Food

USDA Guidelines, Parents Magazine, and You


image courtesy of Minnesota Agricultural Experiment Society

I usually find most conventional nutritional advice to be somewhat amusing, considering that a lot of it is driven by financial interest and not health. I’m not an expert by any stretch, but even with my limited knowledge I can see through most nutritional campaigns. What’s upsetting is that some of it can be potentially dangerous since most people don’t spend much time researching nutrition on their own and rely on easy-to-read columns and the like. I stumbled upon this article on Parents magazine entitled 10 Things You Need to Know About the New USDA Guidelines and found it so repulsive that I had to comment each of its assumptions.

Read Full Article

Beef Marrow Bone Stock

NOTE: An updated version of this recipe appears in my cookbook, The Ancestral Table.

Many stores or butcher shops have beef marrow bones on the cheap, which make a dense and highly nutritious stock and excellent soup base. Although I’ve made my own stock using oxtails I’ve been wanting to try my hand at other soups, so marrow bones seemed like the best starting spot.

Before we dive into this recipe, let’s have a quick culinary lesson. “Stock” refers to a liquid that’s made from simmering bones, and “broth” is made from meat. You can use both, and as far as I know that’s still referred to as “stock”. Now that we have that cleared up, let’s make some food.

Read Full Article

Chicken Livers


image courtesy of Nourishing our Children

While planning a yakitori night for sometime in the future I ran across this picture. Yikes!

Chicken Tikka Masala

One of the most common curries you’ll find in Indian restaurants here in the US is chicken tikka masala, a creamy, tomato-based sauce with slow-roasted chicken chunks. Being that it’s so popular, it’s easy to find pre-made sauces in most grocery stores; after putting several through their paces, I’ve settled on a quick, foolproof chicken tikka masala for an easy weeknight dinner.

One of the more interesting facts about this dish is that its place of origin is under dispute; there’s a good chance that it was invented in either India or England.

Read Full Article

When Gluten Free Goes Wrong: Pancakes

Those pancakes look great, right? Totally delicious, huh? Not really. Truth is, I know how to make a fine looking pancake (let’s chock that up to my brief stint at IHOP as a teenager), but these pancakes didn’t taste very good at all. I think it just goes to show that gluten-free substitutions don’t always pan out.

Despite my gross pancake experience, I thought that now would be a good time to give some pancake tips. You first want to concentrate on the batter, and my biggest suggestion is to not over-stir the mix. You want to make sure the batter is still a little bubbly, and let it sit for at least five minutes. Once you pour the batter onto a medium-heated and slightly greased pan, you want to flip it at the perfect moment: when the batter is bubbling and the edges are slightly dried. Once flipped, you only want to cook the other side for about 45 seconds.

Okay, let’s get down to business.

Read Full Article

When Gluten-Free Works: Pizza

If you think that gluten-free breads taste good, I would say that you haven’t tasted gluten-free bread. Seriously, for a guy that’s not a huge fan of bread in the first place, gluten-free varieties are never fun: they’re either dense beyond belief or have a strange consistency. For that very reason, I’ve been leery of all gluten-free substitutes. However, pizza deprivation can drive a man to do some crazy things, and lately I’ve tried my hand at gluten-free pizza.

I realize that there are Paleo pizza crusts out there that are made with ground nuts, but I don’t have the courage to try one of those yet. Maybe later. I’m also sure that there are plenty of homemade crust recipes on the internet but I figure for now I’ll leave it up to the experts.

First, a word on how to cook a proper pizza at home. I’m not a big fan of tomato chunks in my red sauce, so I will buy pre-made pizza sauce or I will blend a spaghetti sauce if I’m in a pinch. Sauce from scratch is always an option, but I like to consider pizza a quick meal so I don’t like to put too much work into it. Jarred sauce will generally taste better if you simmer it for 30 minutes to reduce acidity before applying it to the crust. We also like to use a pesto sauce; we brush melted butter on the crust and then spoon pesto sauce on.

Cheese placement is essential! You want to evenly spread grated cheese (picture above) or lay out slices of mozzarella (picture after the break). When the pizza is fully cooked, you will want to broil the top to bubble and brown the cheese. Let it rest for five minutes before slicing.

Read Full Article

Boiled Lobster

NOTE: An updated version of this recipe appears in my cookbook, The Ancestral Table.

As with most seafood, if you keep an eye on prices you can get lobster for surprisingly cheap. What’s more is that with lobster, bigger is not always better – the tastiest lobsters are right around the 1.5 lb weight. I tend to consider a max live lobster price to be $7/lb, which results in a $11 lobster cooked in the comfort of your own home.

Read Full Article

Double Down is a Triple No

I decided to look into KFC’s Grilled Double Down as a potential emergency meal. It sounds legit – bacon and cheese and sauce sandwiched between two grilled chicken breasts. I figured the sauce would have some banned ingredients (and it does – wheat, soy and corn), but I was disappointed to find that KFC’s grilled chicken contains all three of those Paleo-forbidden foods.

I decided to check out other “grilled chicken” options and this is what I found:

Burger King: modified corn starch, partially hydrogenated soybean oil
McDonalds: corn gluten, soy, wheat gluten proteins, partially hydrogenated cottonseed/soybean oils
Wendy’s: modified corn starch
Arby’s: corn flour, corn syrup solids
A&W: soybean oil
Chik-fil-A: soybean oil, palm kernel oil, soy lecithin
Chipotle: doesn’t say, although it mentions it contains soy
Hardee’s: soy, wheat, high fructose corn syrup
Jack in the Box: wheat, soy
Sonic: soy, wheat gluten
Taco Bell: modified corn starch, corn syrup solids, soy

So there you have it. Not one grilled chicken choice at any of these fast food restaurants is Paleo-friendly. I’m going to stick with Wendy’s Double Cheeseburgers when I’m in a crunch.

Chicken Alfredo with Rice Pasta

Making a white-sauce pasta dish from scratch is one of my favorite cooking activities. There are several variations to this meal – with or without pesto, egg yolks, wine, etc – but this is its most basic form, and a great starting point.

This recipe calls for rice pasta, but if you’re not Paleo(ish) like me, you can use regular pasta. I’ve found that although most people associate alfredo sauce with fettuccine, mixing up the pasta shapes can really add some variety to the dish as well.

Read Full Article

Let’s Talk Rice

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).

Read Full Article