Category Archives: Food - Page 9

Sarah Atshan’s Lovely Food

Posted by on September 11, 2011 42 comments

On Facebook, Sarah Atshan has put up photos of meals that helped her lose 120 lbs.

Her food is Perfect Health Diet compatible and awesomely healthy!

I was going to link to her photos yesterday, but Sarah deserves a post to herself. All photos are © Sarah Atshan 2011.

Keftah (middle Eastern meatballs) with raw onion in hummus and veggies.

Beef and broccoli over rice, with some kimchi.

“So simple yet so yummy”: Hainanese chicken rice. Poached stewing hen from Polyface farm (stuffed and cooked with aromatics), plus rice cooked in chicken fat and chicken broth from the poaching, plus caramelized onion and chicken skin. Mix and serve with a chili, garlic, ginger, and lime sauce.

Korean bibimbap is a great way to dispose of leftovers. This began with leftover vegetables: Daikon radish, broccoli, carrot, button mushrooms, shiitake mushrooms, green onion, and cilantro. Standard ingredients: onion, garlic, ginger, and Serrano peppers added to beef, rice, and a raw egg yolk.

Korean seafood stew: Fish and shrimp cooked in homemade seafood broth, with rice, green onion, garlic, jalapeno, cilantro, onion, carrot, bok choy, shiitake mushroom, ginger and Chinese broccoli (gai lan).

Korean style Shepherd’s Pie:

Mash made with Japanese sweet potatoes, Yukon gold potatoes, and egg yolks.

Mince made with grass fed beef, mushrooms, onions, garlic, ginger, kimchi, and Korean seasonings.

Vegetables: wilted pea shoot, carrot, and daikon radish salad.

“Mex-a-bap”: Korean bibimbap with Mexican ingredients. Grassfed Mexican seasoned beef with onions and mushrooms, rice, garlicky guacamole, and green mango salsa (tomato was not in season yet).

Steamed shellfish with grass fed butter, lemon, crystal hot sauce, old bay seasoning, homemade cocktail sauce (tomato paste, fish sauce, and horseradish), served with oven roasted potatoes.

Middle Eastern cabbage stuffed with grass fed beef and beef heart, garlic, green pepper, onion, rice, and spices. Cooked in chicken stock.

Salad: tomato, bell pepper, and dandelion greens with lemon juice.

Yogurt sauce: raw milk yogurt, hot pepper, lemon and garlic.

Beef with lots of garlic, onion, Serrano pepper, mushrooms, green onion, and Sarah’s special sauce, served with carrot and kale, and rice cooked in homemade chicken stock.

Thai coconut milk soup with fish, veggies, and eggs. Serve with rice.

Thai green coconut milk curry with beef. Potato, kale, yellow squash, carrot, green onion, basil, Thai basil, cilantro, and garlic scapes; grass-fed beef, and homemade stock.

The green curry paste was home made: jalapeno, poblano chili, Serrano chili, New Mexico green chili, Thai green chili, lemongrass, galangal, lime leaves, cilantro root, basil, red onion, garlic, ginger, fermented shrimp paste, white pepper, coriander, cardamom, and cumin.

Thai green papaya salad.

Salmon cakes made with basil, mint, carrot, cucumber, onion, lime, garlic, lettuce, ginger, jalapeno, pepper, and tomato. Salad is dressed in a homemade spicy coconut lime dressing and topped with nuts.

Beef pho with beef tendon and rice noodles, garnished after cooking with Thai basil, carrots, cilantro, Thai chilies, lime, daikon radish, and vinegar-ed onions.


Vietnamese garlic and ginger beef stew with beef tendon, daikon radish and carrot salad, rice, and homemade turnip kimchi, topped with raw yolk. Mix and eat.

Vietnamese steak salad made with grass fed sirloin, baby chard, romaine lettuce, carrots, daikon radish, vinegared red onions, cilantro, and pickled jalapenos. With coconut milk rice and a hard-boiled duck egg.

Conclusion

Sarah’s food is super-healthy, super-appetizing – and perfect for those who want to lose weight.

Sarah, it’s great being Facebook friends and all, but how do we wrangle an invitation to dinner?

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.

Gnocchi

Posted by on August 28, 2011 49 comments

We don’t recognize a huge number of starches as safe, so it’s nice to find ways to prepare our favorite safe starches that give a slightly different taste.

By happy coincidence, we were planning a Gnocchi post today, and Cathryn left a gnocchi recipe this morning:

I made these Gnocchi (potato dumplings) the other night and they were delicious and so easy, a kid could make them.  I used one potato (about 220 grams) boiled in the skin for about 30 minutes, left it to cool, then peeled it and mashed it up.  I added one beaten egg, a little sea salt and 20-30 grams of tapioca starch (the amount needed depends on the moisture content of the potato.  You want a fairly stiff dough).  Put it in the fridge til just before dinner, then took out the dough and using a board dusted with more tapioca starch, rolled it into a “rope” about 1 inch thick and then cut it into pieces about 1 inch long.  Dropped it into gently boiling water for about 2-3 minutes (the dumplings float), drained it, threw in chopped, fresh garden herbs and a lot of butter and had it with roasted chicken.  Really good, very versatile and a recipe that could be tweaked in numerous ways.

