Browned-Butter Sour-Cherry Almond Torte

This is the recipe for the sour-cherry almond torte,
now paleo-friendly!

Start with:

1 stick unsalted butter
vanilla extract
6 egg whites
1/2 tspn salt
cardamom (to taste)
cinnamon (to taste)
nutmeg (to taste)
1/2 cup tapioca flour
1/2 cup molasses
1/2 cup shredded unsweetened coconut
1 cup almond flour
1/3 cup sliced almonds
3 1/2 cups pitted sour cherries
arrowroot powder
1 pint heavy whipping cream

Preheat oven to 375 F.

Butter and flour/coconut a 8-10" cake pan
Mix the salt, spices, flours, and coconut together.
Melt the butter in a sauce pan, and cook it until it begins to brown (not burn).
Remove it from the heat, allow it to cool, and then add ~ 1 taplespoon of vanilla extract to the butter.
Beat the egg whites to the stiff peak stage (egg beater FTW).
Gently fold in the dry ingredient mixture, then the molasses, then the melted butter.
Transfer batter to the prepared cake pan. Cover the top of torte with sliced almonds.
Bake torte at 375 F for 45 minutes, or until fork comes out clean. Remove pan from oven and cool on rack for 15 minutes. De-pan the torte (carefully!) onto a rack and allow it to continue cooling for an additional 20-40 minutes before serving.

Prepare the sour cherry topping by heating the sour cherries with their juices in a sauce pan. Arrowroot powder may be added to thicken the juices, if desired. Cinnamon / cardamom / nutmeg may also be added if desired. Once the cherries are cooked, remove from heat and add vanilla extract to taste.

Prepare the whipped cream topping by adding cardamom / nutmeg / cinnamon and vanilla extract to taste to 1 pint of heavy cream. Beat the cream to the stiff peak stage (egg beater, yet again), and refrigerate until ready to serve.

Enjoy!

Eat the Universe

I've been trying during the course of this experiment to figure out a way to communicate all the things I've learned about food in as simple a way as possible. I've been trying to offer rules of thumb, and lists of foods to avoid as well as lists of foods to eat. It's tempting to look for a quick fix, or a blanket statement to make food choices less harrowing. This is why people choose veganism or vegetarianism as a lifestyle. This is why people go on diets or develop rules about eating via religion or culture - they want to narrow their choices in an environment where it's almost impossible to know what a good choice is. People hope that they can find staple foods that they can feel good physically and morally about eating for every meal, so that they don't have to confront those decisions every single time they sit down to eat.

Unfortunately, I think it's this impulse that leads to our warped sense of food. Animals don't have to make complicated food choices because they eat what tastes good to them in their environment. Same with humans. However, our environment no longer consists merely of the landscape and the plants and animals that live on it. Our environment now consists of complex systems of economy and technology through which our food must pass in order to get from the farm to our plates. This is why our instincts are now at odds with our health - our instincts should tell us what is good to eat based on what tastes good. With industrialized food designed to trick our instincts, what tastes good these days is often very bad for us. The food available to us at any given moment has nothing to do with the land and everything to do with economics.

It used to be the seasons and the environment dictated what we had available to eat. Our choices were based on the life cycles of the animals and plants that were around us either by nature or by domestication. Even with people supplanting hunter-gatherer lifestyles with a sedentary agrarian way of living, the vast majority of people were still responsible for raising, growing, hunting, and foraging their own food. However, as more people became alienated from food production, as industrialization took people off the farms and put them into factories, we began to lose our understanding of the animals and plants that nourished us. Farming has slowly become a profession rather than a necessity for most people, and we have relegated food production to an ever smaller portion of the population so that the rest of us can work to support the other parts of the increasingly massive machine we call civilization. This separation may have occurred in old civilizations in China, India, and the Middle East, which is why there have been so many doctrines with strict dietary guidelines that originate from those places. When people no longer have nature to tell them what to eat, they need God or a philosophy. But the alienation from food that occurred just in the 20th century is unique in human history.

This is all just a long-winded way for me to say that we have to really start thinking about food again. Whether or not you think it's important for yourself to avoid grains permanently, I hope that this process of focusing on meat and vegetables has made you a better cook and forced you to think harder about each thing you eat. It's important that we cook as many of our own meals as possible, talk to farmers, plant seeds, and meditate over every single meal we eat. People have decried the elevation of food to the status of a religion, and indeed many people use food to underpin a certain neurotic view of the world. But food is the primary connection that all living things have to each other, and it therefore makes sense that our understanding of our health and ourselves begins with our relationship to the organisms that we need to put into our bodies in order to live. I can talk to you about macronutrient proportions and omega-3 fatty acids, we can talk about the politics and the ethics of our food choices, but until we can all stand back and have a more holistic view of how what we eat literally connects our bodies to the earth and the sun, then all we are doing is perpetuating our ignorance.

