cooking

Best. Delivery. Ever.

I’m happy to say that I have a copy of The Ancestral Table sitting on my lap as I type this! While I was at work yesterday, I got an email from my publisher that the first copy – hot off the press – was en route. As you can imagine, it was the longest workday ever.

But this post isn’t (only) about gloating that I have an early copy of the book. Serendipitously, Amazon has also updated their webpage for my book to now include theor “Look Inside!” feature, which allows you to get a glimpse of a good chunk of the book (40 pages, to be exact). So check it out, if you’re inclined, to get an idea of what you’ll get when The Ancestral Table releases on February 11th.

It may sound funny, but writing, designing, and shooting The Ancestral Table was the easy part. Now I actually have to promote and sell the thing! That’s where you come in. If you’re excited about the book, please tell your friends about it! Tweeting, Instagramming, Facebooking, Pinteresting, texting, snail mailing, or simply shouting out my cookbook’s landing page link – https://thedomesticman.com/cookbook – would be really helpful. Heck, call your congressman while you’re at it. Politicians eat food, too. I even have a hashtag going (ridiculous, right?): #TheAncestralTable.

It would be beyond awesome if this little book went viral, and people started cooking more delicious, healthy meals around the world.

Thank you for your support and readership. I can’t wait for you to see the book.

Pumpkin and Chorizo Soup

I figure it’s safe to post a pumpkin recipe now. For a while there (all of October and November) I thought I was going to drown in pumpkin-flavored products. Is it just me, or are they becoming more and more prominent every year? Regardless, pumpkin soup is a hearty, warming way to enjoy the cold months of fall and winter, and I didn’t want to let spring hit me before sharing this recipe.

Like many foods we enjoy today, pumpkins are a product of the New World, and entered Europe in the 15th century. Most foods introduced during that time took a while to gain momentum in Europe – sometimes hundreds of years – but not the pumpkin. Because they resembled gourds and squashes common in the Old World, pumpkins were readily adopted and prized for their robust flavor and easy cultivation. It was quickly made into various soups, and mixed with honey and spices as early as the 17th century – a precursor to pumpkin pie.

For today’s recipe I wanted to keep pumpkin closer to its place of origin – North America – so I decided to focus on a Mexican soup commonly referred to as Sopa de Calabaza, often flavored with cumin and chorizo sausage. I really like the cyclical nature of this dish. Cumin was first cultivated in India and introduced to the Americas by the Portuguese and Spanish. Chorizo is the best of both worlds: Old World sausage flavored with paprika made by New World peppers, and later re-introduced to the Americas. So this dish is the product of the unique culinary marriage of these two continents and cultures.

While pre-roasting a whole pumpkin inevitably lends more depth of flavor, using canned pumpkin puree drastically cuts down on your cooking time and effectively turns this dish into a 30-minute meal. Read Full Article

The Ancestral Table Recipe List


Holy smokes, my cookbook will be out in one month! That is pretty crazy. I figure that some of you would like to see a little more about the book before committing to buy – I don’t blame you, I’d want the same thing – so here is a list of every recipe in the book, as well as some pretty pictures to look at.

Some longtime readers may notice recipes that I’ve already published here on the site; don’t worry – every dish in the book has been redeveloped from scratch, so every taste you encounter will be new!

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Three Years Paleo – Nine Lessons Learned and Tips for Sustained Eating


Cacao-Rubbed Steak

Yep, last month I quietly celebrated the three-year anniversary of switching my diet and regaining my health. It’s been a crazy ride, and I thought it was time to update you on some of my experiences over the years, and share some quick fundamentals that I’ve learned along the way.

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2013: Year in Review (and a look at 2014)

Before I forget, let me start off by saying thank you for your support and continued readership. In October of 2011, I made a decision to follow a strict posting schedule – one post a week at the least, two posts a week at the most – to make sure that I had enough recipes to keep this little website chugging along at a steady pace. I’m happy to say that I haven’t missed a week since, and The Domestic Man has grown to be something far beyond my expectations; to give you an idea, my average daily traffic is now far higher than the traffic for the entire month of October 2011. This is all thanks to you and your encouragement along the way.

To be honest, I had expected 2013 to be a relatively quiet year for me. I started secretly writing and shooting for my debut cookbook in late 2012, and my goal was to basically just keep the website afloat while I focused on writing the book. Turns out that everyone else had other plans! Let’s look through some of this year’s surprises.

