Recipe File

 Perhaps one day I shall de-randomize these . . . 

Thai-Style Totally Paleo Chicken Salad (serves 4)


*dice half an onion finely in the food processor and dump it in a bowl

*dice 4-6 medium boneless skinless chicken breasts with a pinch to a small handful of fresh cilantro in the food processor, and add to the onion in the bowl

*add a generous shake of ground ginger and an equally liberal spritz of lime juice and stir to mix

*add just enough coconut milk to dampen and cohere the mixture and stir again

*Taste and adjust seasonings

*serve on fresh greens or in a pretty bowl, with fruit and/or halved hardboiled eggs on the side


Shoestring Sweet Potatoes

 Julienne several sweet potatoes (I find that once they reach a certain concavity, I can't julienne them any more, so I save the pieces to dice for a sweet-potato-onion roast), till you have the size pile you desire. Melt a couple tablespoons of coconut oil in a non-stick pan over medium heat, and saute the sweet potatoes until their orange fades to yellow, and some of them at least begin to be crispy. You can salt them and/or sprinkle with your favorite spice mix. They go wonderfully with curry, but would be good any time you want something sort of like French fries.


Leftover Greek Stew

I had made a Greek Hot Plate dinner, with a mix of ground beef and lamb, seasoned with garlic, cinnamon, nutmeg, and allspice and sauteed with diced onions and a can of tomato paste. To make leftover stew I sauteed yet more onions in some beef fat and stock left over from browning the original meat, added a can of diced tomatoes with their juice, some more of the spices I'd used in the Hot Plate saute, and the leftover meat (a coconut-oil jar full). We chopped in some extra spinach, added a bay leaf, and let it simmer for about half an hour while we finished up school.  

Salmon Muffins: 

Easy-peasy carmeleasy! I adapted the Meat and Spinach Muffins from Well Fed for Friday consumption, with great success. Here's how:

2 cans wild Alaskan salmon, drained, but with skin & bones
1 medium onion, sliced and diced very thin and small
dill weed to taste -- I use a lot, but no idea how much
salt & pepper, also to taste
4 large eggs

Preheat oven to 400. Mash the drained salmon with its skin and bones in a large bowl until all the big clumps are broken up. Mix in the onion and seasonings. Beat the eggs and add them, mixing everything thoroughly.

Pour the salmon-egg mixture evenly into paper muffin cups in a conventional muffin tin or, if you have one, a silicone muffin baker. I have one and adore it -- that way I don't have to remember to buy muffin cups. Fill each cup to the brim, as the muffins tend to shrink a bit as they cool. Bake on 400 for 20-30 minutes, until gently browned on top. Let muffins cool, then tumble them out of the muffin tin to make room for the next round.

Makes about a dozen salmon muffins. My 3 kids at home ate 3 each for lunch, and I divided the remaining three in half and arranged them artistically on a plate as a little nibbly side dish at dinner the same night.


Seaweed Snax

My wonderful kindergarten-teacher next-door neighbor, who has celiac, has opened the eyes of my younger children to the wonderful world of gluten-free eating. Going to play with Mrs. M. and eating gluten-free snacks is the highlight of any day in the life of my 8- and 9-year-olds.

Because she's a teacher, she doesn't just play with them and feed them -- every moment at her house is a teachable moment. So she has not only fed them seaweed snacks, but she's drawn them into the experience of making seaweed snacks. And now they've taught me. Here's what you do:

You take a sheet of that seaweed that's made for wrapping sushi, right? And you hold it in some tongs over the burner on your stovetop. Mrs. M. and I both have gas stoves, so we're holding the seaweed over actual flame, but I don't see why this wouldn't work with any other kind of burner, with the added advantage of not catching your seaweed on fire quite so easily as we have done. (Adult supervision, folks! Somebody supervise the adults with the flaming seaweed!)

So you toast your sheet of seaweed for approximately thirty seconds, until it's shriveled and crisped a little. Then you eat it. You could salt it;  my kids seem to like it as is. The seaweed is a little too fishy-tasting for me, but the kids love the whole experience, and it makes a very nutrient-dense snack with enough crisp to satisfy a craving for chips or popcorn.


Sunday Brunch:  I had had to go to the store for coconut oil, which Aldi didn't have, and there, in addition to the frozen shrimp, I bought some jicama. A jicama. A jicama root. One of however you designate a unit of jicama. 

Anyway, jicama. You can slice or julienne it raw for use in salads, which I've done, but you can also cook it. If you're going to use it in place of potatoes, in for instance a recipe for home fries or potato salad, you have to pre-cook it for a long time -- 12 to 24 hours, according to the cookbook -- to tenderize it enough for it to stand in for a cooked potato. I bought my jicama on Friday, peeled and diced it, and put it to cook in the crockpot covered with water for what turned out to be slightly more than 24 hours. It cooked all Friday evening, all day Saturday, and all morning Sunday, until I was ready to use it in a ground-turkey hash. 

I drained the jicama in a colander, then fried it in some coconut oil in my cast-iron skillet.  To the fried jicama I added about half a bag of frozen peppers and onions, which I'd thawed in the fridge and pressed the water out of. As all this was cooking, I seasoned it with salt, pepper, paprika, garlic powder, and chili powder, and when the vegetables were looking done, I added . . .  half a pound, maybe? . . . of pre-cooked ground turkey. More chili powder to spice it up, and scrambled eggs on the side, and that was brunch after Mass. 


