03 Thursday Jan 2013
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Breakfast:
Two hard boiled eggs and two sausage patties, macadamia nuts
Snack:
Clif Kits Bar bar (GF)
Lunch:
Chili, guacamole, sunflower seeds, 3 slices deli turkey
Dinner:
Broccoli and apple soup & sausage
03 Thursday Jan 2013
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Whole 30 Day 2 was yesterday, another successful day in the books!
Breakfast:
2 Hard boiled eggs, 2 sausage patties, banana & macadamia nuts.
Lunch:
Chili, guacamole, grapes
Dinner:
L/O Pork and root vegetables, sunflower seeds and apple as a snack while watching TV.
Workout:
Crossfit
01 Tuesday Jan 2013
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Today is day one of our 2013 Whole 30. So for the next 30 Days I am going to post what we eat for breakfast lunch and dinner.
Breakfast:
Pumpkin & Almond Flour Pancakes with Breakfast Sausage Patties from our 1/2 pig.
Lunch:
Roll-ups of grass-fed roast beef and organic roasted turkey with guacamole.
Dinner:
Cumin spiced pork tenderloin with root vegetables and sautéed spinach with pine nuts, both from Practical Paleo, the pork was picked just from the meat case nothing special.
25 Sunday Nov 2012
Posted in Plates
We went to Julie’s parents in Worcester for Thanksgiving but came home with no leftovers. So on Friday we went shopping and bought a Turkey and decided to Thanksgiving take two!
Since this was the second pass at Turkey Day and just for Julie & I, we decided to keep it simple and found “The Simplest Easiest Method“.
I quartered and onion and two apples and along with two cinnamon sticks out these in the cavity of the Turkey. I then rubbed the skin with salt and pepper. Before placing it in the oven I placed two cups of chicken stock in the pan and basted the Turkey just before putting it in the oven and every 1/2 hour during cooking.
The recipe called to heat the oven to 450 degrees lowering to 350 when you place the Turkey in the oven and cooking for 13 minutes per pound. With about 1/2 hour remaining I basted the Turkey with olive oil to help it brown. I think it came out looking great, it was a bit in the dry side but it was a better quality bird we picked up at Whole Foods so I wasn’t expecting a Butterball. Maybe next year when I do Thanksgiving at our place I can hope
We also made a stuffing, i’ll save those instructions for another day.
And also made a sweet potato casserole.
16 Friday Nov 2012
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I love Christmas time and the beers that come along with it. Yesterday I stopped at Table and Vine in West Springfield and picked up a few.
The first one I popped was Sierra Nevada’s Celebration ale.
The second was Goose Island 2012 Christmas Ale. I like this beer a lot we visited the Goose Islands brew pub when were in Chicago in the summer of 2011. Although I recently heard they had been sold to Anheuser-Busch in Spring of 2011. Nonetheless they make some pretty good beers.
What will be next this Christmas?
12 Monday Nov 2012
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As I noted in the last post Julie and I have been dabbling with paleo/primal eating, so all of my recent cookbook purchases have been along those line. Most recently I bought Practical Paleo: A Customized Approach to Health and a Whole Foods Lifestyle by Diane Sanfilippo. Diane writes a blog entitled Balanced Bites which admittedly I have not often read. I have my favorite couple blogs and pretty much stick with them. At least the first 1/2 of this book recounts the whole premise of paleo eating so as a student of this for more than a year it is a repetitive although for the new paleo eater undoubtedly very useful.
To begin Diane calls to brush the chicken with melted bacon fat. That’s what you see in the white lidded jar among my collection of ingredients. We have been buying a 1/2 of a farm raised pig which comes with 8-9 pounds of some very nice bacon which I am sure to collect the drippings of. Reading the recipe that was the part that had me the most interested.
After cooking. (I’ll add the time and temp info when I have the book in front of me.) The chicken was done, it had a nice citrus taste but the skin was much less crispy and tasty then I expected after being coated with bacon fat. Last weeks chicken coated with olive oil had much crispier skin and as for the addition of bacon this recipe is still tops.
The chicken did have a nice citrus zing to it but not too much. There definitely could have been more veggies and i’m really not a fan of them cooking in the pan with the chicken, to me they become to greasy. Perhaps it’s time to begin experimenting with sides as we continue with the 52 Chickens Project. Diane’s book has one more recipe that use’s a parted whole chicken along as well as two yummy looking wing ideas. You’ll probably see those appear as well.
05 Monday Nov 2012
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With Julie’s gluten issue and our crossfitting we have been slowly eating more and more of a paleo/primal diet. That has meant more cookbooks to add to my shelf.
The Food Lovers Make it Paleo has two chicken recipes using an entire chicken. This recipe was nice & simple, something I really like now that our Sundays’s seem to be crazy getting ready for the week. It starts by rubbing the chicken with a coating of EVOO, garlic, rosemary, lemon zest & black pepper.
This chicken from Whole Foods was a big boy at just over 5#, the recipe said 20-30 minutes per # at 350 deg. which had a me a little worried. Put I started it in the oven plenty early and think it came out in under 2 hours. The skin was crispy, and the flavor great. This could end being part of the perfect roast chicken, a coating of fat, and a medium temperature.
Next time I will omit the garlic from the rub as it burns being exposed in the oven for that much time. They note this as a suggestion at the bottom of the page, but I wanted to try it as rx’d just once. I ended up flicking off the worst bits and then taking the picture. Not sure why that was not a suggestion brought into the body of the recipe as I think the garlic will burn everytime. As I read the various paleo cookbooks I am sometime left scratching my head at little things like this. The current generation of paleo cookbooks are great but have a ways to go to catch up with the real masters.
03 Saturday Nov 2012
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The last recipe I posted was for two roast chickens. This week I’ve decided to take those carcasses from the fridge and make stock. Here is my recipe for chicken stock.
2 Chicken Carcasses
1 or 2 Carrots
1 or 2 stalks celery
Garlic
Peppercorns
Bay leaf
16 Cups of water
Simmer for 4 hours
Chill overnight
During the simmer I couldn’t remember if I should or shouldn’t cover the pot so I covered some with a small gap. In the end it only produced just over 6 cups of stock. The stock had a great flavor and looked to be on the darker side, hard to tell with nothing to compare. I plan to make stock again in a few weeks and make some tweaks.
15 Monday Oct 2012
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Back to the 52 Chickens project, this week I decided to make Julia Child’s classic roast chicken as portrayed by Nom Nom Paleo. I did not check any resources to see how true to Julia’s recipe she was I may look for the source and then make this again.
This was a really easy recipe, simple to follow and execute. With some pretty nice looking & tasty results.
I most interested in tracking the way various temperatures and cooking times effect the outcome. NNP starts with the oven preheated to 425 deg. the chicken goes in for 15 minutes then the temp gets lowered to 350. After and hour total my chickens were still only 125 deg. internal temp so I upped the oven a bit to 365 and took the chickens out after a total cooking time of 90 min. They were not as crispy as I expected even being coated with butter, I think next time I will start the oven a bit hotter and be sure the butter is softer so it can more easily coat the whole chicken. I also need to reserve a little butter to coat the veggies before they go in the roaster.
The nice thing about cooking two chickens is now a I have two carcasses ready to make stock!
12 Friday Oct 2012
Posted in Pints
A Wee Heavy 