Category Archives: Food - Page 13

Pesto

Posted by on March 27, 2011 38 comments

Pesto is a classic Italian sauce that originated in Genoa. The traditional ingredients are basil, crushed garlic, grated parmigiano or pecorino cheese, pine nuts, and olive oil.

It’s traditionally prepared with a mortar and pestle (thus the name), but we use a food processor. We also vary the ingredients from time to time.

The nice thing about pesto is its versatility: it can flavor a lot of Perfect Health Diet foods. Like a good poet, pesto makes the familiar new.

Pesto with Rice Cakes and Shrimp

Here are the ingredients for a traditional pesto: grated cheese, pine nuts, garlic, olive oil, and basil.

Pine nuts will usually taste better toasted. You can buy them pre-roasted, but if you buy raw pine nuts it’s not hard to toast them yourself. Heat a dry pan, then turn the heat off and add the pine nuts. Stir until done. Careful, they can burn quickly.

The basil takes up too much space for our food processor, so we put the basil and garlic in first for pre-shredding:

Then add the other dry ingredients, with some pepper:

Mix, adding olive oil to the food processor until it has the desired consistency. The finished product:

The sauce is now ready. Here we put it on some rice cakes and shrimp. Rice cakes are usually found in the frozen foods section of Asian supermarkets. Look for rice cakes that have no wheat (which is sometimes added to help the cakes stick together). Remember that rice cakes cook very quickly – 1 to 2 minutes in boiling water. When they float, they’re done; be sure to quench them in cold water to stop them from overcooking.

Spreading the sauce:

Ready to eat:

Macadamia Pesto with Buttered Potato or Liver

This one is similar but we used macadamia nuts in place of pine nuts, and included a bit of lemon juice. Macadamia nuts are lower in omega-6 than pine nuts:

Here it is in the food processor with most of the oil in:

Here it is with boiled potatoes and butter, for a sort of pesto potato salad:

Here it is with boiled liver:

Boiling liver removes a lot of the flavor, and adding substantial amounts of a pesto may make it palatable to those who dislike the taste of liver.

Conclusion

Any traditional food can be made Perfect Health Diet-compliant by swapping out ingredients. Pesto is pretty healthy to begin with, but replacing pine nuts with a low-omega-6 nut can make it even better.

Staple foods like rice, potatoes, and beef liver can get tiresome if they’re always eaten the same way. Luckily, traditional cookbooks are full of good sauces that vary the flavor of familiar foods. Be a poet in the kitchen, and look for flavors that can make the new familiar and the familiar new.

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:

Clam Chowder

Posted by on March 13, 2011 20 comments

Clam chowder is a New England favorite, and it’s quite a treat when made properly. However, even in New England most restaurants take shortcuts and their chowder often disappoints. Luckily, it’s easy to make an exquisite clam chowder at home.

Ingredients

Part of the secret is to have fresh ingredients. Clam chowder made with fresh clams is much better than clam chowder made from canned clams. In Boston, live clams are readily available in supermarkets; those who are farther from the sea may be able to find seafood stores that carry clams. It’s worth trying at least once so you know what you’re missing!

Here are most of the ingredients: potatoes, celery, onions, butter, 1 cup heavy cream, and 1 tbsp tapioca starch mixed with 2 tbsp water to make a paste that dissolves easily in water.

Here are the clams we used. Soak them in salt water (1/2 tsp salt in the water) for a half hour or more to help remove impurities; discard the soaking water:

We also used 2 cups chicken broth, but forgot to take a picture of it.

Cooking the Clams

The object is to steam the clams while collecting the juice that comes out of the clams when they open. This clammy juice adds great flavor to the chowder.

We used a pot with 2 steaming baskets, a deep one and a shallow one, and a glass cover. We put a bowl in the deep basket to collect the clam juice:

We brought the water in the bottom of the pot to a boil, then added the clams to the top shallow basket and covered:

If you don’t have a pot with 2 steaming basket, just put the clams in the bowl in your single steaming basket.

After about 5 minutes, the clams open. Turn off the heat – they are now cooked.

Any clams that refuse to open are bad and should be discarded. Scrape out the open clam meat into a bowl. You can dice the clams if you like; we chose to keep them whole.

