A nice little curry

I was trying to decide what to make for supper yesterday, and hit on the idea of making a curry. This may sound odd, but I'd never actually made a curry before. But, I looked at a few recipes, figured things out, and this is what I served last night over cauliflower rice...

 Ingredients

• One large yellow onion
• 3-4 Tbsp Coconut oil or olive oil or lard/bacon fat
• 4 chicken breasts, skin and bone removed, cut into 1-inch cubes
• 1-2 cloves garlic, minced
• 1 tsp curry powder (or more if you like it curry-er)
• 1 can coconut milk
• 1 small can tomato paste

 Instructions

1. Put the oil in a good-sized pan or wok. Quarter the onion and thinly slice it.
2. Put the onion slices in the oil over medium heat.
3. Once the onion is waxy, add the chicken and garlic.
4. Mix the curry powder with a bit of the coconut milk in a bowl.
5. Once the chicken is no longer pink, add the coconut milk and curry powder, bring to a boil, and simmer for about 10 minutes.
6. Add the can of tomato paste and simmer a while longer - it should be a nice, thick sauce.
7. Serve - best over either cauliflower "rice" or shirataki noodles.

Greek Village Salad

AKA "Horiatiki" or "Choriatiki", this is a favourite around here. Yes, it contains cheese, so non-milk paleo types will have to "just say no", but it's goat cheese, not cow cheese, okay? :-)

Ingredients

• 1-2 English cucumbers
• 1 sweet pepper (green or red)
• 1/2 pound feta cheese
• 1 Tbsp capers
• 1 Tbsp dried oregano
• 3 Tbsp olive oil
• 1 pint (small box) of "baby" tomatoes

Instructions

1. Chop first four ingredients into bite-sized (1/2 inch or 1 cm) pieces. Combine in a bowl with the remaining ingredients except the tomatoes. For best results, allow to in the fridge sit overnight.  Add the tomatoes just before serving.

Reducto ad delicious!

Recently, I came into the possession of two cases of pure mango juice - 12 tetra packs of one liter in each case, 24 liters of mango juice in total.  That's a lot of mango juice.

In addition to drinking it, I decided to try using it in sauces, via the reduction method.  In case you don't know, that's pretty much exactly what it sounds like - you reduce the liquid by simmering, which drives off the water and concentrates the flavours (and the sugars).  When you've reduced it by 3/4 or so, and you cool it, you're left with a thick, concentrated juice (think concentrated orange juice in the freezer at the grocery store - same idea).

On its own, this makes a great glaze for chicken or fish.

Something else you can do with it is add some hot sauce just before you're done reducing it (I added two or three dashes each of a habanero-based sauce and some Louisiana-style cayenne-based sauce).  It ends up being a great sauce for stir-fry; it starts out sweet and ends with just a bit of a burn.

Again - this concentrates the sugars in the juice, so if you're concentrating on the low-carb aspect of paleo, this isn't the best idea.  However, it won't give you any more sugar than was already present in the juice, so as an occasional treat (and to help convince your friends who aren't sure about this whole "caveman diet" thing), it's not bad at all..

Bacon makes it better!

Just a quick tip today for you wanna-be chef-types out there.

Generally, I prepare meat either by frying it in a pan (using either olive oil or bacon fat to prevent sticking) or roasting. The latter method is about the only viable method for larger cuts, like the pork roast I had last night.

Personally, whenever I roast meat (pork or turkey anyway) I take an additional step to make sure the meat is moist without basting - after seasoning my roast but before I put it into the oven, I lay several strips of bacon across the top. As things heat up, some of the fat melts out of the bacon and bastes the meat below, ensuring it doesn't end up dry. And, as a bonus, I get a bacon snack before the meal is ready! (I generally pull the bacon off before the meat is done to allow some browning where the bacon had been - otherwise you end up with "tan lines" on the meat, which any dinner guests might question. Maybe 15-20 minutes for a small pork roast, 30-45 minutes for a decent-sized turkey.)

Bacon. Is there anything it can't do?

How about some noodles?

So it turns out that, over in Japan, there are these things called Shirataki noodles, which are a very-low-carb noodle made mainly from water and plant fiber. Available now in other places, in Canada they can be found in Asian supermarkets, as well as at the Low Carb Grocery, which has a store in Markham (if you live in the Toronto area). And no, I haven't received any money or other consideration for mentioning them.

