Slow-Cooker Sundays: Turkey Chili & Cornbread

So this is actually the first time I've ever made chili from scratch and it turned out pretty well! It had just the right amount of spice and flavor but it lacked body, if that makes any sense. I based my recipe off of the Cuisinart Slow-Cooker Cookbook, but made some changes based on the things we like and don't like. I keep reading that "real chili" doesn't have beans in it, but that's always been my favorite part! You can't have chili without cornbread and honey butter, so we took this recipe from Gluten Free Girl and altered it just a bit.  Recipes are below...

Turkey Chili

4 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
1 1/4 lbs ground turkey thigh meat
3 large garlic cloves, peeled and finely chopped
1 1/4 medium sweet onions, chopped
1/6 cup chili powder
1/2 tbsp ground cumin
3/4 tsp ground allspice
3/4 tsp ground cinnamon
3/4 tsp ground coriander
3/4 tsp ground oregano
1/4 tsp ground ginger
1 28 oz can of diced tomatoes
1 15 oz can of kidney beans
1 green bell pepper, chopped into 1/2 inch squares
1/2 cup chicken broth
1/3 cup apple cider vinegar
1 bay leaf
1/2 tsp fresh ground sea salt

Heat 2 tbsp olive oil in a medium skillet on medium-high heat. Add the ground turkey and cook until browned.
Transfer turkey and any remaining liquid in pan to the slow-cooker pot.
Add and heat remaining 2 tbsp olive oil to the skillet on medium heat.
Add the garlic and onion to the skillet and cook until translucent and softened.
Add chili powder, cumin, allspice, cinnamon, coriander, oregano, and ginger to the skillet and heat on low heat until fragrant.
Transfer the onion mixture to the slow-cooker pot.
Add and stir in the diced tomatoes, green pepper, chicken broth, apple cider vinegar, bay leaf, and sea salt to the slow-cooker pot.
Cover and set the slow-cooker for 6 hours at low heat.


Gluten Free Cornbread
From Gluten Free Girl's Website - with my changes in Blue

1/4 cup sorghum flour
1/4 cup tapioca starch
1/4 cup potato starch
1/4 cup corn flour
1/4 cup sugar
4 teaspoons baking powder
3/4 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon xanthan gum
1/4 cup butter, melted
2 large eggs
1 cup coconut milk
1 cup yellow cornmeal


Preheat the oven to 425°.
Combine the flours by sifting them into a large bowl. Add the remaining dry ingredients and stir.
Combine the eggs, melted butter, and coconut milk in a small bowl. Make a well in the center of the dry ingredients and pour in the liquid. Stir with a rubber spatula until everything is combined.
Stir in the cornmeal, whisking fast, until it is just combined. Do not over stir.
Pour into a greased 9 by 9 by 2-inch pan. Slide it into the oven. Bake for 20 to 25 minutes, or until the sides of the cornbread are slightly shrinking from the pan and a toothpick comes out clean.

Getting Ready - On the Brides Side

So I can't do my own hair in any special way, in fact I don't even know how how to really use a curling iron.  Our wedding coordinator found Alisa from Heidi's Studio and she did a great job with what I wanted.

I did however do my own makeup after taking a lesson at the Source Spa & Salon in Ballard.  And I actually did a great job!

Us ladies all ended up being ready about 40 minutes early so we had some time to relax and eat some guacamole and chips.  We hung around in the kimono style cotton robes that I purchased for us all from Pretty Plum Sugar.

I also got to spend some time with my mom, which was absolutely wonderful.  She was a very helpful and calming influence in the morning, which I am so appreciative of.  What a great mom!

She helped me get all zipped up and set in my dress, which I'm sure wasn't as complicated as most wedding dresses, but it still required zipping assistance.

Overall, it was a very easy and relaxing morning.  We did have over 40 minutes of downtime after getting ready.  I felt sort of anxious the whole time because I just wanted things to start moving.

