Taking (Making) Stock

In light of the recent interest in soups, here's my recent foray into making stock (aka 'soup base').

I started by taking the roasted fat trimmings from a 2.3 lb chuck roast that I made earlier in the day, and combined them in a big pot with wilted-but-not-rotten veggies, as well as the carrots I roasted the roast on top of, and stems / tops / random bits from some root vegetables and kale that I cooked separately. I covered the meat and vegetable trimmings with water, brought it to a boil, and then covered it and left it to simmer. For a long time. Eventually, I strained the liquid into a container and discarded the solids. The result could be reduced a bit more, but it is a perfectly serviceable beef/vegetable broth for making soup.

This same process also works for chicken carcasses (be sure to add the feet, if you have them).

Soup recipes, please!

If any of you have any good paleo-friendly soup recipes, please post them! I have a mad craving for soup but am not really sure how to put all my veggies together into a soup.

Is a calorie just a calorie?

I really love this guy's youtube channel "Underground Wellness"

He's very pro Weston Price/ Paleo, and he has a knack for explaining very complex biological processes in laymans terms for dummies like me.

Sausages and Packaged Meats

Be careful with sausages and packaged meats (even from Trader Joe's!), they're often laden with a million weird ingredients including sugar, corn syrup, MSG, wheat-derived substances, and horrible preservatives. In fact, it's very rare to find commercial sausage that doesn't have sugar. READ THE LABELS!!!!!! I can't stress this enough. Don't just read the nutritional information, read the ingredients, which is really more important anyway.

I've found the Roma brand sausages made right here in Baltimore are decent, cheap, and often available at Giant or Safeway. The label on Roma sausages says "pork, salt, spices." I'm not always sure what "spices" means, but I reckon it's not as awful as the crap they put in the Giant brand. I haven't yet found good salami, but you could probably ask people at Trinacria to see ingredient labels and such. Incidentally, their roast beef is pretty awful, just a tiny notch above Arby's - tastes like salty plastic.

The market at Belvedere Square has some nice stuff meat wise if you can splurge. They don't take food stamps unfortunately. Whole Foods also often has some ok sausage as well.

Wild Alaskan Salmon Salad

Here's something you can make the night before and bring to work with you in some tupperware with some sliced up cucumbers or on top of a salad for lunch. Oh, it also goes really well with avocado! Sorry about the crappy pictures, all I had was my phone.


$2.68 at Giant... wild-caught, sustainable, omega-3 rich Alaskan salmon.


That's two omega-3 egg yolks in there with the juice of one lemon, a pinch of salt, and a spoonful of mustard. Blend it. Then, keep the blender on as you slowly pour in oil.


This is what it should look like when it's done. Mayonnaise.


Mix as much of that as you want with the salmon, basically until it attains the consistency of tuna salad. I chopped up some apple, shallot, and scallion and threw it in there. Black pepper. You could put some parsley or celery and carrots in there... whatever you like. From start to finish, the whole process took me about 5-10 minutes.

Update: I just spooned out the salmon salad onto cucumber slices and put bacon bits on them. A few of them I even put a little blue cheese under the bacon.

Butterfly-Cut Leg of Lamb

marinade:
Leg of Lamb, butterfly cut
1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil
1/8 cup wheat-free tamari
3 sprigs of rosemary, chopped
3 cloves of garlic, crushed and coarsely minced
2 shallots, diced
salt/pepper

Butterfly usually means that a thick piece of meat is sliced partway through it's lateral midsection. Generally this is done to make it cook faster and more thoroughly. In the case of the lamb leg, the meat is sliced to the bone and unwrapped. This essentially turns the lamb leg into a flat steak. The butcher that sold me the meat also butterfly cut it for me but, it's a reasonably simple operation.

First you'll want to take all the ingredients (besides the Lamb itself) and combine them in a mixing bowl. Then marinate the Lamb. I ended up transferring the whole operation to a food storage container and marinating it overnight. You don't have to marinate it this long, but it's nice.

Begin by preheating an oven to about 375F.

