Misc

Turning Your Kids into Real-Food Foodies

Earlier this week I wrote a guest post for my friends Matt and Stacy (aka Paleo Parents), here is the post for those of you that missed it:

Meet Oliver. He turned four years old last month, and has been eating the Perfect Health Diet version of Paleo (includes white rice and some dairy) since he before he was two. He loves Star Wars, Legos, and anything Disney. He has his ups and downs, but for the most part he’s a pretty adventurous eater, and I thought it would be fun to share what we’ve done to encourage healthy eating behaviors.

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Eating Gluten Free and/or Paleo at Disney World

A couple weeks ago our family spent a week in Orlando, visiting Disney World. It was great to get away from the freezing Maryland winter and spend some time in the Florida sun, enjoying one of our favorite places. We also got a chance to hang out with our friend Tony from Fitness in an Evolutionary Direction.

Being that this was our second trip to the resort in the past year, I made a conscious effort to track how we ate so that families heading down to the park can see how we managed. Overall, it’s a great place to visit if you’re concerned about diet, although you’ll have to actively avoid sugar, since it’s just about everywhere there! Alright, let’s get down to business.

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Nom Nom Paleo iPad App Giveaway!

Update: congratulations to Chris, Ethan, and Jamison, the three winners! The giveaway is now officially closed.

It’s probably no surprise that I’m a huge fan of Nom Nom Paleo. Michelle’s photos are always perfect and vibrant, and her recipes make it immediately apparent that not only does she know her way around a kitchen, she has a serious love of all things food. She’s a continuing source of inspiration for me in terms of presentation and healthful approaches to cooking. You might think it’s funny, but I only allow myself to visit her website every so often, mostly to make sure that my next recipe isn’t going to conflict with one of her recipes. And this is because I have serious blog envy; I’m afraid that if I go there too often, my cooking and website will mimic hers even more than it does already! I know, it’s ridiculous.

Her much-lauded iPad app received a serious update earlier this month, with a new pricing scheme – instead of in-app purchases for new recipes, you get the whole shebang for a one-time $6 price tag. I have put the app through its paces and I can say with conviction that it’s one of the best-designed apps I’ve seen, period. It has over 120 recipes, all of them both beautiful and delicious. I especially love her Walnut Prawns recipe, which made me realize that my own recipe for the dish is in serious need of updating!

To celebrate her new iPad app update, I’ve teamed up with Michelle to offer three download codes!

Here’s how to enter the giveaway (first one is required, second is optional):

1. Sign up for my newsletter (on the right sidebar of this page) and leave a comment on this post letting me know you did it.
2. “Like” The Domestic Man FB page and leave a comment on this post letting me know you did it.

If you do both options, I’ll give you two entries into the giveaway! You can tell me which options you did in one comment to save time. The giveaway ends at 10pm TONIGHT (January 27th, EST), and I will select three winners using a random number generator right afterwards. Good luck!

Fine print: the download codes expire on January 30th, 2013, so be sure to redeem it as soon as you get it!

2012: A Year in Review

As we’re all celebrating the New Year, I wanted to take a second and reflect on 2012. It’s been an eventful year for all of us. We survived Presidential elections in both the US and Russia, watched some breathtaking Olympic performances and the successful Mars rover landing, and even averted a Mayan apocalypse. And through it all this little site here kept chugging away. Back in October of 2011 I made myself a promise that I would post a new recipe at least once a week, and I’m proud to say that I’ve kept up my end of the bargain. I’ve made some dishes that I’m really happy with, and some others that I can’t wait to pull down from the website when I get a chance!

We’ve made quite a few friends over the year, and built some relationships we hope to keep for years to come. I’ve happily watched some of my favorite new recipe sites like Strictly Paleo…ish, Virginia is for Hunter-Gatherers, and Alex Boake’s Food Blog find audiences and grow stylistically. It’s also been great to watch some of the big names in the Paleo movement help refine the community, with the Perfect Health Diet book providing the best approach to ancestral eating that I’ve seen, and Nom Nom Paleo’s incredible iPad app raising the bar in terms of presentation and culinary masterwork.

On a personal note, 2012 has been quite a year for our family. Our son started pre-pre-school and is starting to make his way through that whole “reading” thing, and I finished a Masters in Healthcare Administration and was selected for a new job as a Health Care Administrator starting next year. And we survived another year on the East Coast! (We consider Hawaii to be home.)


a peek at 2013

So, thanks for visiting in 2012, and I hope I’ve provided a little inspiration for your kitchen. There’s plenty more to come.

– Russ

Perfect Health Diet (Signed Copy) Giveaway!

UPDATE: Congratulations to Heather M., who won the giveaway!

Today I’m taking a break from my regularly scheduled recipe to host another giveaway. I feel like Father Christmas – two giveaways in one month! Don’t worry though, I will still be posting a recipe this week (on Thursday). And it’s a doozy.

