four spoons.)

We even went to our local grocery store and, with the store’s permission, walked up and down each aisle and talked about how to shop for a gluten-free Thanksgiving.

And Debra and Rod filmed everything, then edited the videos, for you.

They made the beautiful video you see above, shot at our good friend Gypsy and Stephen’s house. (Thank you, Gypsy and Stephen!) Our friends Ashley and Gabe came over with their wonderful kids, and our dear friends Anita and Cameron were in town from San Francisco so they came by too, and we all had a feast. The full feast, after making three or four dishes a day. In 90-degree heat, in August. (If you see us wiping sweat off our faces, you’ll know why.)

We really wanted you to know: a gluten-free Thanksgiving could be the best holiday you’ve ever celebrated.

So, starting today, there will be a video on this site every day leading up to Thanksgiving, and even some in the days after. (What do you do with all those leftovers?) We want to show you how to make the entire meal, laughing, and confident in the kitchen.

We’re also going to give you the recipes for nearly every dish. The baked goods? Well, you’ll have to buy the iPad app for those, of course!

So get ready for gluten-free grocery shopping, cauliflower, and cranberry chutney in the next few days!

here’s where you come in.

Let me be honest.

When we first thought of doing this huge series of videos — 24 in all! — we were going to charge you for them. They weren’t going to cost much, but we were still going to make them a payment thing. You see, there’s a lot of money involved in making the Thanksgiving dinner several times over. In flying out our video editors and paying them for their services. For our work and time. Since we’re both creating this website full-time now, we’ve been trying to come up with interesting ways, with integrity, that we can feed our family on this work. The idea of that income is why we did all of this in August.

So we were going to charge you for these videos.

But after we were done filming, and we had said our sad goodbyes to Debra and Rod, we started to change our minds. We still want to make money at this. But something just didn’t feel right. And we started to realize that people just aren’t comfortable paying for information they are used to receiving for free. (At least, it seems to us and some of our smartest friends whom we asked.) We weren’t entirely comfortable charging for it either.

Should we just do all this for free? And hope it comes back in karma? That’s more our way.

Here’s what we’ve decided to do.

We want to offer these videos to you. Anyone can see them. The recipes too, at least the ones that aren’t the baked goods. We want you to enjoy them, learn from them, and make something out of them. That will be a great reward for our work.

If you find the videos useful, and if you feel more confident about being in the kitchen from watching them, and if you have a stress-free, delicious Thanksgiving because of our work, perhaps you would consider donating something to the cause. (Of if you have been reading this site for awhile, if you have found our recipes in your kitchen, perhaps you would consider donating.)

If that is the case, then click on this PayPal button, which will be at the bottom of each post in November. If you enjoy these videos, give whatever you feel is right.

Because we are who we are, we aren’t even entirely comfortable with all the money going to us. You see, we want you to have a great gluten-free Thanksgiving. But we’re also, all of us making gluten-free pie dough to make pumpkin pie, lucky to have food to put on the table.

That’s why we will give half of all the money donated to WhyHunger, a hunger organization based in New York that works with 26 organizations in 15 countries to try to end hunger now. You can read more about WhyHunger on the Bloggers Without Borders website, as they are working closely with WhyHunger right now to raise funds and awareness of this exemplary group.

So, if you feel so inclined to donate funds for these Thanksgiving videos, remember you’re also donating to WhyHunger. Those of us with food on our tables are pretty damned lucky.

(If you can’t donate, maybe you could spread the word? Tell your friends on Facebook and Twitter. Pin these images on Pinterest. Make sure that anyone and everyone who needs to be gluten-free knows about these videos. Thank you.)

sit back and enjoy the recipes. 

We have so much to share with you in the next few weeks.

Welcome to our Thanksgiving table.