October 21, 2025

Picking it Back Up

It’s been quite a while since I’ve been back into this project, and a lot has happened in the mean time. Shortly after the last recipe I made, Gemma was officially diagnosed with Celiac. Then in the summer of 2025, Vivian was diagnosed Celiac as well. So now 2/3 of the family is gluten free, which has been quite an adjustment.

It will have its effect on this project – from here on out I am going to try to make each recipe gluten free if at all possible. Some recipes of course will need to be adjusted, and there will be some that I won’t be able to share with the girls. I’m going to try and keep the number of those to a minimum. When there’s a Good Eats recipe that requires ingredients that contain gluten, I may completely stray from AB’s original guidance and just do my best to make a gluten free version of whatever’s being made.

To get back into the swing of things, on Friday night I put some ingredients together into the little 2.5 quart slow cooker for some Overnight Oatmeal. Thankfully Bob’s makes gluten free steel cut oats which were perfect for this.

prepping oats

The show’s recipe called for using dried figs and dried cranberries, but we tried it with dried cherries and dried apricots. The cherries were a great addition, but the apricots really overpowered everything else.

finished oats

Then on Sunday I decided to make us a dessert treat for later in the evening by putting together two gelatin recipes: Sparkling Gingered Face and Cinnamon Cherry Heart. I had bought these small heart and brain molds to use for this, so instead of a face I used brains for the sparkling ginger gelatin.

prepping gelatins

I did notice that on the online recipe for the ginger face, there’s a single comment saying it’s all wrong and in the wrong order. I went back to the episode to verify this, and sure enough the comment is right. The real recipe should be more like:

  1. Pour 1 cup ginger ale into a bowl
  2. Sprinkle 2 packets gelatin over the ginger ale
  3. Let bloom for 3-5 minutes
  4. Microwave on high, stirring every minute until temperature reaches 150°F (no higher)
  5. Slowly pour 1 cup champagne into the warm gelatin mixture, stirring constantly
  6. Refrigerate for about 1 hour until it reaches egg-white consistency
  7. Pour into mold and refrigerate until set

finished gelatins

The gelatin itself came out perfectly – completely clear, very well set. However, the flavor of both was just… gross. We couldn’t figure out why these flavor combinations would be used. We figured maybe this is something like they’d do in the 1940’s or something, but anyway we’ll never make these particular flavors again.

Later that night I put in some oats using only dried cherries for additions. Monday morning we tried it again and still were underwhelmed. The fruit just seems to take over and really detract from the oat’s flavors. I didn’t get a photo of that one.

Monday evening we were planning to do a sausage and root vegetable bake for dinner, so as a little appetizer I decided to make some Squash Soup. The recipe calls for using two large butternut squash, but I only used a single squash and halved the rest of the recipe.

prepping squash

It came out great. A wonderful belly warmer as the weather is starting to get a bit colder this time of year. I think this will be added to my go-to rotation. In my version I only used a pinch of white pepper, and way less than the half a tablespoon of salt that the recipe calls for. I used a couple pinches on the squash itself, and then a couple pinches in the soup. By the way, I think next time I’ll cut the squash up before roasting it – trying to scrape it out of the hot peel was a pain, and I think by cutting it up I’d get a bit more even cooking.

squash soups

And finally, since the two previous overnight oats attempts were both mediocre, I decided that I’d try one more time, this time without fruit additions. I followed the recipe exactly, just leaving out the fruit, and this time the family did enjoy them. Something about adding the dried fruit was just too reminiscent of fruit cake I guess…

Overnight Oatmeal

  • Crowd: 3/5
  • Ease: 4/5
  • Used both dried cherries and dried apricots. Apricots overpowered it.
  • Ultimately landed on no fruit additions being our favorite.

Sparkling Gingered Face

  • Crowd: 1/5
  • Ease: 4/5
  • Used prosecco instead of champagne
  • Bloomed in ginger ale, and then microwaved until it got to about 150, then added prosecco

Cinnamon Cherry Heart

  • Crowd: 1/5
  • Ease: 4/5
  • Only used 1 tsp of cinnamon extract. 2 tsp would have been overpowering.

Squash Soup

  • Crowd: /5
  • Ease: 3/5
  • Squash took an hour and 15m to cook (vs recipe saying ~35m)
  • Probably would be way easier to peel the squash next time and roast it in chunks
  • Used way less salt than the recipe said to, which I am happy I did