No recipe, no problem

Preparation is key in sticking to a nutrient-dense whole food diet (or paleo, primal, whatever term you prefer). There’s no drive-through for leafy green vegetables and liver meatballs, and your dine-out options can be pretty limited too. This is why I like to cook and prep as much as possible in advance.

But a night without a plan is no reason for panic or an excuse to dial the pizza guy. And every dish does not need a name and an exact recipe. Believe me, it’s taken me a while to understand this!

The other night I got home with no dinner plan and no recipe in mind. In the fridge was a package of ground beef, a half a head of green cabbage and some other vegetables. Chop, cook, add some some spices - that's dinner in less than half an hour! 

Five-spice beef and cabbage bowl

1 tbsp coconut oil

1 onion

1 tsp garlic

1 lb ground (grass-fed) beef

1-2 carrots, sliced

1/2 green cabbage, shredded

Chinese five-spice

Bone broth

Salt & pepper

Heat the oil in a pan, cook garlic and onion for a few minutes. Add beef to the pan and brown, flavor with the five-spice.  Add the carrot slices and cabbage with a little bit of broth. Cook covered for 5-10 minutes until vegetables are soft. Eat and enjoy!

Adventures in Fermentation - Part II where the scoby gets a new home

My baby is all grown up! 

Of course I’m talking about my baby scoby that had been growing in its little jar on my kitchen counter for the last four weeks.

I expected the scoby to be a flimsy, slimy blob that would slip though my fingers, but it turned out to be a surprisingly hardy pancake-like disk, about as thick as my finger.

This step involves adding the scoby to the tea that it will be fermenting.

What you needs is 

1. A gallon-sized glass jar
2. Water
3. 8 bags of tea
4. 1 cup of sugar. Yes, this seems like a lot if you don’t typically use added sweeteners. But the scoby needs to eat to do its fermentation magic! There won’t be much sugar left in the finished drink.
5. Scoby and the liquid it has been growing in
6. A dish towel and a rubber band

Again, I followed the directions here. I like that website because their FAQs seem to have an answer to all the questions I didn’t even know to ask.

You boil a gallon of water to make the tea, add the sugar and then let it cool to room temperature. I brewed the tea in the morning and it was cool by the time I got home from work. 

Then you remove the scoby from its little home an plop it into the big jar and along with some of its liquid. 

Cover the big jar with a dish towel and find a place for it where it won’t be bothered for the next week or so. And then you wait again!

Asparagus soup (parsakeitto)

"During the asparagus season, members are requested not to relieve themselves in the hat stand.”

                     - sign at a British men's club

Image courtesy of Paul / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

The spring is almost over, but I still see asparagus in the stores so it’s not too late to make some asparagus soup!

This is something I miss from home, so I adapted an old Finnish recipe to be dairy free and use bone broth. 

Ingredients:

• One bunch of asparagus (about a pound)
• 2 cups of bone broth
• 2 shallots, chopped
• 1 clove of garlic, crushed
• 2 tbsp butter
• 1 cup full fat coconut milk
• 2 tsp lemon juice
• Salt & pepper

Directions

1. Remove the tough ends of asparagus, cut off the tips for later use and cut up the spears. 
2. In a large pot, heat up the butter and cook the shallots for a few minutes. 
3. Add the asparagus and broth, bring to a boil and cook for 10 minutes. 
4. If you want to be fancy, save some of the feathery tips of asparagus for garnish later.
5. Remove the soup from heat and puree with an immersion blender or food processor.
6. Add the coconut milk, salt & pepper and lemon juice. 
7. Heat and enjoy!

Adventures in Fermentation

You know fermented foods are good for you, right? Well yes, yes they are. And if you don’t want to take my word for it, you can go Google it. 

I’ve been trying to add more fermented and probiotic foods into my diet for a while, but so far I haven’t had the courage to make my own. Recently a good friend convinced me that it would be really easy to make my own kombucha, or fermented tea. This sounded good to me not just because of the health benefits, but also because quite honestly I’m a little tired of just drinking water all the time. Or wine, but that is frowned upon at the office. 

The first step in kombucha brewing is to get your hands on a kombucha SCOBY. It is also called a starter culture or kombucha mother, but I like the word scoby because it reminds me of Scooby Doo. (I’m afraid I have some sort of non-native-speaker word association condition…..I should have it looked at.) 

Anyway, there are a few ways to obtain a scoby. In short, you can buy, borrow or grow one, and I decided to try to grow my own. Even after I read about how that method does not work. I feel like this is a win-win situation. If the scoby grows, then it’s obviously a success. And if it doesn’t, I get to say “I told me so!” 

For growing the scoby, I followed the instructions here. It’s so easy! Basically all you need is a bottle of kombucha from the store, a quart-sized glass jar, some tea and sugar (optional), a paper towel and an elastic band. That’s it! 

I now have this suspicious-looking jar in my kitchen, hiding behind the food processor.

Undercover Scoby

After a couple of weeks it’s looking very promising

Baby scoby, 2 weeks old.

More to come soon.

What's cookin'?

I like spending time in the kitchen on the weekends. Especially when it means I don’t have to spend time in the kitchen during the week!

This is what a typical cooking day looks like.

Frittata. An eight-egg frittata will give me breakfast for four  days. A nice thing about this dish is that you can bury of a lot of leftover veggies and meat in it! 

It's so easy: Cook a bunch of vegetables in a couple of tablespoons of bacon fat or coconut oil in a cast iron pan. Throw in some chorizo, sausage or bacon...or not. While the veggies cook, mix eight eggs in a big bowl with some salt & pepper, maybe some turmeric and paprika.  Then pour the egg mixture over the veggies and cook at 350F about 15 minutes.  Once the frittata has cooled down, I cut it into quarters and store away in individual containers that I can grab and heat up in the morning in about 60 seconds. And while it’s microwaving in the morning, I cut up some avocado to put on top!

For an actual recipe, I like this one from PaleOMG http://paleomg.com/brussels-sprouts-and-spinach-truffle-frittata/

Soup. I like to eat soup because it’s easy to make a LOT of it. And because Santa brought me the prettiest purple immersion blender and I'll take any excuse to take it out.

Two of my favorite soups lately are this Golden cauliflower soup from Well Fed 2: 

And any one of these slow cooker butternut squash soups. 

Some kind of meat in the crockpot. I like to have a couple of pounds of beef or pork ready for any meal.

These are some of my go-to's:

Beyond Easy Pulled Pork from Everyday Paleo

Beef brisket with coffee/cumin/cocoa rub from the Paleo Drummer

Kalua pig from Nom Nom Paleo