This was essentially our recipe too. We tested three kinds of starch – potato starch, tapioca starch, and rice flour – and liked the potato starch best, but all three worked. We made two kinds of sauces, a Bolognese-style sauce and a pesto sauce, but of course safe starches can be matched with anything – Cathryn’s herbs, butter, and roasted chicken sound great!

Making The Gnocchi

As Cathryn says, start by boiling a potato. It should be fully but not overcooked:

You want to break up any potato lumps and an easy way to assure that is to press the potato through a strainer:

Wait until the potato is cool (otherwise the egg will cook) and mix in one egg per potato, and some salt:

Add 1/3 cup potato starch (tapioca starch and rice flour may also be used, but we liked potato starch best:

Knead the resulting mixture into a dough and move to a cutting board. Gradually mix in additional starch, rolling and kneading the dough to mix thoroughly, until the consistency is similar to the fleshy part of your palm at the base of the thumb:

Once you like the consistency, you can divide the dough into pieces, roll them out, and carve little patterns in the rolls with a fork:

Dice up the dough into bite-size pieces and drop them into boiling water to finish cooking:

When they float, they’re done.

Making the Sauce

Any sauce will do. We’ve previously blogged about Pesto (Mar 27, 2011) and Bolognese style sauces (Cranky Grouch’s Spaghetti, Feb 6, 2011), but there are many possibilities. As in Cathryn’s recipe, just butter on potatoes is excellent, and with meat and vegetables makes a meal.

Here’s what we did today. We put onions, tomatoes, and garlic with a little oil and some herbs in a wok:

We have a hand blender that can puree vegetables in the pan, which is nice because it leaves less to clean up:

We had some leftover meat to get rid of, so that went in the sauce:

After a little simmering we spread the sauce over the gnocchi, added some parmesan cheese, and called it lunch:

We also made a pesto sauce, this time with an equal mix of pistachio and macadamia nuts (highly recommended!):

Conclusion

Cathryn’s conclusion is just right:

Really good, very versatile and a recipe that could be tweaked in numerous ways.

Potatoes have great nutritional value (lots of potassium and other nutrients), but it’s easy to get bored with the texture.  Gnocchi has the same nutritional profile but a chewy, doughy texture that gives a different taste. Try it – you’ll like it!

Chocolate Chip Cookies

Posted by on July 24, 2011 28 comments

We have little baking experience, so we’re just beginning to learn how to make Perfect Health Diet compliant doughs and baked goods. This recipe turned out very well — unexpectedly well considering it was our first try. And it’s so easy; it takes less than half an hour.

Ingredients

Dry ingredients:

  • Rice flour 1 cup (optional: sticky rice flour)
  • Tapioca flour 1/3 cup
  • Baking soda 1/2 tsp
  • (optional) Beef gelatin 1 tablespoon

Wet ingredients:

  • Butter ½ cup (1 stick)
  • Egg yolks 3
  • Rice syrup 1/4 to 1/3 cup
  • Vanilla ¼ tsp

Flavorings

  • Chocolate chips
  • (optional) pistachios
  • (optional) raisins
  • (optional) pomegranate seeds

Preparation

Melt the butter (we used the microwave, about 20 seconds) in a mixing bowl. Add the other wet ingredients and mix thoroughly.

Mix in the dry ingredients until the dough has an even consistency. It will look like this:

Then fold in some flavorings. We broke up some bulk dark chocolate and included pistachios:

In another batch we tried chocolate covered raisins:

Place cookie-sized batches on an aluminum foil lined baking sheet:

The aluminum foil prevents the bottom of the cookies from burning.

Bake at 375 F for 10-12 minutes. Remove the cookies and let them cool for at least half an hour; after they are cooled, refrigerate them.

This was the chocolate and pistachio batch:

The chocolate covered raisins melted and produced brown cookies:

Post-eatem

The cookies were good – we were surprised how well they came out on our first attempt.

Shou-Ching really loved them, and so did our guests, but I thought the texture was drier and more crumbly than I would like. (Of course, I used to prefer uncooked dough to cookies, so I like things chewy.) This is a general issue with rice flour – it doesn’t hold together as well as gluten-containing flours. We tried both sticky rice flour and regular rice flour; I think the sticky rice flour might be very slightly better but it was difficult to detect a difference.

Here are some tweaks we’ll try next time:

  • Add more egg yolks. A little more fat might give a moister texture.
  • Try potato starch in place of tapioca flour.
  • Experiment with the protein. Most recipes either have no protein or use egg whites. We like the idea of a balanced mix of macronutrients, so we wanted to include a bit of protein. We tried the beef gelatin, partly because we have some around, and partly because gelatin mixed with water makes a good glue. We wondered if this might help the rice dough cohere. As yet we haven’t tested enough variations to know whether this was a good or bad idea.

We’d love to hear tips from more experienced cookie chefs – and reviews from the most honest critics, young children!