Gluten Free Christmas

Merry Christmas!

Ok, not quite! Not even that close but it’s that time of year again when the shops are starting to get full of Christmas cards and decorations, soon we will be digging out our Christmas jumpers and Christmas songs will be on the radio. I thought I would do a post about how I survived Christmas gluten free. My family isn’t very religious, for me Christmas is about family, being with people you don’t see much at other times of the year, exchanging presents, having fun and eating and drinking together.

Last Christmas was particularly good for gluten free – we had gluten free beer on tap:

This was Hambletons GFA- my personal favourite of the gluten free beers available. It tasted just like normal beer but with a slightly sweet after taste. Really nice to be able to have beer! You used to be able to buy this in Tesco but I haven't seen it for a long time. You can get it delivered directly from the brewery, with free delivery, as I have recently discovered. 

For some reason, traditionally we always have lasagne on Christmas eve, this was made with gluten free lasagne and gluten free garlic bread:

I find gluten free lasagne works just the same as normal lasagne, and I made the garlic bread using a shop bought gf roll with garlic butter on it.

Made a loaf of bread for turkey sandwiches, this was the large white oven loaf:

 

Deliciously juicy turkey:

We made gf bread sauce as well, which I didn’t take a photo of, but we just followed the normal technique but used gluten free bread instead- it worked well. We also tried making it with milk and polenta, but this just ended up being polenta so you couldn’t really call it bread sauce. We make gluten free gravy using gluten free flour instead of normal flour, and it works just as well, sometimes it’s a bit thinner but it’s usually ok.

We also had gluten free Christmas pudding, I can’t remember where it was from - I think it was probably Waitrose. I soaked it in rum and set it on fire which was fun. It tasted good although I don’t really like rich fruity things that much:

There were all sorts of non-gluten free things knocking about (bread, bread sauce, biscuits etc.) but we just made sure to keep these separate. Had separate sections of the boxing day buffet for gluten free stuff so we didn’t get mixed up. I had plenty to eat and it was a very Merry Christmas indeed!