Lamb Meat Sauce - Disaster Averted!

I wanted to make chicken meatballs. That was the plan and I was excited about it. It did not happen. I went to the market and there was no organic chicken, so I decided to get ground chicken breasts.  I’d never used it before but I thought it would work the same as ground turkey.  As you can see, I was wrong:

Now I can’t tell you exactly what happened.  While I was making a red sauce, Mike was assisting and mid-mixing he looked up and said “Something isn’t right here.”  For a minute I tried to blame it on him – “You’re mixing too hard!!!!” What does that even mean? Nothing clearly.  I grabbed the chicken bowl (ground breast, spices and a egg) and tried to see it I could salvage it.  It was soon obvious that chicken meatballs weren’t happening, and it probably wasn’t Mike’s fault.

(Question – do you ever use ground chicken breast? Does it turn into a weird gloopy paste? If not how do you prevent that from happening?)

But I did manage to salvage it. I ended up cooking the chicken breast with a pound of ground lamb and then adding the cooked meat to the red sauce that was bubbling on the stove.  I finished the sauce with a tablespoon of butter (seriously butter makes everything, but especially meat sauce, better) and ate it over some spaghetti squash.  

This ended up being seriously delicious, and taught me a new cost saving strategy. I love the flavor of lamb. But ground lamb is more significantly more expensive than ground chicken.  This sauce ended up being lamby and rich tasting, but because I used half chicken half lamb it cost me way less than a sauce like this normally would. Yay!

 

Ingredients

1 small onion, diced

3-5 cloves of garlic, diced (i like it super garlicky)

1 tablespoon thyme

1/2 tablespoon red chili flakes (or more for spicy)

1 teaspoon oregano (some people like more, but im really sensitive to oregano)

4 sundried tomatoes, diced

2 tablespoons tomato paste

1 28 oz can crushed tomatoes

1 splash sherry (or if you are being stricter, red wine vinegar)

1/2 tablespoon butter

1 lb ground chicken

1 lb ground lamb

2 tablespoons butter (optional, but seriously it makes it super duper extra delicious)

salt and pepper to taste

1) Sautee diced onion in a sauce pot over medium high heat, once they are translucent (about 3 minutes) add garlic, spices, tomato paste, and sun dried tomatoes, cook for an additional 2 minutes

2) Add crushed tomatoes and turn heat down to medium low

3) While tomato sauce is simmering season ground lamb and chicken with salt and pepper and brown in a sautee pan over medium high heat for approximately 10 minutes. Stir meat occasionally to ensure even browning.

4) Add meat and splash of sherry or vinegar to tomato sauce. Stir and cook for another 3-5 minutes until hot.

5) Taste and season with salt and pepper.

6) Right before serving add butter to sauce - this will make your sauce creamy and rich

7) Serve over spaghetti squash. Yum!!!

Coffee-Chili Rubbed Steak

Last night I knew I needed to make a super quick dinner. I got home a little late and we were going to see some standup at Littlefield (awesome show almost every Monday). It was sold out last night because Wyatt Cenac was going to be there, so I definitely wanted to make sure I got out of the house on time. The show ended up being amazing – and Aziz Ansari showed up randomly to do a set. I basically laughed my ass off for two hours. And to top it off, for the first time there ever I managed to resist the allure of combining booze and comedy.

Anyway – tangent about my awesome night full of laughter and self-control aside – dinner needed to be quick. I planned on making steak with my trusty Montreal Steak Seasoning, but lo and behold there is sunflower oil in it. This is seriously upsetting. So instead I decided to make an espresso-chili rub which turned out amazing.

Now every other time I have made a rub (or really any food) with coffee I have also included brown sugar to cut some of the bitterness. A quick googling of espresso rubbed steaks told me that this was the norm. Totally sold on the idea of the espresso-chilli rub, I improvised with some paleo approved spices to up the sweetness factor without sugar. A little cocoa powder, anise seed, and ginger balanced the bitterness of the coffee. I also added some coriander to round out the flavors a bit. Finally, I seared the steak in coconut oil to add another touch of mellow sweetness.

