Primal Pumpkin Pie

I have mixed feelings about eating primal on Thanksgiving.  On the one hand, so many delicious foods can be prepared in a primal way that there is truly no need to feel deprived.  After all, the turkey and the vegetables present no problems, gravy can be thickened with arrowroot, and even a tasty batch of quick rolls can be whipped up using almond flour.

On the other hand, this tends to be the only day of the year that I eat one of my favorite non-primal foods – stuffing.   When I was around middle-school age I used to actually make Stove Top Stuffing as an after school snack.  Although the microwave prep was easy and fastest (important if you wanted to catch those first few minutes of Oprah) I would prepare it on the stove top (as God obviously intended) and exactly according to package directions.  Those soft bits of rehydrated bread intermingled with the tang of margarine, artificial chicken flavoring and enough sodium for a week were worthy of nothing less than my perfect preparation.

I don’t like Stove Top Stuffing much anymore.   Or rather, I much prefer stuffing when the ingredient list is easily distinguishable from that of my shampoo. This year I am bringing the stuffing to mom’s.  I plan to prepare it using one of my other favorite non-primal foods – French bread.

However, I am also bringing pumpkin pies and I could not resist coming up with a primal pumpkin pie recipe.  I made a test pie yesterday and I have to say it exceeded expectations.  Dave thinks it tastes better than ‘regular’ pumpkin pie.  At the very least, this is definitely one of those primal adaptations where nobody is going to notice anything weird or different about it.  It just tastes like good pumpkin pie.

So for all my primal cyberfriends out there who are making more nutritionally sound choices than I am this Thursday – this one’s for you!

Ten things I learned in Costa Rica:

1.    It is very hard to eat primal if you are relying on traditional Costa Rican food for sustenance.   The national dish is Gallo y Pinto (rice and beans).  Although the small, casual Costa Rican cafes tended to have meat on the menu, they mainly serve up a lot of sandwiches and other bready fare.
2.    It is easy to walk around in the rainforest for hours and never see an animal bigger than an insect.   But you won’t care because it’s worth it just to check out the incredibly huge moss and vine laden trees.
3.    There are a lot of wealthy American and even wealthier European, young twenty-somethings hanging around on the beaches down there getting stoned.  It seems that entire towns, complete with yoga studios and sushi, have evolved to cater to their trust funds.  Over time, some of these kids have presumably been cut off from financial support back home.  They have rubbed their stringy strands into dreadlocks and moved in.  Either out of financial necessity or else a deeply repressed sense of work ethic they have learned to weave friendship bracelets that they sell at impromptu ‘artisan markets’.
4.    It is possible for a leaf to grow the size of a large dog.
5.    I can no longer tolerate very cheap hotels.  Maybe some kind of switch gets turned off when you hit 30 or own a house of your own because back in college I used to do very well in hostels.  Now I really want my own bathroom and for there not to be any strange hairs on the sheets.
6.    Costa Rican coffee is incredible!  We had some truly amazing cups of coffee while we were there.  Disappointingly, however, if you buy some and take it home and make it in your own coffee maker it just tastes like regular coffee.
7.    Costa Rican women tend to be overweight.  Not any more than your average American but since the fashion there seems to be low rider jeans with tight- fitting shirts it was easy to notice.  In all honesty, I found this devil-may-care attitude towards rolls of abdominal flab sort of refreshing.
8.    In some parts of the world, monkeys really do swing impishly around bus stops and outdoor cafes eating bananas.
9.    While plane fare to Costa Rica is pretty reasonable, it is otherwise not extra-special cheap to be there.  Just something to think about if you ever plan to visit.  It was easy to spend $2 for a cup of coffee and $25 for a meal.
10.    A zip-line canopy tour is not really about exploring the rainforest canopy.  Instead,  it is all about the adrenaline rush that comes from flying through the air strapped to a metal cable.  I highly recommend it!

Various photos from the two places we visited outside of San Jose - Montezuma and Monteverde. Clockwise from lower left: me on a zip line, beach, suspension bridge, walking along the beach in my Vibrams, Dave and I sunburnt on a bus.

