In the before-times, I had the pleasure of making Christmas Eve dinner both for someone who can't eat fish and for a celiac sufferer. I say pleasure because I actually enjoy these kinds of cooking challenges; it's more fun than just following a recipe. But if you don't enjoy them, then here's my recipe for you to follow.

Carbonnade Flamande is probably the ultimate beef stew. Arguably Flanders' national dish, it's a slow-cooked pot of large beef cubes simmered in Belgian beer and spices. Which you might think would make it out of the question for anyone on a gluten-free diet. But, you've reckoned without the creativity of the modern craft beer movement:

This is what you're going to have to locate first: gluten-free Belgian-style beer. I highly recommend this one from Bierly, if you can get it; not only did it work a treat in this dish, but it was just good beer period. In a blind tasting, I'd have identified it as a dubbel, but not even known that it was gluten-free. If you're in Europe, there's Green's.

Then, equipped with a recipe from the delightful cookbook Everybody Eats Well In Belgium plus 4lbs of large pieces of stew beef, I was ready to proceed.

Normally carbonnade flamande starts by coating the beef in flour before frying it in butter until the outside is browned. For this version, I used 1/3 cup mixture of 50% rice flour with 50% tapioca starch. This worked great.

The rest of the recipe was more-or-less as written, so I'll give you the full instructions:

carbonnade flamande sans gluten

4lbs stew beef (like chuck) cut into 2-inch cubes
salt & pepper
1/3 cup 50/50 mix of rice and tapioca flour
6-7 Tbs butter
2-3 large onions, sliced, about 4 cups
2x19oz bottles of gluten-free Belgian-style beer
2 tsp dried thyme
2 bay leaves
2 Tbs tart jelly, ideally redcurrant
1 Tbs grainy or dijon mustard (GF)
equipment: cutting board & large knife, large bowl, stock pot or dutch oven, 6-10qt

Cube the beef. Lightly season it with salt and pepper. Toss it in a bowl with the flour, until all of the pieces are lightly coated.

Heat 4 Tbs of the butter in the pot until foamy. Drop in the beef. Fry it, letting it sit for 30-40 seconds in each spot to brown, then stirring it, until most pieces are browned on at least 3 sides. Put the beef back in the bowl.

Add the additional 2 Tbs of butter and put the onions in the pot. Turn it down to medium, and cook the onions, stirring once a minute or so, until they are completely soft and brown, 10-14 minutes.

Deglaze the pot with the beer. Add the beef back in, and the thyme and bay leaf, along with around 1 tsp of salt. Bring to a bare simmer, then cover and turn down to low. Simmer for 2 hours, until the beef is very tender.

Uncover, and add the jelly and mustard, and stir in. Simmer for another 5 minutes. Check to see if it needs more salt (likely), and if so add it.

Serve, together with frites and more gluten-free beer. Serves 6 to 8 people.

Notes: If you're not on a GF diet, then the ideal beer to use is a Flemish Red or Sour ale. It's also customary to finish the stew with pieces of bread coated in jam or mustard that dissolve into it, but that seemed risky with GF bread. For the jelly, I used a fairly tart plum jelly; anything with a very acidic fruit will do.

Having finished the appetizers and salad course we moved on to our main course. Now, the super-traditional Christmas eve dinner for Cuban-Americans is Lechon Asado (roast pork shoudler), with rice and black beans, and I had to have all of those things, and you'll see them in a minute.

What you're seeing above, though, is the fish dish, because I may cook pork, but I haven't started eating it, so I wanted some fish for me at least. Now, the recipe I had was for baked grouper with peppers, green onions and cilantro, but grouper isn't a fish you can get on the West Coast so I used sole instead.

Now, I did say beans and rice, didn't I? Yes I did. And in my opinion, there is no better way to eat black beans and rice than to combine them in the form of moros y christianos where the rice and beans are cooked together. Yes, this dish does have the rather insensitive name of "Moors and Christians". It's traditional, deal with it. It's also tasty, and almost a meal in itself.

However, there's still the pork. The pork I spent two and a half days making. You ready?

Now, as you know I don't exactly cook a lot of pork. Heck, I don't cook any, since I don't eat it. So I turned to my Cuban friend Alina for advice, and she helped me out with a recipe for Lechon Asado, the traditional Cuban pork roast.

Alina's recipe lays out for you how to make proper Lechon Asado, so I'm just going to give you my tips and modifications.

First, I only used 5lbs of pork, because that's still a ton of pork and it was more than too much for 8 people. Second, I used a lot more garlic, like two whole heads, so that I could poke 30-40 half-cloves deep into the meat. I had two thoughts here; one was that, well, I like garlic, and the other was that more holes in the pork would help the marinade reach more of the meat.

Now, the traditional marinade that Alina gives you is made from sour orange juice (naranja agria), and while folks offer various substitutes for this, you really don't want to swap it out. Order it online if you don't have a good Latin market in your area. Since the Badia sour orange is a bottled product, it lacked acidity so I added a bit of lemon juice to it. I also used the sour orange juice in the mojo de ajo sauce I made to go with some of the other dishes.

Next, I marinated the pork in a giant plastic bag, which was much easier than trying to fit a roasting pan into the already crowded-fridge, and made it easy to flip the meat over for even marination. Since this was a smaller pork roast, I "only" marinated it for a day and a half. You really need at least a day for this recipe to work, and up to three days is better.

Then roast for 4 hours, let rest, slice, and broil. The guests told me it was fantastic; I had to take their word for it.

Dessert, of course, was proper flan. Because what else would you make with a Cuban meal? We did have a bit of a start because the caramel in the bottom of the flan cups crystallized, but that actually turned out not to matter at all. It re-caramelized in the oven.

So that was last year's Cuban Christmas eve. Hopefully it inspired you to try something a bit more adventurous for your own holiday meals.

As for this year ... I'm doing Belgian food. Watch this feed for that!