Paleo Breakfast

Paleo breakfast. Three-egg omelet with spring onions (eggs were from the egg guy at the Waverly farmers market and the spring onions were from the downtown market), apple salad, and sweet potato, served with mustard/cider vinegar dressing, chipotle salsa, and salsa verde with avocado. I used ghee to cook the omelet, and I melted extra butter and a touch of ghee into the sweet potatoes. I didn't put any cheese in the omelet. For those of you still getting acne or gaining weight, or generally still feeling a bit bloated and gross, please try eliminating dairy from your diet for a while. Ghee is ok because the milk solids have been removed, it's just pure fat, which is good for you. It's the casein and the lactose in milk that are particularly growth-inducing. Chill on that shit. The irony of that ashtray in the picture is not lost on me.

Also, another note, when doing scrambled eggs or omelets, scramble the eggs in a bowl before you cook them - really whisk them to get them to froth up a little. Once you pour it into a hot pan, turn the heat down and stir very gently once every 30 seconds or so just to get them to cook evenly. Don't scramble in the pan. You need to be gentle with eggs when you cook them, otherwise they stick to the pan or become mealy and gross.

Lamb Stew

I made lamb stew.

Ingredients:
Chunks of bone-in lamb (the bone is important if you don't have stock on hand because that's where the flavor comes from)
Onions
Carrots
Bay leaf
Water
Tomato (optional)
Garlic
Salt
Pepper
Cumin
Lemon zest

I rubbed the chunks of meat with salt, pepper, and cumin. I then heated some ghee (I'm trying to use more saturated fats to cook, and ghee has a very high smoking point and tastes awesome) and browned the meat in it. The important thing here is to use a heavy pan (I used a cast-iron pot) and use pretty high heat. You want to get a nice sear on it, which should be a rusty copper color. Too many people are afraid to use high heat, so they wind up with grey, unappetizing meat. Ok, so once the meat was seared, I added chopped up onions, bay leaf, a little more salt, and gave it a stir. When the onions were transluscent, I added carrots and a tomato. I let that cook down a little, then I added a few cloves of garlic, a little lemon zest, and enough water to just barely cover everything. I covered the pot, and put the whole thing in the oven (sort of like with my Fuck You Texas Chili, except covered this time). I intended to leave it in there for at least 2 hours, but when I checked on it after a little over an hour and a half, it was already done. I then chopped up some parsley I got at the farmers market and threw it in. I ate the stew with roasted sweet potatoes, sauteed zucchini, and sauteed turnip greens. Again, I used ghee for everything. There was no vegetable oil at all in this dish.

Fuck You Texas Chili

Tonight, I got bored and went up to Waverly to wander around. Of course I had to stop at Punjab. I got a pound of ground beef. I can't afford grass-fed most of the time, and at least Punjab is halal and they grind the meat for you in front of you, so you can be reasonably sure there's minimal weird crap in it. Also, the fatty acid profile of ruminants is less adversely affected by grain feeding than poultry is, plus the beef at Punjab is very lean, so the fatty acid thing is pretty much a non-issue.

I went home and made chili. I decided I needed to put veggies in it, which is very un-Texan, which is why this is my Fuck You Texas Chili. Chili purists forbid the use of all veggies except garlic and onions (the red color should come from the chili and spices, not tomato). Beans are verboten as well, and the proper thickening agent is corn meal. Since I'm doing a paleo chili, I didn't even intend to use beans or cornmeal, but I definitely felt the need to eat some vegetable matter. Even though they're not seasonal, I used zucchini because that's what they had at Punjab, and they go rather well in chili.

Ingredients:

Ground beef
Onion
Bay leaves
As many cloves of garlic as you can handle
Chili powder
Cumin
Chopped tomatoes (fuck you Texas! Also, anyone allergic to nightshades can omit these.)
Lemon zest/some juice
Salt
Pepper
Cinnamon
Nutmeg
Zucchini
Stock (beef, chicken, veggie, whatever)

Ok, so I didn't list these in the ingredients because most of you probably won't have these on hand, but I used rendered duck fat (you can use bacon fat or light olive oil) and duck stock despite my previous warning about fatty acid profiles of poultry. Duck is delicious, and the fatty acid ratio is better than that of chicken, so whatever. I first heated the duck fat in a dutch oven, then I threw the spices in to let them "open" to use Indian terminology to mean that they become fragrant. I browned the meat in the spice/oil mixture, letting all the exuding liquid evaporate. Then I threw in the chopped onions and tomatoes, stirred it, let the veggies exude their liquid, then I squeezed some lemon juice into it and zested the peel into it as well, threw in a couple bay leaves, a dash of cinnamon and nuteg, a couple cloves of garlic, and enough stock to cover the rest of the stuff by about half an inch. I then put the whole pot, uncovered, into a 350-degree oven for about an hour. Then I chopped up some zucchini and threw them in the pot, and let the whole thing cook for another 20 minutes or so. And that's my Fuck You Texas Chili.

Eating Solo

One thing I've been thinking about a lot during the course of doing the paleo thing is how culture can reflect something evolutionary. Sharing food seems so natural to me that I have to believe it's built in somehow to our genetic code. Indeed bonobos, who we often look to for insight into human behavior, have very complex systems of gathering, hunting, and sharing food. This is why I feel the modern habit of each person getting his or her own plate of food, restaurant style, is not only wasteful and inefficient, it also flies in the face of our intense need to connect to each other via the meals that we prepare and eat together. For the same reason, I also abhor convenience food and food designed to eat on the go. I much prefer cooking and eating family style.

Recent changes in my daily routine have resulted in me cooking mainly for myself most days. This is very awkward for me. Beyond affecting my cooking times and quantities, by the nature in which fresh produce is sold, it's hard for me to use everything fast enough. I also really hate putting so much effort into cooking when no one else is around to appreciate it. I do indeed enjoy cooking, and it's a meditative process for me, but it's just a little less rewarding when I can't share the fruits of my labor with people I care about.

I think sharing food helps us prepare healthier food. We feel free to buy produce and meat and good ingredients when we feel that we are doing so to take care of the people we love. When we're solitary in our eating and cooking habits, it's too easy to slip into convenience foods. Sandwiches, ramen, and microwave dinners are for lonely eating. Real food is to be eaten and shared with your tribe. What I mean is that I miss you guys on nights when I'm eating alone.

I Scream!

It's warm and sunny out, which means the ice cream and icey stands are opening! But alas, if you are sticking with the paleo diet you will have a hard time finding an icey treat to eat out there that's not packed with tons of sugar.

Look no further.

Make your own one-ingredient ice cream at home. It's literally BANANAS. Apparently this is a recipe that is very popular with the vegans but I'm just now discovering it. I found it here. All you need to do is freeze chopped up bananas for a couple of hours. Then put them in a blender or food processor until you've made a creamy consistency. You can add whatever you like (peanut butter, vanilla, honey, cocoa powder, etc.) I put a spoon full of almond butter, vanilla extract, and walnuts in mine and it was so delicious. The picture above (not mine) is the result of re-freezing the blended frozen bananas and then taking a scooper to it to make it look even more like ice cream. This is something that you should enjoy fast because if you let it melt it will just become gooey bananas, which is delicious but no longer ice creamy.

Apparently this process also works with fruits like mamey and mango. I bet it would also work with avocado too. The key is the fat content in these fruits that make it that creamy consistency. To make it local, maybe you could use paw paw from the forest!

Try this. You will like it.

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.