February 21, 2026

Season Six Begins

We had this Saturday afternoon/evening free so what better opportunity to jump right into Season Six?

The first recipe I wanted to try was the Curry Chicken Pot Pie. I love chicken pot pie, and I’ve been wanting to try out some gluten free puff pastry.

Reading the comments on the recipe, folks said it helps to use more liquid, so given that the recipe calls for 12oz of chicken broth, I figured I’d just use a whole 14.5oz can, and then add another 9.5oz of milk for a total of 3 cups liquid. I used 2% milk, and I adjusted the flour and butter up by 1 Tb each. That finished up the prep for all my ingredients.

For the flour, I used Bob’s Red Mill measure-for-measure flour. I followed the recipe from here exactly, and I put it all in a glass 9x13 baking dish.

Once that was done I set it aside, and turned my focus to dessert – chocolate eclairs. Now, these obviously rely on gluten and I needed to figure out how to adapt the recipe. Turns out that King Arthur has a recipe for gluten free pate a choux on their web site. Looking at that recipe, it’s pretty close to the Sweet or Savory Pate a Choux that Alton does in the episode. So, after reading it, I decided I’d just go for the Good Eats version but just substituting the King Arthur 1:1 flour. I did the boil and then added the result to the mixing bowl to cool.

It actually took about 20min to cool. The King Arthur recipe helpfully says that the dough ball should be about 125 degrees before adding the eggs. So I waited, then added egg by egg. When it was done I put it in the piping bag and then… attempted to pipe them into eclair shapes.

So you can see they did not turn out very well. I figured out later that the piping set I have doesn’t have a big enough tip for this. I should have just used the set without a tip, and it would have turned out way better. Oh well. Another difference that King Arthur has in their recipe is cooking time, which I figured may have something to do with the lack of gluten, so I followed their timing: 15 min at 400 then another 25 at 325. When they were done, I turned back to the pot pie. I have been looking forward to using this gluten free puff pastry for a while.

I rolled it out and cut 6 circles out, placed them on top of the casserole, and got it all in the oven.

It took about 30m to cook.

The puff pastry didn’t puff as much as I’d hoped it would, but it was cooked and the whole dish was really good. We all agreed, though, that the curry powder was a bit too present, and while it does add a really good dimension to the dish, perhaps halving it would be a better way. We also lamented the small amount of pastry crust. Next time I do this, I’ll probably just put a whole sheet over the top and let it be the crust.

Once the pot pie was done and eaten, I turned my attention to finishing off the eclairs for dessert. I started off by making some Ganache to top them off with. Then, I grabbed the Jello vanilla pudding I had made earlier from the fridge. I put the pudding in a piping bag, and filled a few of the pate a choux shells. Finally, I covered them with the ganache and we had beautiful looking eclairs.

Just kidding. That picture was, uh, enhanced. The eclairs actually looked like this.

Yeah, not winning any beauty contests. Actually the photo makes them look kind of gross. But, I’ll tell you, they were pretty darn good. Not as light and fluffy as gluten eclairs, but they were definitely passable. I think next time I make pate a choux I’ll do them as little dumplings and make profiteroles – that would be a perfect application for this gluten free adaptation.

All in all, a great way to begin Season Six!

A note on gluten free modifications

This will be the first season where we start out with the mission of trying to make every recipe gluten free. We need to be real about this, though – modifying recipes to remove gluten many times results in something very different from the original. Therefore, the ratings for some of those recipes may be skewed a bit by how the results of modification turn out. This is especially true for stuff like pastries, desserts, and breads.

So starting now, I’ll be tagging recipes where we made significant modifications for gluten removal. Significant modifications would be substituting gluten free flour for baked goods, for example. An insignificant modification might be using gluten free breadcrumbs as a topping. Beware if we rate one of those recipes low – it might be due to fact that gluten free recipes sometimes just don’t translate well. For example, I suspect that the pate a choux might have been a 4 if we were able to use regular gluten flour. If we ever rate a GF recipe a 1 or 2, I’ll probably try the full gluten version just to be sure.

A little Season Six preview

There’s a lot to look forward to and be excited about in Season Six. I’m looking forward to artichokes, which I’ve never cooked before, and doing the chimney starter tuna loin. Lots of good dips, a cheese souffle, and making home made yogurt. I’m also looking forward to a return to home brewing, something I haven’t done in a long time.