So I guess, at the end of the day, my rule of thumb would be: eat the way you have sex, the way you admire a star-filled sky, the way you sing a song, and the way you breath fresh air.

How does your garden grow?

For those of you who are interested in gardening, there are two community gardening opportunities coming up (probably more around town, too).

In Hampden, there is a community garden and park near the 3500 block of Ash Street (near Baldwin Street). The group there is working on clearing a few city-owned lots and converting them to community gardens. Donations and assistance welcome; contact William at 410-900-7779.

Near where I live, there is a community garden, and I'm planning to rent a plot this year (it's CHEAP!). Anyone from our paleo group who would like to garden with me on my plot is welcome to, as I think (hope) the plot will yield more than I'll be able to use myself. E-mail me or contact me offline if you're interested. We're having a garden clean-up day next Saturday 3/27/10 from 10 to 12 noon.

For those of you interested in learning more about container gardens, you can get more information from the Home and Garden Information Center (http://hgic.umd.edu/) (which I think is affiliated with the Maryland Master Gardeners program). They've held workshops on container gardening in the past. In addition, they have a live chat option and other ways of seeking gardening advice. I believe the Maryland Master Gardeners usually attend the Sunday farmer's market under the JFX (May thru December) and are on hand there to answer questions about gardening.

Fat Head

Clip from the documentary Fat Head

This clip explains how we get fat in a very easy to understand way:

Did we lick it?

....the sugar habit, that is?

Now that we're nearly done with Week 4 of our paleo challenge, I'd be interested in hearing how people are doing in relation to cutting out or reducing sugar and refined carbohydrates in their diet.

Since we started the challenge, my one very non-paleo food has been chocolate. I've tried to stick with very dark chocolate (90% dark, but sometimes in the 74%-88% range instead). Sometimes, though, I've had slightly less dark chocolate with a lot of sugar in it. I haven't had any grains since we started and have not had juice either.

As the weeks have gone on, I've noticed two things: I get less hungry between meals (a good thing, and I assume because I'm eating veg and protein that's keeping me fuller longer and with fewer dips in blood sugar), but I also have been eating a LOT more chocolate than when I started (not necessarily a great thing, given the quantities).

Are We Not Hipsters?

Most of you probably know this already, but an article written about Sarah Magida and me has caused quite the stir around the interwebs in the past 24 hours. I didn't expect to enter the public food debate in this fashion, but I guess I blew up my own spot by agreeing to the interview in the first place. In any case, they've posted a response from me, and I've written another response for the blog I work for. There have been some really great and supportive comments, despite the usual trolls and malcontents.

I just want to say to all of you that I really love having dinner with you every Sunday. I love that you're in my life, and that we get to share food and hang out so much. The really hateful things people are saying out there have made me really appreciate all of you that much more. Thank you so much for indulging me in this experiment. At the end of the day, I hope we're all healthy and happy and full of great food.

Despite the article painting a picture of me as some spoiled brat who can't give up my high-society tastes, here's what I've had for lunch for the past three days: soup made from the broth in which I boiled the bison tongue on Sunday. I add vegetables (carrots, celery, turnip greens) and I break and egg into it before turning the heat off and stirring. Delicious, satisfying, full of minerals and protein, full of vegetables. That $9 tongue has turned into at least five or six meals. Cheap as cheap can be, and I didn't even eat any meat. You can do the same thing with any stock that you make.

Cooking tips for busy folk

One thing that has pleasantly surprised me about paleo is that despite my very busy schedule, I've managed to cook for myself on many nights, or at least have enough leftovers to assemble a tasty, veggie-heavy plate of food.

I usually prepare for the week by doing some batched cooking on Saturday or Sunday. Often I cook more than one thing in the oven at the same time--baking fish in one dish and then doing a few sweet potatoes, or doing sweet potatoes at the same time as a spaghetti squash. Then I have portions that I can mix and match for a number of dinners and lunches. (And, sometimes, breakfast.)

The other thing that surprised me was my misperception that vegetables take a long time to prepare and cook. Tonight, I peeled, sliced, and steamed some turnips for dinner in less time than it takes to make macaroni and cheese.

Paleo-baking and sugar exchanges

As Gerry mentioned in his 4th-dinner recap post, I am attempting a paleo-conversion of one of my more elaborate (but so, so worth it) dessert recipes: the (in)famous sour-cherry almond torte. The original recipe has 1/2 cup flour (easy to adapt with nut/tapioca flour) and 1 cup of sugar to eliminate--everything else is mostly paleo-friendly (or at least as paleofriendly as almonds can be).

