"Where's the turkey, Chuck? Don't you know anything about Thanksgiving dinners?"

It's hard to get excited about Thanksgiving when you can't eat mashed potatoes or gravy.  Just sayin'.

Regardless, we were headed a few hours south for dinner Thursday so I wanted a couple of simple recipes we could make the night before or that morning, that would travel well and not require precious oven space upon arrival. 

I found two from my new hero, The Wannabe Chef, whose motto ("love the ingredients, not the food") and totally simple, mostly gluten-free, handful-of-ingredients recipes won me over a few months ago. 

First came the maple roasted brussel sprouts.  Apparently this maple-syrup-brussel-sprouts business is really common, but it was news to me earlier this week.  Good news, it turns out.  They were a bit overdone but still delicious, and they traveled well. 

not pictured: the brussel sprouts we actually used to make the dish

Next up: maple almond butter sandwich cookies.  I am all for homemade nut butter but I bought pre-made almond butter just for convenience this time.  We used the whole jar for a double batch of the cookies (which took about 3 seconds to whip up, by the way) so I had to improvise for the filling.  After a 10 minute showdown between my As Seen On TV Faboo Quad Pro food processor and the filling ingredients, I decided to settle for chunky almond creme, and I actually think it made for a more interesting texture and tastier filling.  And I'm not just saying that because I'm lazy.

The kids tore into the cookies as soon as we put them out after dinner, probably because they looked like peanut butter cookies and tasted like gingersnaps and had creamy sugary buttery mapley goodness in the middle.  The adults got a few as well.  We set aside a few cookies while packing food that morning (which will go fast) and a few spoonfuls of filling (which will go wonderfully on... something yet to be determined...  pancakes, perhaps?  who am I kidding?  I suspect it will go wonderfully on a spoon on the way to my mouth).

no spoon necessary

Finally we threw together a quinoa pecan salad with parsley, mint and lemon.  I overcooked the quinoa just a bit the night before but in the end it didn't really matter.  So easy, so tasty, so protein-packed! 

 note to self: make more

Couple all of this with turkey, ham, fresh veggies and homemade wine (and maybe some ill-advised cheesecake sans crust too close to the quinoa salad, but only mildly ill-advised) and I'd call my first healthy Thanksgiving a success.

I think that calls for some sausage.