Shrimp in Garlic, Bacon, Mushroom Tomato Sauce

I love wilted greens. For some reason, something about slightly limp lettuce warmed by some kind of sauteed meat in a sauce appeals to me. I think it's a texture thing. I also love shrimp. So it would only make perfect sense in my head to put these two things together. Check out this recipe for something quick and refreshing as the weather gets warmer (or stays exactly the same here in Hawaii).

The lower left corner is my homemade bacon!
And tomato paste and coconut milk are not pictured.
The lemon just showed up there, uninvited.

You will need:
1/4c. chopped up bacon, or some other meat like steak or a pork chop (not cooked)*
3/4c. chopped up mushrooms (also tiny squares)
1tbsp butter (more if using non-fatty meat like steak)
Three sprigs of fresh basil
1.5 tsp crushed garlic, or 2-3 cloves finely minced
1/2 tsp fresh ground pepper
1lb. shrimp, shelled and cut into chunks
3tbsp (roughly half a can) tomato paste
1/2c coconut milk (in a can or in a carton, but none of this "lite" junk)
fresh greens or other vegetables like zucchini noodles

*If you use steak or pork, make sure you get a fairly marbled or fatty cut, leaner cuts will dry out and become too chewy. Try a porterhouse steak or a pork shoulder blade steak.

Take your chopped up bacon and put it in a pan over medium heat. When the bacon is about half way cooked and on its way to being nice and crispy, put in the mushrooms and the butter. Mushrooms seem to suck up a ton of oil when they cook, so rather than have your pan dry, add the oil. If you are some kind of lunatic and you don't like butter (especially the good stuff from Kerry Gold, they probably give their cows Guinness over there too, luckiest damn cows), you can use coconut oil instead.

When everybody is crispy in the pan, add half the basil. As you can see in this picture, I have some crazy basil plants, and I haven't harvested them like I should. Technically you should trim the basil before it flowers. All of the energy and flavor stored in the plant goes into making it bloom rather than producing green and flavorful leaves. So technically, these basil leaves will be kind of bland. I don't use basil often enough to warrant doing this, so I just use the flowers like I would basil leaves, and voila. Defreakinglicious. Add the garlic and ground pepper and continue to toss around the pan.

Throw the shrimp into the mix. This is starting to get good. Fast.

Now you can add the coconut milk and tomato paste. Turn the heat down low, whisking in the tomato paste so it begins to thicken the coconut milk and make a sauce. Simmer this for five minutes or until your sauce is thick enough to make you the happiest person ever. I'm easily amused so it only took five minutes.

Put some lettuce on a plate and spoon your mixture over it. The heat of the sauce will wilt the lettuce but keep it crunchy. A great mix of flavors and textures, this dish is probably the best thing I've made in a long time. And it's ridiculously easy. Sometimes I amaze myself. And I already know I'm pretty awesome.

**UPDATE I checked on my pickles. I didn't weigh them down, and they molded. Overnight. So, make sure you keep your cucumbers sunk, or they will be moldy, and you will throw them away lest you get food poisoning.**

Roasted Garlic Pork Belly

I gave you my two cents about bacon in a recent post. Is it paleo? Is it not? Will either response keep me from eating bacon? The answer to the last is a resounding no. I will gnaw someone in half to get to bacon. In fact, if Denny's wasn't so horribly nonpaleo in pretty much everything it serves, I'd consider going there just to take part in its holiday Baconalia (and yes, I chuckled when I heard this ad on the radio... because it's like Bacchanalia, get it? Oh Denny's, appealing to the nerds among us...). Not surprisingly, since you can make bacon out of any cut of pork, conversely you can do any number of things with a side of pork belly! Today I'll show you my recipe for roasted garlic pork belly. Admittedly, this particular batch was a little too fatty, even for me. But you can find portions of pork side that have higher ratio of meat to fat than this one did. Sure made some amazing eating though... despite feeling a little ill afterwards...

So! You start off with raw pork that looks like it should be bacon (the picture shows about 1.7 lbs of pork belly). You may or may not be able to find this in your grocery store. Since Oahu (and Hawaii in general) has such a high population of people from different parts of Asia, and pork in its various cuts is a dietary staple, I easily pick it up at the commissary. Elsewhere, you may have to check out Whole Foods or a local butcher. If they don't have it, they can definitely order it. And it's well worth it.

