In other news, we are getting ready for Halloween.  I’m still getting used to doing Halloween every year again.  Sometime around 13 years of age I got my first of many menial food service jobs. My initial foray was at a Dunkin’ Donuts.  Back then Dunkin Donuts had a long coffee counter where regulars hung out and we had to wear hideous brown, orange, and pink thigh-length smocks with matching visors. Even though I got sent home early my first day on the job for consistently making inaccurate change, they kept me around until I moved up in the world by landing a choice cashier job at a local bookstore.  I think the onset of regular employment marked the end of trick-or-treating.  Once you are actually able to afford the bags of candy from the supermarket yourself, the trick-or-treat excitement dies away.   I mostly ignored Halloween from that point on until a few years ago when I realized my children were going to be trick-or-treating soon.  Now it’s a really big deal, on par I’d say with Easter or Thanksgiving (not quite at the level of the big “C”).  They are both going as werewolves although there is still time for last-minute mind changes.  I offered to go with them as the victim, perhaps with a prosthetic bloody stump or a fake neck gash but they just looked at me with big sad eyes and said softly, “Please, mom, no”.  Oops.

It’s a dark, wet, gloomy morning here in the mitten. There is no doubt that fall is upon us.  The leaves are beginning to change, my garden is (finally!) dying, and huge flocks of thousands of birds have been occasionally sweeping through our tree tops.

All this fall-ness makes me want to cook squash.

Last night I put together a delicious stuffed squash dish that I thought I’d share.  Not only is this a complete meal in itself, but the whole dish only took me a little over a half hour from start to finish.  I think I’ll be making variations on this a lot this fall.

If you don’t eat dairy or do not tolerate cheese, my apologies in advance.  I have made this pizza crust without the parmesan cheese but it was not as firm as it is otherwise.  I welcome you to give it a shot, though, and see what you think.  I have also made this recipe using zucchini instead of the eggplant.  If you do this, just make sure you salt the shredded zucchini and squeeze out the excess moisture.  Also, make sure you end up with a pound of shredded zucchini before you add the other ingredients.  If you’re not sure how to get the water out of shredded zucchini, take a look at my recipe video from last year.

I hope this recipe is as useful to you as it has been for me. As I mention in the video, half of this crust, which I consider to be one serving, has about 330 calories. Not too shabby! Wishing you many years of delicious primal pizzas!

There are two things you may not know about me.  The first is that I enjoy eating large quantities.  I don’t know how I developed this inclination, but there it is.  I distinctly remember the day I was able to eat entire can of Spaghetti-O’s, just like my big brother.  I was so proud.  I once asked my husband if he had ever dated a woman who could eat more than me.  He responded with a nervous look but I eventually got him to admit that he hadn’t.  Luckily, I eat a lot vegetables or I’d probably be getting lap band surgery by now.  As I’ve gotten older I’ve had to tone things down somewhat, but I’ll always be a big eater at heart.

The other thing is that, like the hot-blooded American I am, pizza is one of my favorite foods.  Despite the countless hours of my life I’ve spent learning about and working with ingredients and cuisines of all kinds, I still have the same favorite foods as your typical 3^rd grader.   Oh well.

Now that you know these things about me, you should also be aware that it has been my mission for well over a year now to come up with what I consider to be an ideal primal pizza crust.  The problem with most primal or paleo pizza crusts that I have tested is that they are either so heavy and caloric that you can only eat a slice or two (I’m thinking your typical almond flour crusts or ‘meatzas’), or they are unreliable and floppy.  I’ve heard good things about cauliflower crusts but truth be told I‘ve never been able to make that work.

In order to qualify as ideal in my mind, a crust must meet all of the following requirements:

1)   The pizza crust must not be overwhelmingly caloric.

2)   There must be no mistaking the crust for a frittata!

3)   The crust must stand firm, allowing you to easily enjoy the pizza with hands, not fork.

4)   The crust must be relatively easy to make.

5)   The crust must, at the very least, have a neutral flavor that does not interfere with the ‘pizza experience’.

Well, I’ve done it.  My primal pizza crust not only meets all of my ideal criteria but it is only 330 calories per serving, allowing plenty of ‘room’ for your favorite toppings.  A serving can be half of a large pizza (see photo) or, if you prefer, an entire individual pizza.  Further, I’ve managed this without using any weird ingredients or complicated techniques.  You can easily throw this crust together on a busy weeknight.

Sorry for the teaser but I am waiting until September to share the recipe in the new cookbook.  I’m just so happy to have finally accomplished this that I couldn’t wait to share the news.   I know you guys will come up with all sorts of excellent additions and modifications so I am looking forward to that, too!

My kitchen is a mess.  I don’t mean messy, I mean it has too much of too many types of food in it.   It looks like three different families just stopped by and dropped off their weekly groceries.  I’m trying to remain calm about it.   “It’ll all work out,” I say to myself. “I’ll just make some big soups”.  But in fact it all has me a little nervous and confused. 

First off, this is the time of year that my farm share really kicks into high gear, which is always a little nerve wracking.  This week I came home with, among many, many other things, six red bell peppers, a sack of chard that could smother an infant, and five pound of green beans.  Add to this the groceries from my near daily trips to the store to buy bits of this and that for the primal cookbook I’ve been working on.   Keeping the right kind of food around for the cookbook is a challenge all on its own.  Some recipes end with ingredients leftover, others are still waiting for a single ingredient I forgot.  Still others need more work (and another trip to the store).  Finally, for some reason I can no longer recall, we decided to grow a garden.  Yesterday I counted 12 cucumbers and more cherry tomatoes than I could eat in a year.

The kitchen chaos and my desire to create meals using up what we have on hand has led me to contemplate some food and flavor combinations I might not have thought of otherwise.  These are the thoughts that plague me:

How would coconut milk work in a tomato soup?

Avocado with almond butter: delicious or disgusting?

Lime with roasted beets?  And curry?

Primal Rosemary Olive Oil Cake

It is in this spirit that I introduce to you the rosemary olive oil cake.   I ran across the original recipe for this cake at 101 cookbooks some time back and was intrigued by the idea of using rosemary and olive oil in a cake, especially a cake that has big chunks of chocolate.  The end product is sort of what you’d imagine:  a little bit strange and a little bit wonderful.

I adapted the cake to use almond flour.  Unfortunately, I opted to use the almond meal from Trader Joe’s (which includes the skin of the almond) instead of almond flour from blanched almonds.  While tasting fine, the cake turned out very dark which means you couldn’t see the flecks of rosemary or even the chocolate very well.  I recommend making the cake with a lighter flour for maximum effect.

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 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.