Thanksgiving - Part 1

This year's Thanksgiving is going to be a potluck!  We will be joined both by Hilary's and my family, at our house.  This is our second year having both families together (last year it was at Alexi's house), but the first major family gathering since we've gone Paleo.  Of course, not everyone has embraced the lifestyle as fully as we have, but (with our encouragement) it appears that 80-90% of the food will be REAL food! (REAL=food that does not come in a can/box/bag).

Since Hil and I volunteered to host this year, and we have the pickiest eating habits, we are taking on a few extra dishes for the potluck.  We are gearing up for the big day, spreading our prep-work out over the week.  Today (Sunday), after a jaunt up Camelback with the pups, we stopped by the Ahwatukee Farmer's Market to pick up our order of 20 lbs. suet from one of our favorite meat farmers, Circle Key.  What for you ask?  For a fried turkey of course!  Turkeys are usually fried in peanut oil because of the high smoke point, but it is highly processed and oxidizes too easily, and actually pretty unhealthy.  Beef tallow, both inexpensive in price and a Paleo alternative, seemed like an appropriate choice.  We plan on having a traditional turkey as well, but since there were SO many votes for a fried turkey (which will be cooked by Tricia and Tony), we thought we could at least help Paleo-ize it.  Anyway, I started rendering the beef tallow out of suet, although I didn't realize it would be such an intensive process!   It will take a day and a half rendering the 20+ pounds down to a usable form to fry the turkey.

I first had to cut 20 lbs. suet into small pieces.

I then put it in a food processor and chopped it into even tinier pieces.

Finally I cooked it at a 250 degrees for 2 hours in the oven.  The hamburger looking things at the top is the leftover grisle.

I will be storing the tallow in the large frying pot until we use it on Thursday.  I will let you know how it tuns out.

Paleo Doughnuts!

Is it donuts or doughnuts?  You can decide for yourself but I prefer “doughnuts” because they are traditionally made with dough, not “do.”  Hilary rolls her eyes when I bring this subject up so now I just vent here.  But, I digress....

Since switching over to a Paleo-ish lifestyle, there haven't been many Neolithic foods Hilary and I miss, but we do miss doughnuts, and especially during the Holiday Season.  Pre-Paleo we would frequent Dunkin’ Doughnuts once a month or more as a treat with a nice cup of joe (Good Times!).  But since shifting our nutritional paradigm, we gave up the doughnut part and it left our coffee lonely and without a friend :(  That is of course until Hilary received a doughnut maker for her birthday last month...thanks Melissa and Jove!  Without further ado I present to you:


Paleo Doughnuts (Bear's Base Recipe)
1 Large Sweet Potato or Yam (Same thing really)
½ cup Coconut Flakes
4 Eggs
1/4 c Coconut Oil or Butter
1 Tbsp. Baking Soda
1 tsp. Salt
Spice Mix (Pick one from below)
*2-4 Tbsp Molasses,  Maple Syrup or Honey (Optional)

Holiday Spice:
1 Tbsp Cinnamon
1 tsp. All Spice
1 tsp. Cloves
1 tsp. Ginger Root

Chocolate:
1 Tbsp Cocoa Powder
1/2c - 1c Dark Chocolate Chips


Cook the sweet potato, scrape out the pulp, and puree in a food processor.
In a bowl, mix remaining ingredients, including your spice mix.
Mix in sweet potato puree.
Place batter in a doughnut maker for 2-5 minutes.
Remove and cool to a delicious temperature.

* Note: If you don’t have a doughnut maker try making them into pancakes on a griddle or use a muffin tin to make doughnut muffins.
** Note:  Great with coffee!

Enjoy it all and send me your recipes!

New Foods!

A few posts ago we mentioned trying raw milk and seeing how it affected us.  Needless to say, neither Hilary nor I seem to have the same skin problems with raw dairy products that we do with regular pastured dairy.  Since we got the gallon of raw milk (priced at $10 here in AZ) we have made several batches of kefir.  Kefir (pronounced key-fear) is kind of like a drinkable effervescent yogurt, a centuries old drink that was first “brewed” in the Caucasus Mountains by shepherds carrying cow or goat’s milk in leather pouches for several days at a time.  The milk would then turn into the drink we know today.  The milk is transformed by using kefir “grains,” which are casein and gelatinous colonies of microorganisms that are grown together symbiotically.  Sounds fancy huh?  

Kefir Grains

So why do we drink kefir?   It’s because, like yogurt, it populates our guts with beneficial flora, i.e. probiotic bacteria. A major difference is that unlike yogurt, which contains one or two probiotic strains of bacteria, kefir can contain up to 26 strains of probiotic bacteria and up to seven different yeasts.  (More on gut bacteria in a later post).

So…kefir wasn’t the only food we have been fermenting, heck we didn’t even start there.  Several months ago I started making kombucha.  Kombucha is a fermented tea, cultured similarly to kefir, except a “mother” is used, or symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast (SCOBY).  The SCOBY can either be made from scratch by using a bottle of store bought kombucha, or gifted from someone (it is called a mother because it keeps growing, producing “daughter” SCOBYs that can be removed).  Since we (I) didn’t know anyone at the time who made their own Kombucha, I opted to start from scratch!  Hilary actually thought I was crazy when she discovered the first bottle “growing” in our pantry.  It was one of our water pitchers filled with tea and what looked like a white mold growing on the top.  Only, like mentioned above, it was yeast and bacteria and I was intentionally growing it so that I could drink it.  Sounds kind of weird, right?  In fact, I over-brewed our first batch and it tasted much like vinegar.  We have refined the process and it actually tastes pretty good now. So good that both Hilary and I drink about a cup a day, each!  

The Kombucha SCOBY

The benefits are similar to kefir,  as it is considered a probiotic drink.  The  first recorded use of kombucha comes from China in 221 BC during the Tsin Dynasty, and was known as "The Tea of Immortality" because it produces a range of organic acids like glucaronic acid, lactic acid, acetic acid, vitamins (especially B and C), amino acids, and enzymes.

A lot of these traditional and fermented recipes can actually be found in Nourishing Traditions Cook Book by Sally Fallon.  This massive cookbook also has quite a few non-fermented foods and drinks that I think would be a great resource for anyone.  

So, as you know, we are continually playing with our diets, and our most recent adjustment was trying out a recommendation by Martin Berkhan and Tim Ferriss to cluster our meals in an 8 hour time window.  Their rationale behind it was better hormone regulation and cellular repair, as well as improved gut health.  So, willing to try just about any change for 30 days, we began eating at noon, 4pm, and 8pm.  If you want to know the details, just ask.  We found it relatively easy to adjust our eating to this pattern, and enjoyed having our mornings to relax instead of preparing a meal, but didn’t really notice any other differences besides a flatter stomach, so Monday we’ll go back to eating as usual.