First, use a very sharp knife and slice the skin in a cross hatch pattern. It not only looks pretty, but allows you to get nice crispy edges on the skin as it roasts. Yes you should leave the skin on. No it's not weird to eat real pig skin. If you've never been into sports, throw it about your kitchen and pretend you played football once. Now, mix 1 tsp garlic salt, 1 tsp dried sage or fresh sage, 1/2 tsp ground pepper, 2 tsp chopped garlic or two to three crushed and chopped cloves of garlic and pretty much whatever the hell else you want. You might be able to see the small spice jar without a lid on the right. That's Wegman's BBQ seasoning mix, which is perfect for this. If you are a sad human being and you don't have a Wegman's nearby, find some other BBQ or similar seasoning mix and douse your pork belly with that too. Trust me, it can only make it better. Once you've rubbed the pork down with your spice mixture, making sure to get it into all the crosshatches in the skin, put it and any remaining or additional spices you want into a casserole dish. This will release a lot of juice and fat, so make sure you have enough room for this to cook (e.g. don't put it on a cookie sheet or in a shallow pan).

We have a midget grill...

Put this in an oven at 450 deg F for about a half hour to get it nice and hot and crispy, then reduce the heat to 350. Now slow roast this to perfection for at least 1.5 to 2 hours. If you're like me and don't care about added sugar in the form of maple syrup or molasses, drizzle some on top when you reduce the temperature to 350. It adds a great sweet flavor but also gets gooey on the pig skin for the grand finale. Time consuming? Yes. Incredibly delicious? You bet your sweet bippy.

Now, if you're like me and slow roasting just isn't enough, you can finish cooking this masterpiece on the grill. Besides, if you're working on a painting, you don't just slap on paint when you're almost done just to put an end to it. You finesse it. And grilling pork belly is definitely the right kind of finesse. So, after the two hours are up, slap the strips on a grill for a few minutes on each side to crisp it up. It shouldn't fall apart as would a pot roast, but be gentle. You don't want to ruin the most amazing thing you're going to eat all week.

Like I mentioned above, I was a bit ill after eating all this, because it had SO much fat. Did that stop me from eating it? Of course not. But in retrospect, I would get a leaner cut next time. But nothing beats that first crispy, sweet, gooey bite. And from there, it's all downhill. I paired this with some butternut squash and (of course) bacon roasted in the oven on the rack below the pork belly. Dave was doing some serious work between crossfit and PT so the extra carbs were necessary for him. I'm sure meals like this are why I only maintain weight... But I'm okay with that. Good, real food is hard to come by these days, and I'm not about to ignore the fruits of my labor when they take so long to produce. Admittedly this recipe is not for those who don't have hours on end to cook. BUT! I would recommend for the temporally challenged to put their pork belly and seasonings into a crock pot, turn it on low all day, and then come home and grill or broil the end result. Same idea, just less work! The pork will cook in its juices just the same as it would in the oven! Problem solved!

I am not a recipe genius. I will be the first to admit. My recipe is inspired by the countless other posts when googling "paleo pork belly," and especially this post from Modern Paleo Warfare. **WARNING this website is full of obscenity and references to sexy meat. Don't say I didn't warn you.** I'd love to meet these guys across the pond. Their posts are hilarious if infrequent. Check out their blog for other great recipes of the paleo persuasion.

So that's it for today! Two posts in one day! I'm spent! Let me know what you think in the comments!

Because. Bacon.

One of the best parts of paleo to the uninitiated has to be the focus on meat and cooking with animal fat.  The taste of duck fat, beef tallow or bacon drippings as the base for sauteed shallots and asparagus is unparalleled. Something about the richness that animal fats impart to food outpaces their vegetal oil counterparts. I most certainly jumped on the animal fat cooking bandwagon of paleo from the beginning. My mother always had a can of bacon grease under the sink in an old coffee can, back in the day when Maxwell House came in an aluminum can not plastic. She never used it to cook, but she got the practice from my grandmother, who I swear to gods is Paula Deen's long lost sister. She often asks for extra crackers to go with her butter.... Anyway, my old school Polish grandma drowns her pierogies in butter and fries her eggs in all the bacon fat she can get. I once attempted to put a paper towel on a plate to soak up the butter after frying the pierogies. I almost lost a hand.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:NCI_bacon.jpg

But really, let's think about cured meat. Bacon. Side of pork or pork belly or whatever cut of pork you want to call it (you can truly make bacon out of any cut of pork, for instance Canadian bacon from a pork loin instead of side, or back bacon which is two cuts of pork cured together) cured in sugar and salt and usually smoked. Sure, cured meat doesn't require sugar to be considered cured, but you would be hard pressed (pun only slightly intended) to find a sugarless bacon. The bacon you find in stores is not traditionally cured, though.  That would take time and effort, and why do things the traditional way when you can create a machine of tiny needles to inject your pork with these very ingredients and liquid smoke then package it and sell it as "bacon"?