Dave getting ready to eat his fancy stuffed pork chop

There’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you.  You know all the fancy photos of the food on this site?  The ones that make it look like we live in some kind of Autumn paradise.  Or the ones that look like we spend our evenings gathered around a cozy dining room table sipping wine?  It’s all fake.  Well, the food is real, but the rest of it is staged.  Dave, my husband and resident photographer, has a number of high-tech cameras in addition to lighting equipment, light boxes, studio reflectors, etc…. So if your reality doesn’t resemble the food photography you find here, don’t feel bad.  Mine doesn’t either.

Even though Dave knows what he’s doing and we’ve got some nice equipment, it’s actually really hard to get a decent picture sometimes – especially when it comes to meat!  Meat tends to look either greasy or dried out.  This is frustrating because while your carefully prepared steak might look amazing in person, as soon as you take the picture it is reduced to a big ugly blob of brown.  Baked goods are the opposite.  They are actually enhanced through photography.  Do a search on a site like tastespotting and compare the number of meatloaf photos with the number of cupcake photos and you’ll see what I mean.

What this all boils down to is that I came up with a really good stuffed pork chops recipe the other night but the photos turned out like crap.  It would be a shame not to share the recipe with you just because we couldn’t get a good picture, though.  Luckily, Dave was wearing his skeleton costume.

Feliz Dia de los Muertos!

Another use for Vibram 5 Fingers: skeleton feet!

Real life. Dave trying to edit photos for the blog.

While researching information for the squash handout I came across an interesting recipe for peanut butter squash ‘brownies’.  You can imagine my excitement when I realized these were primal-friendly, grain free, refined sugar free brownies!  At first glance, the short ingredient list seemed really strange. There are only 5 ingredients in these flourless brownies and I couldn’t imagine what kind of texture would result.  Of course, I had to make them immediately.

These brownies are amazing!  The texture is like a wonderfully moist cake or brownie and most of the sweetness comes from the squash.  I can’t say this about all my primal treats, but in this case you can feel confident serving these to friends, family, coworkers and children without looking like you’re trying to impose some crazy health-food agenda.

Compared to the original recipe I found, I increased the squash, decreased the honey, and used raw almond butter instead of peanut butter.  I used 1/3 cup honey for the whole batch which comes out to just over ½ tablespoon of honey per brownie.   However, you could probably get away without adding any honey and maybe just mixing in some coconut, dates, or raisins.

Before I started eating primal, I used to sit down with my cookbooks on the weekend and plan out each meal for the upcoming week.  I would make a detailed grocery list that included every ingredient I didn’t already have.  Then I set out on a mission to buy everything I needed as cheaply as possible.  In retrospect the meals seem disjointed.  They were not only disconnected from each other but totally irrelevant to the season: chicken enchiladas on Monday, stir-fry on Tuesday, spaghetti on Wednesday, etc…  Furthermore, it was exhausting!  I mean, some Sundays I just didn’t feel like spending hours planning meals and buying food.  Then, despite all my preparations, at some point in the week the inevitable happened: take out.  Chicken ceasar salad night would be pushed to some indefinite future date so we could collapse on the couch with a pizza after the kids were in bed.  Come Saturday I’d throw out a crisper full of rotting vegetables and start the whole crazy cycle all over again.

I’m doing a lot of things differently these days.  Obviously, vegetables are the foundation of my diet and I don’t include grains and starchy vegetables in my usual fare.  But aside from (although perhaps as a result of) these dietary changes, my entire approach to daily cooking and meal planning has changed.

First of all, I make it a point to buy and enjoy quality foods.  Americans spend proportionally less of their income on food than any other industrialized nation.  Since the money we spend on groceries is one of the most flexible portions of our monthly expenses, we naturally appreciate the idea of getting a bargain on food.  Unfortunately, coupons and store discounts are oriented towards the sale of processed food ‘products’.   And, as you might have heard lately, the meat from your average supermarket is of questionable quality.  I know most people just aren’t used to thinking about it this way, but it does seem a little strange that we would care so little about the substances we are literally putting inside of our bodies throughout the day.  I think this comes from a lack of understanding about the impact eating real food has on your health.  I’d rather live in a smaller house, drive a cheaper car, and forego a lot of comforts before I’d resort to feeding myself whatever is on sale that week at Kroger.  Oddly, I don’t spend that much more on food now than I used to.  This is mainly because I buy less and don’t waste as much.  I also stock up on good quality protein when I see an opportunity.

