what I've been eating

I'm not ready to start posting recipes yet, but I thought it would be fun to have another installment of "what I've been eating." In the last week I've had...

Roasted chestnuts - this is the only time of year I ever see fresh chestnuts in the store, so I got about half a pound to try them out. I liked them best fresh from the oven, but cold is ok. They definitely have a unique flavor and texture.

Fresh pomegranate - this is the time of year for fresh pomegranates, too, and I find popping the seeds out of the membranes oddly satisfying. Not an activity to do while you're wearing a white shirt though, which I learned the stupid way.

Turkey stock - I finally FINALLY figured out how to make good tasting chicken or turkey stock. Ugh, took me long enough. This will get a recipe post by itself at some point. The batch I made this week was made with turkey legs and it turned to gel in the fridge. I get a kick out of that every damn time.



Hash - I made the turkey stock and had a bunch of leftover meat I picked off the bones, so I made some kind of hash using turkey meat for lunch almost every day. My favorite one was purple potatoes, shiitake mushrooms, spinach, garlic, turkey thigh meat, and cubed country style pate (storebought) that I cooked in butter.



Chicken Normandy - I got the recipe from Simply Recipes. Basically chicken cooked with loads of apples, onions, and heavy cream. Absolutely delicious.



The leftover sauce made its way into a hash the next day, along with some bacon.

Pork with sauerkraut mashed potatoes - this was a recipe from The New German Cookbook. Pork tenderloin poached in my homemade turkey stock and white wine, along with potatoes mashed with wine-spiked sauerkraut, bacon, and caramelized onions. The potato stuff was great and the pork was very tender, although I wish it had been fattier.



Braised beef shank - basically one of my old recipes, although I have since added some tweaks for maximum deliciousness. The major thing is to take the cooking liquid and boil it down until it's reduced by about half and then thicken it up with a little arrowroot to make it like gravy. Then mix the shredded beef/marrow back into it. Also you can do it in a crockpot on low for 8 hours. We had it with lemony sweet potatoes (recipe from Nourishing Traditions, containing loads of butter, lemon, and egg yolks) and buttered green beans.



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I've also had too much birthday cake and German gingerbread, but we shan't speak of these things...

paleo reboot

So, um, hey guys. It's been awhile. What may have happened in the intervening year, you ask? Well, several things. I moved and had a baby, for starters. I also completely abandoned paleo for multiple reasons, including morning sickness, stress, and burnout on food in general. I really wasn't doing well on paleo near the end of it (around the time I wrote the shrimpy new year post back in Jan 2010) and the time off this past year has given me space to sit back and think about why it wasn't working for me and how I think I can improve it.

In short, I was "faileo" dieting. It had become about what I was excluding instead of what I was including and after 4 years of that my health was suffering. I've made myself a list of things that I think will vastly improve my version of the paleo diet, which I'll share with y'all partly in hopes it may help others and partly for my own reference. A lot of the old recipes on this site are probably more faileo than paleo, but I'm gonna leave them all up anyway in case someone finds them useful/tasty/whatever. So here are the guidelines for my new and improved ancient diet (har har):

1. Eat less meat. Shocking. My old recipes you'll see call for around 1/2 lb per person, and I've since found that this is WAY too much protein for me. I feel way better when I slash that in half.
2. Make the meat I eat fattier. Less chicken breast + olive oil, more fatty beef roasts.
3. Make a concerted effort to eat offal, including bones.
4. Make a concerted effort to eat seafood, including shellfish, roe, and seaweed.
5. Eat at least some meat/seafood raw.
6. Choose animal fats over plant fats whenever possible. I may keep butter around...even though it's dairy I think it's a better option than olive oil, which I previously used by the bucketful.
7. Eat more carbs, choosing tubers and squashes over fruit.
8. Severely limit nuts/seeds.
9. Add in herbal infusions like the nettle infusion that I posted about a million years ago and never kept up with. Tons of nutrients in that stuff.
10. Add in some fermented foods.
11. No "paleo" baked goods.


So I'll be back in January with recipes and pictures just like before. Anything in particular that people would like to see?

update

Sorry I've been MIA again. Lots of stuff has been going on here - colds/flu, the holidays, and a somewhat unexpected move. We've known we were going to be moving for a little while, but we thought it wouldn't be until January - well things got pushed up and now we're moving next week! So it's been pretty busy around here.

I'm looking forward to getting back to recipe posting once we move. We're upgrading from a tiny little apartment to a nice sized house, so I'll have a bigger kitchen and a grill. I'm pretty excited. :) The only problem will be trying to figure out where to shop now that I won't have a Whole Foods down the street from me anymore!