This all worked perfectly and was as good as any other espresso rub I’ve ever had.

Coffee-Chili rubbed steak with buttered broccoli

Ingredients

1/3 cup ground coffee beans

1/4 cup chili powder

2 tablespoons unsweetened coco powder

1 tablespoon ground ginger

1 tablespoon anise seed

1/2 tablespoon coriander

1 steak

coconut oil for cooking

1) Mix all ingredients besides steak and coconut oil together. This should give you enough for steak now, and some to save for later
2) Coat one side of your steak liberally with coffee rub, press in with your fingers and let sit for 10 minutes.
3) Cook steak in skillet or cast iron pan starting with rubbed side down until desired doneness - medium rare to rare for me! Eat! Go do something fun because dinner took you like 10 minutes to cook!

Mango Curry Soup

So, I'm sitting here on my lunch break eating a bowl of soup that I made at 6 o'clock yesterday morning. I'm not normally one to wake up early during the week to cook, but these were special circumstances. Warning - this is a serious case of white people problems! If that sort of thing bothers you feel free to skip on down the recipe :)

This Sunday I made enough food so that Mike (husband along for this paleo ride) and I could take our lunch to work everyday this week. At the last minute on Tuesday (via email at 9 pm) my boss offered me free tickets to the opera last night (which was super weird), neither of us had ever been before so we decided to go. That meant that we needed to bring both our lunch and dinner with us to work to avoid eating out in the dreaded Midtown Lunch region of tasty but horrible for you food. I also wasn't going to have have time to cook new lunches for today after we got home from being classy at the opera. And didn't want to skip the gym this morning to make it today. If it was just me I probably would have just had a big breakfast and skipped lunch, but Mike who has never tried to control his diet before (and, maddeningly, has always been thin) probably would have fallen face first into a burrito.

All this means that at 6 am yesterday I got up and made this Mango Curry soup with ingredients I had on hand. It's creamy, smooth, a little spicy, and a little sweet. I originally planned on this being a cold soup, and that's pretty good but hot is definitely the way to go. It's not necessarily the most balanced lunch - lacking in protein and veggies - but it is so freaking delicious.

This is a bowl I poured yesterday morning for picture taking purposes
I definitely didn't scarf half of it down while pouring it into Tupperware
P.S. I totally did that
P.P.S It was awesome

I'm not the only one who liked it either. I just got this message from my husband on gchat:













Ingredients
2 teaspoons coconut oil
1 medium sweet onion (I used vidalia, but anything would work)
3 cup mango chunks (I used organic frozen from Trader Joe's, fresh would probably be better)
1 - 2 tablespoons thai red curry paste (I used the Thai Kitchen version which has no yucky things added to it. It's a little spicy, which I like, but if you don't use less and then add more to taste. They also make a green curry paste which is milder if you're into that sort of thing)
1 can full fat coconut milk (Again I used Thai Kitchen, I know there's better out there but this is what the place closest to me carries. Just don't use light!)
salt to taste

optional garnishes: lime, cilantro, whipped coconut milk I didn't use any of these but if you were serving this to people you wanted to impress all three of these would make it look prettier/taste better.

1) Heat coconut oil over medium heat in dutch oven, or other soup pot
2) Dice onion and sautee in coconut oil - the evenness of your dice doesn't really matter here, its all getting blended up later
3) Once onions are softened (turned translucent) season lightly with salt and add curry paste, and cook for 30 sec - 1 min
4) Add mango chucks - if you are using frozen cook for about 5 minutes until fruit defrosts and softens a bit. If you are using fresh, I would say you probably only need a minute or two on this step.
6) Add coconut milk and simmer for 3-4 minutes until mixture looks like this:
7) Turn off heat and blend soup with an immersion blender until all the chucks of mango and onion are gone. If you don't have an immersion blender you can use a regular blender, but its way more annoying, harder to clean up, ad more likely to spill, so I think you should probably just get an immersion blender - they are pretty cheap and I use mine all the time.
8) Now you could either eat the soup as it or if you wanted to get all fancy you could run the soup through a fine mesh strainer to make it even smoother and then garnish it with some of the optional garnishes above. Whatever you decide you are in for a tasty bowl of soup. Enjoy!

