Mashed sweet potatoes have a distinctly different taste from your everyday mashed potatoes. Yep, you guessed it: they’re sweeter. They’re also much more delicate so they require a slightly different approach; namely, you steam them instead of boiling them.
For this recipe, I used three different sweet potatoes/yams, only because we had all three at the house. This recipe will work fine with almost any sweet tuber, although admittedly this dish looks pretty awesome with all three.
NOTE: An updated version of this recipe appears in my cookbook, The Ancestral Table.
There are several types of chinese cabbage out there in the wide wide world (or your local supermarket), so let’s learn them real quick. Won bok (“napa” cabbage) is the large, football-shaped heads of cabbage that are used in making kimchee. Bok choy resembles celery but with large green leaves (as seen above). Lastly, choy sum is the inner core of bok choy, with narrow, green stalks. Now that the hard stuff is out of the way, here’s how to steam bok choy for an interesting and nutritious side dish.
Boiling potatoes for anything other than the purpose of mashing them may seem insane, but with certain potatoes it results in an evenly cooked potato with a mild taste – provided you cook them perfectly. Fingerling potatoes are perfect for boiling because it brings out their subtle, nutty flavor.
This is a recipe borrowed from my father-in-law, who often uses breakfast foods as the base of his fried rice. I thought I would take it a step further and make this a breakfast-centric dish, while also retaining the bacon grease to fry the rice.
I should mention that although I use the word “wok” in this recipe, we actually use a Calphalon 12″ Chicken Fryer which has a larger bottom and can fry more food at once.
No burger should go without fries. Unfortunately, making fries at home is a mildly infuriating process, because each cooking method has serious flaws. Frying them on a stovetop can produce excellent results but uses a lot of precious oil. Reducing the oil produces uneven results and dried out potatoes. Baking them in the oven generally results in either soggy or crispy-beyond-belief potatoes. I set out to find a better oven fries recipe to save on oil costs as well as the messy, tedious work of frying potatoes in batches. I found one through Cook’s Illustrated that works well, and with a few modifications, is also Paleo-friendly.
This recipe is unique in that you cover the fries with tinfoil for the first few minutes to steam them. Also, you add salt and pepper to the pan BEFORE adding the potatoes, which actually works to keep the fries from sticking to the pan as well as evenly coating them.
I spent some time in Prague last year and was introduced to česnečka (pronounced “chesnechka”), which is a simple garlic and potato soup.
I found that the soup tasted best with a mixture of my homemade beef stock, beef broth, and water. If you don’t have access to all three (my guess is you have easy access to one), improvise as needed.
Rice is a continuing source of debate in both the online world and my own. Sites like the Perfect Health Diet encourage rice as a “safe” starch, and other Paleo/Primal folks like Mark Sisson consider it okay provided everything else is going well in your diet. However, most Paleo dieters shun this gluten-free food due to its high glycemic index and label as a “grain”.
For the first couple weeks after starting the Paleo diet I was feeling great, with more energy than I had felt in years. And then I totally crashed, and was more tired than my usual constantly-tired state. I felt that it was probably because my body had run out of fat to burn (I was getting scarily skinny), and I just couldn’t eat enough fat to keep my body going, even after reintroducing dairy fats like butter and cream. So I reintroduced rice and potatoes in limited amounts, and felt great again. But then I felt guilty, that I wasn’t being “orthodox Paleo”, so I started to cut them out again. This time I tracked everything I ate through myfitnesspal.com (great food tracker, btw), and cut my total daily carbs down to about 40g a day, almost all of it from veggies and some fruit. My tiredness returned in full force. In comes rice again (100-150g of carbs/day, the Primal Blueprint maintenance range), and I feel great again.
I may experiment with my diet again in the future, but for now, I’m sticking with rice. I simply can’t eat enough fat in one day to keep me from shrinking to near-starvation levels on a carb-free diet. 100-150g of carbs from rice and potatoes seems to make me feel the best.
In celebration, here’s how I cook basmati rice on a stovetop (we have a nice Zojirushi rice maker, but basmati never comes out right).
Making gravy from scratch is one of my favorite things to do. I love the idea of taking a flavor that’s derived from the meat you’re cooking, adding some seasoning and making something that’s similar but complementary to the whole meal. I’ve been making gravies since my first cooking job as a teenager, and I’ll tell you right now – you’re going to make some truly awful gravies at some point (at least I did). Hopefully this little guide will help steer you in the right direction.
Gravy is simply the combination of two elements: flavor and thickener. Let’s start with flavor.
I’ve probably read about this somewhere, but the other day I decided to try and use cauliflower instead of rice, and I was surprised by the results: the texture was similar, and I couldn’t taste any cauliflower in the dish at all (and we used an entire head for about four servings).
The Domestic Man 