Sugar, for better or worse, has distinctive properties beyond simple sweetness: it is dry, it browns with baking, and yet more or less retains its character under high temperatures. Most other sweet things do not have this combination of characteristics. Many artificial sweeteners and some natural sweeteners (honey) are not stable under baking conditions. Other natural sweeteners may be heat-stable, but have different physical properties (wetness, for example) that will alter the characteristics of the final baked good. Most often, adaptation of baking recipes to no refined-sugar versions involves replacing the sugar with some exchange volume of apple sauce, molasses, agave, maple syrup, etc., and reducing the volume of liquid ingredients in the recipe to compensate for the added moisture from the sweetener.

Unfortunately, the almond-torte recipe brings with it a significant challenge, as the torte portion has very few wet ingredients (6 egg whites, which provide the leavening for the torte), and yet has a cup of sugar that must be eliminated. I've got some ideas, and I'm open to suggestions (a tip of the hat to Gerry re: the virtues of molasses and tapioca flour). Needless to say, I'll be running at least one test version before Sunday to see what comes out. And if anyone is making mayonnaise this week, I can probably help you out with some egg yolks...

Bleeding Gums Grimmak

One thing I've had since I can remember is bleeding gums. No dentist has ever told me I have gingivitis, and my gums are not receding, they just bleed every time I brush my teeth. I've tried everything - Listerine (which I heard can actually make things worse), flossing more regularly, using toothpastes for sensitive gums - to no avail.* I read a passage, though, in Gary Taubes' book (Good Calories, Bad Calories, which I showed y'all at the first paleo dinner) that describes a doctor who eliminated all carbs from his diet for a year to see if there were any ill effects - he found none, and he also strangely found that his gingivitis went away. This got me thinking. The more I research this, the more I am suspecting that the problem isn't in my mouth, it's somewhere else in my body. When your gums bleed, it means they're inflamed. If one tissue in your body is inflamed, it could indicate that tissues in other parts of your body are inflamed. Realizing this, I have been trying to pay close attention to my gums and how they change with the things I eat. I have found that when I eat generally low-carb, and I haven't been drinking that much, I bleed much less than when I've been eating things that irritate me and drinking more heavily. I also have found that when I eat sugar, and when I have high acidity in my body, the bleeding gets particularly bad. I am going to strive especially hard to not eat sugar, limit booze, and get my acid-base balance in order. Proper sleeping may also help, but I'm really not good at sleeping. Some people view eating as just something they have to do to stay alive, and if food came in pill form they'd eat it that way. I sort of feel that way about sleep. I do it because I need to, not because I love to. This is a problem, and may be wreaking havoc in my body.


*I think the common dental explanation for gum disease - that it is caused by plaque - is completely ludicrous. My bleeding gums persisted despite regular cleanings when I was still under my parents' insurance. I also don't brush very hard, and I generally use medium or soft toothbrushes.

Fourth Dinner

Tonight/last night was a great meal, as usual. A lot of good topics raised after we ate. I was particularly interested in Gina's comments on aerobic vs. anaerobic exercise. Exercise is important, but I don't think killing yourself at the gym is useful, and can even be highly damaging - as Gina pointed out, many people are doing way too much cardio, causing a stress response in the body, leading to some of the same issues we're trying to avoid by cutting out stress-inducing dietary things like sugar and gluten. Also, you can't work out to make up for a bad meal. Really, at the end of the day, you have to do what makes you feel good. Exercise can't be a chore, and it can't be a form of self-punishment for eating the wrong things. It has to be a pleasure, and I think healing the body through diet can help to make working out less laborious.

On another note, I found tonight's meal to be rather acidifying. After the meal I felt a bit of off, not necessarily tired, but my lips were tingling and my tongue felt very mildly sore around where it rubbed up against my teeth. My mother used to say this feeling was caused by hot qi, which I've found lines up nicely with western findings about acidity vs. alkalinity in the body. This meal actually had way more sugar than our usual fare. Dates, though unrefined, are very high glycemic (they spike the blood sugar very rapidly), and I put raisins and apples in the tongue salad. And though Victoria's smoothie was delicious and might have been great on its own between meals, when food is pureed, it increases its glycemic index (the sugars in it enter the bloodstream faster). There was also quite a bit of fruit in this meal, which could have been a problem. The tahini in the Katey's soup is also acidifying. Did anyone else feel anything?

Of course, this is not to say that the meal wasn't delicious. Thanks everyone!