There’s a few in this season giving me a bit of a pause, though. Ravioli and tortellini will be interesting to try out gluten free. There’s the funnel cake and golden cake, too. We’ll give our best GF efforts on those, though I may need to adjust the recipes a bit to account for it.

Anyway, it took me almost 3 years to get through season five, let’s hope it’s way less for season six!

Curry Chicken Pot Pie

• Crowd: 4/5
• Ease: 3/5
• Used a whole can of chicken broth, then topped off to 3C total liquid with milk
• Adjusted based on the liquid content by adding another Tbs of flour and butter
• Used the white meat from a fresh supermarket rotisserie chicken
• Next time would halve the curry powder
• Next time would just put the whole sheet of puff pastry on top

Sweet or Savory Pate a Choux [GF]

• Crowd: 3/5
• Ease: 3/5
• Used 155g King Arthur Gluten Free 1:1 flour, and an extra Tbs butter
• Made Jello vanilla pudding using 1.5C milk instead of 2C as eclair filling

Ganache

• Crowd: 3/5
• Ease: 3/5
• Used 50% dark cacao dark chocolate, it was still very chocolatey

February 14, 2026

Season Five Grand Finale

Since we were having some friends over on Saturday, which is Valentine’s Day, I figured why not do a special dinner that also wraps up Season Five?

Let’s start with dessert

It hasn’t happened for a while that my first attempt at a Good Eats recipe was a total, throw-it-away-and-try-again disaster, but it happened on Sunday. I’ve never made a cheesecake before, but I thought I had been doing a good job on it – my crust looked good and blind baked, my batter was smooth and not chunky, I had the water bath perfect. Well, I followed the Sour Cream Cheesecake recipe to a T, and when I finally turned the cake out onto a plate, it basically fell apart, looking more like cheesecake pudding than an actual cake. The flavor was really good though – we each had a piece (or two!) but I threw the rest away and vowed to come back and figure out what I did wrong.

I spent the rest of that evening scrolling through the 200+ comments on the recipe. Come to find out, what most likely went wrong was the cooking time – on the web, it says to cook it for 1 hour and then let it sit in the oven for another hour. Most folks who did that ended up in the same situation as me. Well, if you then go and look in the Good Eats: The Early Years book, it says to cook it for two hours, and then let it rest in the “off” oven for another hour and a half. People in the comments who did this all reported great success. So. This is what I did on my second attempt.

On Friday night, I prepared the cheesecake second attempt. I began like I did the last one, with a blind baked crust:

In the episode he used “33 graham cracker squares” but as you know we do things gluten free around here, so I used two 7oz boxes of Pamela’s Honey Grahams. I then got all my ingredients laid out for mixing.

Once the batter was finished and the crust was cool to the touch, I poured it into the pan and put it in a roasting pan to make a water bath.

This time, I cooked it for two hours, then turned the oven off after opening the door for a minute, and left it there for another hour before moving into the fridge to set overnight.

And now for the beef

I had always planned to make the Dry Aged Standing Rib Roast with Sage Jus my last recipe of Season Five, and it just so happened that it was perfect timing that we were planning to have 10 people here. I have to say this one made me nervous – rib roasts are very expensive so I did not want to screw this up like I did with the first cheesecake attempt. This time, I sat down and read almost all of the comments in the online recipe to see if there’s any gotchas I needed to look out for. More on that later.

I started by going out and buying an 8.75 pound three-bone prime rib roast.

This was on Monday. After unwrapping it I dried it off, wrapped it up in some cheese cloth, then popped it into the fridge to dry age.

There I left it until Saturday morning. A few times during the week I unwrapped it and changed the cheese cloth out, just to keep things as dry as possible. Saturday morning I took the roast out of the fridge around 9:30am, to let it start getting to room temp.

It had gotten much darker as it aged, but I didn’t really see any of the “gross” looking parts that folks often talk about on dry aged beef. So I didn’t bother trimming or cutting anything off of it.