Second, when you pay $6 or more for a pound of beef, or get the red peppers yourself from an organic farm just outside of town, dumping a jar of Ragu Light Parmesan Alfredo Cheese Creations Sauce all over it just doesn’t seem right, even if you do have a coupon.  So, I end up making my meals from scratch, and an alfredo cheese sauce creation, under normal circumstances, is more trouble than it’s worth.  Instead of fussing with lots of different recipes, our meals tend to be simple, and focused on a few great-tasting components.  Steak, fish, shrimp with whatever vegetables we received that week from our CSA, some butter, some salt and pepper, a spice or herb, a simple sauce or pesto.  It’s good, it’s simple, and it never gets old because it is limitless in possibilities.  Eff you, Ragu.

Finally, I don’t do big weekend grocery shopping trips every week because if I want to do something else on Sunday afternoon, I’m not setting our family up for a week of drive-throughs and pizza delivery.  Luckily for us, our freezer currently contains 20lbs of ground moose and even more halibut that Dave’s parents killed and butchered themselves and sent us from Alaska.  But even in the absence of such a windfall, there’s usually some meat in the freezer.  For 5 months of the year, I get a lot of produce from our CSA farm share.  If we’ve got a pound of moose, a head of cabbage, and a few staples on hand, we can have a pretty good dinner.

In summary, here’s a rundown of how my old routine compares to my new approach:

Then: I wasted a lot of weekend time that could have been spent on more interesting activities.
Now: I go to the supermarket irregularly and less frequently and make quick trips to the little market in town when I run out of something.  I get to take my kids to a farm on Wednesdays to get our produce.

Then: Instead of having fun and being creative with my cooking, I was boring myself to death by executing recipes.
Now: We seldom eat the exact same meal twice.  Perhaps contrary to what one might think, making use of whatever we have on hand and keeping our meals focused on a few key ingredients allows me to be more creative and innovative in my cooking.

Then: In order to spare myself more boring time in the kitchen, I would buy processed convenience foods which weren’t healthy for me or my family.
Now: I can spend as little or as much time in the kitchen as I feel like because I am not beholden to a weekly plan that requires I make enchiladas on Tuesday no matter what.

Then: I was buying cheap food of questionable quality in order to compensate for having to buy such a huge diversity of ingredients.
Now: I buy higher quality food and I buy less of it.

Then: I was wasting food because I didn’t stick to my plan or the recipe didn’t call for all of what I had bought (green onions, anyone?).
Now: I waste less food because I don’t rely on recipes to use the food we have.

Now that I’ve said all this, let me be sure I am not giving the wrong impression of myself.  I probably sound more organized than I really am.   Sometimes I don’t feel like cooking and I give my kids cottage cheese and deli turkey for dinner.  Sometimes a bunch of green onions still rots in the crisper.  Sometimes I bust open a packet of McCormick Bearnaise Sauce Mix just because I can’t resist the yummy MSG.  My point here is that overall I’ve found a way to not only eat healthier foods but also increase the enjoyment I receive from preparing and eating while greatly simplifying related processes.

I believe that a lot of people will find familiar elements in my old routine because it is a common approach to mealtime management.  To be fair, my heart was in the right place.  I wanted to make delicious and interesting meals for my family every night.  I was making reasonably nutritious food and was trying hard not to rely on fast food or take out meals.  Turns out, there’s a better way.

That said, I am not interested in living up to an impossible ideal of healthy kitchen efficiency and I hope you’re not either.  What works for me might not be the same thing that works for you.  For that matter, I’ll likely be doing things somewhat differently five years out.   If I’ve given you an idea or two, then I’m happy.  Likewise, if you have tips or an approach to weekly meal planning (or un-planning as the case may be), leave a comment, I’d love to hear from you.

I think cardamom is an under-utilized spice.  If you’re not familiar with cardamom, it has a slightly sweet, pungent flavor that can be used in savory meat dishes, curries, and baked goods.  You can also add some to your coffee grounds.  My mom makes a cardamom braid at Christmas so I always associate cardamom with a colder season.

I was thinking about how I might use cardamom more often and decided it was a good time to visit a website I had heard about called FoodPairing.  A group of Belgian Scientists created a food pairing database based on the chemical properties of foods.  It is a little hard to navigate but is fascinating once you figure out how it works.  Flavors are mapped out on sunburst charts.  You can look up what might pair well with a specific flavor or search for substitutions.  The sunburst chart for cardamom recommends, among other flavors, Gruyere, bitter orange peel, olive oil, and something called Muscat of Alexandria.

