Gluten Free Challenge - Roast Chicken With All The Trimmings

This week was my daughter's birthday - the tricky bit about her sleepover was that one of her friends must have a gluten free diet and the plan was to do roast chicken with all the trimmings. I never realised how much gluten stuff we use. Flower for thickening the gravy, breadcrumbs in the stuffing, sometimes even a dusting of flower for roast potatoes. So this is what we had:

Actually the stuffing is missing in this picture, but we'll get to that. So here we have crispy Black Kale, Butter Bean mash and roast chicken.

To do the chicken I create a spiced "butter" based on butter, olive oil. garlic powder, salt, pepper, some mushroom powder and paprika.

The butter bean mash is based on a recipe idea of Jun Tanaka. I sweated off some garlic, shallot, thyme and rosemary in olive oil. I the added 3 tins of drained and rinsed butter beans and pureed the lot and re-heated it just before serving.

The crispy kale is following an idea of Ian Garten's. You simply rip it into shreds, and rub it in olive oil, salt, pepper and garlic powder and give it a about five minutes in the oven at approx 200C.

As to the stuffing I actually forgot to serve it initially, which is why it's not in the picture. I mixed a bunch of parsley, with rosemary, thyme, salt pepper, one egg, Heck's Fair & Square, and quite a few chestnuts that we froze after last year's chestnutting.

When doing the gravy I remembered reading in one of Heston Blumenthal's books that you can use Xanthan Gum to thicken gluten free sauces, so that's what I did.

Everybody loved it and had seconds and my daughter's friend especially loved the idea of being allowed to eat the stuffing for once.