For the next meal, I'd like to have more veggies, minimize the fruit and dairy, and basically have no sugar. If Edward's torts are successfully paleo friendly, this would be even more reason to minimize sugars in the rest of the meal, so that we can more fully appreciate his hard work. Meat. Veggies. That's the moral of the story.

Acid-Base Balance

Another reason to remove grains, legumes, and sugar from the diet is that that they are highly acid forming. Meat and protein are also acid-forming, but eliminating meat is not as effective as eliminating grains and legumes for lowering acidity because of the nature of how most people eat them - meat, for the average person, still represents a relatively small percentage of the food mass he or she intakes compared to how the average person eats grain. Additionally, meat is vital to nutrition in other ways - we need protein, we need the good fats from animals, and we need the minerals. Meat also doesn't contain anti-nutrients the way that grains do. That said, paleo really isn't a meat-based diet. Paleo recognizes the importance of meat, but it's really a vegetable-based diet. Most vegetables are alkalizing, meaning they lower acidity. So, if you eat a lot of vegetables and a little meat, you get a net alkaline effect on the body. This will alleviate such symptoms as yeast infections, cold sores, acne, fatigue, and susceptibility to colds.

So, to recap, if you are looking to reduce the acidity in your body:

EAT LOTS OF VEGETABLES

and greatly reduce your intake of GRAINS, LEGUMES, SUGAR, COFFEE, and BOOZE.

Things like apple cider vinegar and lemon juice actually LOWER your acidity.

For me, the coffee and the booze will be a bit difficult, but again, I don't eat sugar or grains, which I think are much bigger factors for acidity. I did recently have a mild cold sore, but it quickly went away when I ate a lot of sweet potatoes, which are alkalizing.

Here is a great list of foods and their affect on the acidity in your body.

Broken Record

So, I'm getting the sense that the paleo approach to eating is still somewhat confusing for some people, so let me try again to restate things as simply as I can:

1: The basic idea behind paleo is that you should found your diet on quality meats and vegetables, with the veggies being the bulk of your food intake. I don't think this is a very controversial notion.

2: The secondary notion behind paleo is that grains and many legumes (beans, peas, lentils, and peanuts) are nutritionally inferior and in many cases anti-nutritive for humans. We are the only animal besides birds that eats the seeds of grasses, which is what grains are. Not even cows eat grain unless we force them to (and boy do we force them, which is why their meat is unhealthy for us - meat is not inherently unhealthy). Whether or not grains should be demonized isn't the point - the point is that they don't provide anything that meat, vegetables, fruits, and nuts can't provide better. We should also avoid the oils derived from grains and legumes.

3: Wheat and wheat-related grains such as rye and barley are particularly bad because of the protein found in them called gluten. Gluten is ONLY found in wheat and wheat-related grains. Gluten is an irritant much like poison ivy. The more exposure people have to it, the more they have a reaction to it. It literally causes a poison ivy-like rash in your digestive system. This leads to all kinds of awful things in the body. We are more exposed to gluten than ever before because of the types of high-gluten industrial wheat being developed and also because it's added into processed foods as wheat-derived chemicals and food additives. It's in almost everything that comes from a factory, not just bread and pasta.

4: Sugar is bad. It's highly addictive and causes diabetes, acidity in the body, feeds tumors, and makes you crazy. High fructose corn syrup is even worse, and it makes you fat. Agave nectar is as bad as HFCS. Don't eat sugar. Eat a tiny amount of honey or maple syrup like once a week, but not every day. Please. Pretty please? I'm really serious about this. I don't want to see you die.

5: I know I said dairy is ok, but dairy has to be eaten very moderately. It has a lot of sugar in it (lactose) and the primary protein in it, casein, can have bad effects on the body. We're the only animal that eats the milk of another animal, and we are the only animal that eats milk past infancy. Please limit dairy, or even eliminate it if you feel you might have a problem with it.

6: The idea behind all this is to try to approximate what cavemen were eating, because our genetic makeup, which dictates what we're best adapted to eat, was formed in the millions of years before we developed agriculture. We have not had time to adapt to our rapidly changing industrial food system, which is why we are all sick. I mean that literally. Every single one of us is sick because of our food. Pie might be tasty, but it absolutely is killing you slowly. Sandwiches sound simple, but they're not, and even if you assemble one yourself, you're still eating highly processed food.

7: If you can't abide 100% by paleo, just try your best to avoid sugar and gluten, and don't make grain the central part of your meal.

8: Ok, fine, I'll demonize grains - they're horrible for the environment, horrible for your health, kill more animals than the entire meat industry because of the habitats they destroy, they're heavily subsidized by the government, and they're more vulnerable than any other crop to the tampering of agribusiness and chemical companies.

