My go-to lunch is a chunk of meat cooked up with some vegetables on the stove. At the moment, however, we are deep into summer and I really haven’t been feeling like pushing food around over a hot stove at noon. Furthermore, It is not always convenient to be home at lunch time.  If you’ve been eating primal for any length of time I am sure you have come to know the elusive nature of the on-the-go lunch in a life without grains.  Sometimes a sandwich would be really handy, and I don’t mean one where a big saggy piece of lettuce is the ‘bread’ because that’s just depressing.

I came to learn of the green eggs and ham sandwich from Krista Schaus’s blog.  Krista is an amazing individual.  In addition to being an ex-police officer, she is BOTH a competitive bodybuilder and powerlifter from Toronto. (By the way, anyone else notice there seems to be a disproportionate number of people from Toronto with strength training websites and blogs?  Why is that?).   She is owner of Defining Edge Fitness which offers an intriguing service called Biosignature Assessment.  Apparently they can analyze your hormone levels and make individualized training and nutrition recommendations based on the results. Anyway, Krista’s recipe calls for oats.  I substituted shredded coconut as a thickener and then threw in ¼ cup of raw almonds for good measure.  The result is a substantial bread-like patty that holds together really well.

You can easily whip up a batch of these in the morning or on the weekend.  This recipe will make 6 pancakes – enough for 3 sandwiches.  My kids will actually eat these hot of the skillet as if they were ‘regular’ pancakes if I put some maple syrup on them!  You can also make a big batch and keep these in a plastic baggie in the fridge.  Use them for sandwiches, hamburgers, or even just as a convenient snack.  I haven’t tried this yet but I think they’d be fabulous with just a little almond butter spread on top.

My turkey and brie sandwich.

Primal Cheddar Jalepeno Biscuit Rounds: very cheesy, a little spicy, and not too eggy.

It may be cooling off a little but barbeque season isn’t quite over yet.  I recently made a huge rack of ribs with a tangy rum-mango sauce (I’ll post the recipe later this week) that would have been just fine with some grilled vegetables.  But having recently purchased Everyday Grain-Free Gourmet: Breakfast Lunch and Dinner by Jodi Bager and Jenny Lass, I decided to try my hand at some primal biscuits as an accompaniment (in addition to the vegetables, of course).  The book has recipes for plain and cheddar cheese biscuits as well as a berry morning popovers recipe (which I have also made and loved) that relies on the same base ingredients.  I still have a way to go before I’ve fully explored the diverse range of recipes in this book but so far I highly recommend this and their first book, Grain Free Gourmet for some great ideas on easy-to-prepare, grain–free, refined-sugar-free and lactose-free recipes.  Although written for the Specific Carbohydrate Diet, primals will find plenty of useful recipes in both books, especially if you include some dairy in your diet like I do.  Other recipes in these books that I can’t wait to try are: Crepes with Brie and Caramelized Apple, Cannelloni, Soufflé Bread, Gourmet Pizza, Tiramisu, and Apple Galette.  Here is my twist on the Cheddar Biscuits.

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.

Garlicky Summer Squash Fritters

As some of you may be aware, Mark Sisson is running a Primal Blueprint Health Challenge throughout the entire month of August.   Every day he is posting a new primal-related contest on his blog.   Some contests simply require that you post a comment.  Others are a bit more involved.  Recently he posted a contest for the ‘best’ primal recipe video.  I’ve been busier than planned this month with a variety of projects and haven’t been entering most of the daily contests, but this one caught my attention.    It’s been fun coming up with new primal recipes over the past several months so I figured this would be a good way for me to get more involved in the Primal Challenge.

Digging around in the fridge for inspiration, I noticed that my supply of summer squash was getting out of hand.  I still hadn’t finished up last week’s share from my CSA box and received another big share that morning.  It was going to be hard for just Dave and I to eat all of these (in addition to the massive amounts of other vegetables from the CSA that we fervently work through each week) without the help of the children.  I decided to appeal to their love for shredded foods and make summer squash fritters.

The first step was to whip up an experimental batch to get the ingredient proportions ironed down.  I substituted almond flour for the usual wheat flour and played around with some additional flavors.  In the end I was very pleased and the girls wolfed them down!  They are pretty garlicky, though, so keep that in mind if you’re not so fond of that flavor.

Once Dave arrived home we put together a video of me making another batch.   I always feel a little awkward watching myself on video, but what the heck, we can’t all be Rachel Ray.  If you watch the video, you’ll notice there are lots of kid and dog sounds in the background – no avoiding that around here. At some point I’ll figure out how to enter it in Mark’s primal recipe video contest.  The prize? I checked on that this morning and found that the winner gets a food dehydrator, a pair of Vibrams, a t-shirt, The Primal Blueprint book, and a supply of Mark’s supplements.  The whole time I thought the prize was some cooking oil!

Here’s the video.  Recipe follows.

This post is participating in Fight Back Fridays at Food Renegade