food

Liver and Caramelized Onions

Liver and onions. You really can’t say the former without saying the latter, at least here in the United States. Surprisingly, I had a hard time finding anyone that’d even try and tackle beef liver in many of my cookbooks. Instead, I had to scour the internet for something palatable. Your typical online liver and onions recipe calls for sautéing the liver for a few minutes on each side, and then throwing some onions on top to simmer until they’re cooked through. While that does effectively mix the onion flavor with the liver, it also can easily result in a gray, overcooked and dry liver.

US Wellness Meats recently sent me a package of their beef liver to make a recipe for their site; the liver comes from grass-fed, antibiotic-free, non-added hormone cows. As far as organs go, it was beautiful! I thought this was the perfect time to try a liver recipe I’ve been cooking up in my head for a while now. The process uses a combination of sautéed liver, caramelized onions, and crispy bacon to create a textured and slightly complicated taste from a dead simple ingredients list. I think it turned out pretty well.

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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.

Baked Sweet Potato with Cinnamon

This may fall under the no-brainer category, but I thought I would explain how we bake our sweet potatoes here at the house. It’s one of our simplest recipes, and the only thing it needs is about 45 minutes of cooking time to ensure you get that perfect potato. Additionally, we like to take five seconds out of our busy day and add a little cinnamon to our potatoes, which gives just a twinge of complexity to the taste.

Here’s a couple neat facts about sweet potatoes. Sweet potatoes originated in Central/South America. Papua New Guinea eats the most sweet potatoes per capita, with 500kg per person annually. North Carolina supplies most of the sweet potatoes we find in US markets. They’re only distant cousins to the white potato, despite sharing the same name. They’re also pretty distantly related to yams (which originated in Africa), even though here in the US we often (incorrectly) label our sweet potatoes as “yams”.

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Perfect Eye of Round Roast

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

Eye of round is a pretty intimidating piece of beef. It’s an extremely lean cut taken from the hindquarters of the cow, which gets a lot of exercise. To be honest, I usually just use the eye of round roast to make jerky (along with london broil, which is also from the same area of the cow) because making steaks and roasts with this part of the cow is usually always a gamble.

The other day I stumbled upon a recipe that seemed both crazy and intriguing; you roast the meat at a high temperature for a while, and then you turn off the oven and leave it in there for 2 1/2 hours. The end result is something like prime rib – a dark, crusty outside with a juicy, pink, tender inside. Honestly, it makes this fairly inexpensive cut of meat taste about 100x better than what you paid for. I may never cook an eye of round roast any other way for the rest of my life!

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Chicken Satay (Sate)

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

Satay is a dish that originated in Indonesia, and can be found in many Asian restaurants as an appetizer. It’s basically meat on a stick, so it has a universal appeal. Making an authentic satay dish is easy, provided you have access to the ingredients (galangal, turmeric, and lemongrass in particular).

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Peanut-Free Satay Sauce

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

Satay sauce is primarily a dipping sauce in the United States, but it takes on a different role in Southeast Asia, where it originated; in addition to being a dipping sauce, it is used as a general purpose condiment to provide depth to dishes, and is the pivotal ingredient in many dishes such as gado-gado in Indonesia. In Australia, it’s a flavor you can have added to kebabs (to delicious effect, I might add), and is used as a condiment in many parts of Europe as well.

Because peanuts are not Paleo-friendly, I replaced the peanuts with a combination of walnuts, almonds, and macadamia nuts. Surprisingly, you can’t really tell that there aren’t any peanuts in this sauce – it’s the combination of shrimp paste, garlic, coconut milk, and palm sugar that really give this sauce its signature taste. If you have no restrictions on peanuts, I made no other substitution so you can just throw them back into the mix.

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Beef Stroganoff

Note: an updated version of this recipe is here.

Beef stroganoff (бефстроганов) is a Russian dish that dates back to the 19th century. The dish became popular here in the US after World War II, when Russian immigrants and American soldiers returning from war brought it stateside.

Historically, the dish was served in a sauce made primarily of mustard and sour cream. Other variations include a little tomato paste for zing. Here in the US, it’s generally served with onion and mushrooms as well; it turns out that a little of everything is what tastes the best.

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Char Siu (Roasted Chinese BBQ Pork)

Char siu (蜜汁叉烧, literally “fork burn/roast”) is a famous Chinese roast pork dish. Not only is it served on its own, but it is commonly found in fried rice, noodle soups, and steamed buns (char siu bao/manapua).

Today this dish is often made with maltose, which is a malt sugar made from barley. Honey is a suitable substitute, and still used by many chefs as well. Also, many restaurants will use red dye to simulate that signature red roasted look – we’re going for the real deal in this recipe.

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Thai-Style Sticky Rice

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

If you’ve eaten at a Thai restaurant, you’ve probably had sticky rice. In many parts of Southeast Asia (Laos and Northern Thailand, for example) eating with your hands is still totally cool, and sticky rice is how they get the job done.

Sticky rice is also referred to as “glutinous rice” but that doesn’t mean it has gluten – it simply refers to its glue-like texture. It can also be labeled as sweet rice or mochi rice. It also comes in short or long grain varieties – the rice I used is short grain.

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New England Clam Chowder

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

Chowders get their name from the French word “chaudière” (kettle, pot), which in turn is derived from the Latin “caldāria” (cauldron). There’s quite a rivalry regarding the white, creamy New England Clam Chowder and the clear, tomato-based Manhattan Clam Chowder – in fact, a bill was introduced into the Maine legislature in 1939 attempting to make it illegal to add tomatoes to clam chowder.

Here’s another interesting fact – it wasn’t until the Second Vatican Council during the 1960s that Catholics were permitted to eat meat on Fridays (the abstinence period has been reduced to Lent now). To provide a seafood option to Catholics, restaurants across the country served clam chowder on Fridays, and the tradition remains today.

Creating a hearty, traditional wheat-free chowder is quite a challenge, since they are usually thickened with flour or soup crackers. Using starchy russet potatoes would naturally thicken the chowder, but also leave you with disintegrated potatoes. And then it struck me: I can cook the chowder using sturdier red potatoes, and thicken it with potato starch – leaving us with the best of both worlds.

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