I decided to serve it with some brusselsprouts and carrots I had on hand. So I put the sprouts and carrots into a bowl and tossed them with some olive oil, salt/pepper and a little bit of butter and, put them in the oven.

Pull the Lamb out of the marinade and place the cut fatty-side (the outside) down in an unheated frying pan and place it on the stove over medium high heat. The cool thing about working with meats that have a thick fatty layer on them is that you can cook them in their own juices very easily. By placing the meat into the pan when it is still cold, you can slowly render out the fat as the pan comes up to temperature, rather than carbonizing the fat when it comes into flash contact with a hot pan. This trick also works really well with Duck breast and Bacon.

When it starts to sizzle, flip it over and fry it quickly on each side (the edges too if possible, tongs help for this, the less squeamish among us use our own washed hands). This process seals in the juices of the meat, so that all the flavor doesn't run out when it goes into the oven.

Now, move the lamb to the preheated oven
and roast for about 20 minutes, depending on how thick it is and your desired degree of doneness. If you're cooking your veggies in the same oven, you'll want to check on it earlier (I ended up overcooking mine a bit).

When it's done, take it out and let it sit at room temperature for 10 minutes before carving, in order to let the meat reabsorb the juices. In my case this meant staring at it and 'testing' little pieces of it.

Jessie's Flava Flav Chicken

Seen here with turnip greens, sweet potatoes, and bison burger... and Keelin's hand.

Mayonnaise Recipe

I really like making my own mayonnaise. Commercial mayo has sugar and is usually made out of soybean oil. When I make my own, I can choose healthy eggs and healthy oil. Also, it's a fun science lesson. So this is what you do... separate two egg yolks and put them in a blender or food processor.

Ingredients:
2 egg yolks
lemon juice
mustard
oil (light olive oil is best)

Directions:
Put the egg yolks in a blender or food processor. Squeeze a lemon in there and add a dollop of good mustard. A pinch of salt. Pulse it a few times to blend. Then keep the blender/food processor on as you slowly pour in a neutral oil... I've found light olive oil to work quite well, although you could use extra virgin if you don't mind a strong olive oil taste. Stop blending every once in a while to check the consistency. When it looks like mayonnaise, you've got yourself some mayonnaise. The lecithin in the egg yolks and the acid in the lemon juice and mustard act as an emulsifier to bind the water in the ingredients to the oil. It's really cool, and tasty. You can also add seasoning like curry powder, and if you add a bunch of raw garlic, you have yourself an aioli.

Also, as Mika says: taste your oil first for freshness. The oil can really make or break the mayo in terms of flavor. Also, if you're using a hand whisk to make it, be prepared for tired arms! It's doable but a hefty workout.

Breakfast & Lunch for the Working Gal

Breakfast

2 scrambled eggs & aged cheddar cheese
2 pieces of bacon (i cooked 4 pieces- 2 for lunch!)

Lunch
I threw into a bag:

Knife
Spoon
Yogurt Container
Apple
Kiwi
Bacon
Cheese
Cucumber
Olives
Honey

During my lunch I cut up the Kiwi and apple and threw it into the yogurt with honey.
I cut up the bacon, cheese, and cucumber and made little "sandwiches".
I ate the olives.
And now I feel great!

More Controversy: Nuts, Dairy, Etc.

Nuts
As Meat Ball Magic pointed out, nuts have actually even more anti-nutritive phytic acid than grain and also really high in omega-6s. Be aware of that when you're munching on them. Again, my sense is that most people aren't going to stuff themselves with nuts the way they would with grain and grain products, but I know some of you might be downing entire bags of nuts in one sitting right now. I don't think it's anything to worry about because I find it hard to imagine anyone would eat a bag of nuts every single day. If you think about it, nuts took a lot of effort in hunter-gatherer life. We had to forage them, break through their shells, and often cook them to make them edible. The equivalent of a big bag of nuts was probably not that common. But I still think they're a good option to help break other addictions. They're also low-glycemic and not addictive in the same way as refined carbs.