Now, this recipe’s episode makes a big deal about oven cleanliness and AB uses a huge terra cotta planter as a safety mechanism to guard against dirty or inefficient ovens. I did try and find one at my local Lowe’s and Home Depot, but they had nothing like the one he uses in the episode. Going back to the comments on the online recipe, I saw that most people didn’t use the planter, instead opting for a roasting pan with a rack, lightly tented with foil. So, that’s what I did too. But first, I oiled the roast with canola oil, mixed up some salt and pepper (0.5 tsp salt per bone is what he said in the episode), rubbed it all over the roast, then put in my probe thermometers. I put the roast in the rack – bone side up – and was ready to go.

I figured I’d use two probes both because I had them, and because I wanted a bit of insurance in case I put one too close to a bone and got wild readings – it looks like there’s more than a few folks in the comments that did this, pulling their roast out when it looked done only to find it extremely rare. I’m going for a perfect medium rare here.

Again from the comments, on average people reported it takes about 45min per pound at 200 degrees. Figuring after dry aging that it was about 8 pounds (I wish I had thought to weigh it), that means it would take 6 hours to get to the ~124 degrees that folks recommend cooking it to. Again, this is another little difference from the original recipe – in the episode he cooks it to 118 and it carries over to 130, but folks observed that it doesn’t carry over anywhere close to 12 degrees, more like 5 or 6. Hence, the 124 target.

Back to the cheesecake

Once I got the roast situated, I turned my attention to the cheesecake, which had been in the fridge all night. I took it out, pulled the parchment from the sides, then put it in a shallow bath of hot water to help loosen up the bottom. Once I did that, I put a piece of parchment on top of the cake, put a sheet pan over it, and flipped it over. It took a few whacks to get to going, but the cake then fell right out of the pan, upside down, onto the parchment. I put a big glass plate on the bottom of the cake (currently on top) and flipped it one more time. It worked WAY better this time than it did on Sunday – perfectly set, a bit springy, and it all stayed together nicely. Finally, I grabbed the left over graham cracker crumbs and spread them over the sides of the cake. This part was a bit of a pain, and if I did it again I would crush up the ones for the cake sides way finer – the large chunks might be good for the bottom, but they don’t work well for the sides, and it would look way better with smaller pieces there.

Once that was done, we had to cut a slice to test it, then it was back in the fridge to wait for tonight.

Cooking the roast

I put the roast in the oven at exactly 11:45am, meaning my calculated finish time to 124 would be about 5:45pm, leaving enough time for resting and searing to get us to my 6:30pm dinner time target. During the cook I wanted to watch the meat’s temperature carefully, as some folks reported that they needed to bump the oven to 225 or even 250 in order to get it cooked in a reasonable time. So I checked both temperature probes every hour. Here’s the log.

So you can see a few things here. First, about 4 hours into the cook I decided it was going a bit too slowly, and I pushed the oven up to 225. This is something that was suggested in the recipe comments, so I felt OK doing that.

Second, you see that one of my probes kicked the bucket in the middle of the cook. That was unfortunate, but also it was lucky I had the second one in there. The second probe was always behind the first, so when I pulled the meat out, I waited until it showed 127, because the second probe would have been about 122. The other thing you can see is that I was about 30m off – I had originally thought it would take 6 hours, but it was more like 6.5 hours. It’s funny because if you take the original weight of the roast (8.75) and figure 45min per pound, you ger 6.5 hours.

I rested the roast while the oven was heating to 500, and it peaked at 133, which is one degree above the top of medium rare. The second probe probably would have peaked at about 128, so I feel like I hit my target. Once the oven was 500, I put the roast back in, this time uncovered, and let it go for another 10 minutes to crust up. The result was a beautiful crusty prime rib.

I let that rest while I made the sage au jus that is part of the recipe. Also, AB notes in the episode that you can add a few pats of butter to thicken it up, so I did that, too. While it rested I also finished up some roasted carrots and some instant pot baby potatoes, and once those were done I got to slicing.

The meat was perfectly medium rare. The au jus was amazing. This recipe was a huge winner, and I was so relieved because of the time and expense put into it. After the steak we then had cheesecake for dessert, and that was a huge crowd pleaser as well.

All in all, this was an awesome way of wrapping up season five, and I was so happy to be able to share that with some close friends. Now, on to season six! I love the start of a new season – the world is wide open with the recipe choices, and I really enjoy planning out when and where to make them.

Sour Cream Cheesecake

• Crowd: 4/5
• Ease: 2/5
• Used two 7oz boxes of Pamela's Honey Grahams
• Next time I'd make the leftover crumbs for the cake sides way smaller
• Cook this for TWO hours, not one. Cooking only one hour results in pudding.

