Simplicity

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I think at the heart of it, we're all creatures of habit. We generally like routine. Maybe some of us like to live on the edge, live spontaneously. But at the end of the day, we still probably prefer to take a shower at a certain time of the day, or eat foods in order on a plate or conversely mix everything together... We do things that we've grown accustomed to doing. 

Sometimes this works in our favor. When we jump on the paleo bandwagon, we get into the habit of eating meats of all kinds, nuts, fruits, veggies and healthy fats. We get into the habit of avoiding grains, legumes, dairy, processed foods and added sugars. We are seriously, if not literally, on a roll. And when we are faced with hunger and traditional eating times, we begin to make it a habit of choosing paleo things over nonpaleo things. Yay for us! Whoo!!!

Sometimes, though, we get stuck on these habits and we get into a rut. The same chicken breast and green beans, or eggs and bacon for breakfast, every day, for weeks.... It can get pretty old. Very quickly. Typical ways to get past this hurdle are to try out new recipes, eating things and parts of animals we never thought possible. In fact, this is what I do with my blog. I go out, buy weird animal parts like oxtails and beef cheeks, and then scour the internet for a gazillion recipes on how to cook these interesting bits. Then, I find my favorite and post them here. I love cooking new things. It's a challenge that I enjoy and I encourage you all to do the same.

But sometimes, we can get burnt out on the new just as easily as the old. And one piece of advice that I can happily pass on to other paleo newbs is this: buy what you would normally buy and cook what you would normally cook 80% of the time, and spend 20% of your time finding a little something new to add to your tool belt of cooking.

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These percentages work for me, the majority of the time. When I shop, I typically buy the same exact things at the grocery store. Same cuts of meat (with some exceptions, although buying weird cuts is now more habit than exception to the rule...), same vegetables, same spices and herbs. At the end of the day, when hubby gets home from work, and I have 1 hour to cook before crossfit, and simplicity wins out. Habits come in to full effect. I know what's in my fridge, and I know how I want to cook it. I'm going to grill some kind of meat. I'm going to pan fry or even (gasp!) microwave some veggies. I'm going to sit down and inhale what I just made. And then it's time to clean up and move on.

Because thinking so much about every meal you make is tiring and impractical. For day to day eating and living, we need something simpler. We need something habitual enough, but tasty to get by and avoid boredom. Crazy dishes like boiling cornish hens and making pickled relish are for weekends and free time. The daily grind is where the majority of our eating and our commitment to paleo falls into place. And rather than make it more difficult for ourselves, we should stick with our 80% habits and 20% new stuff ratio for the best result. 

So that being said, sometimes easier is better. I posted yesterday about my spicy mango barbecue sauce. Today's "recipe" isn't so much a recipe than it is a method recipe. Because sometimes barbecue is just barbecue. And that's more than enough.

You will need:

1/3c. Spicy Mango BBQ Sauce

4 Chicken leg drumsticks

1 pot boiling water

1tsp salt

3 zucchini, sliced long ways in uniform thickness (makes it easier to grill them)

Salt and pepper to season.

1. Heat up your grill and make sure it's properly seasoned. I like to brush my grill with the wire scrubber when it's hot and then take a paper towel with bacon grease or beef tallow and wipe it over the grate. It helps keep food from sticking.
2. Put your zucchini slabs on to cook, seasoning with salt and pepper. Remove when both sides have dark grill marks and the slabs become floppy, maybe two or three minutes per side depending on how hot your grill is.
3. While they're grilling, put the tsp of salt into the water and bring it to a boil.
4. When it's boiling, throw in your drumsticks. They can be frozen or partially thawed. Poaching them in seasoned water helps defrost and cook them so time on the grill is focused on crisping the outside instead of torching them to ensure the middle is cooked.
5. Boil these suckers on medium boil (don't boil the daylights out of them) for about 7-10 minutes. You want to cook them until they're almost done. Time will depend on the size of the legs. The drumsticks I had were like three times the size of a chicken wing drumstick.
6. When done, remove them and let them drain for a minute or two over the sink.
7. Now transfer them to a dish and baste them with the bbq sauce. The best part of poaching them first means that you don't have to worry about gross chicken bacteria getting into your sauce. You can literally baste them with the sauce until you eat them because they're already cooked. So way to save on sauce! Waste not, want not.
8. Grill these suckers until the outside skins are crispy and they want to fall off the bone with tenderness. Feel free to baste a few layers of sauce on the outside of the drumsticks. Again, you've eliminated your risk of salmonella by cooking them in the water first. I love this method of cooking...
9. Now, admire your handiwork with the grill. And slap some butter on your zucchini, preferably Kerry Gold because that sh*t is delicious. 

Admittedly, this has hollandaise sauce. But I had the time to make it.

