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!

Dave getting ready to eat his fancy stuffed pork chop

There’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you.  You know all the fancy photos of the food on this site?  The ones that make it look like we live in some kind of Autumn paradise.  Or the ones that look like we spend our evenings gathered around a cozy dining room table sipping wine?  It’s all fake.  Well, the food is real, but the rest of it is staged.  Dave, my husband and resident photographer, has a number of high-tech cameras in addition to lighting equipment, light boxes, studio reflectors, etc…. So if your reality doesn’t resemble the food photography you find here, don’t feel bad.  Mine doesn’t either.

Even though Dave knows what he’s doing and we’ve got some nice equipment, it’s actually really hard to get a decent picture sometimes – especially when it comes to meat!  Meat tends to look either greasy or dried out.  This is frustrating because while your carefully prepared steak might look amazing in person, as soon as you take the picture it is reduced to a big ugly blob of brown.  Baked goods are the opposite.  They are actually enhanced through photography.  Do a search on a site like tastespotting and compare the number of meatloaf photos with the number of cupcake photos and you’ll see what I mean.

What this all boils down to is that I came up with a really good stuffed pork chops recipe the other night but the photos turned out like crap.  It would be a shame not to share the recipe with you just because we couldn’t get a good picture, though.  Luckily, Dave was wearing his skeleton costume.

Feliz Dia de los Muertos!

Another use for Vibram 5 Fingers: skeleton feet!

Real life. Dave trying to edit photos for the blog.

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.

You can broil the salmon fillets directly on the foil but if you place them on a rack as shown (this cooling rack I have happens to fit this baking sheet pretty nicely) then the fish doesn't get soggy as it cooks in its own juices.

But let’s not think about that.

Let’s think about all the great cooking that can be done during the colder part of the year. This is the time for stews and slow-cookers, root vegetables and warm spices… It’s also a good time to ramp up your vitamin D intake so that you don’t get rickets or catch the flu. I never used to give vitamin D much thought but it is in the news everywhere now since apparently most of us are horribly deficient. The current recommendation is 400 IU/day for adults but many consider that number to be too low. In any case, it’s not a bad idea to increase that number to at least 800-1000 IU/day especially if you are a woman (as vitamin D increases calcium absorption) or live in a northern latitude. By the way, only kids get rickets but vitamin D deficiency in adults is associated with an alarming number of other health problems. Here’s an interesting article from the Weston A Price Foundation on the matter (by the way, those folks recommend 10,000 IU/day!).

Salmon is an excellent natural source of vitamin D although the content varies considerably depending on whether the salmon is wild caught or farmed. Wild caught salmon can contain as much as 1000 IU per 3.5oz portion whereas farmed salmon generally contains far less. Unless you plan to eat salmon or shrimp everyday (or you’re lucky enough to live in the sun all year) the best way to get your vitamin D is to take cod liver oil daily. I plan to do this as soon as I get around to it.

Sri Lankan Coconut Chicken Curry

If I believed in such things, I would say I spent a former life in Southern Asia.  I have always been fascinated with this area of the world and I adore Indian cuisine.  At various times throughout my life I have tried to travel there but have always been thwarted or disrailed in one way or another (mom, if you’re reading this, I don’t mean by you).  I even tried learning Hindi on my own for a while.  My hope is that I can make it there before I get too old and stodgy and have to stay at a Hilton and take guided tours everywhere.   There’s an Indian restaurant about 30 minutes from where I live and the kids and I occasionally meet Dave there during his lunch break.  As delicious as the food is, it is a horrible place to eat primal unless, unlike me, you are able to resist naan and gulab jamun.

Although they utilize many of the same ingredients, Sri Lankan and Indian cuisine really shouldn’t be lumped together.  For one thing, Sri Lankan cuisine tends to be spicier. Chilies are used liberally and some have said some Sri Lankan dishes are the hottest in the world in terms of chili content.  Most curries are prepared in coconut milk to provide a counterbalance to the spice and some special ingredients indigenous to the region are used.

Anuja is a second-generation Sri Lankan and long-time colleague of my husband’s.  She generously sent me her recipe for a chicken curry that looked too delicious to pass up.   I love the idea of incorporating a variety of cuisines into a primal diet.  It’s so much more fun to expand your food choices by drawing upon other traditions than it is trying to make a primal mac and cheese out of cauliflower and almond milk.  If you need to make a special trip to an Indian grocery to get ingredients for this recipe take advantage of the opportunity to buy some common spices at a fraction of the usual price.   I had no idea how badly I had been getting ripped off on cumin.

Not too long ago, I would have thought ‘cauliflower rice’ sounded kind of depressing. I mean, let’s be honest – it’s not the same as real rice. (For the record, I still find cauliflower pizza crusts to be depressing and am working on a primal pizza crust that doesn’t have a bajillion calories.) If you haven’t tried it, though, you might be surprised at how well cauliflower functions as a rice-like base for curries and stir-fries. Aside from kind of looking like white rice, it has a neutral flavor and even manages to soak up a little sauce. Furthermore, if you’re the type who has a hard time getting in all your veggies, this is a practically effortless way to pack in a substantial amount of cauliflower. What was once a huge head is reduced to 4 modest-looking mounds of ‘rice’ after cooking.

Even when I’m making Asian dishes, I have grown accustomed to not including rice and I find that I don’t even miss it. I’d rather have more of the actual dish than just some boring old rice anyway. However, the other night I was making a Sri Lankan coconut chicken curry that was not only on the spicy side but also had a fair amount of liquid. This is when something like cauliflower rice comes in handy. The cauliflower helped to absorb some of the sauce and even out the spicy flavor.

I’ve seen recipes that call for steaming or microwaving the cauliflower rice but I can’t imagine why you’d want to cook it that way unless you are looking to save a few calories. It’s not really faster and since it absorbs water during cooking, the rice won’t be absorbent on the plate. Here’s how I prefer to make the rice. Check back tomorrow for the Sri Lankan curry.

When I was about 6 or 7 years old, I told my dad that pork chops were my favorite meat. I actually meant spare ribs but got the names confused. After that he would make me pork chops on the grill and happily inform me that he was making my favorite dinner. I don’t know why but I could never bring myself to tell him I had made a mistake. Thank goodness I’m a grown-up now and can have ribs whenever I please because I still love them. Unfortunately, I avoided preparing them on my own for years in part because I was put off by the saturated fat content. I should have been listening to my inner cave-child. Now I eat them with wild abandon.

In addition to spare ribs, I also like barbeque sauce. Who doesn’t? But I can’t quite imagine barbeque sauce without sugar. So I set out to create another flavorful but healthier condiment for my ribs. The first time around I created some kind of mango-rum concoction which was okay, but needed work. This time, I used Indian flavors and was very happy with the final product. These ribs were sweet, tangy, spicy, and falling off the bone. I highly recommend them.

My dad died several years ago but his birthday was this week. Happy birthday, dad. You probably would not have liked them much, with the Indian spices and all, but these ribs are for you!

Remove the thin membrane that lines the underside of the ribs before cooking. This increases surface area for the rub and also makes the ribs easier to cut.

If you're cooking them on the grill, either use the upper rack as I did here or put them on the opposite side of the grill from the flame. Close the lid and try to maintain an internal grill temp of about 300-350 degrees.

This post is participating in Fight Back Fridays at Food Renegade.

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 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.