Dry Aged Standing Rib Roast with Sage Jus

• Crowd: 5/5
• Ease: 2/5
• Used a three-bone, 8.75 pound pre-aging weight prime rib roast
• Dry aged about 5 days in the fridge, wrapped in cheesecloth
• Did not use the terra cotta planter. Cooked in a roasting pan with a rack, lightly covered in foil.
• Took 6.5 hours with the first four hours at 200, and the next two and a half at 225.
• Added a few pats of butter to the au jus after taking it off the heat

February 07, 2026

Squid Stir Fry

What better thing to do on a snowed-in day than try out some Good Eats recipes?

Today I decided for a late lunch we’d have some squid stir fry aka. Squid Vicious. It started with some frozen squid that I ran under the tap to thaw. I took the bodies apart, cut, scraped, scored, and quartered them.

It’s worth noting that the online recipe leaves out the scraping part, so I don’t know how important that actually is. After prepping the bodies, I then got all the rest of the ingredients prepped and ready for a very quick cook.

I went back and watched the episode, and I realized that it’s very much about using a wok, and even a turkey fryer burner to get it tremendously hot. Well, I have a turkey fryer but I don’t have a wok, so this would have to be done in a pan, at the highest heat my stove could put out.

After a quick cook, we plated it over some sushi rice and sat down to lunch.

This recipe was surprisingly delicious. The squid was perfect. It rolled up into little ribbons, and it was tender, flavorful, and not in the least bit rubbery. The flavor of the stir fry itself was fantastic, my guess due in no small part to the miso broth stir fry sauce. This is one of the Good Eats recipes I’d been dreading and putting off because I thought it’d be bleh. But fortunately, I was wrong.

My hunch is that this recipe would be great for just any general stir fry. Using shrimp or chicken marinated the same way in soy sauce and corn starch would make any protein perfect for this. Will most likely reach for this recipe any time I want to make a stir fry. Maybe next time I’ll even try a wok!

Squid Vicious

• Crowd: 5/5
• Ease: 3/5
• Scraped the inside of the squid bodies, like he did in the episode
• Didn't have a wok, so just did this in a regular frying pan over the hottest heat my stove could go
• Five rating based mostly on the fact that it's a great general stir-fry, which would be great with shrimp, chicken, etc.

December 23, 2025

Eggplant Pasta

Between holiday parties and entertaining I thought I’d slip in a dinner of Eggplant Pasta. I started by purging a couple of eggplants.

Then sliced them up thin to look like strands of pasta.

Finally, I finished off the recipe in the pan as instructed.

The result was underwhelming. We really though it’d be better, but it’s still just sort of bland eggplant. The sauce was great though, and I’d use this again along with some actual pasta, and then some protein like grilled chicken or shrimp.

Probably won’t do this one again.

Eggplant Pasta

• Crowd: 3/5
• Ease: 3/5
• This sauce would be great with regular pasta, plus a protein like chicken or shrimp

December 12, 2025

Crepe Quiche

This morning I started my day by making some savory crepes so later I could make Crepe Quiche Lorraine for lunch. I’ve made crepes a couple of times already for Season 5, and I think this time I really had it dialed in.

I discovered that the heat on the pan should be much lower than I’d usually think. I used a quarter tablespoon of unsalted butter per crepe in my 8” nonstick pan, and 1.5oz of batter per crepe.

After making the crepes, sauteing the onions, crumbling the bacon, and shredding the cheese, I was ready to put them together.

Then I poured them:

And it was into the oven. I had a ton of left over eggs and cheese so I took the rest of it and made a little frittata. The recipe said to cook at 350 for 15m until the egg is set, but I found that it needed more like 25m.

The quiches were OK. It’s funny because you’d think that because each individual ingredient is great, that the combination of them all would be fantastic, but they were basically underwhelming. With the amount of work it took to put this recipe together, I probably won’t make this one again.

Crepe Quiche Lorraine

• Crowd: 2/5
• Ease: 2/5
• Quiches took 25m to set rather than 15m the recipe says
• Would not use equal portions of salt and pepper -- way less pepper next time

December 12, 2025

Raw Clams

Figured I’d go buy some fresh littlenecks this afternoon to have a bit of an appetizer of Clams on the Half Shell with Fresh Mayonnaise. Earlier in the day, though, I broke out the stick blender and some avocado oil to make some homemade mayo using a recipe I found online. It was super easy and the mayo is delicious.