Sometimes paleo is just grilling. It's not magical and mysterious. It's not a bunch of crazy substituted ingredients. It's not crazy cooking methods known only to elite chefs and paleolithic people. It's just real food, some nifty seasoning and a grill. And that's maybe the best part of paleo in the first place.

Paleo Awesomesauce and Ribs (or Chicken, or Whatever)

Shredded chicken thigh in awesomesauce.

When you immerse yourself into the paleo world, you realize just how much crap companies put into processed foods. Everything has HFCS (high fructose corn syrup) or sucralose or soy lecithin or any number of preservatives that literally no one can pronounce. All of these things are not real food. You don't recognize them. Your body won't recognize them. It switches your system into high gear to deal with these chemicals and junk and you're slowly poisoning your body and your health. To be paleo is to strive to eat real food, containing only things you recognize and preferably know where they came from.

But this gets a bit more complicated when it comes to condiments. Mustard, ketchup, mayonnaise, relish, barbecue sauce... We could make a long list of things in our fridges that persist long after we throw away all those other "nonpaleo" foods. If it weren't for the fact that perishable foods don't ship across the ocean very well, you'd probably find some Hellman's mayo and French's mustard in my fridge from living in Syracuse. They never seem to go bad and you never know when you might need some mustard for a recipe or some ketchup for a burger. But don't be fooled. All of these condiments have those evil fake ingredients above. So what's a paleo person to do?!

One website, the Paleo Diet Lifestyle blog, created by Sebastian Noel, gives all of us a bit of hope. If you've got some time and you like tooling around in the kitchen for some of the more involved recipes, you can have paleo versions of all the things mentioned above! Love ketchup? Make your own! Like relish? Bust that sh*t out! Hell, I even gave you my own recipe for that one. So you literally have no excuse. This particular post is great because it puts all of the recipes for "condiments" in one place. I was happy to see that barbecue sauce was also on this list. I did not go so far as to make paleo versions of things like ketchup and Worchestershire sauce (though I might, because I do so love typing and saying that word), but I didn't strictly follow this recipe either...

Then I found another great barbecue sauce recipe from ANOTHER great blog, that I hope to reference again in the near future because it's a literal treasure trove of awesomeness, The Domestic Man created by a guy with a crazy story (but apparently no name). I more or less followed this recipe, but of course I changed a lot of things. I'm so bad at planning ahead for recipes. I pretty much get an idea of something I want to make, then I check to see what I have on hand to make it, and substitute the sh*t out of it so I don't have to go shopping just for one recipe. Maybe I'm lazy. Maybe I'm just super effing creative and like to problem solve. Either way, check out his recipe first, then come back and we will chat.

Sauce in progress. My house smelled amazing.

Here are a few of my substitutions: Instead of whole tomatoes I used diced. I used regular apple cider vinegar instead of Braggs. I used regular molasses and chunks of fresh pineapple (I live in the land of pineapple so it seemed silly not to use up the one in my fridge) instead of honey and date molasses and orange juice. I skipped the dijon and added regular German style whole seed mustard and left out the allspice all together (because I didn't have it at the time). I used smoked paprika instead of regular... And I think that's pretty much it. Everything else is sort of the same. I say sort of because I don't measure very well. Teaspoons and tablespoons and cups are all great and whatnot... but meh. I made some damn sauce. And it worked. End of story.

Check out those recipes and decide which one sounds best to you. Since I substituted a lot of stuff, neither recipe is really the one I made, so I can't say which one tastes better having made neither. But the sauce I did make was freaking awesome. Thick and smokey and tangy. DEFREAKINGLICIOUS!

This lasted all of two seconds after this picture was taken.

I took that sauce and put it in my crock pot. Then, after baking a rack of pork ribs in the oven for about 1/2 hour at 400 degrees, I put the ribs into the sauce and cooked it on high for 6 hours with the lid ajar to let the moisture out (baking them first also helps release excess moisture that would boil your ribs rather than cook them in the sauce). The result was an amazing rack of ribs (that I ate with my hands! squee!!!) that went well with a goat cheese salad and half an avocado. You could probably have paired it with some really weird and gross sounding vegetables, like day old mushrooms cooked in a used Chuck Taylor hightop, and the meal still would have been awesomesauce. Maybe instead of barbecue sauce, I should just call it awesomesauce. Let's go with that.

So test out making your own barbecue sauce sometime. It's pretty easy, if just slightly time consuming. But on a weekend when you need time to relax and unwind, grab a glass of wine (or tequila, since we're all paleo and sh*t even with boozing) and make up some awesomesauce. Even if the sauce sucks (which I very much doubt would happen), you'll have been drinking wine or tequila and won't care either way. It's a win-win.

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....