The juice that came out of the clams will look like this:

The clams have a surprising amount of liquid inside; we gathered about 1 cup. Note that you don’t need to extract the bowl from the steamer basket; when ready you can pour this liquid directly into the soup with the bowl still inside.

Preparing The Chowder

While the clams are being prepared, you can be working simultaneously on the chowder.

In a wok, begin by sautéing the onions in a half stick of butter for one minute:

Add the celery and stir another minute:

Then the chicken broth:

At this point dice the raw potatoes and add them to the pot. (It’s best to avoid exposing the potato to air for long periods of time. If you want to cut the potatoes ahead of time, store them in water.) The potatoes need to boil about 15-20 minutes; they should be cooked but not totally softened.

When the clam juice and clams are ready, add them too. It will look like this:

When the potatoes are cooked, add the cup of heavy cream, and salt and pepper and any other spices you like, and return to a near-simmer.

Gradually mix in the tapioca starch paste, tasting periodically until you reach a thickness you like. When the chowder is properly thick, warm, and well-mixed, you’re done:

Serve:

Conclusion

Chowder that is made with tomatoes is called “Manhattan Clam Chowder.” This concoction is illegal in New England. If you make it and live in Massachusetts, take care not to post pictures on the Internet.

We predict you’ll love this chowder. Enjoy!

Coconut Bark

Posted by on March 6, 2011 46 comments

Kindy’s son Matthias is on a ketogenic diet and she has been looking for ways to make coconut oil tasty:

I am trying to add coconut oil in every place I can think of but this is harder to do than one would think.  I want him to take 4 – 6 tablespoons a day so I can up his carbs a bit …

I am trying ‘hot chocolate’: heavy whipping cream, coconut oil, cocoa-plain, drop of stevia.  He likes it but will only take a few drinks before he is ‘full’.

Others have also asked for ways to make coconut oil palatable – for instance, Ian.

A lot of Paleo dieters have recommended coconut bark. So we thought we’d give it a try.

Ingredients

We tried several different combinations of ingredients; all of them worked well. This seems a fairly fool-proof dessert.

The basic ingredients are:

1)      coconut oil,

2)      cocoa powder or chocolate,

3)      nuts or nut butter, and

4)      a carbohydrate.

We prefer low-omega-6 nuts, and low-fructose “safe starches” and sweeteners such as rice syrup or stevia. We do eat fruits and berries, but generally avoid any other sources of sucrose or fructose.

For our coconut bark experiments, we tried macadamia nuts and almond butter as our nuts, and puffed rice and figs as our carb sources. Here are a few of the ingredients we used — puffed rice, unsweetened cocoa powder, 72% chocolate, and almond butter:

For a more ketogenic (therapeutic) bark, increase the coconut oil and decrease the carbs; for a more dessert-like flavor, add more carbs.

OK, here’s what we did. I would characterize these as dessert-like and only mildly ketogenic.

Chocolate, macadamia nuts, almond butter, puffed rice

Ingredients for this version (we used rather more coconut oil than is shown here):

Preparation is very simple. First, mix the ingredients over a low heat. We melted the coconut oil first, then melted chocolate:

Then we mixed in the almond butter and ground macadamia nuts, followed by the puffed rice:


Next, pour the mixture onto a shallow aluminum-foil covered plate, and put in the refrigerator or freezer to cool. We put them in the refrigerator for ten minutes, then sliced the bark into pieces while it was still soft, and then moved it to the freezer for ten minutes to finish:


Chocolate, macadamia nuts, almond butter, figs, raisins, cocoa powder

This differed from the previous mix only in that diced figs and raisins replaced the puffed rice, and the finished bark pieces were dipped in cocoa powder. Ingredients:

Freshly poured onto the plate:

Cooled and sliced:

Served:

Conclusion

Coconut bark is not very nourishing, micronutrient-wise, but it is tasty and it does supply the ketogenic fats of coconut oil.

I suppose one could mix in ketogenic amino acids, like leucine or lysine, to make the bark even more ketogenic.

Ketogenic dieters shouldn’t suppose that they need to exclude all carbs. The body needs a little bit of glucose, and the bark will still be ketogenic if the coconut oil content is high enough.