Dairy
Weston Price and Sally Fallon differ from Paleo advocates on the issue of dairy. Many nomadic tribes thrive on dairy-heavy diets, but some scientific research shows that the primary protein in milk, casein, can cause a lot of the metabolic problems and inflammation that we attribute to other things like grains. Dairy also has lactose, which is sugar. The back of a yogurt container says it has 12-14g of sugar - that's mostly lactose. Lactose in yogurt can vary based on how long it has fermented, but most cheese for sure has very little lactose. Dairy is technically a Neolithic food because it wasn't possible until we domesticated animals. Strict Paleo adherents often abstain from dairy. Again, my sense is that it's what we do in aggregate that matters more, and if you don't feel you have sensitivity to dairy, cheese and yogurt can be powerfully satiating and very likely healthy.

Agave Nectar
Agave nectar has been billed as a healthy sweetener, with "no refined sugars." But it IS a refined sugar. That's like the Corn Refiners of America claiming that high-fructose corn syrup is "all-natural." Agave is mostly fructose... so how does it differ from HFCS? It doesn't really, in terms of health, and it may even be slightly worse. Fructose, although low-glycemic because it's mostly metabolized in the liver, has a net effect on blood sugar as bad if not worse than table sugar - at least sucrose is a disaccharide that has to be broken down, fructose is a monosaccharide that just goes straight in for the money. It is more damaging than almost any other sugar when used as a sweetener. The amount of fructose you would get from an apple is much less than the squirt of it you might be putting into your coffee, and fructose in most fruit is absorbed more slowly because of the fiber and other nutrients. Agave is sugar. Evaporated cane juice is sugar. High-fructose corn-syrup is sugar. And sorry to be a bummer, but honey and maple syrup are also sugars, and should be treated as such. There is, however, some research that suggest fructose increases fertility in men. Perhaps, the season when fruits were most available to our paleo ancestors was also mating season i.e. mid to late summer. But eating a lot of it in concentrated forms is very bad for you. Sugar in the form of whole, seasonal fruit is fine, but as soon as you refine or extract it from its source, it acquires some pretty nasty qualities. Still, if you need a tiny bit of honey or maple syrup to ween you off of candy and sweets, go for it, just do so sparingly.

Meat
Contrary to popular opinion, the body doesn't really have a hard time processing meat. Vegetable fiber has more of a chance of getting stuck undigested in your gut than steak. If you're feeling constipated, it's probably more due to your body adjusting to a change in the diet than because you've eaten too much meat. Not to be too graphic, but I have been pretty regular since I stopped eating grains, regardless of how much meat I eat relative to vegetables. In fact, some vegetables have had a more adverse effect on my gut. But that's just my own personal experience. As for acid-base balance, even though meat has a net acid load on the kidneys, the more important factor seems to be how much acid is caused by excess sugar in the blood. The Masai and the Inuit used to eat exclusively meat and animal fats, but they had almost no bone or dental diseases. Acid load on the kidneys causes tooth and bone decay as the body leeches alkaline minerals from those parts of the body to balance the pH. From what I gather, the single most important factor in acid-base balance is sugar.

Flava Flav Chicken

In a large bowl mix together about

1 tbsp ground coriander

1 tbsp ground cumin

1 tbsp tumeric

1 tbsp dried thyme

1 tbsp dried sage

1 tsp ground nutmeg

2 cloves chopped up

1 onion chopped

2 tbsp fresh ginger finely chopped

2-juiced limes

1-2 habanero peppers chopped

about ¾-1-cup olive oil

¼ ish cup wheat free soy sauce

¼ ish cup of apple cider vinegar

add chicken, (I used a whole one that Punjab chopped for me) let sit for 24 hrs

TO COOK:

take chicken out of marinade, put into a pan and cook at 350 degrees for about an hour or so, while chicken is cooking, baste it with the remaining marinade.

Bada-bing-bada-boom, you got yourself some flava-flav chicken, biaches!

Fruits and vegetables are awesome

Yes, we all know that fruits and vegetables are awesome. But YouTube also says so, so it must be true! In case any of you need some humor to get through sugar cravings:

Big Fat Truths

Before I crawl into my cave and drift off to a land of prancing antelope, I just want to get the conversation on fat going.