So if it's cured in salt, and more importantly sugar, can we really call bacon "paleo." There are varying opinions on what is and is not paleo: dairy, sugars like agave and honey, sprouted grains. But added sugar is almost always a no-no. I cannot find any kind of bacon cured with honey. I'm not sure I'd even want to eat it. Clover tasting bacon... does not sound appealing. Even if you make bacon yourself (like I do), you still cure it with brown sugar, which is just regular processed cane/beet/white sugar with some molasses thrown in for color and taste. So if we're looking at the paleo commandments, thou shalt not eat added sugar ranks fairly high on the list. Which would leave bacon out in the cold and definitely not in your paleo frying pan.

On the flip side, cured meat has enjoyed a long and valued history across the globe. This website claims the Romans ate a cured cut of pork called "petaso." I can't seem to verify that claim anywhere else, but the Romans were indeed into indulgence from time to time, and I'll bet cured pork goes great with an amphora of wine. This website claims even the Chinese in 1500 BCE ate salted pork. Smoked and cured meat remains a delicacy in so many countries, like the Nordic specialty gravlax (and a favorite of mine to make and eat). So, if we've been preserving our meat with smoke and salt and probably something sugary for a long time, that would fall in line with the general gist of the paleo/primal guidelines. I'm sure no one would argue that a side of bacon cured in boiled figs would be much more paleo than the stuff in a plastic package on the shelf, but then again the relative "recentness" of the Romans in the grand scheme of human history would probably not satisfy the paleo fundamentalists either...

Regardless, the focus on bacon as a paleo friendly meat is not nearly as clear cut as most paleo folks should believe. It's got added sugar, and not any happy substitute like agave nectar or honey. It's also incredibly fatty, and unless you're buying pastured and grass fed pork bacon (which is ridiculously expensive), the animal fats you're consuming come from an animal that eats the same junk that you wouldn't want to put in your body yourself (e.g. corn products, soy products, pieces of other humans...). Studies have shown that people who eat cured meats of any kind have higher rates of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) as well as heart health issues and diabetes.  Most of these concerns are linked to things cured with sodium nitrate, which not all cured meats use, but still. The health concerns should make you think twice about buying a slab from the store without question.

Feel free to make up your own mind about bacon. I hate to be Debbie Downer to the bacon party. I myself make my own bacon out of pork from the local store which is most definitely not pastured or grass fed at all. We do what we can with the resources available to us, and if I win the lottery, I will buy my own pig farm and give them lots of organic grass and treats and give all of you bacon until your insides explode. But until then, I do what I can to avoid nitrates and bring home my own bacon.

This has been quite a long post full of things that are no doubt making you question your allegiance to all things paleo if it's remotely possible that BACON of all amazing things could be unpaleo... So let me give you my insanely quick recipe for making your own bacon.

Take 1.5 - 3 pounds of pork belly/pork side/pork loin (if you want a leaner cut). The pork could be one giant slab or inch thick slabs, it doesn't really matter. Put it into a large ziploc bag. Throw in about 3/4 c. brown sugar and 1/2 - 3/4 c. sea salt and mix it together to coat all the pork. Then add about a teaspoon of liquid smoke. My favorite is hickory. But really, use whatever you want. Then add two tablespoons of molasses. Something about the liquid smoke and the molasses makes this particular wet brine for bacon defreakinglicious. Put it on top of something like a plate or plastic container to make sure the bag doesn't leak all over your fridge. Now, leave the pork in the bag in the fridge for five to seven days. Flip the bag from side to side once each day to make sure both sides get equally brined and cured. After its time in the fridge is up, take it out and rinse it off in the sink. Then put it on a cookie sheet or in a casserole dish and bake it at 200 degrees F until the internal temp reads 150 degrees. DONE! BAM! You officially have bacon. Now cut it up in more manageable chunks for cutting and put it in a different bag in the freezer. Take it out as you need it to keep it fresh for a long time. If you have a super sharp and thin knife and your freezer doesn't keep things as cold as the arctic, you should be able to cut through it while frozen.

Hope that blows your mind with how easy it is to make your own nitrate free bacon... And if I've scared you away from bacon, I'm sorry. Well. No. I'm not. It just means more for me....