I hope everyone has a very happy holiday season and eats lots of yummy food. Just so I don't leave you empty handed, here are some holiday recipes I've bookmarked lately to try out once we get unpacked into the new place:

coconut flour orange cake
Italian chestnut cake (replace milk with a paleo alternative)
walnut cranberry crackers (replace agave with a less fructose-y sugar)

Also I think my parents have been talking about roasting a goose or two for Christmas, so hopefully I can get them to save the fat for me! I can just imagine all the yummy things I could do with a jar of goose fat.

update

The primal challenge has been going eh. My digestion has never fully recovered from the Korean debacle and it's getting frustrating. Leaving tomorrow a.m. for vacation (New Mexico and then the Jersey shore) and will be gone for a few weeks. I may have internet access or I may not. Luckily for most of the vacay I will have kitchen access and won't be forced to eat out all the time. :)

When I get back I'll go back to posting recipes! It's what you're here for, right? :)

a bunch of old meal pics

I was going through some of my old pictures today and I found some that I took before I started my blog. I don't intend to really write any of them up as individual posts, but I thought people might be interested in seeing them to get ideas. If you want to see them in a bigger size just click on the picture.


Steak, mustardy mushrooms, salad with almonds and I think tahini dressing.


Blended salad soup. It was, um, an experiment. An experiment gone horribly awry.


Shopping haul.


Fried eggs, blackberries and strawberries with mint, sauerkraut, cucumbers with a drizzle of olive oil.


Ribeye steak, raw fennel salad, roasted green beans and potatoes.


Salmon on a bed of collards cooked with onions and cranberries, garnished with grated carrots and pea shoots. I remember trying to make this picture look fancy but I don't remember why!


Tuna salad and pea shoots wrapped in nori seaweed and a salad with walnuts and tahini dressing.


Pork tenderloin with cinnamon applesauce, sauteed red cabbage, parsley soup. I remember my applesauce recipe for this was awesome (maybe I'll dig it out and post it), but the parsley soup was kind of gross.


Scrambled eggs topped with bacon and a side salad topped with Trader Joe's balsamic frozen veggie mix.


Fried egg with parsley on top of braised swiss chard.


Fried egg on top of sauteed mixed veggies, walnuts and a pear.

One Local Summer - Week Two

I kind of slacked on One Local Summer this week. I was expecting an abundance of veggies from my CSA, which just started this past Monday, but instead all I got was a handful of salad greens, some garlic scapes, and a head of Chinese cabbage. It's been a rough, wet spring here in Virginia. So I headed to the farmer's market on Saturday (yesterday) morning to get some goodies for this week's local meal.



My planned meal included spicy chipotle chorizo made from free range buffalo and pork from Cibola Farms. I also picked up some red potatoes and curly kale from Pleasant Fields Farm. I was going to cut the potatoes and sausage into chunks and roast them together and serve them on a bed of braised kale. Alas, my meal was not to be. My husband and I decided to go to The National Zoo today and ogle the cute animals, which delayed lunch until 3:30 p.m. - a time falling squarely into what we refer to as "the black hole of eating." Neither of us was hungry for dinner in the slightest, so our local feast will just have to wait until tomorrow. Too bad the post can't wait for tomorrow, but OLS has a deadline. ;)

To see what other people in my region (Southern) have been up to, check out last week's roundup!

Rendering Lard

As time goes on I have been pondering more and more the role of vegetable fats in paleo/primal eating. The only vegetable oils I use are extra virgin olive oil, coconut oil, and to a much lesser extent palm oil, but I use them a lot - especially the olive oil. I cook just about everything in it and I also pour it all over my salads and steamed veggies. Before paleo I used to joke there was butter in my veins - now I joke they run with olive oil! Is this a good thing though? Olive oil is far more processed than animal fat and has a far different fatty acid profile. I have a hard time imagining vegetable fats being a big part of our ancestor's diets unless they happened to be lucky enough to live in the land of coconuts. Anyway, I'm not about to give up olive oil for salads, but for general cooking purposes I've been considering making the switch to animal fat.

I joined the Polyface Farm buying club recently and I was excited to see that they had pig fat for sale for $1/lb. Perfect for making lard! I thought I read it came in 5-lb bags so I placed an order for one. Well, when it was delivered, I ended up with a 14.5 bag of fat! Turns out they come in approximately 10-lb bags (not 5-lb) and the one I happened to get was a little overfilled. Folks, this is a lot of pig fat.


My package of fat taking up half the sink!