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Smoked Center Cut Pork Chops

Today’s recipe is a combination of two recent events in our house. First, I recently bought a remote grill thermometer, and I was itching to try it out. The thermometer has has two probes: one that goes in the meat and one to gauge the overall grill temperature. It’s an easy way to keep an eye on both the grill temp and your food without having to open the grill lid. Plus, it has a wireless receiver so I can keep an eye on the temperatures from afar, perfect for some wintertime grilling.

Second, we recently came across a beautiful French Rack of Pork at our local market, which is a shoulder pork loin still attached to the ribs; basically, it’s a rack of center cut pork chops. As luck would have it, the rack was on sale; my guess is that it intimidated customers and the store was having a hard time selling it. Either way, we couldn’t turn down the price, so I dragged the big hunk of meat home and the rest is history.

I decided to smoke the rack on my gas grill, which would allow me to give it a flavorful crust without overcooking the tender meat inside. Just to be safe, I brined the pork overnight to keep it from drying out, which was also a good call. The end result was crisp on the outside, and ridiculously juicy and flavorful on the inside.

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Salt and Pepper Fried Duck Tongues

WAIT!! Don’t turn away just yet. If the idea of duck tongues is too much for you, know that you can make this exact recipe with shrimp instead and it’s equally tasty; in fact, this recipe is based on Salt and Pepper Shrimp (椒盐虾), a common Chinese dish that’s one of our favorites. I’ll probably do up the shrimp version of the recipe in the future.

Okay, now that I’ve coaxed you into staying, let’s talk about duck tongues. They’re very different from what you may be expecting from tongue – usually considered dense, muscled, and tough – and are instead tender and succulent. They carry an inherent richness which reminds me of escargot. They have a tender bone in the center of the tongue, that’s mostly cartilage; many people come to relish the slight crunch of eating the whole tongue, bone and all. They’re also very affordable considering their status as a delicacy: US Wellness Meats offers a pack of 50-60 tongues (which I used in making this recipe) for well under $10.

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Review (and a Giveaway): Nom Nom Paleo – Food for Humans

Update: Congratulations to Christopher S., who won the giveaway!

A while back, I made the decision that I wasn’t going write single book reviews, and instead write book review roundups (check out my Summer and Fall roundups). But then I had a look at Nom Nom Paleo: Food for Humans, which came out on Tuesday. Here’s the deal: it’s so good that writing anything other than a single book review doesn’t do this piece of art justice. Don’t even read this review, just go buy the book. Not convinced? Well, then keep reading.

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Cobb Salad with Green Goddess Dressing

To tell the truth, it’s not often that I get a hankering for a meal-sized salad. There’s a lot of chewing involved. But if I am going to sit down and enjoy a full salad, I prefer to eat something made with a wide variety of hearty ingredients. In that regard, Cobb Salad takes the cake: it’s basically lettuce and a bunch of solid, pleasurable mix-ins. No dainty ingredients like sprouts, no sir! Okay, sometimes Cobb recipes call for chives, but you get my point.

Both the salad and dressing used in today’s recipe come from California in the early 20th century. Bob Cobb, owner of the Brown Derby Restaurant in Hollywood during the 1930s, whipped up a quick salad for a friend with a toothache using leftovers found in his kitchen. He cut the ingredients up into small pieces so as not to exacerbate his friend’s condition. (Personally, I would have whipped up a pureed soup if my friend had a toothache.) Other stories contend that there was no toothache involved. Either way, the salad was such a hit that Cobb added it to his menu, and it took off from there. Green Goddess Dressing was made by a San Francisco chef in the 1920s, after a popular stage play of the same name. While the salad and dressing don’t traditionally go together (Cobb salad is usually served with red wine vinaigrette), I really like the pairing of the two. Plus, they each call for 1/2 an avocado, so in that sense, they fit together perfectly.

Special thanks to my friends at Pacific Merchants who donated the hand-carved acacia wood salad bowl for the picture you see above. Their 12″ bowl is both beautiful and sturdy; it’s a perfect size for a whopping salad like this one.

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I’m in People Magazine!

Just wanted to share some cool news: my Honey and Citrus Glazed Ham recipe is featured in this year’s People Magazine Holiday Entertaining issue! Definitely one of the highlights of my cooking/blogging career so far.

If you get a chance to grab a copy, let me know what you think. I pared down the recipe slightly to appeal to a broader audience, but it still definitely carries my personal touch to it. It’s awesome to see a Paleo recipe in such a widely-circulated magazine! And I must admit, it’s pretty surreal to be able to go into any supermarket right now and grab a picture of yours truly.

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