Schnepf Farm 10/2011
Monday, December 26, 2011
Merry Christmas
This Christmas was nice and mellow for us, so we'll keep this pretty simple. We had great times with both the Reznick and Cummings families over the extended weekend. Of note, we tried making a gluten-free pierogi for Wigilia, and it was pretty awful. Guess next year we'll have to try harder, and start playing with recipes BEFORE the day they need to be made. We probably ate one too many dark chocolates over the weekend, and are looking forward to cleaning up our diet again in the New Year. We have a few things that we have reasearched and want to experiment with ourselves, so onward we go!
Tuesday, December 6, 2011
Sunday, December 4, 2011
Thanksgiving - Part 2
Thanksgiving was a hit! It was a day full of wonderful food and family. Here are some highlights from the big day...
A big thanks to both of our families for coming together, bringing amazing food, and spending the Holiday with us! My favorite part of the feast had to be the sweet potato casserole. Hilary's was the stuffing.
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| Cooking cranberry sauce |
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| Preparing the bread-free stuffing (subbing with cauliflower). Recipe al la Mark Sisson found here |
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| Frying the turkey in grass fed beef tallow! |
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| Me carving the traditional roasted turkey. Tony carving the fried turkey in the background. |
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| Bacon wrapped fried turkey - Heaven! |
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| A beautiful day for an outside meal. Thank you AZ weather! |
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| Primal Plate - Clockwise, sweet potato casserole, turkey (fried and roasted), bread-less stuffing, salad with strawberry dressing, bacon seared Brussels sprouts, and cranberry sauce |
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| Pumpkin Cheesecake & Pumpkin Pie with a gluten free, nut crust al la Alexi! |
Sunday, November 20, 2011
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 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.
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.
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| I first had to cut 20 lbs. suet into small pieces. |
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I then put it in a food processor and chopped it into even tinier pieces. |
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| 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. |
Monday, November 14, 2011
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!
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!
Tuesday, November 8, 2011
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?
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 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.
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| 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!
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| 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.
Thursday, October 20, 2011
Update with Life - 4 Months Behind
I hope to get better about blogging. A 4 month break wasn’t necessarily my idea of sharing our lives, but we’ve been quite busy. Let’s see…I’ve graduated PA school, took and passed my boards and even began working for the same doctor I rotated with just prior to graduation. Unfortunately it didn’t work out, and I was only employed 3 short weeks. So now I’m back on the job hunt.
Bear and I were also able to go on a few trips. Mostly camping and visiting Mom and Dad Cummings in San Diego, but we had one big trip to Scotland & Ireland in the beginning of September. And let me say, it was fantastic! It rained quite a bit, but it was absolutely beautiful and green. We were in the Highlands of Scotland, filled with waterfalls and castle ruins, and mainly the South in Ireland, visiting the infamous Blarney Castle and Cliffs of Moher.
So this post is to update everyone a little on what we've been up to, with pictures!
So this post is to update everyone a little on what we've been up to, with pictures!
Camping on the Mogollon Rim
Visiting Mom & Dad Cummings in San Diego (4th of July weekend)
Jerome, AZ
Celebrating graduation, Joe's Crab Shack
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| They made me scream: "My crabs are having a FIESTA" |
Somewhere in The Highlands, Scotland.
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| This pub won “Best Pub of the Year” in 1709. (Note the waterfall behind!) |
Irish Coast
Dinner at Coal Burger. Bear and I both got a 1/2 lb grass-fed beef burger on a lettuce bun, sweet potato fries fried in rice oil (not quite sure what that means yet), and an organic chocolate gelato milkshake (ah, well, we're still playing with dairy after all...)
A home cooked birthday dinner! I feel so loved by all of the birthday-ness I celebrated this year. Tricia came over and we had grass-fed beef short rib stroganoff, a sweet potato, and red wine
And the pups have been eating their form of a paleo diet now for over 4 months. We've seen the most improvements with Cai. He has put on some weight and is definitely less itchy; the rust stains by his mouth and paws (from licking) have disappeared. Elinor seems about the same so far, but they're both very happy and healthy. We have pork brisket, chicken backs and necks, duck neck, and chicken offal in the freezer right now for them. YUM.
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| Elinor |
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| Caillou |
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