Friday Grok-Friendly Recipe Hunt - What I Crave

For this week's Friday Grok-Friendly Recipe Hunt, I am crushing on Carrol's primal blog What I Crave. Carrol has a knack for sussing out fresh new tastes, and also for adaptations of neolithic faves when you get homesick (say, for a bagel).

I am really excited to try some of her recipes in the future. Some that caught my eye recently:

• Chimichurri with Grilled Rib Eye - Since I am a cilantro fiend and an unabashed fan of beef, this chimichurri sauce drizzled on a juicy steak is so alluring. Picture me bopping my head Night-At-The-Roxbury style. "You? Me? You? Me?"
  (And yes, that song is so in your head right now...)
• Chicken and Apple Matchstick Salad - What a yummy-looking Vietnamese dressing!
• Grapefruit Cooler and Cantaloupe and Mint Agua Fresca - Wish I had one of those for this weekend, with the 80 degree weather.
• Better Than a Corn Chip - I have a feeling that when you put the heart, soul, and elbow grease into making your own chips, you probably savor them that much more.
• Savory Herb Crackers - Ditto for crackers. :)

Lunchbox #14

Today, my preschooler's lunch featured (clockwise):

• Quartered strawberries
• Leftover coconut bread
• Leftover "Cheezapalooza"
• Butternut squash pudding with raisins

Lunchbox #13

Today, my preschooler's lunch featured (clockwise):

• Carrot sticks
• Mozzarella sticks
• Piece of dried pineapple
• Leftover roast chicken (dip container contains a teaspoon or two of curry - gasp! - ketchup)
• Half a banana

Primal / Paleo Halloween Ideas

A thread on PaleoHacks got me thinking about Halloween, with minimal sugar. Here are some ideas I came up with:

If you know your neighborhood's general amount of trick-or-treater traffic, consider giving out:

• Nonchokable toys (remember the kids still have younger siblings). Bonus points if they're fitness oriented. Just don't give the costumed mites some kettlebells. Save the kettlebell giveaways for the Christmas stockings! ;op
• Dark chocolate (as dark as you can find). I can imagine the looks on kids' faces if I managed to track down single-square packs of Lindt 99% dark. Anybody know where to find 99% single squares?
• Single-serve packs of trail mix, if you can find'em. (Consider Amazon or Sam's Club/Costco for this...). Have a couple of alternatives if kids with allergies show up.
• Single serve packets of almond butter (you can get these on Amazon)

Paleo-Friendly Halloween Activities and Menu Ideas:

• Bobbing for bags of sug-....errr... organic apples
• Pumpkin carving and associated pumpkin's seed-roasting
• Chili (this is my family's traditional Halloween meal) or pumpkin soup. If you do paleo baking, you could make some coconut bread or muffins to go with.
• A game of "go fish" with someone behind the silkscreen attaching Halloween tchotchkes (no candy) to the fishing line
• Card games! A good game of poker could be enjoyed by older kids (tweens and up). Offer to trade poker chips for candy at the start before the cards are even dealt.
• Offer to "buy" your kids' candy at a nickel or a dime (or whatever) per piece.

How are you going to "do" Halloween this year?

Lunchbox #12

Today, my preschooler's lunch featured (clockwise):

• Carrot sticks
• 2 dates
• Leftover coconut bread
• Leftover coconut-crusted shrimp
• Mozzarella tomato salad tossed with balsamic vinegar

Shrimp Po' Boys

OK, I gave it the college try:

Looks tasty, right? The problem is, the coconut bread recipe, while delicious, is like a dense pound cake, so it didn't really hold up consistency-wise to the required "sandwichyness" needed for a po' boy. But my husband said that he would be just as delighted to eat the same coconut crusted fried shrimp over a bed of salad greens, with a couple of mini slices of the coconut bread on the side. So: note to future self.

Since the coconut bread turned out so much like a dense cake, it got my wheels turning for the possibility of using it as a birthday cake. More on this later - when one of us actually has a birthday to celebrate.

Also, the shrimp was more or less off-the-cuff (when I was cooking, I didn't pull up the MDA recipe that I originally meant to use as a reference point), and since I would gladly repeat - I'll record what I did here for future reference.