Coconut Crispy Chicken Salad

One of my favorite things to eat has always been Crispy Chicken Salad - I mean salad is always healthy right? The best was always Friendly's with extra honey mustard, ranch, and tortilla chips - when I was waitressing there in high school I ate it like 3 times a week.

The chicken salad I made tonight was not like that at all - with vegetables from
my CSA, coconut crusted chicken breasts, and a lime/olive oil dressing it was healthy and delicious!

Coconut Crispy Chicken Salad

I do have to say that the chicken was not as coconutty as I was hoping/expecting, I'll experiment next time to up the coconut factor. Anyways, here's the recipe.

Ingredients
1.5 lbs chicken breast (used about 1/2 for this and the rest i'll eat for lunch this week)
1/2 cup almond meal
2 eggs, beaten
1 cup unsweetened coconut flakes
4 tablespoons coconut oil
1 head of green leaf lettuce
1/2 avocado
1/2 small red onion
1/6 cup unsweetened dried cranberries
1/4 up sunflower seeds
1 lime, juiced
2 teaspoons mustard (spicy brown, i would have used something milder, but it was the only one I had that is paleo friendly)
1/3 cup extra virgin olive oil
salt and pepper to taste

1) Cut chicken breasts into small 3 bite sized pieces, about 1/4 inch think
2) Set up 3 bowls 1 with almond meal, 1 with eggs, and 1 with coconut flakes seasoned with salt
3) Dredge all chicken pieces, first lightly in almond meal, the lightly in the eggs, then press a little bit firmer into the coconut flakes. Lay coated chicken in a single layer on a plate before cooking.
4) Heat 2 tablespoons of coconut oil in a pan on medium high (if you use 1.5 lbs of chicken like me, you'll probably need to use to pan) when the oil is hot place the chicken in the pan, and cook for 3 minutes
5) When chicken has browned flip over and cook for another 3 minutes
6) While the chicken is cooking prepare the salad, cut up lettuce and top with diced avocado, cranberries, sunflower seeds, and thinly sliced onion. Separate evenly into two bowls.
7) Make dressing by juicing lime in top a bowl and a mustard, whisk together and then slowly whisk in olive oil. Taste and then season with salt and pepper if desired
8) Remove chicken pieces from pan and salt to taste.
9) Top salad with chicken pieces (3-4 each) and dress with lime dressing.

My First Post

I'm starting this blog to document my adventures in cooking paleo/primal food.

I'm no expert, so check out whole9life.com or marksdailyapple.com to learn what that really means. How I've explained it to people who've asked (and my husband who I forced/convinced to get on board with this new eating plan) is meat, vegetables, fruits, nuts, fats - all natural, organic.

While I'm no nutrition expert I am a pretty good home cook. I used to write thewinningdish.com where I recreated the winning dish from every Top Chef episode the week it aired. That was crazy, expensive, and exhausting. I made it halfway through a season - I'm a quitter.

But I still love to cook and experiment in the kitchen all the time. Mark Bittman is my hero and his minimalist column (now defunct, frown) is the inspiration for the name of my blog - and hopefully what will be my approach to it. Instead of going nuts, like it did with my last blog I'll just post what I'm cooking for dinner - every night? a few nights a week? Eh, we will see how it goes. Tonight I'm planning coconut crusted chicken with whatever veggies come in my first CSA box of the season.