Then it was time to get into the clams.

I tried using my oyster knife and then a butter knife but both were way too big to get into the shell. So, instead I used an old paring knife while wearing an anti-cut glove.

This was the way, and soon I had about a dozen clams open.

To accompany them, I took the mayo from earlier and divided it up. One third was the original mayo. Another third I added a finely minced garlic clove, some pepper, and a bit more lemon juice to make an aioli. The last third I mixed in some Sambal Olek to make a spicy mayo.

All in all, the clams were fine. We absolutely love oysters on the half shell, but clams on the half shell are simply OK. The mayos as an accoutrement is an amazing idea. Can’t wait to try the spicy mayo on some oysters.

Clams on the Half Shell with Fresh Mayonnaise

• Crowd: 3/5
• Ease: 4/5
• Made fresh mayo with avocado oil and a stick blender

November 22, 2025

Butternut Squash Dumplings

For a Sunday afternoon project I decided to tackle the first half of Butternut Dumplings with Brown Butter and Sage by making the dumplings and freezing them for later. I had been sort of dreading this one, because reading through the comments on the Food Network recipe page, I saw that tons of people had a lot of trouble with it and ended up with wet, sticky dough that couldn’t be worked. So, I figured I’d halve the recipe and see what I could come up with.

The recipe on the site leaves a lot to be desired, especially because it doesn’t give any weights to the ingredients. It calls for one and half butternut squashes, and four russet potatoes. After weighing a few squashes and potatoes at the supermarket, I determined that half of this recipe would be 1.5 pounds of butternut squash, and 1.5 pounds of potato. So, equal proportions.

I went ahead and roasted the butternut squash (oh, by the way I used pre-cubed pieces, which makes it so much easier) and the potatoes for about an hour at 375. When they came out I mashed them all together and mixed in an egg (I didn’t halve that part of the recipe) plus 2 teaspoons of kosher salt and a pinch of nutmeg.

Since we’re halving the recipe I then added 3/4 cups of Bob’s Red Mill All Purpose Gluten Free Flour and mixed it with a spoon. The dough looked like it was coming together but it wasn’t quite the consistency I thought I was looking for, so I added another quarter cup of flour for a total of 1 cup altogether, plus a quarter teaspoon of xanthan gum. At this point, the dough was the consistency of the cookie dough you buy in the tube at the grocery store, which seemed exactly right to me.

Rolling it out on the counter, I used only a little more flour. This part was time consuming but not terribly difficult. As I made rope after rope, I cut them up with a butter knife and put them on parchment-lined sheet pans.

Then it was into the freezer. A few hours later I took all of them out and put them into a plastic bag for cooking later.

The next Saturday was when I decided to give these a try for lunch. I started by boiling a large stock pot full of water, then dumping 2 cups of dumplings into the water. The recipe said they’d float when they were done, but I didn’t find tha to be true. I checked them frequently and when they were thawed through and cooked to al dente I removed them from the water and added them to an ice batch (a strainer in a bowl of ice water). I then drained them, tossed them in a little olive oil, and added them to a pan with some butter and sage.

When they started to get a nice browned crust I plated them and grated some fresh Parmesan cheese on top, plus a pinch of sea salt.

Then we ate! They were good. Not mind-blowing, but a really nice snack. The texture was very light, and the flavor mild. They were a little dry and we concluded that a bit of a light cream sauce or brown butter sauce would really take them up a notch. I might try that with the ones I still have in the fridge. Overall, though, this was a decent project with a pretty delicious result.

Butternut Dumplings with Brown Butter and Sage

• Crowd: 3/5
• Ease: 2/5
• Substituted Bob's Red Mill 1-to-1 Gluten Free flour, plus a quarter teaspoon of xanthan gum
• Added an extra quarter cup of flour
• Would benefit from a cream or butter sauce

November 16, 2025

Roesti and Radicchio

For dinner tonight I thought I’d do a couple of Season 5 recipes that seemed like they’d go well together when combined with some grilled chicken.

In the morning, I started by cooking up a one of the packs of homemade bacon I made a few weeks ago and saving off the resulting drippings. This would be the base of the dressing for Bacon Vinaigrette with Grilled Radicchio.