Omega-3s and Omega-6s

Most nutritionists (whom I don't usually trust, but I'm not finding much argument here) believe that one of the culprits of our deteriorating health is the balance between omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids. The body needs both and can't manufacture either, but our modern diet has way way too much omega-6 from soy, corn, seed, and nut oils. The animals we eat also have this imbalance because we mainly feed our animals grain and industrial foods. Omega-6 causes inflammation, blood clotting, and cell proliferation, while omega-3s suppress those responses.

Part of the Paleo approach (and other more mainstream dietary approaches) seek to up the omega-3 intake by eating fatty fish, fish oil supplements, omega-3 eggs, and fat from grassfed animals (butter, lard, gristle, tallow, marrow... yum!). There are vegetable sources, but the omega-3s in them are precursors to the ones we need - eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA) and docosahexaenoic (DHA) - and the body has to synthesize them out of those precursors. Therefore, while vegetable sources are better than nothing, they aren't as effective in balancing fatty acids.

Saturated Fat
Contrary to PC nutritional wisdom, saturated fats are actually really good for you. They are stable when heated and they are easily metabolized by the body. There are no consistent results from scientific studies that suggest that saturated fat is bad for you, but there are more consistent results from scientific studies that show that fructose and corn oil are. In fact, Americans actually consume LESS saturated fat than we did 100 years ago. Look at it this way: if you were in the wild, the most easily procured types of fat would be saturated - animal fats, coconuts and avocados in tropical places, fish fats, eggs, etc. If you found civilization and stumbled into a corn field and you tried to eat enough corn to ingest the amount of corn oil in an average fast-food meal, you'd literally explode. Even a century ago, most people had only lard, butter, tallow, chicken fat, etc. The vegetable oils commonly used now are only possible because of heavy industry.

Cholesterol
Dietary cholesterol has no impact on blood cholesterol, and overall blood cholesterol has nothing to do with coronary disease. Your body manufactures cholesterol. Your blood cholesterol can fluctuate quite a bit throughout the day due to countless things in your environment. Your cell membranes, the sheath around your nerves, and a lot of your brain are made out of cholesterol, and cholesterol is a key building block in hormone production. Without it, you would die. Of course, analyzing the many different kinds of cholesterol and their levels in your body may be more useful, but read Gary Taubes' book if you want more detail - the key thing to note is that SUGAR actually has a direct impact on your blood-lipid profile. Don't worry about cholesterol. Dietary cholesterol is good for you and won't impact what's going with your blood, eggs are good for you, butter is good for you. The myth that cholesterol is bad just serves to sell more cholesterol-lowering drugs. If you're worried about heart disease... DON'T EAT SUGAR.

Anyway, I'm trying to keep it brief in the hopes that this doesn't overwhelm you.

Fats to Use:

Olive Oil - use extra virgin for salads, and light olive oil for cooking. Extra virgin oxidizes when heated. This is bad.

Coconut Oil - get the unhydrogenated pure stuff. It should smell like coconuts. Supposedly magical. It's mostly saturated fat. Buy it from Punjab.

Butter - get grassfed when possible. LOOK ON THE LABEL. It should just be butter, no "natural flavoring" or anything else.

Ghee - make your own out of butter (ghee is just clarified butter) or buy it from Punjab. Again, make sure it's not hydrogenated.

Bacon and Bacon Fat - I sometimes just chop up some bacon and fry it in a pan to cook veggies rather than reaching for a bottle of oil. If you have bacon in the morning, bake it (350-degrees for about 15 minutes) so that the grease doesn't burn and you can pour it into a little jar or something to use for cooking later.

Duck Fat - get it at Wegman's or scoop it out of the bottom of a pan next time you roast a duck.

Lard - again, get good quality, non-hydrogenated, no preservatives. I have yet to find a good source in Maryland, but I haven't asked at the farmers market yet. A good butcher can get you leaf lard, which is the leaf-shaped deposit of beautiful fat along the inside of a pig's back, inside the ribcage.