Greek Cabbage Rolls

I guess I was thinking, you know, dolmates or something. I had a couple of pounds of ground turkey already browned and flavored with salt, pepper, onion, and garlic;  to that I added a generous dose of cinnamon, nutmeg, and allspice, plus one can of tomato paste. I also added in some leftover garlicky cooked spinach from last night's dinner.

While this meat mixture was keeping warm, I de-stemmed one of the heads of cabbage and pulled away the toughest outer leaves. Then I carefully removed about ten thinner inside leaves, filled each one with some of the meat mixture, rolled/folded it up into as neat a package as I could manage, and nestled the packages into a baking dish. When I'd used up all the meat and filled two not-so-large bakers, I covered them with foil and put them in to bake for 30-45 minutes, just enough for the cabbage to be tender. 

These were delicious. The younger kids peeled off their cabbage leaves and just ate the meat inside, but really, the cabbage with the meat worked very well. It was a filling dish, so unless the bottomless teenager on dish duty has finished it all off, there will be some leftovers for tomorrow.  


For a side dish I julienned two sweet potatoes and made shoestrings/noodles by sauteeing in coconut oil, with a little salt and cinnamon. This may be my new favorite side dish in all the world. We also had Italian-cut green beans (from a bag of frozen) sauteed in coconut oil with salt and pepper. 



Peasant/Provencal-ish Cabbage Soup 


Okay. Here's what I used:

two medium sweet onions, diced very finely
two large carrots, peeled and also diced very finely
three bay leaves
thyme, sage, and garlic to taste
knob of coconut oil
one can tomato paste
one medium head cabbage, shredded
one 1-lb can of crushed tomatoes (or diced, or stewed, whatever you have)
water to cover
salt and pepper to taste

Saute onion and carrot in coconut oil in the bottom of a stockpot. Add bay leaves and spices. Because my stockpot has a relatively thin bottom (it's just enamelware, nothing fancy), I added a little water at this point to keep things from burning to the bottom. Experience dictates these things.

When onion is transparent and carrot is starting to get soft and the whole thing is fragrant, add the can of tomato paste. Stir into the onion/carrot/spice mixture, then add the cabbage and toss to coat with the vegetable/spice/tomato paste. Add the can of crushed tomatoes, then water to cover. Salt and pepper to taste. Simmer until cabbage is wilted and transparent, and you're ready to serve.

If you do dairy, you could top this with a sprinkling of parmesan cheese. If you do grains, a loaf of crusty bread would be nice. We do neither at the moment, so are having hard-boiled eggs, halved and dusted with paprika, as a protein side.

Vegetable broth would be better than water for this soup, but I didn't have any on hand.


Mexican-Style Paleo Chicken Breast Dinner

I had all these chicken breasts which I'd cooked up on Sunday, plus a bag of frozen peppers and onions, plus carrots and a head of cauliflower. Here's what I did with them: 

*Sauteed peppers and onions in a knob of coconut oil. They were frozen, so I wanted not only to thaw them but to cook down the water in them so they wouldn't be runny. I turned the heat down on the big iron skillet and let them simmer away while I worked on other parts of the meal.

*While those were cooking, I put chicken breasts (about 8 -- they're kind of small) in a bowl, then in a microwaveable cup I melted another big spoonful of coconut oil (about 2 T, I would guess) with chili powder and unsweetened cocoa powder. Not quite sure how much:  "to taste," anyway. I stirred this all up together and poured it over the chicken, tossing to coat. Then I let that sit.  

*I had the kids peel five carrots, which I then cut into carrot sticks. As I'd done with the chicken, I melted some cumin and cinnamon with a knob of coconut oil in the microwave and then tossed the carrots in that and put them in the oven on 375 to roast for about half an hour (this is a Well Fed recipe, and actually in the cookbook it's more detailed, and they're even more delicious than what I'm describing here. This was my quickie corner-cutting version).

*When the chicken had marinated for a while in the spice/oil mix, and the carrots were close to done in the oven, I added it to the sauteed peppers, scraping all the spice marinade into the skillet. I covered the skillet and let all that simmer together (but not too long -- just enough to warm the pre-cooked chicken)

*I stemmed, chopped, and "riced" the cauliflower in the food processor. In a separate skillet, I sauteed it for about five minutes in coconut oil, until it was tender but not mushy.

Kids liked their chicken and cauliflower rice to be separate on the plate. At least one grownup opted to have chicken, peppers, and the chili-chocolate-mole-tasting pan juices over the cauliflower rice. Carrots on the side.

Paleo Italian-Style Hamburger Helper

After cooking up 9 pounds of boneless, skinless chicky breasts and three pounds of ground turkey for use this week, I made what I guess amounted to paleo Italian-style Hamburger Helper for our Sunday-night supper. Here's what I did:

* Brown 3 lbs ground beef with 1 diced onion, a lot of garlic powder, and Italian spices (basil, sage, oregano, etc) also liberally applied

*Add 1 can tomato paste, mushrooms, and a shake of frozen chopped spinach (just enough so that there's really spinach in the "sauce," but you don't exactly taste it. Let the meat sauce/mixture simmer and fill the house with its delicious aroma.

*Make cauliflower "rice" by dicing it to a rice-like consistency in the food processor (a Well-Fed invention -- cauliflower "rice," that is, not the food processor). Add to the meat mixture and cook until tender (about 5-10 minutes -- I wanted it gently al dente, but not raw-cauliflower crunchy).

On the side:  carrot sticks and kale chips (see Melanie's recipe in Snacks)