Category Archives: Beef/steak - Page 2

Bi Bim Bap

Posted by on October 16, 2011 52 comments

Our usual lunch is Bi Bim Bap – which is Korean for “leftovers.” (Literally, it means “mixed with rice.”)

Bi Bim Bap is a versatile dish which can be assembled out of almost any combination of ingredients. Like Cambridge Fried Rice, it is a classic Asian method for combining leftovers to create a meal in a bowl.

The Bi Bim Bap Recipe

The best place to look for a formula for Bi Bim Bap may be the Perfect Health Diet Food Plate:

The body of the apple contains our formula for a meal. Great meals combine four kinds of ingredients:

  1. A safe starch.
  2. Meat, fish, and eggs.
  3. Vegetables, herbs, and spices.
  4. A sauce made from fats and acids.

Our Version of Korean Bi Bim Bap

The classic Korean Bibimbap recipe uses barbecued beef and eggs as the meat, rice as the starch, mixed vegetables, and a Korean spicy sauce with sweet and sour flavors.

We assembled the following ingredients as an example. For meat we used meatballs and slices of leftover ribeye:

We also included eggs as a second kind of meat. As a base for the sauce we used Korean spicy sauce; here is a possible brand: Sunchang Gochujang 500g. Which is not perfect, as it contains soybean powderwheat, but as it’s quite spicy a little goes a long way. Chili flakes can substitute for the Korean sauce.

Koreans usually favor a mix of spicy, sweet, and sour flavors in the sauce. The sweet and sour can be provided by equal parts rice syrup and rice vinegar, plus a splash of sesame oil and salt and pepper:

The spicy sauce paste is mixed with this sweet and sour mixture to make the sauce. One tablespoon spicy sauce, 1 tablespoon rice syrup, and 1 tablespoon rice vinegar or lemon juice will make a good sauce. For children, increase the sweet and sour flavors and decrease the spicy/chili flavors.

For acids, lemon juice or lime juice, or some other flavor of vinegar, can be substituted for the rice vinegar.

For more spiciness, bits of jalapeno can be added. Egg yolk can provide an additional source of fat.

Include vegetables of your choice. These are onions, peppers, green bean, and watercress:

Kimchi (fermented vegetables) can be substituted for the vegetables.

Everyone can make his own bowl. Since we’ve just been debating how much of the “safe starches” one should eat, here’s what we consider a full meal’s worth of rice:

This is 150 g of cooked white rice which works out to about 200 calories of carbs. We eat two meals a day so this works out to about 400 carb calories per day.

On top of the rice Paul has added meat, vegetables, egg, egg yolk, spicy sauce, and lemon juice:

A bit of rice syrup and a little more meat got the proportions to Paul’s liking.

Here was Shou-Ching’s bowl:

Just mix all the ingredients together and eat!

Bi Bim Bap at Lunch

We didn’t take pictures, but Paul’s typical lunch is assembled like this:

  1. Whatever leftover safe starch is available is put at the bottom of the bowl. If this is potato or taro, Paul dices it up into small pieces; if it is rice it looks rather like the picture above.
  2. Paul adds 3 egg yolks and the juice of half or quarter lemon.
  3. Paul adds leftover meat and vegetables.
  4. Paul adds spices to taste. These may include spices with medicinal value, such as turmeric, and then curry or other spicy flavors. Or they may include salt and pepper, or rice syrup for a sweet flavor.
  5. The Bi Bim Bap is microwaved for a minute, then mixed and microwaved again until it is uniformly warm.

At dinner we usually cook at least twice as much as we intend to eat that night, so there are plenty of leftovers. The leftovers provide lunch and usually a Bi Bim Bap, Cambridge Fried Rice, or Japanese sushi buffet dinner of leftovers once during the week.

Hamburgers

Posted by on September 4, 2011 34 comments

Our round-up of classic American foods continues with a Labor Day classic: the hamburger.

Although it’s possible to buy Perfect Health Diet compatible buns, we’ve gotten out of the habit of eating hamburgers on the bun. Often, we eat dinners buffet style, in which everyone assembles a plate from a choice of ingredients. Hamburgers are a great buffet option.

The classic low-carb Paleo hamburger uses lettuce in place of the bun. This style seems to be making inroads. When we were in California for the Ancestral Health Symposium, we found that the fast food chains there will serve burgers wrapped in lettuce if you ask for it (this is “protein” style at In’n’Out Burger).

Ingredients

Essential patty ingredients include ground beef (1 lb), egg (1, not shown), onion (1 medium), potato starch (1/4 cup, not shown), salt and pepper; we also included shrimp (1 cup), shiitake mushrooms (1 cup), and herbs to taste. A sampling of ingredients:

We made about 8 patties of this size:

Cooking

We fried them in beef tallow, about 3 minutes per side:

Serving

We ate them two ways. First, like meatloaf:

Second, wrapped in lettuce with onion, tomato, egg, cheese, and cucumber or pickle:

We like putting potato starch in the patty because it helps retain moisture in the patties, so they don’t shrink much during cooking. They tasted great, especially with mustard.

Dumpling Rolls

Posted by on June 5, 2011 24 comments

This is our name for Chinese dumpling fillings in Vietnamese spring roll wrappers.

It could be described as a Perfect Health Diet-compatible Asian-style hamburger. Dumpling burgers? Hamburger rolls?

Ingredients

Here are some of the filling ingredients – green onion, shiitake mushroom, 1/2 lb shrimp, ginger, and garlic.