Here’s another recipe inspired by Everyday Grain Free Gourmet.  Their recipe uses berries but considering the season I decided to use apple and cardamom.  I know, my food paring isn’t very adventurous, and apple didn’t even make it on the FoodPairing chart.  But I assure you they do well together here.

You can broil the salmon fillets directly on the foil but if you place them on a rack as shown (this cooling rack I have happens to fit this baking sheet pretty nicely) then the fish doesn't get soggy as it cooks in its own juices.

But let’s not think about that.

Let’s think about all the great cooking that can be done during the colder part of the year. This is the time for stews and slow-cookers, root vegetables and warm spices… It’s also a good time to ramp up your vitamin D intake so that you don’t get rickets or catch the flu. I never used to give vitamin D much thought but it is in the news everywhere now since apparently most of us are horribly deficient. The current recommendation is 400 IU/day for adults but many consider that number to be too low. In any case, it’s not a bad idea to increase that number to at least 800-1000 IU/day especially if you are a woman (as vitamin D increases calcium absorption) or live in a northern latitude. By the way, only kids get rickets but vitamin D deficiency in adults is associated with an alarming number of other health problems. Here’s an interesting article from the Weston A Price Foundation on the matter (by the way, those folks recommend 10,000 IU/day!).

Salmon is an excellent natural source of vitamin D although the content varies considerably depending on whether the salmon is wild caught or farmed. Wild caught salmon can contain as much as 1000 IU per 3.5oz portion whereas farmed salmon generally contains far less. Unless you plan to eat salmon or shrimp everyday (or you’re lucky enough to live in the sun all year) the best way to get your vitamin D is to take cod liver oil daily. I plan to do this as soon as I get around to it.

Pardon my absence as of late.  I haven’t been feeling like posting much mainly because I haven’t been cooking much.  Here it is the fall harvest season and I’ve done little more in the kitchen this last week than whip up a few meals for the kids and cut up a rotisserie chicken.  The reason?  In a very un-primal manner I have been drinking protein shakes for breakfast and lunch followed by a simple meat-based dinner followed by another protein shake.  I gave up whey protein earlier in the year when I decided I’d rather eat actual food following a workout.   But now I am, temporarily, subsisting off them as I conduct a 6 week experiment following the dietary guidelines in the Eades’ new book The 6 Week Cure for the Middle-Aged Middle.  The fact is, since starting this blog, I have put aside my body composition goals for the sake of expanding my primal cooking repertoire.  As nice as it is to know how to make a primal-friendly muffin or cake, I am generally better off without either.  So I am taking a month off from any serious cooking and am back to a regular weight training schedule.  Oh, and did I mention I’m going on vacation to Costa Rica next month?

For someone like me who spends a good portion of their time planning, procuring and preparing food, it can be a relief to devote attention to other endeavors for a while and just let someone else decide what’s for dinner.  And who better to decide than Michael and Mary Dan Eades, that friendly, low-carb husband-and-wife-doctor-team from Arkansas?  The Drs. Eades, authors of the NYT bestselling book Protein Power, are on-board with primal principles and from what I can gather, it is somewhat unusual of them to be recommending something like a protein shake in lieu of real food.  What they’ve devised is a high-protein regiment that supposedly gets the liver in optimal shape so that maximum fat loss can occur without the usual losses in lean body mass too.  By the way, I have absolutely no idea whether the Eades can back up their claims in the book with actual research.   I’ve read some criticisms that call it gimmicky.  I decided I didn’t really care.  Here’s how the diet works in a nutshell:

Stage 1 (2 weeks): 3 whey protein shakes a day and 1 meal consisting of protein and some veggies.  No caffeine, no alcohol (ouch!).
Stage 2 (2 weeks): 3 meals a day consisting mainly of meat.  Limited veggies, no dairy.
Stage 3 (2 weeks): Maintenance mode – your standard low-to-moderate carb diet.

Mark Sisson makes an appearance in their book, although I’m not completely sure why.  The Eades recommend an abdominal exercise called Laplace.  After describing it’s execution they show a shirtless photo of Mark and tell us that he achieved his current physique through no other abdominal exercise than this one.  Of course, not only was Mark Sisson never overweight but he also didn’t come to look the way he does by virtue of some funky sucking-in exercise… but whatever.

