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.
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.
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.
My son learned his first joke the other day while watching Yo Gabba Gabba. He’s being coached by my wife behind the camera, but it’s still funny nonetheless.
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).
NOTE: An updated version of this recipe appears in my cookbook, The Ancestral Table.
Animal fat gets a bad rap this days, mostly because we’re scared of those totally-dangerous saturated fats. The old fast food joints used to cook their fries in lard (rendered pork far) or tallow (rendered beef fat, also known as suet) until the low-fat craze of the 70s forced everyone to use vegetable shortening (and their lovely, cancer-causing trans fats). I’ve looked around for animal fats to use in cooking but all I’ve found is partially-hydrogenated lard, and I’ve come to learn that the hydrogenation process, while useful because it allows for the lard to be kept at room temperature, also has trans fats. While we’re still searching for pork fat to render lard, our local Whole Foods has been more than happy to set beef fat aside for us as they trim their cuts down for sale. Within a day they had 10 lbs of beef fat for us, which I rendered into tallow the other day.
There are two ways to render fat – “wet” or “dry”. Dry rendering is simply leaving fat pieces to cook on low in a stockpot or crockpot until the fat has liquified (leaving cracklings for later), but the fat can burn and leave a bad taste in the tallow. I decided to do a wet render (which basically involves boiling the fat pieces until the liquid fat has been extracted). I found the whole experience to be surprisingly easy.
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.
My son turns two next month, and I compiled some footage over the past few months to chronicle this fun time in his life. I hope that someday I can show it to his girlfriends and totally embarrass him. All video is taken with the same camera I use to take my pictures for this site, a Canon T1i with a 50mm lens.
My wife and I stumbled upon the documentary Fat Head last weekend, and enjoyed it. The filmmaker seeks to refute the claims made by its arch-enemy, Super Size Me, by eating fast food for an entire month (minus the full-sugar soda and fries) and ends up LOSING weight.
There’s a lot of discussion about the myth that fats are the cause of all of our health problems, and it also provides some pretty interesting facts. Handily, it’s also available for free on Hulu right here.
Trailer after the break.
The Domestic Man 