So Many Recipes, So Little Time

Kim (left) and I (right) in November 2012

My college roommate, Kim, who is also my sister/bff/partner-in-crime-when-dancing-to-Michael-Jackson-songs-at-2-am, has recently jumped on the paleo wagon and was interested in buying a cookbook to help her along her paleo way. She works full time and lives in a rural area, so buying tons of fancy (read: expensive) ingredients from specialty stores is not easy nor feasible for her (or for me for that matter). She also doesn't have tons and tons of free time on her hands to make all her own condiments and elaborate meals. She's, you know, like a normal person with a budget and time constraints.

To combat all these things and make going paleo as painless as possible, I referred her to a gazillion different paleo blogs that grace the internet these days. I personally am not big on using cookbooks or exact recipes.  I think cooking is more of an art than a science when it comes to making paleo food. It's about seasoning things to taste, to what tastes good to you then and there when you're cooking it, not what some recipe tells you to do. So I encouraged her to look at some of the blogs out there for recipes, rather than spend her hard earned money on a book. I'd like to show you all some of these blogs too, to make your daily load lighter and your wallet heavier.

My egg frittata muffins, not Michelle Tam's, which are far sexier.

My ALL TIME FAVORITE paleo blog has to be Nom Nom Paleo by Michelle Tam. She is amazing. She takes GREAT pictures of food. I drool every time I check out her website. Literally. Like all over the keyboard. Because her food sounds refreakingdiculous. And one of the best recipes she's got has to be her prosciutto wrapped mini frittata muffins. They changed my world. They. Are. Stupid. Yummy. As with all recipes, you can tweak this one to suit yourself. She includes spinach and tomatoes. I love them, but those veggies do not love me unfortunately. So I use onions, mushrooms, asparagus, and zucchini, all shredded on a mandoline. If you wanna throw broccoli and cauliflower or eggplant in there, knock yourself right out. You can also partially cook strips of bacon and use those to line the sides of the bacon tin like I did and they come out full of bacony goodness. And then, if you manage not to eat all of them fresh out of the oven, you can throw them into a container in the fridge and eat two or three (or all of them) for breakfast for the next few days. They travel well and survive the fridge. And of course bacon makes everything amazing...

Nom Nom Paleo also has an app for all her awesome recipes! You get super extra special stuff and recipes if you buy her app. From what I hear, it's totally worth it. I haven't bought it, because, as I said before, I'm a cheap b*st*rd and I don't usually pay for apps. But someday, when I win the lottery, or maybe become gainfully employed, I'll purchase this app and let you know how it is. I'm sure it's worth every penny.

Well! That's it for today! Check out this recipe and the other amazing foods that Ms. Tam prepares for her family. Ugh, I wish I was her kid... 

Up and running again!

Wow it's only been a few months since I last posted... Okay it's been eight to be exact. But life has thrown some epic curve balls in those intervening months, so cut me maybe a little slack. Pretty please!

In the coming weeks I plan on not only sharing some of my favorite recipes from around the internet but also throwing in my own creations and exploring all the different approaches to paleo with free resources to help you on your way. In addition, I'll be highlighting some of the haters out there and how paleo folks have responded to them. This "diet" has gotten a lot of flack lately and I think if you're going to implement a completely different way of eating into your life, you should be well equipped to inform all the haters by dropping knowledge on their ignorant... butts.

So! Without further ado, let's get this paleo party started! (That was a little lame, I'll be the first to admit. Chalk it up to not having blogged in forever...) I've been taking a few pictures here and there of what paleo stuff has been fueling my bod over the last few months since I got my nifty Samsung tablet, but none of them are in progress shots sadly. Those are my fave since they document my absolute favorite part of paleo: getting up close and personal with real food. But I'll be sure to get some next time. And hopefully soon I'll get my camera set up for video shots of fun stuff like fermenting tea (aka kombucha) or curing your own bacon... both of which are stupid easy.

Here we have a picture of my experiment with cured salmon. It was not the gravlax success story I was hoping for, but I made the best of it by treating it like salmon bacon and serving it with some gooey farm fresh eggs over easy. I tend to eat all my eggs over easy and mangled into a rather unattractive garbage plate-looking monstrosity. It's my mother's fault. 

Check back again tomorrow for a new recipe from a wicked awesome paleo blog!!! Hopefully you will love her stuff as much add I do, if you don't love her already. And no. I'm not talking about myself. I'm not quite that vapid... Close though...