Coconut Crusted Shrimp
Serves 4 generously

Ingredients
1.5 lb. raw shrimp - peeled, deveined, tails off
All-purpose seasoning in the tradition of Old Bay - without sugar, MSG, etc. (Salt, paprika, and other seasonings, generally.)
3 eggs, scrambled
2 cups finely shredded unsweetened coconut (I used Let's Do Organic)
3/4 c. coconut flour (I used Tropical Traditions)
1 c. coconut oil

Directions
Put shrimp in a large bowl, and season a bit. Add a bit of seasoning to the egg wash as well, then pour it over the seasoned shrimp, and stir to coat.

To a shallow dish, add shredded coconut, coconut flour, and another shake of seasoning, and toss to combine.

Add large spoonful of coconut oil to a medium-to-large pan on medium-high heat. Once the oil has melted, pull an "egged" shrimp from the large bowl and toss it in the shallow dish of coconut crust until it's coated. Place the shrimp in the hot pan, and work quickly around the pan, adding shrimp. (I start at the "12 o'clock" position in the pan and work clockwise.) Once the pan is full, the first shrimp to go in will have cooked on one side, so being flipping each shrimp - they should be golden brown once the underside is flipped side up. Cook an additional 2 minutes, then place in a shallow dish on a paper towel. Scrape old oil and debris from pan, add more fresh coconut oil, and start again, frying the shrimp this way in batches until all are fried. Serve immediately.

Menu Plan

I did the happy dance this weekend when a box from Tropical Traditions arrived on my doorstep! I had some Amazon credits and ordered from Tropical Traditions via Amazon - coconut flour. It is so fine, I wouldn't be able to distinguish it visually from wheat flour. It wasn't in our house half an hour before I was busting out a double batch of Joyful Abode's grain-free pancakes. SO TASTY. I very much recommend! The flapjacks have a great flavor, and a versatile half-pancake half-crepe quality - very flippable (and you'll recall that I tend to mangle flippable breakfast items). Joyful Abode's pancakes could lend themselves very well to wrapping or sandwiching meaty fillings. The leftovers went into the fridge for this morning's breakfast.

Monday:
Breakfast - Scrambled eggs, plus bananas for the girls
Lunch - Baked brussels sprouts and chicken breasts
Dinner - Shrimp po'boys, shrimp based loosely on this, and the bun based on the coconut bread recipe here, baked in miniloaf pans

Tuesday:
Breakfast - Boiled eggs, plus grapes for the girls
Lunch - Blueberry Coconut Smoothie
Dinner - Roast chicken, loaded salads

Wednesday:
Breakfast - Gorgonzola spinach omelettes
Lunch - Avocado Ginger smoothie
Dinner - Cheeseburger soup (if it's tasty I'll post details)

Thursday:
Breakfast - Whole milk yoghurt (drizzled with honey for my 3-year-old)
Lunch - Loaded "big ass" salad with leftover roast chicken
Dinner - Miso-glazed salmon adapted Primally (hey, if Melissa McEwen can do it...), stir-fry veggies

Friday:
Breakfast - Banana pancakes (I'll sub baby food - aka banana puree - for some of the milk in Joyful Abode's pancakes recipe, and add a pinch of nutmeg, 'cause I'm a nutmeg freak)
Lunch - Leftover cheeseburger soup
Dinner - Loaded cobb salads (Boiled egg, bacon, veggies, cheese, chopped walnuts, etc. over greens)

Preschool lunch ideas:
Lunch #12: Leftover shrimp or chicken, mozzarella and tomato salad, leftover coconut bread
Lunch #13: Coconut banana custard, veggie crudites with dip, dates
Lunch #14: Nut butter muffins, cheese crisps and guacamole to dip

Primal Kitchen Chili

This is actually quite simple. You sautee a bunch of veggies, onions, and peppers - your pick on the type - then combine with a large can (~30 oz.) of crushed tomatoes, and season with chili powder, cumin, cayenne, etc. to taste. Add browned ground beef after all the rest has simmered for at least half an hour. Garnish with creme fraiche or sour cream. The next day the flavors should be even more deliciously melded, so make enough for leftovers!

P.S. - A fellow student from my grad school program - a Mexican lady - once told me (vaguely recalling here), "Americans think that all Mexican food is CUMIN. Cumin, cumin, CUMIN!"

Heh - I think she was referring to the dominant cumin taste in American-Mexican cuisine (analagous to the American-bastardized creations of fortune cookies and chop suey when it comes to Chinese cuisine). So if you want your chili kind of Taco Bell-ish, feel free to be liberal with the cumin. If not, go easy on it and let other flavors take center stage.

