Thanksgiving Menu

5 comments
I stand amazed.

We actually cooked a yeast-free, gluten-free, dairy-free, soy-free, nut-free, wheat-free, sugar-free, casein-free Thanksgiving dinner. And loved it!

We have come to realize just how intolerant our bodies have become to processed foods in any form. The more we gravitate to a raw/whole foods diet, the better we feel.

This is our menu from yesterday:

Turkey (free-range, no antibiotics or hormones) with oil and spices. Cavity filled with onions, garlic, and celery.

Mashed red potatoes. We can't tolerate the starch in Russet potatoes, so we opted to try twice-baked red potatoes. We boiled the potatoes, mashed them with chicken broth, added stir-fried onions, garlic, and green pepper, and baked them for 20 minutes. We had no leftovers.

Yams slow-cooked with adzuki beans, tomatoes, and vegetables in a vegetable broth.

Cranberry sauce. Made with freshly juiced apples and stevia.

Our courageous friends, who graciously gave up the traditional fare, brought green beans flavored with lemon pepper, and squash with nothing added.

Cindy blazed the dessert trail by making all sorts of gluten-free, dairy-free, sugar-free pumpkin pies. She even made gluten-free, sugar-free, dairy-free pumpkin pudding with coconut milk in place of evaporated milk.

Two Thanksgivings ago we ate at our neighbors' home. We were in the midst of our son's battle with vertigo. Megan carried him home that night.

Last Thanksgiving we ate at a restaurant. Headaches, depression, and stomach pains prevailed.

This year we played Outburst with friends.

We're getting there. One gluten-free pumpkin pie at a time.

5 comments :

  1. Sarah (and Roy) McCollumNovember 27, 2009 at 10:38 AM

    Way to go! Your Thanksgiving menu would be a good idea for all families to follow, whether they have mold issues or not. Thanks for all the info on the blog/radio. We have "known" you two since your early days at Midday Connection on Moody Radio and were thrilled when you came back on the air.

    ReplyDelete
  2. That's GREAT, Andrea!! SO glad you had a nice family Thanksgiving with healthy food you could all eat! I've been allergic to Nutrasweet since I tried it when it first came out. I stayed with sugar (not healthy, especially for diabetics, but at least we KNOW the problems it causes!)until Splenda came out. Now I eat Splenda in coffee, tea, etc. Just this weekend, I tried some "Vitamin Water" and drank most of a bottle pretty quickly. I got kind of wheezy! I had read the label to check for Nutrasweet and one other sweetener whose name escapes me now that they often put with Splenda, and didn't see those two, so I drank it. After I was wheezy, I read the label again - it had Truvia, which is Stevia with an added sugar alcohol thingey. I googled Truvia and bad reactions and found I wasn't the only one to have reactions to that. Apparently stevia is a plant/herb and you can be allergic to that. I'm also allergic (in the past couple years) to pumpkin, cantaloupe, all melons, peppers, anything with seeds in the middle like that!

    Hoping you and your family tolerate the stevia okay - how do you do with Splenda? It's the only artificial sweetener that's okay for me, and also the only one that the Center for Science in the Public Interest says is safe.

    Eating can get complicated, can't it?

    God bless you and Chris and your whole family. I listened to you on Midday starting in 1991 and I listened to Chris on the morning show. I was still missing you guys on the radio when Chris started his show - it was almost too good to be true. SO glad to be "reunited" with you and your family. I'll always remember Chris talking about the newborn baby you had had recently - it was very moving, and I feel the same way. I now have two precious granddaughters.

    Love in Christ,
    Susan from Elk Grove Village, IL
    moot96 AT aol DOT com

    ReplyDelete
  3. Susan,
    Thank you for writing! I agree it is very very complicated and different for each person. We have to be so careful with 11 of us and the various reactions.We can't do truvia either. We use stevia sparingly and seem to do well with the liquid and one type of powder. It's called "Simply Stevia" and has no fillers. Maybe that's why we tolerate it okay.
    Anyway, so nice to hear from you. Thank you for the encouragement.

    ReplyDelete