Bacon Cures Many Ills

Today was a horrible day at work.  It was busy.  I got yelled at by patients and coworkers alike. I finally got to lunch 6 hours after my shift started (makes eating proper paleo really difficult when people don't understand that eating every 3-4 hours and WHEN YOU'RE HUNGRY is a normal thing...). I stepped up and fixed a lot of problems with extra care, and no one probably will ever notice, much less care.  I got teary eyed as I sat in my car in the parking garage, not because I was necessarily sad, but because I was so overwhelmed.  Today was an epic FML. In fact, I think I may have said that a few times...

But, I woke up today telling a friend to remember to make today a good day.  And so, I made my time outside of work count. Mostly by cooking, but also by purchasing a few things for a project in the wings.  (More on that if anything comes of it...)

"What did you cook?" you ask.

"THE MOST AMAZING MEAL EVER!!!!"

Bacon-ated Steak with Portabella, Asparagus and Yellow Squash

 

Here we have everything we need: meat, awesome cutting knife, pecans, asparagus, portabella mushroom, yellow squash, shallots and some fats (duck fat and coconut oil, which I ended up not using). There's only one thing that could make this better, and I'll get to that in a minute.

Again, order of operations being key, I photographed pretty much the whole cooking process this time.  It took me probably 45 minutes from start to finish, but I can eat this meal for probably 2 dinners with how much food it made. So not bad in the grand scheme of time.

Heat up your non-stick or cast iron skillet and throw in : duck fat and shallots and chopped up portabella mushroom. I cut mine in big chunks. Let these babies fry up, and get mellow. I like to throw mushrooms in at the beginning because they get browned and soak up the flavors of other stuff in the pan. Takes about 5-7 minutes on medium heat. Don't burn these guys on high heat if you're in a hurry. This dish is too good to be a jerk to your food.
Then throw in : your sliced up squash and 2 inch pieces of asparagus.  Cover it up! Good life lesson. But mostly to keep the moisture in and steam the newb veggies you just threw in there.  This should also be on medium heat.  Just put the cover on the pan and leave for a few minutes at a time so the sides of the squash have time to brown.
It was at this point, as these veggies were cooking, that I was thinking "Damn, this really could be amazing... But really.  Only one thing could make it better..." and so then we ended up with this:  bacon. 

I put in probably about 3-4 big slices worth of bacon, chopped up into little squares with my nifty red knife that literally cuts through everything (clearly frozen bacon was no match, and thank goodness). Here we have the other pan, all steamed and cooking and mixed together, preparing itself mentally for the amazing baconness that will soon arrive.  In all, cooking this down probably took about 15-20 minutes total, and once it was done, I put it into a casserole dish to hang out til the end. So now, I decided to throw the pecans into the same pan as the bacon.  Because pecans and bacon sound heavenly.  Let those cook down a bit more (I added the pecans half way through cooking the bacon) and then drain. But save that fat, because unlike most ways of eating, paleo actually lets you eat things in bacon fat, duck fat, all kinds of yummy fats. My gram would be so proud.

So now, we come to "Bacon-ated" steak.  I used some bacon fat and bits from the cast iron pan in the same frying pan that cooked the veggies, turned up the heat a bit, and then pretty much just let the steak do its thing. It splutters a lot of grease, so get that cover handy, and a wooden spoon to help keep the cover slightly off kilter and let the moisture escape. We don't want to steam it, but I'd rather keep my stove from looking like BP took over my kitchen. 
I threw on a little bit of "Molasses and Bacon" seasoning from Grill Mates (picked it up at Sam's Club) for good measure.  You can't have too much bacon. And here's the finished product, resting for about 5 minutes so all the juices don't run away.
Last up, put some veggies on that plate, cut that steak, and add something good for dessert, like a handful of raspberries. and voila. You will totally make your neighbor jealous... unless he's vegan and absolutely hammered right now... like my neighbor...

De-freaking-licious. That looks like it came out of a freaking magazine, doesn't it? I've thoroughly impressed myself.

And so, while I'm still working out the mechanics of portions and ratios as suggested in the paleo lifestyle (I Zoned for a good 7 months prior to paleo, and thus have an OCD attention to measuring things out for each meal and serving), I kinda ate until I was full.  And that was a pretty good way to get lost in the joy of cooking and eating after a crappy day at work.

What do you think? I don't claim my dishes to be the result of rocket-science-like-recipe-making, in fact I pretty much use the same order of operations for all of my cooking and just vary the ingredients.  Tried a similar dish? What combination of veggies and spices did you use?

And remember. Bacon makes everything better.  Especially crappy days at work.