Weekend things and a little bit of food prep

Hi there!

Happy Monday!

Are you gearing up for Thanksgiving? Are you cooking? Have you started cooking already? Are you traveling to where someone else is doing all the cooking? <—-winning

I’ll be doing only a small amount of cooking this year as we’re headed to my folks’ house.

Mom’s having the bulk of the meal catered (this should be interesting – my first catered meal experience) and the rest of us are  responsible for a few side dishes and desserts.

I’m making this. I made it for just us last year and it is the bomb dot com.

Plus, the pecan tree in my back yard is literally vomiting pecans so…..yeah.

My town had its Thanksgiving market on Saturday and my favorite vendor was going to be there so, you know we had to go. 🙂

There were like 65 vendors or something!

Lots of artsy craftsy stuff.

There were lots of puppy dogs.

Seriously, I can’t post pictures of all the dogs – we’d be here all day.

And there were lots of leafy green veggies!

There was a pony that I wanted to ride but I don’t think he was there for people of my size age.

I loaded up on sweet taters (duh!) and apples and the biggest butternut squashes I have ever seen (needed for above recipe!).

I tried to get my sailor to take a picture of me holding the butternut squashes but he said no. Because I don’t have a porn blog.

Seriously, where was HIS brain? Haha

And besides, has he never ever heard of food porn?

Whatever.

So, he took this picture of this goat instead. Her name is Latte. She was hanging out with the goat cheese lady. Mmmm…..goat cheese……

Here’s my haul on fresh beef. Score!

After the market, we took our goodies home and headed out for some lunch and errands.

We went to our favorite Indian place. MMMM…

I had the medium spicy vindaloo and was sweating bullets at the table. lol

For the record, I only ate one little triangle of the naan because it is made with wheat and I’m doing that whole gluten free thing.

I was okay with it (or I just couldn’t tell I wasn’t because I was still breathing fire) but a few hours later, I had an iced skinny vanilla latte from Starbucks and that made my stomach hurt.

Did some research and turns out the skinny vanilla stuff has gluten in it! Blech!

I didn’t finish it. Which sucks. Starbucks ain’t cheap.

So, I’m thinking about heading to the doc to officially get tested for celiac, just to see. Because it really did make me feel bad.

Sunday was a pretty low key day.

I did a little food prep but not too much since we’re going to be laden with turkey leftovers, too. 🙂

I made some gluten-free banana bread. Because, it’s banana bread. Duh.

I made us some homemade chicken noodle soup (gluten free rotini pasta) with the last of the chicken from last week and some of the broth that I made.

To make it creamy, I added a tablespoon of grass-fed butter (I buy Kerrygold and if you haven’t tried it yet, you are totally missing out!) and about half a cup of heavy cream.

So delicious!

Then, I made some beef stew in the crockpot using some stew meat that I snagged at the farmer’s market.

I used less than 2 pounds of meat so I used upped the veggies a little. I also subbed Yukon Gold taters for the red taters because that’s what I had and I used regular onion because the recipe didn’t state red onion until down in the directions.

Yes, I broke the cardinal rule of following a recipe – I didn’t read the whole thing before I started.

source

It worked out okay though. 🙂

I also didn’t add any frozen corn because I didn’t have any. T’was fine. Delicious, in fact.

Talk to me: What’s your favorite thing on the Starbucks menu?

– jennifer