The Gluten-Free Version.

When I saw this recipe on Smitten Kitchen, I just knew I had to make it for Thanksgiving. The first time I had brown butter sauce at a fancy restaurant, I was hooked. The flavor of good brown butter sauce is, in my opinion, one of the best flavors there is.

I wanted to make the recipe gluten-free, as well as remedy the problems that Deb reported with the recipe, mostly that there was more sauce than there should have been. To achieve those two things I decided to replace the flour with cornstarch, and to reduce the amount of broth, as well as watch the broth as I added it to make sure it thickened the way I wanted it to. I also just got lazy about the chestnuts, and didn’t use the fresh ones I’d bought, but tried out a can of French chestnuts in water, to see how they worked out. Also, Whole Foods was out of shallots the night before Thanksgiving, so I tried Cipollini onions.

The result was quite good. I overdid the cornstarch a little, resulting in a the brown butter flavor getting a bit obscured, and the canned chestnuts were OK, but I’d go to the effort of prepping the fresh ones next time. The Cipollini onions were perfect, and the brown butter flavor was oh so delicious.

See the last couple of posts for a picture of the Thanksgiving meal on the plate.

Here’s the recipe, as I made it.

2 pounds brussels sprouts, trimmed and halved
4 T. butter
2 very thinly sliced cipollini onions
1 T. cornstarch, mixed with a few T. warm stock
1-1 1/2 C. hot chicken or vegetable stock
2 T. lemon juice
Ground black pepper
1/4 t. nutmeg
1 C. roasted, peeled chestnuts, broken into pieces.

Bring 4 cups salted water to a boil, add brussels sprouts and cook 10 minutes. Drain and refresh under cold water. Drain again.

Meanwhile, melt butter in a 3-quart saucepan. Add cipollini onions and cook over medium heat, stirring, until light brown. Pour contents of pan through a fine strainer into a dish, pressing to remove as much butter as possible from the onions. Place onions on paper towel to drain. Return butter to saucepan.

If serving immediately, preheat oven to 400 degrees. Place saucepan over medium heat and cook until butter has a nutty aroma and is turning brown. Whisk in cornstarch and water mixture and cook until mixture is light brown. Whisk in stock and cook until sauce has thickened. Add lemon juice, salt and pepper to taste, and nutmeg. Add chestnuts and brussels sprouts, folding ingredients together.

Transfer to an 8-cup baking dish. Scatter onions on top. Bake about 15 minutes. Serve.

This item was a last minute addition to the Thanksgiving menu, as someone else had promised to make gravy with the turkey drippings, but I knew my husband wouldn’t be able to enjoy it, since it would be made with wheat flour. And then another friend joined the party who is a vegetarian, so I had all the more reason to make an alternative gravy. I checked with Gluten-Free Girl, who swears that “its absurdly easy to make gluten-free gravy”, with sweet rice flour. I decided to go with a mushroom gravy since I remembered it being tasty from my own vegetarian days, and I couldn’t imagine vegetable stock alone providing enough flavor. Here’s a shot of the production taken by my husband, who remembered to take pictures for my blog when I forgot.

You can see the Sweet Rice Flour from Trader Joe’s, as well as the Mushroom Broth, that made this recipe a snap to make.

Sweet Rice Flour actually works much like regular flour, added slowly to melted butter, it makes something resembling a roux, which then makes a nice thick delicious sauce as liquid is added. I’m not a purist about the roux step, so I go ahead and sprinkle the flour right on the sauteing mushrooms. It works fine.

You could use a wide variety of mushrooms for this gravy, it all depends how much mushroom flavor you want. White button mushrooms are going to give you a fairly simple gravy without too much mushroom flavor, while the more flavorful varieties (oysters, chanterelles, shitakes, porcinis) will of course make a much more mushroomy, and even meaty tasting gravy. I used a pack of Royal Trumpets, and a pack of a type that I think was called Velvet Pelliopini, but I’m not sure. The closest I can find on line is called Flammulina velutipes, and seems to look similar, but what do I know. They tasted mighty good.