Tallow - this is beef fat. You can get a few good grassfed beef or bison marrow bones and roast them at a low-ish temperature (275?) to render out all the fat to use for cooking.

Peanut oil and sunflower oil are acceptable if you really really have no other choice. Whatever you do, avoid corn, soy, and canola oils.


Oh, finally, FATS DON'T MAKE YOU FAT.

Roasted carrots recipe

Preheat oven to 425 degrees. I use this temperature because I can also roast a sweet potato at the same time, but higher temperatures (450, 475) work, too.

Peel and slice carrots into similar sized sticks. Pour a small amount of olive oil into a mixing bowl (I used about a teaspoon for a lot of carrots). Add sea salt and black pepper and/or other spices--I used cayenne pepper as well. Toss the carrots in the oil to coat, then arrange on a baking pan or cookie sheet.

Bake for ??10-15 minutes or until carrots are soft and starting to brown on the edges. Yummy snack!

Sardines - Non-Dairy, Non-Nut

Sardines. Check them out. Sustainable, cheap, and really high in omega-3s. If you don't like their fishy taste, mix them up with some homemade mayonnaise (much easier than you think), diced carrots and celery, salt and pepper, and lemon juice. Maybe a pinch of tumeric. Spoon some on top of cucumber slices. If you don't have time to make mayonnaise, try just mustard and olive oil.

Big Picture

So, I need to reiterate that our attempts to eat more like our Paleolithic ancestors shouldn't be guided by ideology or a romanticized notions of what pre-agrarian people were like.

The removal of grains from the diet isn't a moral or dogmatic decision. As I've said, there are healthy ways to eat grains, but unfortunately, with our busy modern lifestyles, most people don't have the time or knowledge to prepare grains properly. Regarding phytic acid, even though other foods contain perhaps more phytic acid than grains, they are often more satiating and are more nutrient-dense. In aggregate, if you remove grains and legumes, you're eating more nutrients relative to anti-nutrients. It's about proportions. Additionally, you address other issues like insulin levels. We're not cutting out dairy, even though casein, the primary protein in dairy, causes some of the same inflammatory affects as grains.

Look at this way: Do you eat a piece of fish on top of a bed of cashews? Do you eat a steak on top of a pile of cheese? Maybe you do, I don't know. But most of us don't, so nuts and dairy shouldn't pose too big of a problem for people who don't already have issues with those foods.

gotta love the NUT

NUTS!!
Yes, very delicious. Important thing to remember though, peanuts are legumes, which means they contain phytic acid. So try other nuts that might contain less. Walnuts? Pistachios? I actually don't know the level of phytic acid that these nuts contain. But perhaps it is worth looking into.

I came across this blog that debates the nut thing for paleo dieters. Read the comments. Mostly what I get from it is that one should not binge on nuts. As with most foods, binging is bad. But otherwise, nuts are great especially when you are first starting the paleo lifestyle.

I welcome people to look into this if they like and provide more insight or perpectives. I certainly would like to learn more.

Recipes for Day 1

Here are some recipes from the day:

MOCK TENDERLOIN CHUCK STEAKS (pieces of chuck cut into medallions that we got at Whole Foods for cheap)

Ingredients:
Mock tenderloin steak
minced garlic
wheat-free tamari
lime juice
black pepper
light olive oil, ghee, or bacon fat

Instructions:
Marinate the meat in the other ingredients for at least an hour. Heat oil in a medium high pan. Sear meat for about 5 minutes on each side (it should be a rusty brown color). Yummers!


