Chicken Verde

My husband's favorite chicken dish AND about the easiest thing I can make with some chicken!

chicken, diced
coconut oil
green salsa/salsa verde
onion, diced
sour cream

Brown chicken in coconut oil until browned on all sides and cooked through. Set aside.
Add salsa verde to pan to deglaze. Add onions and cook until onions soft and volume of salsa is reduced and it is very thick. Add sour cream until sauce is right consistency. Return chicken to pan and mix.
Serve topped with shredded monterey jack cheese.

Grain Free Pancakes

Every time I find one of my old favorites, in this case pancakes, in a grain-free way that truly tastes good I REJOICE!

ENJOY!!!!!

This is the secret to grain-free pancakes: Coconut Flour. It is very low in carbs, and instead has a significant amount of protein and good fat.

Coconut Pancakes

6 eggs, beaten
3/4 cup coconut milk (the kind that comes in a can, NOT light!)
1 cup coconut flour
1 t baking powder
1/2 t salt
6 T melted butter
1/2 cup water

add ins: cinnamon, vanilla, ginger (dried spice), blueberries, mashed bananas

Mix all ingredients and use a few add ins if you like.

Look at 'em cooking on the griddle! Yum!


Perfection!

Flourless baking

Today I made flourless peanut butter cookies from a recipe from allrecipes.com

1 cup peanut butter, 1 cup sugar, 1 egg. Mix and bake at 350 for 8 minutes. Delicious! Not healthy, but at least a grain-free sweet indulgence.

Last month I made a flourless chocolate cake that was divine!

Here's the recipe: Flourless Chocolate Cake II. I would recommend cutting out parchment paper to cover the bottom of the pan.
I also made ganache to frost it. It was unbelievably simple, just heat 1 cup heavy cream to almost boiling and pour over 3/4 bag semi-sweet chocolate chips. Let it sit for a couple minutes, then stir. Let it cool some and  you can use it as is, or let it cool completely and then whip it up with a mixer.

Who knew grain-free could taste so good?

Favorite Snacks on the Go

During the week I am always on the go. I regularly drive 60 miles a day, sometimes I drive 100 miles a day. That means if I don't have time to get in a meal because I am gone for too long, (and now you can see why I drink a smoothie as a meal nearly every day!) I have to rely on portable snacks to get me through.

Portable snacks are tough because nearly everything we considered snack food was made of grains, and fruit is just too full of carbs. This is my new snack stash.

String cheese, beef jerky and nuts. I made the beef jerky myself and soaked and dried the nuts as mentioned earlier. All are good sources of protein and fat and very low in carbs.

However, even with the best planning sometimes we are stuck and someone (usually one of the kids, but occasionally me) is just starving. I keep a stash of these in my glove box at all times:

All Larabars are grain free and they come in a dozen flavors. Looking at the label, they do differ significantly in protein/fats/carbs, and they all are mostly carbs because of the large amount of dates in them. However, they are completely grain and all grain byproducts free, and they pack a whopping 200+ calories, so they do the trick in a pinch. And best of all, they keep in the glove box quite nicely!

Any paleo snack tricks you'd like to share?

Finally got around to drying some nuts!

I soaked pecans, walnuts and almonds, all separately, in salted water overnight. The pecans and walnuts I put 2 teaspoons of salt in about 4 cups of water and covered the nuts with that. For the almonds I used 1 teaspoon of salt to 4 cups water. It covered about 4 cups of nuts.

In the morning I drained them and spread them on the racks of the food dehydrator:

The pecans and walnuts were halves so they dried in 12 hours. The almonds took 24.

The kids are enjoying them as snacks and I am enjoying how easy they are to take along when I need to eat on the go.

Now that I've got the hang of the process, I can do twice as many at once and keep them in airtight containers in the fridge.

Enjoy!

Some Pasta Solutions

In addition to using spaghetti squash as a pasta substitute, here are some pictures of my other ideas!

Lasagna
Using a mandolin, I sliced zucchini lengthwise into very thin strips and used in place of lasagna noodles:

The result was that all the water in the zucchini made the dish watery, but after draining it off, it tasted just as good as any other lasagna I've ever made!

In the future: 'sweat' the zucchini slices by salting them liberally and leaving them on a cooling rack for an hour before assembling the lasagna

Spaghetti
My dear son, who will try any new food with good cheer, just does NOT like any squash option. He has begrudgingly eaten spaghetti squash twice, but put his foot down at the zucchini lasagna! He loves carrots, however, so I decided to try and cut carrots into a long noodle shape.
The attachment on the mandolin left the strips too thick, so I abandoned it in favor of cutting the strips myself. I cut each carrot in half then painstakingly cut long, thin strips. I tossed these in the steamer and cooked them till very soft.

I make a red meat sauce based on Trader Joe's Organic Marinara Sauce No Salt Added. It's a fantastic base for any tomato sauce!! It's sweet and tomatoey with very little added flavor. I browned ground beef, deglazed the pan with a lot of red wine, then added the sauce and a lot of spices: fresh ground kosher salt, fresh ground tri-color peppercorns, dried basil, parsley and oregano, red pepper flakes, and some ground ancho chili pepper for smokiness. I also put in a dash of red wine vinegar because I think the sauce base is overly sweet.
The result was a MASSIVE HIT with the entire family! The sweet carrots tasted delicious with the spicy, smokey sauce.

