Thanksgiving Recipe Recap

As you may be aware, last Thursday was Thanksgiving. I tried a few new gluten-free recipes, and, as they turned out fairly well, I’ll share with you what I did/what I might do differently if doing these again:

1. Sugar-free cranberry sauce

For this, I just used the recipe on the back of the bag of cranberries (1 cup water, 1 cup sugar, 1 bag cranberries), except that I used Swerve for sweetener, and I only used half the amount of it (due to the fact that there’s not that much in one of those bags of Swerve, and I wanted to make sure there’d be enough left for other things). Most of the family liked this, but it was a bit potent for my taste – a little more sweetener wouldn’t have been bad, in my opinion.

2. Gluten-free pumpkin pie

I used this recipe, and it worked quite well! If memory serves, I used mostly Swerve to sweeten it, along with a little sugar (because, yes, despite the precautions I took with the cranberry sauce, we ran out of Swerve), and that worked very well.

One note on the crust – I doubled the ingredients, since I wanted there to be enough to make pie crust pinwheels as well. I didn’t double the vinegar, though, for fear it would taste too vinegar-y, and I think the crust definitely suffered from the lack of liquid. It was quite crumbly and didn’t hold together well at all. I expect it would have worked much better to add a comparable amount of some other liquid (which, honestly, is just common sense…this was my first time making a pie, so bear with me (yes, I’m milking that excuse for all it’s worth)).

For the filling, I did use coconut milk instead of evaporated milk. I’m just noticing now that the recipe says to use a cup of it – well, I didn’t see that and just put in twelve ounces, but hey, it worked. (This was my first time making a pie, remember. 😉 )

(Also, there was too much filling to fit in the pie pan, so I ended up making an extra small, crustless pumpkin pie with the extra filling.)

3. Gluten-free pie crust pinwheels

I referenced this recipe for this (as well as my awesome mom, who remembered loving these when she was a kid). These came out quite well too. As aforementioned, the crust was very crumbly, which was giving me a lot of grief at first. At my mom’s suggestion, however, I added about 2 tablespoons of naturally refined coconut oil (the naturally refined oil has no taste), and that helped quite a lot.

Well, that’s about it! To sign off, here’s a Thanksgiving-ish quote for you:

“Thanks are the highest form of thought, and gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder.” ~ G.K. Chesterton