GERRY & JAKE'S JERK CHICKEN FOR JERKS

Ingredients:

For the rub:
cumin
coriander
small onion
knob of ginger
green chilies
cinnamon
nutmeg
tumeric
black pepper
cardamom
lime juice
chunks of mango
salt
a couple cloves
enough olive oil to make everything into a paste when you blend it

Other ingredients:
One whole muthafuckin chicken
Sweet potatoes cut into slightly-bigger-than-bite-sized chunks
Onion cut up into chunks

Instructions:
Blend all the rub ingredients together in a food processor or blender. Rub that love all over that naked, vulnerable chicken and put it in a roasting pan. Preheat oven to 475 degrees. Scatter onions and sweet potatoes around yon chicken and dizzle some olive oil on them. Stick her into the oven for 50 minutes or so or until the legs wanna come off pretty easily and the juices run clear. Shake the pan and give the veggies a turn halfway through so they don't scorch. Aight, yous gots chicken.

Travel-food for the working / wandering paleo

I confess, I'm still in researching-the-logistics mode. Most of the food options offered near my workplace are based on grains and sugar (or both). And for the near-mid future, I have virtually no time to cook during the week-- before this experiment, I have been cooking my foods in bulk, once a week.

My challenge, in addition to assessing the workplace options more thoroughly, is to find paleo / low-glycemic foods that I can take with me, from school and then to work, that will provide me with 2 meals and a snack or 2 for my day. These foods need to be stable for at least 4-6 hours at room temperature, easy to transport in a backpack/messenger bag, and provide enough nutrition that I can successfully resist the siren calls of the cafeteria/vending machine/large platter of cookies that somebody left in the conference room.

So far, I've found unsweetened applesauce single-paks, raw fruit, and treenuts (which my teeth are not happy about, but that's another story).

Longer term, I'm seriously considering undertaking a beef-jerky-making project--recipes welcome!

Snacking Tips

SNACK IDEAS!! WHEEE!!!

Instead of crackers or bread, try slices of apple or pear with goat cheese. A drop of honey will also help beat back that sugar beast.

Carrots and celery are not very bioavailable raw, but they can be great mouth occupiers. Dip them in almond or cashew butter. If you can't eat nuts, goat cheese or mustard maybe? You can also eat them straight, but again, nutrition wise not so effective, just great for keeping your pie-hole busy.


Nuts, if you can eat them, are a great freaking snack. The protein and the fat content make them really satiating.

Berries are a good substitute for candy, particularly when they are in season.

Roast a chicken, or get one of those rotisserie chickens from the store (make sure no weird ingredients), shred it up, mix it with some tahini, lemon juice, garlic, and diced onion, salt and pepper. Maybe add diced up apple or chopped walnuts and celery. You got yourself a pretty satisfying chicken salad.

Day 1

Some of us crazy Baltimore losers are trying out the Paleo Diet - you know, no grains, no legumes, no refined sugar, eating like cavemen, wearing loincloths... we're also drawing a bit from Sally Fallon's Nourishing Traditions and the research of Dr. Weston Price. Oh, and also Gary Taubes' book, Good Calories, Bad Calories.

Why are we doing this? Well, we all have our own individual reasons, but mainly, we're just trying to see what happens. I have heard arguments about grain being tolerable for a lot of people, but I haven't heard from anyone why they are necessary or why they should take up space on a plate where good meat or vegetables could go, so I figure we can get rid of them and see if we feel different. I'm hoping a lot of us feel better. I'm hoping we all develop a broader understanding and appreciation for food. I hope we bond and figure out better ways to navigate a really confusing and increasingly bleak food environment. I'm hoping to convince my friends to eat raw liver. That's pretty much it.

Last night, to kick things off, we had loads of collards, sweet potatoes, two different kinds of fish, and mussels in a coconut curry. We talked about food. It was nice. I'm one of those people who loves it when people post what they had for lunch of Facebook. Today, during the day, some people had difficulty, others did not. Seems like work and school make it difficult for people to abide by the diet. We'll try to figure out ways to make it work as the month goes on.

Here are the Paleo Basics

- No grains or legumes because they contain phytic acid and other anti-nutrients and they spike the blood sugar. Spiking blood sugar bad.
- Especially no wheat or other gluten-containing items because gluten is the devil
- Vegetable sources for carbohydrates that don't spike the blood sugar. Spiking blood sugar bad.
- No sugar (spiking blood sugar bad) or processed foods.
- Basically meat, vegetables, eggs, fruits, nuts, and some dairy