Best of all, my boy was happy :)

Have any other pasta substitute ideas? Please share them!!!

12 Weeks In!

Hard to believe it was 12 weeks ago when we made the leap into the Paleo plus dairy diet. The first few weeks my mind had to work 24/7 to remember it all! Now, it's just second nature. It's true that in 10 weeks something new becomes routine!

So, we have fallen into some routines. I'll try to make a nice neat list:

• Pasta: I can't give it up so we've adapted these vegetables to be noodles: spaghetti squash, zucchini (sliced thinly lengthwise to be lasagna noodles), carrots (cut into long, thin strips to be like spaghetti)
• Smoothies: The kids eat smoothies for breakfast about every other day and I eat them for lunch most days. I combine a small amt of fruit (eg. 4 strawberries or half a banana) with about 2-3T coconut milk (the full fat kind from the can) in the blender and grind smooth. Then top off with about 8 oz plain kefir. I usually sprinkle in some cinnamon for its blood sugar benefits. The kids aren't used to the sour taste of unsweetened yogurt or kefir so I use strawberry kefir for them.
• Hot dogs and hamburgers: bunless of course, we keep these on hand at all times. They make quick, easy meals when needed
• Sprouted grain bread: I've gone completely gluten free, but the kids enjoy a slice of toasted cinnamon raisin sprouted grain bread almost daily as a bedtime snack
• Dairy from Trader Joe's: this seems to be the best stuff I can get, the yogurt comes in big tubs of whole milk plain for me and vanilla for the kids (and I stir some plain into theirs to cut back on the sugar), the kefir is awesome and I get milk from there and the Horizon brand from other stores
• Eggs:we eat eggs nearly everyday! I am buying about 3 dozen a week. 
• String Cheese: my go-to snack on the go
• Beef Jerkey: I've only made a batch once, but I'd like to make it more often to always have it on hand. It's as good as string cheese for low carb paleo snacking on the go
• Flourless Chocolate Cake: I made this from scratch for a birthday celebration and it was so delicious there is no need for flour in cake ever again!

And here is a nice, neat list of some things I am still interested in learning about, trying or still working on

• Mexican food: it's tough without tortillas. I made tacos with lettuce leaves in lieu of and that worked GREAT, except Erik won't eat lettuce. The time I tried to make the Paleo Blueprint crepes for enchiladas it was a disaster. I'd still like a better substitute so I can have quesadillas or enchiladas
• Nuts: I finally got to Whole Foods to buy raw nuts, but have yet to soak them. I've made my own nut butters in the past, but would love the convenience of purchasing nuts and nut butters that have already  been soaked and dried. Also, it seems that the peanut cannot be made "safe" which is the biggest tragedy of my life. I sneak a spoon full of peanut butter from time to time but the days of me consuming a pound of p.b. a week are OVER!
• Sandwiches: are no longer a take out option and I lament this. They are so convenient when you need to take a meal with you
• Pizza: I scrape the toppings of and eat it. MIL tried a grain-free egg crust that bombed. Would love a grain-free crust option!!!
• Fast food: not that I eat much ever, but it seems all fast food has either grains, corn, soy or potatoes. We often rely on fast food while traveling and this is tough. Would like to find a better alternative than going off-diet for when we are on the road

Sadly, we aren't able to join a CSA at this time to purchase our meat and dairy due to finances. I look forward to that in the future, right now I am limited to purchasing supermarket meat and only when on sale.

I am getting much better with recipes although it's still more work as I build up a new supply of tried and true favorite recipes.

I really am in disbelief that 12 weeks ago nearly every thing I eat regularly now I did not eat then, and that everything I ate regularly then, I do not eat now! I feel better than I have since the food poisoning incident of 1997 that started this all. The kids are growing at an accelerated rate, both physically and mentally. Erik is having growing pains for the first time in his life. I have not been sick ONCE since I started this. I have never gone 12 weeks in winter without being sick before. EVER. And since I had kids, I don't think I've gone more than 6 weeks in winter without being sick.

I really feel like this is not a temporary change but the way we'll eat for the rest of my life. I hate wheat and what it does to me, I am avoiding it at all costs! As for soy, I just won't eat it or let my kids eat it. Any amount. It's poison and we are all recovering from being poisoned. It seems ridiculous now how blind I was to the fact when I was poisoning myself and destroying my immune system and my neurochemical balances every day, but I just never made the connection. I'm so glad I figured it out before we suffered more! They have been sick less too!!! Also, Erik got a virus, and NO ONE else got it, that was something that never happened before either. Whatever one of us got, we all got.

So, I'd like to change the focus of this blog from making changes in my life to posting recipes or new solutions to Paleo problems. I often post food ideas on facebook, but I'll try to post them here and just link them to facebook :D

Happy eating my hungry friends!