My First...

Tonight was my first experience intentionally cooking a gluten-free meal.  A childhood friend, H, of D lives very close by.  She and her boyfriend, C,  were coming over for dinner tonight (see my previous post where I discuss my trick for ensuring a clean house!!).  H cannot eat gluten.  I knew this when I invited her over for dinner this time.  I always love looking up new recipes.  I usually start planning holiday meals WEEKS in advance while I start finding the new recipes I want to try.  When planning this menu I not only wanted to make sure 100% was gluten free I also wanted to capitalize on the fact that D will now eat free-range chicken (!!!!).  I was looking around and decided to make things a bit easier on myself and find a gluten-free, chicken, crockpot recipe.  I have had the crockpot for over a year and never used it.  It was time!

I did some searching and found two chicken recipes that looked interesting.  This one and this one.  I decided to send both options to H to make sure they were possible.  She recommended the brown sugar recipe.  Although I don't have gluten-free soy sauce, she said since there are only 2T of soy sauce in this recipe, it should be ok.

I figured out how long it would take (4-5 hours on high) and worked backwards.  They are arriving at 7 so I'll put it up around 2:30.  Perfect!  Until I get to the brown sugar.  Our brown sugar had been exposed to air and was HARD AS A ROCK.  I looked at the side of the package and it told me how to loosen it: place two damp paper towels over it and wrap with plastic wrap and place it in the microwave for 30 seconds.  It should have worked immediately but I had to do lots of scraping and do it three times.  But at least it finally worked.  Once the chicken was up it was time for the rice.  Believe it or not, people who are allergic to gluten can eat rice (this may not be all people so double check before serving rice!!).

The meal worked out perfectly, I was all ready the minute C and H arrived!  I mean to take a picture but we were all too hungry!!  I will say that for me the sauce did not need to be thickened as there wasn't much of it.  However, this is probably because the chicken was done before I served it.  Since I had cooked it on high and my crockpot doesn't have a "warm" option, I turned it down to low probably about 30-60 minutes before they arrived so a lot of the sauce cooked out.  If you don't cook it as long as I did there will probably be more liquid.  I served it directly over the rice and it was amazingly yummy!

We had asked C and H to bring dessert: fruit cobbler and soy ice cream.  Honestly their vanilla ice cream tastes JUST like original.  It is absolutely yummy.

All in all a great night.  And the house is still clean!