Helpful Real Food Cooking Tips

In the past few months I have been reading more and more cookbooks and books about food in general. Some of these books have been duds (The Taste Thesaurus? Blah) but others have been gems. You might be wondering if I have become obsessed with food and you might be onto something. I do like food, A LOT, but cooking? Not so much. Being on the GAPS diet, also known as the "no processed anything diet" requires me to spend a lot of time cooking. You might think that having been on this diet for 16 months! now I would have acquired a love of cooking given the many hours each day I spend in the kitchen but you would be sadly wrong. If nothing else I probably dislike it more. In my quest to make cooking less painful I have stumbled upon a few very fabulous tips that help me spend less time in the kitchen and help me save money to boot.

The first tip comes from a cookbook that I haven't even read yet and probably won't unless the price goes down:

The author of Well Fed offers a thirty-page teaser preview on her website which was so awesome that I was almost willing to pay $30 for the cookbook; almost. What is magical about this cookbook besides its delicious recipes which include, amongst others, chocolate chili? Melissa Joulwan comes from a family of restauranteurs which means she knows how to cook food FAST. Once a week Joulwan does the majority of her food prep for the week, usually within a day of her shopping trip. In two hours she browns ground beef, cooks chicken breasts and sausages,  roasts sweet potatoes and spaghetti squash, steams broccoli and cabbage, chops up raw veggies for snacks, boils a dozen eggs and much more.

As I read this idea it astounded me. In years past I had subscribed to a menu mailer that advocated such weekly prep as this but it didn't really work for me because I didn't like all the recipes included in each weeks mailers. Joulwan, however, doesn't worry about such things as "recipes". She only makes 2-3 real recipes every week. The rest of the time she makes what she calls "hot plates." Basically, she takes what prepared items she has an assembles them into a meal. She decides what flavor she wants (Mexican, Indian, Asian etc.) and then what protein and throws it all together into a skillet and voila! Dinner. The example she gave for a Mexican dinner was to throw together in a skillet a pound of the precooked ground beef, steamed chopped peppers and cabbage and while that was warming up make some "South Western Cumin Lime Dressing" and she had dinner ready in less than ten minutes. This way you get lots of variety and you aren't stuck with the Chicken curry you had planned to make when what you really crave is Mexican.

I have done this a few times and it has worked famously. I wish I was better at doing it but as with every new skill learned, it takes time to change habits and fit something new into the routine. The chopping and steaming vegetables has been genius. I wash and cut up lettuce as soon as I get it so that I can make an easy salad, grate and steam cauliflower rice, and slice a head of cabbage for "noodles." It is so easy just to steam the already wet from washing sliced vegetables until just soft and put in a container in the fridge until I need it. I also like to make up the week's salad dressing so I have no excuse not to eat my greens.

As for working on those flavor combinations to mix together those hot plates? The Flavor Bible is essential! I cannot say enough about how great this book is. The way it is organized is so perfectly aligned with how my brains works. The only thing that I didn't like about this book is its omission of Sherry for cooking.

An Everlasting Meal: Cooking With Economy and Grace had such a lovely little gem of a not-quite-cookbook title that I bought it, not even waiting for it to come to the library. I don't exactly regret my purchase but I since I am not eating grains currently, her grain heavy and Italian influenced cooking tips really did not quite hit home with me. She also has a mysterious "thing" with beets which I cannot comprehend. It wasn't that this was a useless books, on the contrary, her tips for stretching your culinary budget are sound and tasty, but Adler definitely needed to endear herself to me with her unflinching praise of fat to keep me reading until the end. The most useful tip that I found in her book was to use EVERY part of the vegetable. The core and leaves of that head of cauliflower? Edible. Yup. Not every part of plant is edible (carrot tops?) but when you are paying for those throwaway bits it is nice to be able to put them to use. I now use the extra leaves and cores of cabbage and cauliflower to make blended French-style potage soups.

Another trick that Adler taught is to use the cooking liquid from cooking vegetables as a base for soups. Yes! Duh, I don't know why it took me this long to figure that one out. For a while now I have always saved the drippings from roasts to use for soups and they really amp up the flavor; using the veggie "drippings" is much same. 

My favorite kitchen tip I have actually been doing for years: boil the bones but what I didn't know is that you can boil the snot, erm nutrients, right out of them for a week before throwing them out. Perpetual Broth has become my new best friend and the very best way to stretch that expensive pastured chicken carcass. It is so nice in the winter to be able to have broth for soup available for meals throughout the week and even with a 1/4 tsp. sea salt, a cup of broth is both nourishing, soothing and delicious after a long day. I very highly recommend doing this.

Those are my tips for now. Any that you are willing to share with me?

When It's Time to Change...

Have you ever read something on the internet and thought "Wow. It would have been really nice to have known that a year ago?" Well the last few weeks have been that, over and over again for me. I am still on the GAPS diet, plugging away but I have been making some BIG changes. After 12 months on the GAPS diet I figured that I would be feeling pretty great and that I would be well on my way to recovery. The problem was, however, that I felt terrible. I felt worse. How was this even possible with all the work that I had been doing. So I kept plugging along at it, never understanding why my symptoms never got better and others appeared in their place.

The candida infection never left. It would get worse and then get better but it never totally went away, no matter how low carb I went. I felt tired all the time; depression would creep in at every little disturbance especially foster parenting stress would put me into a tailspin; my appetite disappeared both for food and sex; I got terrible PMS symptoms of incredibly tender breasts, acne and spotting a week before my period; my cycles were irregular;  and I started to put on a lot of weight even though I wasn't eating any more calories. What was going on?

I have been following the Cheeseslave blog for a few years and while I don't always agree with her, I think that I was absolutely meant to read the posts she has been writing recently about what being low carb did to her and it was like reading my own story. I had NO idea that being low carb for too long could be dangerous. Everything I had read, like on Mark's Daily Apple, said that if you stayed between 100-150 carb grams per day, you were golden for life! I was afraid of adding too many carbs for fear of my candida beast and the possible effect on my insulin resistance. It was just easier to restrict my carbs since I had been doing it for so long so I usually stayed somewhere between 50-100 net carbs a day.

Now it is like EVERYBODY, even Paleo/Primal bloggers are coming out with these studies about how being low carb for too long with stress your adrenals. Matt Stone was writing about this long ago but his style can be so abrasive that I generally ignored him. Now, however, I am paying more attention and what he has been saying has been backed up so many times that I think I can say that he knows what he is talking about. 

So now what is my game plan 15 months into the GAPS diet and feeling no better than when I started? Well, number one, I started eating more carbohydrates and more often. To repair adrenals it is best to eat 3 meals and 3 snacks a day, but it is really hard for me to do that on GAPS without spending my life in the kitchen. To boost my carbohydrate intake, in the last two weeks I have added some GAPS legal legumes (split peas and lentils) and I have also been eating more fruit and honey. While the extra carbs do aggravate the candida, it wasn't going away anyway and it doesn't seem to be getting worse so I will press on. I am supplementing with Adrenal Stress End which is a blend of adrenal cortex and some herbs that was recommended by another GAPS blogger in a similar situation. I do not like that it containes Betaine however since it gives me heartburn. I am also supplementing with Magnesium oil, Magnesium Citrate, B-Complex, Vitamin C and Zinc Piccolinate, all of which are supposed to support the adrenals. In addition I started to brew my own Rooibos Kombucha which helps with detoxification and should help with the candida.

Matt Stone recommends overfeeding and a lot of R&R to repair stressed adrenals, but unfortunately for me as a mom and especially as a foster parent I just don't have that luxury. I have been going to bed earlier; a bedtime between 9-10 pm is recommended as well as naps throughout the day (again, that really wouldn't work for me). Stress reduction is a HUGE but the only way I would see that happening is if our foster baby went home, which would make me sad.

So that is what I am doing and where I am at. So far I am feeling better and I am no longer constipated which is what always happens whenever I get stressed. I have been waking up less groggy and without arthritic-like pain in my joints. Those are good signs so far and I am hoping for even greater improvements in the next few weeks.

M-E-A-T

I am reading this book right now and totally fascinated by the art of preparing good meat. "Art?" you say? Yes! When you get really high quality meat from animals that live their lives as they naturally should on pasture the meat is fundamentally different than the stuff you buy in the grocery store. Not only are the animals raised differently but their meat goes through a very different process of cutting, hanging, aging and packaging than you get with meat from your local chain store.

This year I purchased half a hog and a half a steer (which steer I then divided with a friend) from Meadow Run Farm. Last year we bought our quarter from a different farmer and the meat was fine but we didn't feel like we got a good deal. Enter: Offal. Offal is just about everything edible other than the "meat" you are used to buying. By requesting the offal and choosing to eat it we save money because we pay by the hanging weight (weight of the hanging animal before cutting). Also, it seems far more respectful to the animal and less wasteful if we make use of as much of its body as possible.

I wasn't prepared by just how much extra stuff I would be getting. Not only did I get the organs, tongues, tails etc. of the pig and steer but I also got the fat for rendering into lard and tallow and the bones for stock. Learning to prepare organ meats can be challenging but that is why I am reading the above mentioned cookbook.

Now for the nitty gritty details: Our side of pork had a hanging weight of 100 lbs. and cost $325. Of actual cuts we received 15 lbs. of ground pork, tongue, liver, heart, kidneys, about 20 lbs. of fat, lots of bones, 1 tenderloin, 12 lbs. of pork chops, 1 rack of baby back ribs, 4 shoulder roasts, 1 shank roast, 10 lbs of pork belly (bacon), 3 ham roasts, 3 ham steaks and 2 packages of spare ribs. The roasts are all between 3-4 lbs. each.

Our quarter of beef, after being divided with our friend had a hanging weight of 115 lbs. and cost $392. Out of that we got 24 lbs of ground beef, 9 lbs of hamburger patties, 3 chip steaks, 3 lbs. short ribs, 2 flat iron steaks, 1 petite tender, 8 soup bones, 2 chuck roasts, 1 sirloin tip roast, 7 New York Strip Steaks, 4 Filet Mignon steaks, 8 Delmonico steaks, 4 mock tender steaks, 1 Tri Tip roast, 2 sirloin steaks, 2 London Broil, 1 brisket, 2 eye roasts and 1 skirt steak plus probably 30 lbs. of bones and fat. We haven't yet received our offal and ox tail but we will be getting it next week.

Fun stuff! This should last us until next summer but anticipate that we may need to buy more ground beef. It truly is a pleasure buying directly from the farmer and having so much choice in what we get for our dollar. I highly recommend going onto to Local Harvest and searching for farmers in your area. Being able to know where the majority of the food we consume comes from is such a blessing. Even with the high price tag, the assurance that what I am feeding my family is of the highest quality keeps me coming back for more.

Is It Supposed to Feel Like This? Month 6

I feel really great! Well, most days are good and that is a serious improvement! This last month has been tricky trying to adjust to being on GAPS/SCD instead of Bee's diet. I went a bit crazy at first jumping into all the things that I hadn't been allowed before like yogurt, cheese, berries, honey and nuts. Too much, too fast. Now I have slowed down and am working on phase 3/4 of the GAPS Introduction Diet. I keep getting stalled on the dairy and nut flours but I have found that I can tolerate soured raw cream very well and the introduction pancakes. The key is going slowly, adding a little bit more every 2-3 days and paying attention to what my body is telling me.  Healing the gut takes a lot of time and energy on the part of the body and I have to keep reminding myself of that when I get impatient to add another food that I miss.

Adding fermented veggies to every meal makes a HUGE difference and I love them.. I am loving daikon pickles and kimchi especially. As far as fruit goes I am only eating cooked berries at this point because they are easier to digest and don't seem to give me any negative reactions. The only thing I will never add to my version of the GAPS diet is the juicing (because of the candida) and the probiotic BIO-KULT (because it is expensive).

I continue to do weekly enemas which are very helpful along with dry skin brushing. What it comes down to is that I feel really great. I am getting so much done! Every day I am so grateful and full of awe when I think "Oh! So this is how everyone else can do so much!" I feel like every minute of my day is filled to the brim and I am happy. I am no longer looking for excuses not to do things because I feel so tired and achy. Every day is different, and I still get bad days, but they are getting fewer and farther between. Food heals!

Making Some Changes

My last post about my 5 months on the diet was dire. I was feeling awful and wanted to give up. It turned out that my gallbladder was about to pass a bunch of gallstones, so I know why I was feeling so bad. While it was really uncomfortable and even painful at times, it was such a relief to know that my gallbladder was just detoxing. When things got really tough I did some coffee enemas and they made a big difference. I also only wanted to eat hard boiled eggs and drink bone broth, so I went with that. I am a big believer in following the body's cravings, except when it relates to sugar and high carbohydrate foods (then the body is saying it needs instant energy and there are better ways to feed it).

While I was going through that ordeal I decided that I needed to move in a different direction and have been drawn to the GAPS/SCD diets which are similar but much less strict. As far as GAPS goes, I find its system, especially its intro diet incredibly confusing, plus they advocate a very expensive probiotic that I doubt the efficacy of. On the other hand, I found that with the Specific Carbohydrate Diet probiotics are not necessary but probiotic foods are highly encouraged and that is more the direction that I want to go. On a SCD website I found an introduction diet specifically for sufferers of candida and I believe that is how I want to go, though I won't follow this exactly because I do not want to include juices or anti-fungals. It is in three stages and it is simple for me to follow. I am going to work on increasing my intake of fermented vegetables and also probably start culturing yogurt soon, making sure that I get a serving of fermented foods with every meal.

Here are the changes:

• Adding 1 oz. hard cheese a week ETA: It appears that I cannot tolerate cheese yet 3/23
• Adding 1 cup. cooked berries every other day
• Slowly add in small amounts of plain 24-hour fermented yogurt every day starting with one spoonful
• Decrease coconut oil to no more than 2 tbsp/day to help with the detox symptoms
• Occasional almond flour or almond butter
• Maybe some lentils?
• Maybe some raw honey? ETA: Honey is a no-no 3/24

I will continue with a modified Bee's diet with these small additions until my symptoms improve enough to move on. I may need to remove aspects of these changes depending on my reactions to them and it is a good idea not to eat ALL the news foods at the same time. Ideally they should be spread out 3-5 days or as much as a week. SLOW introduction is key to knowing what I should and should not eat. I also want to limit the amount of supplements I am taking. Wish me luck!

Primal TV Dinner

3 hard boiled eggs, sauteed Brussels Sprouts with Garlic, supplements and Electrolyte drink. Top Brussels Sprouts with vast quantities of melted Kerrygold butter and devour while watching a BBC period drama.

Not a whole lot o'bloggin' goin' on...

December went by in a mad frenzy. Still struggling with my diet (I have a hard time getting enough calories) I somehow made it through to complete all my projects and even made cookies for the neighbors, which I had sworn I would NOT do because who, in their right mind, makes delicious Christmas cookies when they can't eat a single one? Oh, it was painful but I was pleased when after all the baking was over I had somehow conquered the urge. Who knew that I was THAT stubborn to be able to resist such delicious temptation?

Christmas in Virginia turned out to be nothing like I expected due to both weather and illness but it was nice to be with family. Ravenna had a fabulous time being with her aunt Rachelle and uncle Josh and has perfected being a "monster." Now I find myself with the itch. Whenever I get something new I survey all that I have and find that I have too much! I am seriously considering having a garage sale in January just for the delicious feeling of getting rid of "stuff."

I have some really fabulous primal recipes to share too. This Cauliflower and Ginger Soup is shockingly easy and fabulously delicious. You won't be able to eat just one serving! I made this on Christmas Eve but I will be making it again ASAP in my lovely new Enameled Cast Iron Dutch Oven!

How was everyone's Christmas? Any fabulous new recipes?

What on Earth do you EAT?!

Yes I am still on my diet and I survived Thanksgiving! I even made a primal pumpkin pie which tasted a lot like curry but was still delicious. Whenever someone I haven't talked to for a while hears about my diet the question of what I can eat invariably comes up. Basically I eat the same thing most people do, just modified. For example, instead of eating a starch at dinner I will eat a double portion of veggies. My husband and daughter might have a starch or fruit as a side with their meal, but for me meals must solely consist of protein, lots of fat and a vegetable. So here is an example of what I eat in a week:

Breakfast is almost always eggs so I don't really need to go into that too much. Lately I have been enjoying them sunny side up with a sliced avocado but I have also been known to eat them scrambled, hard boiled, poached, you name it. Lunch is usually leftovers so let's get right into dinners shall we?

Sunday: Polish sausages, sweet and sour red cabbage
Monday: Guacamole Beef over cauliflower rice
Tuesday: Spaghetti squash with marinara (Boves makes a great low-carb sauce) and meatballs, nutritional yeast, steamed broccoli
Wednesday: Roasted chicken with fennel and green salad
Thursday: Swiss chard and tomato frittata, green salad
Friday: Buchons au thon (modified to be primal w/nutritional yeast and 1 extra egg), buttered sauteed green beans
Saturday: Primal chicken "noodle" soup with cabbage noodles and primal crackers

Some of the things that are really helping me on my diet right now are Pau d'arco tea, which helps with die off and is also an anti fungal and stevia sweetened coconut macaroons which make a great snack. While I can't say that I am that creative in the kitchen I am always finding new recipes to try out. For example this coconut macadamia bark is calling my name and if you happen to know of a good chicken liver pate recipe that doesn't include booze or dairy please pass it on!