Here's the long version:

Primal Kitchen Chili
Serves 4 adults generously

Ingredients
2 lb. ground beef
1 large (~30 oz.) can crushed tomatoes (I used one with added basil)
2-4 cups of 1/2"-1" cubed fresh veggies - in my case I like zucchini and yellow squash, onions, mushrooms, tomatoes, etc.
1-2 finely chopped jalapeno or other peppers, if you like it spicier
Butter or other stable cooking oil, to sautee the veggies and peppers
Broth, if you want to make your chili a bit thinner
If you do dairy, creme fraiche or sour cream (or cheese) to top

Seasonings to taste:
Cumin (this is the traditional American interpretation Mexican seasoning)
Cilantro (if using fresh, stir in just at the end or use to top as a garnish)
Dried chipotle peppers
Cayenne (Be careful! A little goes a LONG way!)
Paprika (this, especially sweet paprika, will take your chili in a "goulasch" direction the more you add)
Garlic powder
Salt
Pepper

Directions:
In a large pan over medium-high heat, add onions and peppers and sautee in butter or other cooking oil until the onions start to brown and turn translucent. Add other veggies, and stir continuously for about 10 minutes to ensure that everything gets an even shot at being browned/sauteed. Add veggies and canned crushed tomatoes together in a crock pot on low, and then brown the ground beef. Season the ground beef as it browns, tasting along the way to make sure that the seasoning is to your liking, and then add this to the crock pot when it's mostly brown (especially if this is grass-fed ground beef, which is easier to overcook). Stir contents of crock pot through, allowing to warm for a few more minutes. Garnish with any of the following: sour creme or creme fraiche, cheese, and fresh cilantro.

Friday Grok-Friendly Recipe Hunt - Simply Sugar and Gluten Free

This week's Friday Grok-Friendly Recipe Hunt brought me to Amy Green's blog Simply Sugar and Gluten Free. I love Amy's laid-back style and her evident passion for crafting quality dishes. She's even training as a chef! She lost over 60 pounds after giving up white sugar and gluten, so that enough is reason to check out her finely-tuned recipes. Also, her blog has a lot of innovative twists on substitutes in a world without gluten or sugar, so of course I'm inspired by her creativity.

In particular, she offers a lot in the realm of desserts which I will probably peruse in the event of very special occasions - though much of her baking contains non-gluten grain flours, I wouldn't mind baking up some of her teff-flour gingerbread cupcakes for my preschooler's birthday classroom cupcake treat to share with her friends, as my primary goal is avoiding gluten and refined sugar. (I've made them once before, substituting palm sugar for the agave.)

Amy also has a terrific "How To" lineup:

• How to Butterfly Chicken Breasts
• How to Freezer Marinate Chicken
• How to Hard Boil Eggs Perfectly
• How to Line a Cake Pan the No Fuss Way
• How to Make Garlic Paste
• How to Oven Roast a Squash & Dry the Seeds
• How to Peel a Butternut Squash
• How to Roast Peppers
• How to Segment an Orange

Here are some primal-adaptable Simply Sugar and Gluten Free recipes of Amy's that I'm dying to try:

• Dairy-Free Coconut Spice Chai Ice Cream looks delish! (Enough to make me put an ice cream maker on my Christmas wish list! I'd do full-fat coconut milk and skip the agave.)
• Almond Flour Crepes
• Broiled Grapefruit (I'd probably do honey in favor of agave)
• Mushroom Frittata
• Homemade Buttermilk Dill Ranch Dressing (I'd use organic full-fat yoghurt)

Lunchbox #11

Today, my preschooler's lunch featured (clockwise):

• Cubed baked chicken, drizzled witha bit of balsamic vinegar
• Strawberries, stems off
• Full fat cream-top yoghurt, with a pinch of nutmeg, a teeny bit of vanilla extract, and a drizzle of honey
• Sliced green peppers, two fresh figs, and two fresh dates

Lunchbox #10

Pomegranates are great primal finger food. I was struck by a huge urge to snack last night, and them remembered the pomegranate loitering in the fridge. My first try opening a pomegranate (last year), I sat and took out the arils (seeds) one by one. Took for-ev-ah. (Yes, you Sandlot fans, you can envision: "For-eh-ver! For-eh-ver!")