My Awesome Dress & Gear

I got my awesome dress custom made by Amanda Archer. It was a long process (if you remember the original sketch was quite different) but in the end it turned out absolutely perfect!  I wanted a dress that I could really dance in and twirl.  The color is also more of a cream then a white and that band in the middle is a midnight blue. At the bottom is one layer of custom tulle as well. 

For the ceremony, I wore Reef flip flops.  The ladies had the same ones but with brown straps rather than cream colored.

I didn't wear a vail and the only thing I wore in my hair was a single blue cornflower made out of an ultralight clay that was custom designed and made by Midori Designs.

After dinner I changed into some flats to prepare for dancing.  I found these on sale at DSW, they were so cute and comfortable and just a little flashy!

Our Wedding Rings

We got our wedding rings from the same place that my engagement ring was from, Brilliant Earth. Both are recycled platinum and hammered.  My ring has a line of Australian sapphires set in a channel.

Our Flowers

Our wedding coordinator recommended our florist, Floral Design by Reina, to us and we couldn't have been happier with her!  Reina was incredibly generous with us and our budget, had amazing ideas, and ended up saving the day when things didn't work out as planned.

After we got engaged and started thinking about flowers, the only thing we knew we wanted for sure was pampas grass, and then we got some other ideas that we posted about here and here. And I knew for sure that I didn't want a big poofy bridal bouquet because I'm not really big on flowers to begin with. Reina was able to come up with some great ideas and flowers we had never heard of.

And then it was the night of our rehearsal dinner and our wedding coordinator, Beth, had a phone call for us from Reina. Poor Reina had to explain to us that due to the unusually cold weather she wasn't able to get the California poppies and blue cornflowers that we had wanted.  But, she had already come up with a back-up plan which even involved altering some other blue flowers to individually look like the blue cornflowers.

To be honest, when we got the call and Reina explained what had happened, it was totally disappointing.  And when the flowers arrived the next day, it was a little disappointing not to see the flowers we had pictured for our wedding. But in the end it totally didn't matter and I certainly was not thinking about our flowers while I was eating our delicious food or dancing my heart out on the dance floor!

Our Photo Booth

We had an idea that we wanted to do a photo booth at the wedding, specifically to give our guests a fun little activity to spend some time at during the reception.  However, this was something that really didn't come together too well until just before the wedding.

It all started with the gorgeous wedding quilt that my mom made us.  We wanted to display it and do something special with it at the reception.

We also happen to own a GoPro camera that we were able to set up and program to take still images every 10 seconds.  It has a bit of a fish-eye lens to it as well, so it gives a funny picture.

Trying to figure out a way to set it up was a challenge until a very obvious solution dawned on us.  We bought a bamboo garment rack back when we first moved to Seattle because we didn't have any closets. Since we moved into our new place, we've just been storing it down in the garage.  So we set up the rack and then zip tied a long wooden dowl to the top of the rack and then just hung the quilt over the top.  The quilt is big enough for a California King bed, so it has plenty of weight on it.

On a whim, I ordered some paper cut-out glasses from the Little Retreats Etsy Store and I'm so happy we did.  They were adorable and so much fun!  It was fun to see in the pictures which ones were the most popular.

The last piece of the puzzle was a little instructional sign.  We wrote, designed, and printed it ourselves and then placed it in same sign holders that we created out of driftwood gathered on the Washington State coast.

Stay tuned for a post with all of the wonderful photos that we got out of our photo booth!

Our Food

I'm working on another blogging project, Gluten Free Travelette, that I'm hoping to really make something of.  I don't know what my ultimate goal with the project is yet, but I have at least a general concept for it right now.  Anyway, I wanted to do a post about the food at our wedding which was tailored to my food intolerances.  In some ways having an almost entirely gluten and dairy free wedding seemed like a brave move at the time and we are so glad we were brave enough to do it. 