I am not yet middle aged (I checked!) and I also don’t have a lot of visceral fat so I may not be the target audience for this diet.   Even though I am already at a good weight for my height I still wouldn’t mind leaning out a little.  In less than 2 weeks, I’ve lost nearly 5lbs of scale weight.   I took into account an initial drop in water weight, so as far as I can tell – that’s real poundage.  So, yes, this diet ‘works’.  But just to be clear, there’s nothing magical going on.  Switching things up can help when you’re at a plateau, but there’s definitely some plain old calorie restriction going on here.  Also, in an effort to stay compliant with this temporary plan, my eating behavior has changed in that I haven’t been eating out, snacking, drinking, or partaking in small indulgences that I might not resist otherwise.  If you are interested in losing fat and are at a standstill, you might give the 6-week cure a shot.  I’ve also learned a few things, such as that I can survive without fruit and sugar in all of its forms (at least for a while), and that it might not be so bad to try intermittent fasting again at some point (hated it).

Once these shake weeks are over after Wednesday, I’ll be back to posting recipes.  After the two ‘meat weeks’, I’ll look forward to resuming my usual primal eating style – in Costa Rica!

Sri Lankan Coconut Chicken Curry

If I believed in such things, I would say I spent a former life in Southern Asia.  I have always been fascinated with this area of the world and I adore Indian cuisine.  At various times throughout my life I have tried to travel there but have always been thwarted or disrailed in one way or another (mom, if you’re reading this, I don’t mean by you).  I even tried learning Hindi on my own for a while.  My hope is that I can make it there before I get too old and stodgy and have to stay at a Hilton and take guided tours everywhere.   There’s an Indian restaurant about 30 minutes from where I live and the kids and I occasionally meet Dave there during his lunch break.  As delicious as the food is, it is a horrible place to eat primal unless, unlike me, you are able to resist naan and gulab jamun.

Although they utilize many of the same ingredients, Sri Lankan and Indian cuisine really shouldn’t be lumped together.  For one thing, Sri Lankan cuisine tends to be spicier. Chilies are used liberally and some have said some Sri Lankan dishes are the hottest in the world in terms of chili content.  Most curries are prepared in coconut milk to provide a counterbalance to the spice and some special ingredients indigenous to the region are used.

Anuja is a second-generation Sri Lankan and long-time colleague of my husband’s.  She generously sent me her recipe for a chicken curry that looked too delicious to pass up.   I love the idea of incorporating a variety of cuisines into a primal diet.  It’s so much more fun to expand your food choices by drawing upon other traditions than it is trying to make a primal mac and cheese out of cauliflower and almond milk.  If you need to make a special trip to an Indian grocery to get ingredients for this recipe take advantage of the opportunity to buy some common spices at a fraction of the usual price.   I had no idea how badly I had been getting ripped off on cumin.

Not too long ago, I would have thought ‘cauliflower rice’ sounded kind of depressing. I mean, let’s be honest – it’s not the same as real rice. (For the record, I still find cauliflower pizza crusts to be depressing and am working on a primal pizza crust that doesn’t have a bajillion calories.) If you haven’t tried it, though, you might be surprised at how well cauliflower functions as a rice-like base for curries and stir-fries. Aside from kind of looking like white rice, it has a neutral flavor and even manages to soak up a little sauce. Furthermore, if you’re the type who has a hard time getting in all your veggies, this is a practically effortless way to pack in a substantial amount of cauliflower. What was once a huge head is reduced to 4 modest-looking mounds of ‘rice’ after cooking.

Even when I’m making Asian dishes, I have grown accustomed to not including rice and I find that I don’t even miss it. I’d rather have more of the actual dish than just some boring old rice anyway. However, the other night I was making a Sri Lankan coconut chicken curry that was not only on the spicy side but also had a fair amount of liquid. This is when something like cauliflower rice comes in handy. The cauliflower helped to absorb some of the sauce and even out the spicy flavor.

I’ve seen recipes that call for steaming or microwaving the cauliflower rice but I can’t imagine why you’d want to cook it that way unless you are looking to save a few calories. It’s not really faster and since it absorbs water during cooking, the rice won’t be absorbent on the plate. Here’s how I prefer to make the rice. Check back tomorrow for the Sri Lankan curry.