Our grain-free Thanksgiving

Sorry there haven't been any posts lately. Baby and I have been sick. Any parents will know what a long story that sentence hides ... a lot of me sick, then baby sick, then me sick again, and some with us sick simultaneously; a baby too congested to sleep or nurse, me coughing too hard to let the baby sleep or nurse; a baby who needs to be bounced and walked around all day while I need to lie in bed with the covers pulled up all day ... Well, it's been rough. We're feeling somewhat better now, thank God.

Anyway, for Thanksgiving this year, I'm planning only grain-free dishes. I was going to make at least some stuffing for our guests, but sadly we could not dredge up a single one! Last year, you might remember, we had what I call an "orphans' Thanksgiving," where we invited two guests who didn't know each other a bit, and had a lovely time. I tried to do the same this time, but no one could come, sigh.

Here's our menu for tomorrow:

Turkey: a 12-pounder, the smallest I could find, but also on such a deep sale (46 cents a pound) that I was happy to buy what I could. You're just not going to find meat cheaper than that.

Gravy: I'm hoping to thicken this with arrowroot powder, if I can find it. Other grain-free thickeners include tapioca and potato starch.

Mashed potatoes: with butter and milk.

Salad: John's "ancestral recipe" is seven-layer salad. I don't think we've got all seven layers worth of vegetables, but it will have lettuce, cucumber, tomato, green peppers, peas, and carrots.

Apples and cranberries: My "ancestral recipe" is apple-cranberry casserole with streusel topping. I'm just omitting the streusel, so it's just apples, cranberries, and sugar, baked together.

That's all. I could do sweet potatoes, but John doesn't care for them, and with only the three of us, I don't want to overdo things. The baby will probably just eat turkey, apples, some of the salad vegetables, and maybe his first try of potatoes.

It'll be a quiet Thanksgiving, and I do wish we could have some company (ah, for the lovely company we had last year!), but I think we'll have fun. In any event, that turkey will feed us for weeks!