Primal Pumpkin Pie

I have mixed feelings about eating primal on Thanksgiving.  On the one hand, so many delicious foods can be prepared in a primal way that there is truly no need to feel deprived.  After all, the turkey and the vegetables present no problems, gravy can be thickened with arrowroot, and even a tasty batch of quick rolls can be whipped up using almond flour.

On the other hand, this tends to be the only day of the year that I eat one of my favorite non-primal foods – stuffing.   When I was around middle-school age I used to actually make Stove Top Stuffing as an after school snack.  Although the microwave prep was easy and fastest (important if you wanted to catch those first few minutes of Oprah) I would prepare it on the stove top (as God obviously intended) and exactly according to package directions.  Those soft bits of rehydrated bread intermingled with the tang of margarine, artificial chicken flavoring and enough sodium for a week were worthy of nothing less than my perfect preparation.

I don’t like Stove Top Stuffing much anymore.   Or rather, I much prefer stuffing when the ingredient list is easily distinguishable from that of my shampoo. This year I am bringing the stuffing to mom’s.  I plan to prepare it using one of my other favorite non-primal foods – French bread.

However, I am also bringing pumpkin pies and I could not resist coming up with a primal pumpkin pie recipe.  I made a test pie yesterday and I have to say it exceeded expectations.  Dave thinks it tastes better than ‘regular’ pumpkin pie.  At the very least, this is definitely one of those primal adaptations where nobody is going to notice anything weird or different about it.  It just tastes like good pumpkin pie.

So for all my primal cyberfriends out there who are making more nutritionally sound choices than I am this Thursday – this one’s for you!

While researching information for the squash handout I came across an interesting recipe for peanut butter squash ‘brownies’.  You can imagine my excitement when I realized these were primal-friendly, grain free, refined sugar free brownies!  At first glance, the short ingredient list seemed really strange. There are only 5 ingredients in these flourless brownies and I couldn’t imagine what kind of texture would result.  Of course, I had to make them immediately.

These brownies are amazing!  The texture is like a wonderfully moist cake or brownie and most of the sweetness comes from the squash.  I can’t say this about all my primal treats, but in this case you can feel confident serving these to friends, family, coworkers and children without looking like you’re trying to impose some crazy health-food agenda.

Compared to the original recipe I found, I increased the squash, decreased the honey, and used raw almond butter instead of peanut butter.  I used 1/3 cup honey for the whole batch which comes out to just over ½ tablespoon of honey per brownie.   However, you could probably get away without adding any honey and maybe just mixing in some coconut, dates, or raisins.

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.

I ran across a rustic sort of carrot cake recipe online not too long ago and thought it looked like a good candidate for a primal cake.   I am beginning to realize how many flour-based dessert recipes can be successfully altered using almond flour and an alternative sweetener, such as honey or maple syrup.  The result, as in this case, is frequently something healthy enough to eat for breakfast.  I made this cake in a loaf pan but you could shorten the cooking time and pour the batter in muffin tins, too.  Skip the pastry display at Starbucks and have a carrot cake muffin with some blueberries and a hard-boiled egg for an on-the-go breakfast.  I’ve also seen photos of soft carrot cake cookies sandwiched together with the cream cheese in the center.  This batter is thick enough that you might be able to pull something like that off.  Just don’t forget to shorten the cooking time considerably!

Feel free to add dates, raisins, additional nuts, or just whatever you have around that captures your imagination.   I added coconut because I love coconut and thought the flavor would work well with the carrots.  My mom says this carrot cake tastes like ‘real’ food: filling, satisfying, and not too sweet.

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

Yesterday I posted a master recipe for create-your-own primal cookies.  Today I will share with you some of the cookie recipes I came up with.

Over the 4th of July weekend I decided to mess around with some primal cookie making.  The last thing I need are loads of cookies hanging around the house but I had lots of family in town who politely ate the products of my experiments.  I’ve mentioned before that baking is not my forte mainly because I don’t measure carefully and I get impatient with the process.  There’s something about primal baking, though, that brings the fun and creativity back into baking for me.  Also, I eat so few baked goods now that no matter how it turns out it will still be a treat.

I had a great time putting these cookies together.  I did not include the kids but if you are so inclined, this would make for a fun family sort of activity.  Use the master recipe on this page and your imagination.   You can make the cookies as primal as you want.

All in all I made 4 batches of 12 cookies.  I started off by portioning out the almond flour, baking soda, and salt in 4 separate bowls.  Then I played around with variations on the wet ingredients.  Finally, I perused the pantry for various cookie add-ins. Chocolate chips are always a big hit, but I also made a few batches with more healthy options like banana, nuts, and coconut.

Following is the master recipe I used in my experiment. I noted that the cookies made with butter came out firmer than the ones made with coconut oil, which tended to remain fairly soft even after cooling (maybe it was the warm weather…). If you decide to use this recipe to come up with your own primal cookie concoction, let me know how it turns out.

Stay tuned for another post on the recipes I came up with for a pretty darn good chocolate chip cookie and some other variations.

All I needed was a primal alternative to the shortcakes.  I eventually settled on a primal pound cake.  After digging around on the Internet a little, I discovered a coconut flour pound cake recipe at Healthy Indulgences but the 10 eggs and 2 cups of coconut flour her recipe requires were more than I was willing to sacrifice for this experiment.  I noticed she had altered a recipe from a coconut flour pound cake at Cooking God’s Way, so I decided to do the same.

The result was very satisfying.   Using the natural sweetness from the orange juice meant that hardly any extra sweetener was required.  I did include 2 tablespoons of honey (as I figured this was a pretty negligible amount spread out over 8 servings) but I am anxious to try the recipe again without.  To make a primal strawberry shortcake, I topped individual servings with sliced strawberries and whipped cream.

Coconut Orange Pound Cake