More From the Cabbage Patch

Ever since I made that coleslaw last week, I've been craving cabbage. I've always liked cabbage...I think. I guess I only really ate it on top of salads and in coleslaw...Anyway. A while ago I read Melicious' recipe for Smokey Cabbage Saute and, after eating cabbage last week, I haven't been able to get it out of my head. So I made it.

I fried the bacons, and poured some of the grease into the saute pan along with a little bit of coconut oil.

Sauteing the onion (please excuse the Iphone pictures...)

Added the cabbage

After sauteing the cabbage a bit, I put the lid on and allowed the mixture to steam.

Then I added the bacon!

I also added a little bit of sea salt and garlic powder. I would have used fresh garlic, but I forgot to add it at the onion stage, which would have made sense.

Let me just say: I am loving the cabbage these days! We devoured almost the entire pan of this last night for dinner. I even added this to my scrambled eggs this morning...awesome!

Sea Foraging in Gloucester

Last weekend, M and I had the pleasure of joining my mother and her boyfriend (also an M...so let's call him M2) for dinner in Gloucester, MA. M2 spent his boyhood summers there as a wee lobsterman selling lobsters for something like 25 cents per pound. Lucky for us, he still has lobster traps and an amazing fishing boat: our trips to Gloucester are, naturally, filled with lobsters and boat rides. Mama and M2 whipped up an amazing meal for us in one of the most beautiful and relaxing places on Earth.

The Aerie (Eagle's Nest)

M2 built these stairs leading up to the house. One of his many Sisyphus Projects.

I've spent many hours scaling these rocks. Back in my college marine bio days, I could always be found searching for crabs in the seaweed.

The view.

The dinner table.

We started off the night with a boat ride to Crane's Beach and a tour of the harbor. The sun was setting when we got back and started working on dinner.

We nibbled on cheese and summer sausage. Okay, everyone else "nibbled", I feasted.

The vegetables.

Yellow tomato, regular tomato and avocado.

Cucumber salad made with cucumbers and fennel from my mother's garden in VT.

Cucumbers, fennel, and red onion mixed with some Bragg Healthy Vinaigrette.

M2 caught two lobsters that we boiled up and ate with melted butter.

Surf and Turf. To go along with the two lobsters, we grilled us some steak. There was also corn on the cobb, but I don't do "the cobb" part. I hate corn stuck in my teeth. Plus, there's a surprising amount of corn on one cobb. I shaved it all off, and ate a little less than half of what was on my plate.

For dessert, I had made a traditional carrot cake in honor of my mother's 32nd birthday (*wink wink*). I followed a recipe from the Magnolia Bakery Cookbook. I substituted coconut oil for the vegetable oil that the recipe called for, but that was the only change that I made. Well, the cream cheese frosting recipe called for 5 cups of confectioners sugar, which I decided would give me instant metabolic syndrome. So I only used one cup of sugar, and that was definitely sweet enough for me.

The cake was perfect, if I do say so myself. Not too sweet, and wonderfully coconutty.

It was a delectable dinner with wonderful company in a beautiful setting. Sharing quality time with my family is very important to me, especially because my two sets of parents live in a different state than my sister and I. It's always a treat when they come to visit: we get spoiled with homemade mama food and people telling us we look pretty and stuff. Sometimes one needs a good dose of parental doting-- even when they're in their late 20's....

Sometimes I Get Jealous...

I love eating the way that I eat. I love eating the foods that I eat. Eating this way has helped me gain energy, changed my body composition and allowed me to comfortably stop counting calories and worrying all the time about gaining weight.

How do I eat, you ask? Well, I try very hard to follow a Primal way of eating. I'm not strictly Paleo, but I do avoid grains, legumes and dairy* whenever possible. I use unsweetened almond milk in my coffee and I enjoy the occasional spoonful of peanut butter. I will eat special goodies made with wheat flour at family get-togethers, but for the most part I bake with almond meal and sweeten said baked goods with honey or maple syrup. No oats, spelt, amaranth, sorghum, barley, buckwheat or kasha for me.

That being said, sometimes I get a bit jealous when I go through my daily food blog rounds. Carrots 'N' Cake, KERF, Oh She Glows and The Edible Perspective (to name a few) are always creating amazing looking oatmeal or pancake breakfasts. Oatmeal and pancakes with nut butters, chia seeds and berries and coconut! Drool-worthy overnight oats. When I look that the pictures of these concoctions, I sometimes feel like I'm missing out. I want to put all of those delicious toppings on top of something, but I choose not to eat grains. Thus, a grainy base is out.

Last weekend, I gave in to my jealousy and created an almond meal pancake monster, which I topped with blueberries, almond butter and maple syrup. Totally hit the spot!

