Hello 2012!

Happy New Year!

As the New Year typically means new resolutions, we thought we'd share ours with you...

Finding a Tribe
Abraham Maslow identified "human belonging" as one of the five basic needs of humans.  A tribe, pack, team, mob, family or posse all share common interests and values and show genuine appreciation and care for each other.  We found it difficult in the past few years to really be a part of any one group.  Society in general uses food as a tool to get together, and as we've changed our diet, it has made get-togethers a little more difficult.  And with Hilary being in school, she felt like she did not have the energy or time to be out late on the weekends with friends, and we together lacked the finances to go out with friends for dinner-dates, happy hour, sporting events, etc.

So this year, Hilary and I are committing ourselves to finding our tribe, as individuals as well as a couple.  We plan on dedicating more time to making new friends and growing relationships with old friends.


Perfecting Our Nutrition
I do have to say that we both already have a pretty damn good diet!  Both us of have learned so much in the last year about the biochemistry of nutrition and how it relates to health and disease.  One interesting thing we have researched into is how diets were different over various parts of the world (higher carb in certain Papua New Ginea tribes, low-carb high-protein in certain tribes Africa), and how diets were different over various times of the year as well.  Although it may not be the case anymore (you can find winter squash in the summer, and summer squash in the winter...), food supplies should wax and wane over the year.

Hilary and I are planning on eating as local and as seasonal as possible.  We already get our weekly vegetable and fruits from a local Arizona farmer found here and get our pasture raised beef and pork from a Wickenburg farm found here as well as our eggs from the farmers market down the road.  But since we started eating an ancestral diet we both find that we still rely too much on foods only found at the normal grocery store.  This often causes us to eat out of our local season and may impact both our health and the environments health. 

To kick it off both of us are starting the first 30 days eating a ketogenic diet.  This will not only emphasis our Caucasian ancestry as related to diet for this time of year but will allow us to only eat food from our local sources mentioned above.  Additionally, we are both going on a coffee holiday (I resisted a bit to this idea) so that our bodies can re-regulate what natural hormonal balance and blood sugar control we have.  We are also going to boycott buying food at the grocery store.  I can't speak for Hilary, but I will also be tracking my weight and circumference measurements and will probably post them in February to see if this will impact me in anyway.

Edit Our Life

Check out this link!  We plan on cutting back on our unnecesary posestions.

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!

Perhaps we can learn best from others.  My cousin, Tim,  passed this video on to me and I wanted to pass it along to everyone else.  I recommend only watching it when you have time to pay attention.  It is about 18 minutes long, but well worth the time. 

Dr. Terry Wahls - Minding Your Mitochondria

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...

Cooking cranberry sauce

Preparing the bread-free stuffing (subbing with cauliflower).  Recipe al la Mark Sisson found here

Frying the turkey in grass fed beef tallow!

Me carving the traditional roasted turkey.  Tony carving the fried turkey in the background.

Bacon wrapped fried turkey - Heaven!

A beautiful day for an outside meal.  Thank you AZ weather!

Primal Plate - Clockwise, sweet potato casserole, turkey (fried and roasted), bread-less stuffing, salad with strawberry dressing, bacon seared Brussels sprouts, and cranberry sauce

Pumpkin Cheesecake & Pumpkin Pie with a gluten free, nut crust al la Alexi!

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.

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.