9: EAT YOUR VEGGIES

Recipes using anchovies or sardines

Please post your anchovy or sardine recipes! Now that I have anchovies, I've got to figure out what to make with them. Thanks, paleo pplz!

Shopping Finds

The grocery store I shop at (Shoppers @ Mondawmin) carries Tulip brand salmon (on sale this week) and wild-caught anchovies:


They also have red bell peppers on sale this week for $1 per pound. (Not local, but inexpensive.)

Grain of Salt

OK, here's a little debate on MetaFilter about the veracity of the anti-nutrient claims made by Sally Fallon (via Weston Price) and paleo advocates. My contention is still that whether or not phytic acid and anti-nutrients really pose a threat (actually, not enough studies have been done to prove or disprove this theory conclusively), other foods are much more dense in bioavailable nutrients. Grains, in general, are just filler. Additionally, it's proven that an increasing number of people are developing sensitivity to certain grains, particularly wheat, corn, and their industrially refined products. Whether it's something innately in grains or the fact that grains are more subject to industrial tampering, I still conclude that I should avoid them. I also believe that management of blood glucose is important even if you don't have diabetes, and seeing as grains tend to be high-glycemic (they spike the blood sugar a lot), it would make sense to be careful with the amount of grains you eat. Again, anti-paleo people claim that the antinutrient thing is bunk, but no one that I've found has stated that grains are vital and indispensable. I think it's worth it to see how we feel without them.

Many people I've talked to about diet have said, "I just don't think I'll get diabetes. It doesn't run in my family." However, the number of people developing diabetes is exploding, and I'm certain a large portion of the people who develop it did not necessarily have a family history of the disease - and though I do think diabetes has a strong genetic component, I also think that certain environmental factors can trigger the disease. The nature of our food has changed drastically over the past 40 years, more so than in the 40 years before that (contrary to the changing diet myth perpetuated by the low-fat crowd), and I can't believe it hasn't impacted our health. Ultimately, I can see only benefit from focusing your diet on quality meats and vegetables, and eschewing industrial products as much as possible. In the end, not even Sally Fallon or Weston Price advocate for the total elimination of grain from the diet - indeed, we should utilize whatever can be grown sustainably and efficiently to optimize our nutritional intake. I just hope that in the course of this experiment, people have a heightened awareness of the things that we put into their bodies.

Oven-Roasted Root Veggies

I sliced some beets, carrots, sweet potatoes, and onions and put them in a baking dish. I added some salt, pepper, herbs, and spices to some bacon fat (approximately 1-2 tablespoons) and stirred it into the veggies. Added a bay leaf. I baked it, covered, at 425 (because I was baking a dish of fish at the same time) and then raised the temperature to 450 when the fish came out of the oven. Baked until veggies were soft. Garnished with some lemon juice.



I have a neat sound clip of what it sounded like when it came out of the oven...but you'll just have to take my word for it because Blogger allows posting of photos and videos but not sound files.

You Ain't Eatin Enough

Hey guys, just a reminder that you should be eating until you're full. If you've stuck with relatively strict paleo, you've probably been struggling to find things that you can eat. Keep at it, but under-eating can lead to some problems, so make sure you're eating enough. If you're hungry after a meal, keep eating.

Also, this isn't necessarily a low-carb diet. Unless you're trying to lose weight, eat as many sweet potatoes and yams as you want. But also keep in mind that protein and fat are very satiating.

Broccoli Soup

Actually, scratch that, this is the simplest soup I know:

Bring some salted water to a boil. Throw some broccoli into the water. Cook until tender but still bright green. Remove the broccoli, and put it into a blender or food processor or another pot if you're using an immersion blender. Add a little bit of the water that you boiled the broccoli in. Blend it until smooth. If you want it thinner, add some more of the water. Salt and pepper to taste. You could use stock instead of water if you want, and you can also grate some cheese into the final product. You can also garnish with some crumbled bacon or crumbled blue cheese! Drool.

Sweet Potato and Coconut Milk Soup

Here's the simplest soup I know:

Roast a couple sweet potatoes at 450-degrees until mushy (usually just under an hour). When cool enough to handle, remove skin. Heat some stock (vegetable or chicken) in a pot. Put the sweet potatoes in, blend it with an immersion blender, then add one can of coconut milk (the kind without preservatives or anything weird). Continue blending until smooth. Add more stock if you want it thinner. You can garnish with some scallions or cilantro, and you can also add curry type spices (tumeric, garam masala, etc) if you want. You could also do this with squash or yams.

Paleo-rific!

Bison Tongue in Ma La Sauce

'nuf said.