Other filling ingredients include 2 lb ground beef, 2 tsp fish sauce, 2 tsp soy sauce, and a pinch of salt. Traditionally Chinese dumplings contain ground pork, but we favor beef over pork.

You’ll also need spring roll wrappers, and for a dipping sauce rice vinegar and ginger.

Preparing the filling

We minced all filling ingredients except the ground beef and shrimp in a food processor, pureed the shrimp separately, and combined them with the ground beef in an unheated wok. This is 2 lb ground beef, the shrimp, and the other filling ingredients before we mixed them:

This is what they look like after hand mixing:

Preparing the spring roll wrappers

The easiest way to do this is to buy pre-made Vietnamese spring roll wrappers. You can see that the ingredients (tapioca, rice, salt, and water) are Perfect Health Diet-compatible.

The wrappers need only be pre-soaked briefly in warm water, one by one, just before use:

Once a wrapper is moist, soft, and flexible, spread it on a work surface and place some of the filling on it. Then wrap the wrapper around the filling, burrito-style:

Cooking

We recommend steaming the dumpling rolls. We used a wok with a steaming tray on top. To prevent the rolls from sticking to the steaming tray, we placed a bed of shredded cabbage between the steaming tray and the rolls:

Pre-heat the water to a near-boil before placing the steamer tray on top. When ready to cook, cover the wok, bring the water back to a boil, and steam for 10 minutes. When the filling has changed color throughout, they’re done:

Serve them with the now-cooked cabbage, some cucumber slices, and a dipping sauce made from sliced ginger and rice vinegar:

Alternative cooking methods

You can also fry the dumpling rolls, as here:

Conclusion

This is a very flexible dish: you can adjust the filling ingredients and dipping sauce to suit your taste. We quite liked this hamburger-like flavor, but next time we’ll probably use less ground beef and more shrimp. Or maybe we’ll try some cheese, onion, and tomato in the filling for a cheeseburger roll!

Steak Diane (Ribeye with Cream Sauce)

Posted by on March 20, 2011 22 comments

Ribeye steak is a staple in our house; we eat it almost every week. Its low omega-6 content makes beef, along with fish like salmon, our favorite meat. Ribeye is a fatty cut, which fits Perfect Health Diet macronutrient ratios.

Given how important it is in our diets, you might think we’d have a lot of fancy recipes; but simple grilled or pan-fried steak is highly satisfying, and also very quick. We’ll usually have a simple seasoned grilled steak, or pan-fried steak with a simple sauce, along with vegetables and a starch on the side.

Although our steaks are usually simple, I think it’s worth a post to show what we do. We would be curious to hear what sauces our readers like on steak.

Pan-Fried Steak in Cream Sauce

This is better known as Steak Diane, after Diana the Roman goddess of the hunt; it is a simple recipe such as a hunter might use.

Here’s what we typically buy:

These are regular grain-fed, not grass-fed, steaks; grain-fed is cheaper and fattier, both of which we like, and the omega-6 content is reasonably low even in grain-fed beef.

We eat toward the lower half of our recommended protein range, which translates to between 0.5 lb and 1 lb (0.4 to 0.8 kg) meat per day. So this $20 package represents a 2 day supply of meat for 2 people. At $5 per person per day, it’s quite affordable. Certainly cheaper than restaurant meals!

Here are a few ingredients for the sauce:

Butter, cream, lemon for juice, rosemary, garlic, and bay leaves. The bay leaves are rather old and brown, but might as well use them up.

We start with some coconut oil, rosemary, garlic, and bay leaves, and two steaks seasoned with salt and pepper.

We brown them about 1 1/2 minutes per side at medium to high heat:

At that point we pull them out, carve them into smaller sizes, and return them along with the butter to the pan:

After another 2 minutes per side, the steaks are ready to remove from the pan. We then use the pan residue to make a sauce.

Normally we might add mushrooms, onions, or other vegetables to the sauce, but today we were pressed for time and just added cream and some lemon juice to the pan. It looked like this at first:

Stir it at low heat and remove as soon as ingredients are mixed; the sauce looks like this:

Note: Don’t eat the bay leaves! They flavor the sauce, but the leaves contain toxins. We removed the bay leaves before adding cream to the sauce.

We always have some rice around – we run the rice cooker once every 3 days or so – and some seasoned seaweed, kimchi, and baby carrots for vegetables when we need them. So if we’re pressed for time and don’t feel like cooking plant foods, dinner will look like this:

(Kimchi and seasoned seaweed not shown. We also put the sauce over the rice.)

Table-grilled steak

If we’re even more pressed for time and would like to relax in our living room while cooking – maybe to watch a movie or television show – then we’ll grill our steak at the table.

Cooking at the table is a tradition in Asia; many restaurants have grills built into the dining tables so that diners can barbecue their food.

The easiest way to do this is to buy an electric table grill. We got ours for $20 at an Asian supermarket. Amazon has some fancier models:

Here’s the steak cooking:

On our table grill, the heat is lower near the edges than in the center. So we usually need to pull the steak when the center part is cooked, cut off the edges, and return the undercooked edges to the grill:

Here’s the steak fresh off the grill:

Add whatever plant foods you like! We’ll typically do bell peppers as here, onions, portobello mushrooms, or asparagus.

It’s hard for a meal to get easier to prepare than this. The table grill is easy to clean also – both the grilling surface and a pan to catch drippings pull out and clean easily.

Steak Diane with Gordon Ramsey

Here is Gordon Ramsey cooking essentially the same meal: