I think cardamom is an under-utilized spice.  If you’re not familiar with cardamom, it has a slightly sweet, pungent flavor that can be used in savory meat dishes, curries, and baked goods.  You can also add some to your coffee grounds.  My mom makes a cardamom braid at Christmas so I always associate cardamom with a colder season.

I was thinking about how I might use cardamom more often and decided it was a good time to visit a website I had heard about called FoodPairing.  A group of Belgian Scientists created a food pairing database based on the chemical properties of foods.  It is a little hard to navigate but is fascinating once you figure out how it works.  Flavors are mapped out on sunburst charts.  You can look up what might pair well with a specific flavor or search for substitutions.  The sunburst chart for cardamom recommends, among other flavors, Gruyere, bitter orange peel, olive oil, and something called Muscat of Alexandria.

Here’s another recipe inspired by Everyday Grain Free Gourmet.  Their recipe uses berries but considering the season I decided to use apple and cardamom.  I know, my food paring isn’t very adventurous, and apple didn’t even make it on the FoodPairing chart.  But I assure you they do well together here.

Clockwise from left: Indian Deviled Eggs, French Deviled Eggs, Mexican Deviled Eggs, Traditional Deviled Eggs

Since I’ve started eating primal, my egg consumption has gone way up.  On days when I actually possess a little motivation before 9am, I might fry some with a few vegetables or some apple for breakfast.  More often I eat hard boiled eggs as snacks.  In my opinion, hard boiled eggs are nature’s perfect convenience food.  Already in their own little wrappers, you can take them in the car, on a picnic, or to the office for a 3pm snack.  As much as I love these little guys, they can begin to seem a little bland after a while.  I’ve noticed that it takes a week for a dozen hard boiled eggs to disappear from the fridge, but the same number of deviled eggs is gone in just a few days.

A few days ago I experimented with some new deviled egg recipes.  First I worked on perfecting the proportion of ingredients for my standard deviled egg recipe.  I also substituted apple cider vinegar for the white vinegar I used to use.  Then I worked on creating other recipes that incorporate complimentary flavors from different cuisines.  If you like to play around with different flavors, this is a fun, low-risk project that allows you to see how different herbs, spices and other ingredients work together.  The egg provides a neutral medium for the other flavors and you can use what you learn to create more complex dishes like soups, stews, salads, etc….  If something goes horribly wrong, its not like you’ve ruined your whole dinner.  Just grab some fresh eggs and start again!

Here are the 4 recipes I ended up liking best.  They are all very distinct and look beautiful when combined on a platter.   I can’t say which is my favorite because they are all good in their own ways.  Dave likes the Indian ones the best.  The kids seemed to prefer the traditional.  I went a little crazy tricking them out with garnishes and such but just so you know, if nobody is going to see them but my immediately family I don’t invest much time in making them pretty.  You can get the ‘messy hair’ look by using a fork on the yolk mixture and then carefully transferring it with a spoon so that the textured part remains on top.  You can also use a pastry bag and star tip for a more refined-looking egg.  Pushing the yolk mixture through a plastic bag with the corner cut out works pretty well, too.

Kohlrabi Casserole with Sausage and Fresh Thyme

This is my first year eating kohlrabi, thanks to my CSA farm share.  I wonder where this vegetable has been all my life!  It’s like it just appeared out of nowhere.  I have only just begun to explore the possibilities of kohlrabi but so far I am quite taken.  Fresh, the texture and water content (though not flavor) reminds me of jicama.  You can shred it, dip it, put it in a salad, whatever.  Cooked, however, it takes on a totally different quality.  It firms up like the center stem of a cauliflower and takes on a very mild flavor easily associated with a cruciferous vegetable.   Mostly I’ve been using it as one of my lunch time sautee vegetables.  I have also grilled slices of it with eggplant and topped them both with olive oil and fresh basil.

In this recipe the kohlrabi is cubed and cooked casserole style.  If you don’t eat dairy, look away now.  I can’t think of a good substitute for the cream.  I have made this several times and have mixed in other vegetables with the kohlrabi with good results.  Any sturdy vegetable would work well.  I have also mixed in raw chopped collard greens.  Another idea is to top the whole thing with cheese (such as parmesan) and finish it off in the broiler to get a nice browned top.

Primal Coconut Blueberry Muffin

I am always on the lookout for a primal baked good that still might taste good without adding honey, agave, or sweetener.  I’ve noticed that if you stop eating sugar for long enough, fruit starts to do a pretty good job at satisfying a desire for something sweet.  It being blueberry season and all I decided I’d try my hand at creating a coconut flour blueberry muffin that only uses the natural sweetness of fruit.  I’m always a little surprised when my baking experiments actually work.  Well, friends, these work!  Not only do they satisfy that baked-good craving that primal eaters may occasionally encounter, but they taste good, too.  This proves one of two things. Either I am better at this baking thing than I thought, or you can throw any old mess of coconut flour and fruit in to a muffin tin and if its been long enough since you’ve eaten sugar, it’ll taste pretty good. You be the judge!

Out of curiosity I conducted a nutritional breakdown over at Sparkrecipes. I discovered that these guys only have 98 calories each.  I had yet to meet a muffin under 140 calories. I suppose it is the lack of sugar and oil in these muffins, neither of which is missed, that brings the calorie count so low. In case you’re wondering, here’s the macro data per muffin:  fat 4.8 grams, carbohydrate 10.7 grams, protein 3.3 grams.

So, here we have it, a 100% primal grain-free, dairy-free, sugar-free coconut blueberry muffin.  Enjoy!

This post is participating in Fight Back Fridays at Food Renegade

Last weekend Dave and I took the kids to pick strawberries.  I love doing this type of thing with the kids because it reinforces the idea that eating plants is interesting and fun.  They will be four years old in September, so they are old enough to legitimately help pick… or at least not stop us from picking once they get tired.

Luckily for us, we live close to a lot of u-pick farms.  Last year we picked $50 worth of raspberries.  At first I thought we’d gone overboard but when I was still putting frozen raspberries in my smoothies in January, I was glad we’d picked so many.  So today we picked 20 pounds of strawberries.  We’ll gorge on them for a few days and then I’ll freeze the rest.

Primal Strawberry Banana Pie

Now on to the pie.  I’m going to be straight with you.  I don’t normally do things like whip up a new pie recipe on a Sunday morning for the family.  In fact, I don’t normally make pies at all.  Baking is not really my thing.   However, since starting to eat primal I have been experimenting more with baking.  About half the time I end up making something that, to put it gently, I would not feel comfortable sharing with someone outside my immediate family.  So, I was nearly overjoyed at the results of this experiment.  This pie was pretty darned good and after I told the kids that I wasn’t sure they could have any because normally this kind of pie is “for grownups only”, they really dug in!  As a bonus, you can serve this to non-primal folks, even ones you don’t know really well, and not look like a weirdo.

By the way, I highly recommend eating this pie for breakfast!

Strawberry Banana Pie