When it was time to start dinner, I first shredded up a pound of yukon gold potatoes and 4oz of onion. After all the shredding was done I then put it all into some cheese cloth and squeezed as much liquid from it that I could. This was the base for the Potato Roesti.

While the grill was heating, I started the roesti. I had two 8-inch pans so I could do two at a time.

To flip them I used the lid trick that AB used in the show, and it went pretty smooth.

I continued doing roestis and putting them in a 200-degree oven to keep warm.

Meanwhile, I had some chicken on the grill and put the radicchio on there as the chicken was finishing up. I microwaved the now-congealed bacon grease and whisked up the dressing. It was dark out and my grill area isn’t super well lit, so I didn’t notice that grilling the radicchio took more of the color out of it. It looked pretty sad when I got it back inside.

However, both dishes were delicious. This salad dressing is really great, though not terribly good for you, with the bacon grease and the sugar, but it would be a good one to make for dinner guests with a green salad, tomatoes, croutons, and bacon crumbles.

The roestis were a huge hit, too. We ate them with a little sour cream, and we wer all sad when all four were gone. Cooking them is a bit of a pain, so next time I think I would try using my electric griddle and making smaller ones, kind of like I do with pancakes.

Potato Roesti

• Crowd: 5/5
• Ease: 3/5
• Next time would try cooking these on a griddle

Bacon Vinaigrette with Grilled Radicchio

• Crowd: 3/5
• Ease: 3/5
• Perhaps grilled the radicchio a bit too long, it lost its color

October 29, 2025

Bacon!

Creating Scrap Iron Chef’s Bacon is more of a project than a recipe, and I’ve been looking forward to this one. The prospect of making my own bacon, completely from scratch, has always interested me.

It started with the pork belly. I was able to find a 3.5lb one in the freezer at my local butcher, so I thawed that out, and cut it down to 2.5lb for ease of recipe adaptation. I then rubbed it with coarse ground black pepper:

And then popped it into a container with the cooled curing liquid:

I weighed down the pork with some pickle pepples that we had, and that worked well for keeping it submerged in the cure for the next three days.

After three days, it was go time. I pulled the pork belly out of the cure and put it on a sheet pan with a rack, in front of a fan, for a little over an hour to develop a nice pellicle on top.

After that, it was time to get it smoking. For cold smoking, I used a setup that I’ve been successful with in the past for making smoked cheese. Rather than rigging up a hot zone/cold zone smoker like AB does in the episode, I used a smoke tube together with some apple wood smoking pellets, right on my regular grill with the burners off.

After smoking for about 6 hours (I needed to refill the tube twice), I pulled the pork belly, or should I say the bacon.

After pulling from the “smoker” I vacuum sealed the whole thing and put it in the fridge for a few days. The recipe doesn’t say to do this, but when I do smoked cheese I let it rest for a while to let the smoke “sink in”. Figured it wouldn’t hurt with the bacon.

A couple days later, I borrowed a friend’s deli slicer to get to work. First, though, I put the whole belly into the freezer for about an hour to help with the cutting. After that, it was slicing time.

Since the slicer can fit ~8 inches left to right, I had to slice the short way a bit, leaving me with a few shorter pieces, but then I was able to get a whole bunch of normal long cuts. I also ended up with a chunk of bacon ends, which I’ll eventually render down to use for making clam chowder.

Finally, I divided up the cut bacon into vacuum-sealed packages about about 6oz each.

I froze most of it, but left two packs out – one to cook, and the other to give to Stan, who lent me the slicer.

At last came time to cook the bacon. I used my regular technique, which is similar to the one AB uses on the show – I lay the strips out on a sheet pan and pop it into a cold oven that I then set to 350. It takes 25-30m and the bacon comes out crispy and crunchy, just the way we like it.

– cooked bacon

Scrap Iron Chef's Bacon

• Crowd: 4/5
• Ease: 2/5
• Used a 2.5lb pork belly, and halved the amounts in the wet cure
• Next time time would flip the belly and put the bottom of the belly up to dry with the fan and develop a pellicle
• Smoked it on a grill with a smoke tube, got about 2hrs of smoke per full tube. Smoked for a total of about 6 hours, which I think was plenty.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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: 4/5
• 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