Then I read up on the quickest way to access the poms' delicious contents, and it turns out that doing so over a bowl of water is the most common shortcut; the membranes have just enough pockets of air that they float over the water, while the juicy seeds sink to the bottom.

For those who've never tried fresh pomegranate arils, they are a tasty treat. Sweet, but just a hint of sour, juicy on the outside with a crunchy sunflower-seed-like center.

Floating membranes - seeds at the bottom.

Drained the water from the bowl and
skimmed off the membranes at the same time:

Packed some in my daughter's lunch:

Today my preschooler's lunch featured (clockwise):

• Sliced tomatoes
• A slice of sharp cheddar
• Pomegranate arils
• Leftover baked salmon
• Leftover garlic roasted cauliflower
• Fresh cut slices of yellow squash and green peppers

Two Dudes Cook Up High Fructose Corn Syrup in Their Kitchen

The two dudes in their kitchen show up about halfway through.

Lunchbox #9

Today, my preschooler's lunch featured (clockwise):

• Sesame egg salad (made my DIY mayo with sesame oil)
• Roasted butternut squash puree with cinnamon and raisins (believe it or not my preschooler covets raisins, ergo I can kind of get away with this as a dessert)
• Garlic-roasted cauliflower
• Fresh yellow squash, green pepper, and cherry tomatoes with a dipping sauce

Menu Plan

Well, we've earned the badge of having a child in a school setting: our family had a little bout of something flu-ish over the weekend, though so far we've bounced back pretty well. I wonder to what extent our diets affected our recovery? Though I was being rather stupid and had too much dark chocolate, which I think may have set me up for immune weakness in the first place. Thankfully, my husband and I are merely stuffed up, but still operational.

Last winter, when my husband got sick, I had brought home lots of comfort junk foods to get us through the week - mini muffins, Gatorade, etc.

But now that I've gone down the MDA rabbit hole, my recovery objective when sick is the same as when healthy - lots of real food, minimal processed items. Fortunately for me, at the first sign my family was headed downhill this weekend, I was able to reconstitute a bag of frozen slow cooked pork and veggies, using some added chicken broth on the stovetop.

Today, I have a whole chicken in the crockpot to cook with water, chopped onions, crushed garlic cloves, diced ginger, carrots, and some salt, and in the oven I've roasted separate pans of cauliflower and butternut squash with butter and seasonings - truly nourishing comfort food. Not only will the chicken and carrots serve as a no-stress dinner tonight, but I'll be able to salvage lots of nourishing broth out of the deal. I'll also boil some eggs tonight to have at the ready in the fridge in case my bout with the illness isn't over and my family finds itself without the head chef on her feet.

Besides fresh fruit and veggies, I did pick up a few prepackaged items for us - mainly dried fruit and crystallized ginger (to aid with nausea).

Here's the menu plan for this week:

Monday:
Workout: Kettlebellin'
Breakfast - Boiled eggs, bananas for the girls
Lunch - Leftover chicken soup, romaine salad
Dinner - Crock pot pork ribs with tamari and seasoning, broccoli stir-fry

Tuesday:
Workout: Swimmin'
Breakfast - Strawberries with creme fraiche
Lunch - Pureed vegetable soup, using whatever's left from Sunday (broth + roasted veggies), plus a bit of Kerrygold
Dinner - Coconut lime salmon filets, brussels sprouts, romaine salad

Wednesday:
Workout: Rest/play day
Breakfast - Cottage cheese drizzled lightly with honey
Lunch - Romaine "big-ass" salad
Dinner - Bacon and eggs

Thursday:
Workout: My first attempt at Turkish getups with Veronica; going to take this VERY slowly (so it may not count as high intensity anything)
Breakfast - Baked apples topped with chopped nuts
Lunch - Quiche of some kind
Dinner - Eggplant lasagna with a meat sauce

Friday:
Workout: Need something very quick and intense, so may do kettlebell swings
Breakfast - Curried egg salad (may try D-I-Y mayo!)
Lunch - Leftover eggplant lasagna
Dinner - Leftovers

Ideas for preschool lunches:
Lunch #9 - Leftover roasted cauliflower with dip, cottage cheese, fresh pomegranate seeds (pomegranates are also coming into season!)
Lunch #10 - Egg salad, leftover brussels sprouts, dates, trail mix
Lunch #11 - Maybe some kind of finger sandwiches made with coconut/egg pancakes (?), strawberries, zucchini sticks