Mushroom Gravy (gluten-free)

4 T Butter
1 1/2 C Diced Mushrooms
1 t Italian Herb Mix
3-4 T Sweet Rice Flour
1 1/2 C Mushroom Broth

Saute the mushrooms in the butter with the herbs. Add salt and pepper to taste. When the mushrooms are nice and soft, sprinkle in the sweet rice flour, one Tablespoon at a time. Allow the flour to fully soak in to the butter before adding more flour. When you have a thick flour butter mixture surrounding the mushrooms, add the broth, a little at a time, allowing it to cook and begin to thicken before adding the next half cup.

That’s it! Easy-peasy.

I think stuffing at Thanksgiving, with a little mashed potatoes and a lot of gravy, is one of the best food combinations. I don’t even need the turkey, although it’s certainly nice too.

I made gluten-free stuffing for the first time this year, and it turned out perfectly. My old stand-by is Pepperidge Farms herb stuffing mix, but this year I wanted to make something I could share with my wheat intolerant husband. Earlier in the year we found some incredibly light and fluffy gluten-free bread products from a company called Kinnikinnick Foods. Our local Whole Foods doesn’t carry a wide variety of their products, but what they do carry is great: hamburger and hot dog buns, and english muffins. No one cared that it was gluten-free. The texture was just little different, but still lived up to my expectations of being one of my very very favorite foods.

Bread stuffing is really simple, basically it’s just bread with some goodies, moistened with butter and broth, so please feel free to improvise. I usually use sausage and chicken broth, but this year I wanted to make it vegetarian friendly, so I left out the sausage and used vegetable broth.

Like I said in the last post, I didn’t get any good photos of this meal, but you can see it here again on the plate.

Thanksgiving Stuffing

6 C cubed bread (here’s where you can go with wheat or gluten free)
1 stick of butter
2 medium onions, diced
1 1/2 C mushrooms, sliced
3 or 4 ribs of celery, sliced
1 bunch fresh sage
Salt and Pepper to taste
Other fresh or dried herbs
1 apple
1 small can water chestnuts
1-2 C broth

If your bread is not stale, put it in a 350 degree oven for 15-20 minutes until it’s dry. (Fresh bread makes mushy, textureless stuffing.)

Melt 1/2 a stick of butter in a large dutch oven. Add the onions and celery. In another pan, saute the mushrooms in the other 1/2 stick of butter. Add some chopped fresh sage to both pans as they saute. Add other herbs and salt & pepper to taste. When the onion and the mushrooms are both beginning to brown and carmelize, add the mushrooms in with the onions. There should be a nice layer of herb-y melted butter at the bottom of the pan. Add the bread cubes and quickly stir to coat evenly.

Add the apple and the water chestnuts, and a cup of broth. Add more broth, just a little at a time, stirring it in, until the stuffing is about the texture you like.

Cover the dutch oven and put it over low heat for about an hour, or until the apples get soft.

If the bottom begins to dry out or burn, add more broth (and/or butter) to keep it moist.

Serve with mashed potatoes and gravy. That’s a must.

I’ve been taking a little blogging hiatus since Thanksgiving. I think I got a little overloaded with cooking, and the dark, dark nights are getting me down. I mean, what’s the point of cooking anything if there isn’t enough light to get a good picture of it? The non-blogging streak began with Thanksgiving when I missed all sorts of good photo opportunities, what with the chaos of Thanksgiving, with people around, not to mention the wine. I did remember to capture one good photo of the meal, via my friend Abby’s plate. Here it is.

We had a potluck Thanksgiving at my folks house this year, which worked beautifully. (And you know I like potlucks.) Everyone contributed something, and no one had to stress out and get up at the crack of dawn to prep a dozen dishes. I’ll post about my contributions, namely the stuffing (gluten-free), the mushroom gravy (also gluten-free), and the delicious brussels sprouts with chestnuts in brown butter sauce from Deb over at Smitten Kitchen.