Monday 24 December 2012

A vegan, gluten free Christmas

Happy Christmas everyone! Here are a few photos from the gluten-free, vegan Christmas dinner/marathon I cooked with Naomi and Mark the other day. After five hours of cooking we'd used every pot and saucepan in the kitchen (my daily aim) and concocted up a feast of proportions we're still working through.


We started with salted popcorn and mulled cider to help fuel snowflake making, A Charlie Brown Christmas watching, and obviously, quite a bit of cooking.
  
Here's Mary Berry's chestnut and apricot stuffing, adapted using vegan margarine and gluten free, vegan ciabatta rolls.

You don't need turkey to have cranberry sauce (it tastes amazing with basically everything we cooked) so I made my own from scratch, just heating cranberries with sugar, a little orange zest and ginger. Based on a BBC recipe, I made this the day before and left it to thicken over night in the fridge.


Instead of one key dish to replace the meat, we had about twelve. Above are the mushroom, leek and wild rice tarts I made with gluten free flour and ground almonds for the base, taken and adapted from this recipe by Vegerrific.

Amongst a ton of other treats I'll have to blog about another time, Mark and Naomi bought some of the best beer I've ever tasted from The Kernel Brewery in Bermondsey.

Along with everything else we also had hasselback potatoes, cabbage, cavolo nero, butternut squash roasted in spices, balsamic shallot gravy, roasted parsnips, purple carrots, onions and apples with rosemary and mashed potatoes.

                                     
By the time we were ready to serve I couldn't fit everything on my plate and had to go for two rounds (convenient).

So until next year folks, have a wonderful Christmas!

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