Baked Pumpkin Chicken and Noodles

 

Today I have the wonderful honor of guest posting on Prerna’s gorgeous food blog, Indian Simmer!  We’ve become lovely internet friends through sharing our passion for food, cooking, and photography, and I am so excited to be able to share on her site today.

One of my favorite things about the upcoming holidays is that essentially from now until the New Year for my family it is all about tradition.  Favorited treasured recipes that only get made once a year, as everyone eagerly awaits the familiar aromas wafting throughout the kitchen.  There’s always such a buzz of energy and excitement in the air, no matter what crazy weather/fallen trees/power outages Mother Nature decides to bring on my family’s New England home over the past Halloween, which they are have been heroically dealing with. Seriously well over a week later and my quaint little hometown is still a near disaster area, trees and wires lying in the road making several areas impassible, no cell service, many homes still without power and thus also without heat or running water, it’s absolutely nuts. But progress is slowly happening, and that is another story for another time – suffice to say while some of us are preparing Thanksgiving dinner this year, the rest of us may be outside chopping all the newfound firewood from the fallen trees…

This Thanksgiving seems like it will be full of all sorts of new experiences this year – so maybe it’s a good time to play with tradition as well. Why not try a holiday switch on some of our favorites? Every year that we’ve celebrated the holidays with my grandparents, Christmas dinner has involved baked chicken and noodles as the highlight of the meal.  It’s not so fancy, it’s not extravagant, but my grandparents have been making it for decades and it’s 100% pure happiness on the plate.  Seriously, comfort food doesn’t get any more satisfying than this.  But with every tradition comes the natural evolution of recipes, and while there may be a little pressure to keep a dish exactly how everyone remembers it, I cannot help but play.  This year, I’m taking our family Christmas dinner tradition and bringing it to our Thanksgiving table.

Changing the holiday isn’t the only switch I did with this tradition – I added in a little Thanksgiving essence by incorporating pumpkin, but I also made it completely gluten free so that this year, my husband will be able to enjoy it too.

Some traditions are meant to stay around forever unchanged, and some are meant to evolve – will this dish find a new home in the coming years on my family’s Thanksgiving table? Only time will tell. To find out my tips and recipe to convert this family favorite into a Thanksgiving inspired gluten free dish, you’ll have to go check out the rest of my post on Prerna’s blog, Indian Simmer. Happy cooking!

Also submitted to Gluten Free Wednesdays