My sister (who you may remember from her guest post) came to visit me this weekend and we decided to have ourselves a lard rendering party. Fourteen and a half pounds is a lot to render at once, so we let it thaw just a bit and peeled some pieces off the top to work with and put the rest back in the freezer.

First, my sister diced the fat up.


Then I took my enameled cast iron Dutch oven, put it over very low heat, and poured in about 1/4 inch of water (to prevent scorching) and started adding the diced fat. We started out with adding just one layer across the bottom, and when it started melting we added a bit more, repeating the process until finally everything was in the pot. After a little time and some stirring, the fat started rendering out and looking like this:


This bubbling pot of wonderfulness smells FANTASTIC. You can't imagine how good it smells unless you've done it yourself! We left it over very low heat, stirring occasionally, until most of the cracklings started to sink to the bottom. Once that happened (it took several hours), we poured it through a strainer into a container to cool. This stuff is pure liquid gold.


After chilling out overnight in the fridge we ended up with a container of pure white lard ready to be used in any and all cooking applications. We also have an incredible snack - the leftover cracklings!


For her help in the endeavor, my sister is going back to school with a jar of our delicious pastured pork fat lard with which to cook and scandalize her low-fat roommates. :D

Guest post by my lovely sister - So Many Veggies, So Little Time

My little sister has been listening to me prattling on about food and nutrition for years now. She's been in college though, where it's really difficult to have the time and/or attitude to care about what you're eating or to cook properly. Now that she's getting to the end of her senior year, she decided to take the plunge into paleo about 2-3 weeks ago and she's already feeling better and losing weight. Still being a college student though, she has let me know that a lot of the recipes I post just don't work out for her because she doesn't have the time or facilities. With that in mind, she has offered to write a guest post about how to do paleo when time is a definite factor. I hope you enjoy!


Weren't we cute?

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I'm Laura... 22, *almost* a college graduate, and a lover of all things fatty.

Despite the fact that I live with two of my best friends who think bacon is the devil and whole wheat is a cureall, I have still always eaten relatively low carb. I'm not too keen on the excess dairy and lack of fruit that comes with Atkins, though. Atkins also led me to want to "cheat" because I felt like I was on a diet. My sister had been talking about this caveman diet for a couple of years, but I didn't see how I could do it myself. Cheese and low carb pasta were too ingrained in my eating habits. I read a couple of articles on Mark's Daily Apple and I started thinking that I could try cutting out wheat. Wheat first followed by dairy a few days later. Well, less than a week later and I felt better than I even knew I could! My acne has cleared up considerably and my back doesn't hurt anymore

I really enjoy cooking, but as a college student, I rarely have enough time for drawn out slow cooked meals (unless it’s in a crockpot). Another obstacle I have to overcome is living with two of my conventionally educated best friends who worry about me eating bacon, loads of olive oil, and no uber-"healthy” whole wheat. But alas, I love eating like a cavewoman. My mouth, stomach, and over all well being love it too.

I came to the realization that I don’t ever want my meals to take longer than 30 minutes to prepare. If it’s going to take longer than a half hour, I probably won’t do it. Most of my meals involve cutting up a bunch of veggies and some sort of meat (usually chicken) with some spices/herbs, both pan fried in olive oil. The combinations of vegetables are virtually endless, but one of my favorites is zucchini, yellow squash, onions, and red peppers. I usually cook the onions the longest, and put the peppers in right at the end because I don’t like the mushy texture of fully cooked peppers. I make a huge skillet full of veggies that looks like way too much for one person. It usually gets put into a serving bowl, spiced protein on top, and voila! yummy, nutritious food that I can eat while reading or in front of the TV. Another super simple meal is a can of tuna tossed with olive oil, vinegar, and salt & pepper which I throw on top of some greens and whatever vegetables I have in the fridge that haven’t been stir fried yet. Sometimes I don’t come home from doing work on campus until 11 pm and by that time I’m usually hungry again. I’ll either make 2 fried eggs in olive oil (mmm delicious protein and fat!) or I'll have a handful of nuts with some berries. My favorite nuts are walnuts and almonds, and I get frozen berries because they are cheaper and never go bad. It’s a win-win situation.

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Thanks again to my sister for the great guest post!

What I've been eating: Feb 19, 2009

Once again I've been remiss in my blogging! My mom and little brother came down for a visit over President's Day weekend and they threw me completely out of my groove. That's ok, family wins out over groove any day! Anyway, the cooking has not stopped completely in the past week or so, so I'll dish out another bullet list of stuff we've been eating around here. Maybe I'll make this a regular thing!

Scotch eggs - Well, it's just me eating these. My husband wouldn't eat an egg if you paid him $20. Basically you hardboil some eggs and then encase them in raw sausage meat. Then you bake them in the oven until the sausage is cooked through. I grab two for a quick breakfast or lunch.

