Sunday, April 8, 2012

A gluten-free Easter

In order to change things up a bit and get rid of the foods that upset my tummy we came up with a new menu for this Easter. We decided on ham, sweet potato casserole, roasted zucchini, and roasted potatoes with some Oreo poke cake for dessert.
No spiral cut ham for us this year, just a small pre-cooked piece of ham.
The sweet potato casserole wasn't really even sweet potatoes, it was mashed butternut squash mixed with almond milk, egg beaters and sugar free maple syrup. This was my favorite part of the meal.
 Instead of green bean casserole we made zucchini crisps where I thinly sliced zucchini, coated them in egg beaters and then rolled them in seasoned, gluten free bread crumbs before roasting them.
And then some good old standard seasoned roasted potatoes.
 So many new tasty favorites!

For dessert I made a twist on my old favorite, Jello poke cake. I saw a version online that used chocolate cake (instead of white) and topped it with Jello Oreo pudding instead of regular gelatin. So I went about turning it into a gluten free version.
Betty Crocker makes it pretty easy to swap out the cake, I used sugar-free white chocolate Jello pudding and mixed in gluten free Oreo-like cookies to make my own Oreo pudding. I kept the cake low-cal by mixing it with just a cup of water and a cup of fat-free Greek yogurt. It makes it denser, like a brownie, but not any less tasty. So, like a poke cake, you bake the cake first and then poke holes along the top of it. Once cooled you make the pudding, mixing in the cookies, and then pour it all over the top of the cake (I only ended up using 1 box of pudding since I only used an 8x8 pan). Finally, I topped it all with crushed cookies and put it in the fridge to set up.
Here's what I learned - adding your own crushed cookies to white pudding turns it a very unappealing shade of gray. Good to know. Secondly, pudding is very thick and doesn't show as well from the side view of a cut slice.
It's good, but no regular poke cake. Don't feel bad for us though, we'll manage to choke it down.

All in all, a very successful day of delicious food!

1 comment:

Lisa Dovichi said...

Yay! I just bought zucchini. I'm goin g to try the dipping it in bread crumbs deal -- 'cept I'll probably use Panko because I don't have "cranky-old-guy-get-off-my-lawn" stomach like you do. :)