The new edition of Perfect Health Diet comes out today, and I’m proud to say that I’m teaming up with Paul and Shou-Ching Jaminet to host a giveaway: a signed copy of their new book! The Perfect Health Diet is the template I use to guide my own dietary habits, and it’s quite a coincidence that this book is coming out on the same week as my two-year anniversary of switching my own diet.

The Perfect Health Diet is a simple and thoughtful approach to eating, which could probably be summed up as 3/4 vegetables and safe starches, and 1/4 meats, with healthy fats and acids to taste. The diet avoids the same foods as a Paleo diet (cereal grains, legumes, added sugar, grain-derived oils) with the exception of white rice, which is considered a safe starch.

Here’s how to enter the giveaway (first one is required, second is optional):

1. Sign up for the Perfect Health Diet RSS feed and leave a comment on this post letting me know you did it. If you don’t use RSS feeds, you can “like” the PHD FB page or follow Paul on Twitter instead.
2. Sign up for my newsletter (on the right sidebar of this page) and leave a comment on this post letting me know you did it.

If you do both options, I’ll give you two entries into the giveaway! You can tell me which options you did in one comment to save time. The giveaway ends midnight Saturday, December 15th (EST), and I will select a winner using a random number generator on Sunday. Good luck!

Giveaway not restricted to US residents – international entrants are welcome!
Giveaway graphic by Alex Boake Illustration.

Easing into a Paleo Diet

A couple months ago I wrote a guest post talking about easy ways to incorporate healthy eating into your life, and I decided to revise it a bit and put it up here on the site for posterity’s sake.

It is no secret that I follow a mostly Paleo-minded way of eating and cooking (more specifically, a model based on the Perfect Health Diet). And while the Paleo diet is a lot of fun and a great template to eat from, it’s a pretty drastic change from your standard, everyday Western fare. Switching to a Paleo way of eating is a major adjustment, and one that many people aren’t willing to jump into headfirst. And I get that. So I wrote up a few steps that anyone can take that aren’t drastic, or terribly inconvenient, but are big steps towards eating better. Think of this as the first steps in easing into an ancestral diet at your own pace.

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The Domestic Man’s US Wellness Meats Giveaway!

Edit: the giveaway is now closed! Congratulations to Maia Low who is the big winner!

You may have seen my recent recipes featuring some delicious meats from US Wellness Meats (including my liver and caramelized onions and honey and citrus glazed ham recipes). You may also have been salivating from the awesome looking meat and dreamed of making some of your own. Luckily for you, I am teaming up with US Wellness Meats to make your dreams a reality: we’re giving away a $100 gift certificate to their site!

And while a free $100 worth of meat sounds great, I have an even better proposal. How about you treat this $100 as a “grass-fed buffer” – in other words, calculate what you pay for the mediocre (and possibly toxic) meat that you can find at your local supermarket, and then use the $100 certificate to offset the cost of buying this delicious, healthy grass-fed beef. For example, let’s say you regularly pay $4/lb for ground beef at your supermarket. US Wellness Meats’ awesome 75/25 ground beef currently costs $6.45/lb. This means that if you win the giveaway, you could buy THIRTY EIGHT POUNDS of grass-fed ground beef for the same price as the same amount of conventional ground beef, and have money to spare even after paying their reasonable $7.50 handling fee (shipping on their site is free)! Just an idea – you can spend the $100 how you’d like, but that’s what I would do!

Here’s how to enter the giveaway (first one is required, second is optional):

1. Subscribe to the US Wellness Meats newsletter and leave a comment on this post letting me know you did it.
2. “Like” The Domestic Man facebook page and leave a comment on this post letting me know you did it.

If you do both options, I’ll give you two entries into the giveaway! You can tell me that you did both options in one comment instead of two. The giveaway ends midnight Saturday, February 11th, and I will select a winner using a random number generator sometime thereafter. Good luck!

Fine print: Giveaway for US residents only – US Wellness Meats is not able to ship internationally because of customs issues.

Kalbi, Illustrated by Alex Boake

Yesterday I posted my own recipe for one of Alex Boake’s awesome illustrations. I was really happy with the results.

Additionally, I’ve got a little secret: in writing up one of her creations, I secretly coerced her into making an illustration of one of my recipes. She decided to take on my kalbi recipe, and her piece is probably the coolest thing on the entire internet right now. Head over to her blog to check out her post about my recipe.

Interview with EasyPaleo.com

Last month I was interviewed by Jennie at Easy Paleo. Today I realized that although I mentioned the interview on my facebook page, I never put a link up on my site. So here it is! I was fun to dig in a little bit beyond the scope of just writing recipes and the occasional rant.

The Paleo Diet: One Year Later


image courtesy of Warner Bros.

Note: this was written in January 2012. Check out my three-year recap post here.

Last month was the one-year anniversary of my switch to a modified Paleo diet (which = Paleo + white rice and some dairy). At the six-month mark I made this post with some lessons I’d learned; while many of these tips still ring true (although we haven’t had ice cream for some time now), I thought I’d add a few more.

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