Monster Almond Meal Pancake

Ingredients:

1/4 cup almond meal
1 egg
1 tsp cinnamon
1Tbsp chia seeds
~2Tbsp shredded coconut
blueberries

I fried this puppy in coconut oil over medium heat until cooked through and browned on each side. Once finished cooking, I topped it with maple syrup, almond butter and additional blueberries.

This was going to be a single serving sized pancake, but it turned out to be gloriously dense and pretty gigantic, so M and I split it. It was everything I'd hoped it would be and more.

The primal way of eating works incredibly well for me. Not only do I feel and look healthier, I've also made huge gains in my workouts since switching away from the standard American diet. Eating this way, on top of my exercise routine, has given me the fitness results that I've always wanted...and I'm still improving everyday. A lot of that has to do with the way that I work out, but, they say, your body composition is 20% exercise and 80% diet.

I rarely crave grains, legumes or dairy and I don't really miss them either. Peanut butter is an exception: I do crave PB every now and then, but because my diet is pretty clean otherwise, I allow myself to give in to this craving (within reason). I eat so many vegetables and such a wide variety of vegetables that I never really want breads or baked goods.

* Okay, so lately I've been less than stellar with the avoiding of cheese. I really don't drink cow's milk, eat yogurt or consume any non-cheese dairy products. I try really hard to avoid cheese...but sometimes it sneaks into whatever I'm eating...mostly because other people put it there to sabotage me. Cheese is delicious, and I'm pretty sure it has addictive properties. I try to avoid it...really, I do.

More Adventures in Home-Cooked Goodness

Last night, we decided to embark on another kitchen adventure. I've been scouring the world wide web for new ideas and recipes, and last week I stumbled upon the Everyday Paleo blog post for homemade plantain chips with guacamole. I was surprised to find the recipe, because for some reason, M and I were under the impression that we had invented the combination of plantain chips and guacamole...we pretty much thought we were culinary geniuses...but apparently, everyone eats plantain chips with guacamole...who knew?

Anyway, after a quick jaunt to Whole Foods, we had all of the ingredients to make some plantain chips to go with our beefy taco salad. I modeled the taco salad recipe after one that I found on the Whole9 Blog. The plantain chips were produced by two methods: lightly frying in coconut oil a la Everyday Paleo, and baking with olive oil, a la Martha Stewart's recipe for baked potato chips. I also baked up the last sweet potato from over the weekend...

Plantain Chips (& Sweet Potato Chips)

(please disregard the wine and ping pong balls)

Ingredients:

Ripe plantains-- I used two and had plenty of chips for two people
2-4 Tbsp Coconut oil*
Sea Salt to taste

* For the baking method, replace coconut oil with olive oil (or another oil that's liquid at room temperature.)

If frying, place coconut oil in a pan over medium heat. Slice the plantains either width-wise or lengthwise with the peel still on (a tip from Everyday Paleo: the plantains keep their structure better with the peel). Remove peel and place in oil, and fry until brown on both sides.

If baking, line a baking pan with aluminum foil and spray with olive oil. Place the chips on the tray making sure that they do not overlap. Spray the chips with oil and salt them at your own discretion. Bake for about 25 minutes rotating the tray once. (Follow the same protocol for sweet baked sweet potato chips, but bake for about 30 minutes).

The baked chips came out great! Some were crispy and some were chewy. All of them were deliciously sweet and salty!

The fried plantain chips were, in M's words "sinful." The first thing he said when he tried one was "these can't be good for you..." I mean, they're not great for you...but they're better than...some other things. Frying the plantains in coconut oil seemed to caramelize them more than baking them. The browned edges of the chips were almost like candy, but the added salt balanced the sweetness perfectly. They were a little bit thicker and chewier than their baked brothers, but we ended up liking these more.

To go with our plantain chips, we also prepared a nice, taco-y salad:

For the meats we used:

Four hamburger patties (leftover from our weekend BBQ)
1/2 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp cumin
1 1/2 tsp cayenne pepper (we lika da spicy foods)

M ground up the hamburger patties in a bowl, added the spices and then cooked the meat in a pan with some olive oil and a little water to moisten it up. In the future, we'll probably just buy ground beef instead of using already formed hamburgers...but we were trying to be thrifty.

I cut up some tomatoes, red pepper and red leaf lettuce for the salad base. We topped our salads with salsa and some guacamole from Whole Foods.

It was a great, homemade Mexican-ish feast with plenty of leftovers for another day. We both ate too much and walked off our bellies with Chester after dinner. Isn't it great to eat too much of a meal that you made yourself? To want to eat more of something you created? It's kind of a new experience for me...and I love it!