And getting back to the topic at hand, here is the post about our food that I wrote for my other blogging project;

Our wedding was approximately 97% gluten free and 95% dairy free. The majority of our vegetarian dishes were also vegan. So if you ever get married in the Monterey Bay Area and you're looking for a caterer that can accommodate a specialized diet, I would highly recommend Classic Catering in Pacific Grove, California. 

The only items with gluten were the blueberry and applies pies that we bought from The Buttery Bakery  in Santa Cruz, California and the beer we bought from Costco and BevMo. The story with the pies is that we tried to find a local bakery that would make gluten free pie's but we had no luck what-so-ever. And while I was prepared to make a couple of gluten free pies myself the night before the wedding, I certainly wasn't prepared to make 13!  

The only items with dairy were our tray passed apricots stuffed with goat cheese and pistachios, the honey butter to eat with the gluten free corn bread muffins, half of the stuffed portabella mushrooms which had some shredded cheese in them, and both the gluten full and gluten free pies which contained butter. 

I think the corn bread muffins were perhaps my favorite part of the whole meal and I think they were the favorite of the other guests that avoid gluten as well.  When I asked Classic Catering if they could make gluten free corn bread muffins I suggested to them that the mix by Bob's Red Mill is quite good. I don't think they used that mix though, because Classic's corn bread muffins were way better, and I find that impressive.  Gluten free baking from scratch isn't exactly easy to master, so I was very pleasantly surprised by the quality of the corn bread muffins. 

All of the food was truly amazing and we received lots of positive comments from our guests on how yummy it all was.  It's funny though, just like with our flowers the unseasonably cold weather of the year also affected our food.  We were supposed to have persimmon and blueberry skewers but Classic's Chef didn't feel the quality of the persimmons he had were quite worthy.  (Which frankly, I am impressed with because of the level of quality he gave us.) So the skewers became cantaloupe, blueberry, and persimmon skewers. 

Like I mentioned at the beginning of the post, we bought our gluten full blueberry and apple pies from a bakery in Santa Cruz.  But I made 3 gluten free pies after the rehearsal dinner the night before the wedding. To make it easy, I premixed the GF flour mix I developed earlier in the year in individual zip lock baggies.  Then I used thawed out gluten free pie crusts from Whole Foods to use as the crust.  I had originally planned on making 2 rhubarb pies and 1 blueberry pie, but I ended up not having enough rhubarb, so I improvised, again, the night before the wedding.  We ended up with 1 rhubarb, 1 rhubarb blueberry, and 1 blueberry. To be totally honest, the rhubarb pies didn't turn out so well and that was probably because I used frozen rhubarb.  The gluten free blueberry pie turned out amazing, but that was with fresh blueberries. To ensure that the gluten free pie made it to the gluten free guests, we gave the caterers little toothpicks tied with navy blue bows to stick in the gluten free pies to identify them.  (The toothpicks were another DIY by the lovely wife of our officiant and our groomsmaid.  

Toasts presented yet another opportunity to try something different to accommodate my specialized diet. Since I'm allergic to grapes, champagne was out of the question. So we ended up ordering a keg of pomegranate cider from Two Rivers Cider in Sacramento, California. It was wonderful as well. 

When we would tell folks that the food at our wedding would be almost entirely gluten and dairy free we got a lot of confused looks.  Sure we only had a couple of folks at our wedding with specialized diets that we knew about, but for anyone that knows anything about eating gluten and dairy free ... you can eat darn well without those ingredients and we wanted all of our guests to know that too! 

I would highly encourage anyone planning a wedding with guests on specialized diets to look for a caterer that can meet your needs.  One caveat to that though, I would encourage you to do a tasting with your caterer of the dishes you plan to serve at the wedding, just to make sure they really understand the special diets you are looking to cater to.  We went to two different caterers for tastings and explained my dietary restrictions prior to the tastings.  Classic obviously impressed us, but the other caterer actually served us dishes that I couldn't eat. So as always, do your research and don't be be afraid to go entirely gluten or dairy free (or anything else for that matter) for your wedding!