Shepherd's pie - Traditional shepherd's pie has a mashed potato crust. I made my crust with rutabaga and turnip and also added in some roasted garlic cloves. Yum yum. Sautee your veggies in a pan (onions, celery, carrots are good choices) and then deglaze with beef stock or red wine. Add in some ground meat and brown. Add some herbs for flavor (sage is good) arrowroot if you want a thick gravy. Top with your mashed root veggies and bake until bubbly!

Fruit crumble - As previously blogged here. This week's had blueberries, apples, and frozen strawberries. Topping was pecans, almonds, prunes, and a splash of pomegranate juice.

Pomegranate juice - As good as my eating is in other areas, I have yet to completely kick the diet soda habit. This week I finally found a drink that keeps the diet soda craving severely at bay. I fill a big glass up with water and then add maybe 1 oz of pomegranate juice. It's just enough to flavor the water but not enough to be too sugary. This drink helped me cut down from my usual one soda per day to maybe three sodas this week. Maybe soon it will be no sodas at all. :)

Pork chops and mashed celeriac - This is my favorite dinner we had recently. I coated some pork chops with grill seasoning and seared them in bacon fat. Then I made a gravy from the pan drippings with mustard, white wine, and some arrowroot to thicken. On the side we had mashed celeriac (celery root). I cubed a celeriac, boiled it until tender, and pureed it in the food processor with some roasted garlic cloves (I also used a little bit of butter, but if I wasn't going to use dairy at all I would have used more bacon grease or some olive oil). It was deeeeee-licious. The celeriac had a great texture, almost exactly like mashed potatoes but with a hint of celery flavor. We also had a side salad, but it was just filler for this meal. :)

what I've been eating

I don't have any structured recipe posts for you after the flurry of last week, so I thought I'd just write about the dribs and drabs of what we've been eating lately. Hopefully it can inspire someone!

Turkey Soup: Remember the big pot of collards I made last week? Well I took the leftover cooking liquid and simmered some chopped up vegetables (2 teeny tiny potatoes, carrots, celery, and okra) until tender and then added in all the turkey meat I shredded off the wing that also had cooked with the collards. I added some parsley too. It made a really nice soup that we've been having a cup of with dinner for the past few days.

Apricot Glazed Lamb Chops: This is so easy it's almost criminal. The hardest part is going to the store and finding some apricot preserves that are made with all fruit and no sugar. Once you have your preserves in hand, mix 1/4 cup of them with 1/2 tsp ground ginger. Take enough lamb chops for two people and coat with half the preserves. Broil 5 minutes. Flip, coat with other half of preserves, and broil 5 more minutes. Ta da! Here is a picture of that dinner:

Also on the plate are a simple carrot salad (shredded carrots with parsley and olive oil vinaigrette) and some braised mustard greens with shallots, white wine, and celery.

Skirt Steak with Beer: This one isn't technically paleo, but it was pretty awesome. If you're going to be unpaleo, this is the way to do it. I marinated skirt steak for 24 hours in a mix of wheat-free soy sauce, rosemary, garlic, mustard, worcestershire sauce, black pepper, and dark lager beer (thus negating the wheat-free soy sauce but oh well). Sear it to death in a skillet so it has a nice crust but is medium rare in the center. Yum yum. I think we had it with the turkey soup and a raw fennel salad.

Pork Breakfast Sausage: I finally got around to making sausage for my husband to take to work so he's not eating all the crap that is in the breakfast meat available at his office. It's just ground pork with various seasonings that make it taste like sausage (key ingredient: sage). It's really good. I'll do a proper write-up on it soon. We've been having that for breakfast this week along with blueberries and walnuts.

Apple Fritter Things: I have these in the oven right now and I'm not sure how they're going to turn out. It's shredded apples held together with ground flax seeds and an egg and flavored with lemon zest/juice and cinnamon. You bake them first and then turn the oven heat really low to kind of dehydrate them. They're still in the oven right now. If they turn out any good I'll post the recipe this week.

Fruit Salad: Blueberries have been on sale so we're eating them a lot! I have hit upon my favorite combination of fruits for fruit salad: Pears and blueberries with cinnamon and lime juice. Heaven in a bowl! We also had cantaloupe and blueberries with lime juice and it was pretty good too. The lime juice really has an affinity for the blueberries, I think. I picked up something called "blossom water" at the store today that smells like flowers - I think it might be good on fruit salad too. Maybe rose water would also work! Hmmm...

That's it for tonight. Happy eating!