Anyway, the noodles are pretty tasteless on their own, but go well in a pasta sauce because they really tend to absorb the flavour of the sauce. While not strictly paleo, they are very-low-carb and thus worth a consideration for those nights when you just can't face another spaghetti squash. I've seen them in fettuccine and "spaghetti" styles, but supposedly the Miracle Noodle company also makes a rice style, even if it's only available in Australia for now. EDIT - I have had the rice version via the Low-Carb Grocery. I can't really recommend it, it's basically little gummy balls of not-starch.

You're on your own when it comes to garlic bread, though.

You can't beat beets!

Beets are a great root vegetable - they are high in folic acid, potassium, calcium, and antioxidants, low in calories, and high in fibre. They are also very cheap to buy fresh - we recently bought a ten-pound (4.5 kg) bag in our local super-mega-mart for $2.99, which is a lot of beets. We're keeping the excess in a paper bag in a cool place (the cave's basement).

I think fresh beets scare people though - how the heck are you supposed to cook them? Short answer - roast them. Here's what we do:

1. Rinse 1-2 pounds of beets under cool water to knock the excess dirt off, if necessary. If they are fresh beets, trim off the stems/leaves (use in a salad, they're even healthier!) and the "tail" at the bottom.
   
2. Place them in a roasting pan.
3. Roast at 350 F for 1 to 2 hours depending on the size of the beets - when a fork goes in fairly easily, they're done.
4. Let them cool.
5. Peel them (this is the messy part).
6. Slice them, and re-warm them in the microwave.
7. Delicious with salt, pepper, and butter.

Just keep in mind, beets are very rich in a plant-based dye. Not only will your kitchen look like a murder scene after you're finished peeling them, but you may notice a biological effect over the next 24 hours. As in, certain bodily functions may be somewhat (or more than somewhat), shall we say, tinted.

Mainly for the meat

Not much of a post today, but I did want to pass this link along for anyone who reads this and happens to live in South-Western Ontario (Toronto or points west). The Black Angus Butcher Shop is where we go about once a month to load up on game meats (which tend to be both leaner and richer in Omega-3 fatty acids than regular beef), including such things as venison, ostrich, wild boar, kangaroo, camel, and even python. Highly recommended if you're in the area, they have two shops, in Mississauga and Thornbury.

And I don't even get a kickback!

Cow farts cause global warming!!!

An oft-repeated statement in the last few years has been that cows (or more accurately, their methane, um, "excretions") contribute some ludicrous amount of carbon to what is typically now referred to as climate change. This is typically done, it seems, to shame us meat-eaters into changing our carnivorous ways and joining the soy-munching brigade at a vegetarian love-fest.

Except, as this article points out, that is a load of, well, cow crap. A typical grass-fed cow is not in any way pulling carbon out of the deep earth - it's performing what is typically called the short-term carbon cycle. Basically, plants take in CO2 and store it as sugars and starches, cows eat the plants, break down the sugars and starches, and release some (but not all) of the same CO2 back into the atmosphere. Livestock can't create new carbon atoms at will - that requires fusion, something that only occurs in that giant blazing ball of fire we call the "sun". Our meat-on-the-hoof is only re-releasing carbon that has already been in the atmosphere quite recently.

The article also points out something that the anti-meat brigade often omits when talking about how much land is required for farming plants versus animals - there's an awful lot of land out there that is useless for growing industrial crops, but is just perfect for our four-legged friends to roam and eat and grow big and fat and succulent. Sorry, I was drooling for a second there.

Anyway, my point (and I do have one, honestly) is that if you're eating locally-sourced, grass-fed, free-range beef (or other such animals), and somebody tries to tell you that you're contributing to the death of the planet, just try to refrain from whacking them with a club, no matter how much it might seem like the "caveman thing to do".

Where do your veggies come from?

Recently, you may have seen an article similar to this one, talking about a recent study which found that organic fruit and vegetables were not really more nutritious than standard industrial-farming-techniques crops. The organic crowd are attacking this study on several fronts, and they do have some points, but there are also some counter-points to consider.

First up, for some nutrients (such as beta carotene), it did appear that organic food might have somewhat more than the standard crops. However, it should be pointed out that in most nutrient categories, both kinds of crops were roughly the same. Given that, on the paleo diet, I'm typically eating 20 servings of fruit and vegetables a day, the small percentage difference isn't going to make much difference to me - I'm still getting more than 100% of the RDA of most minerals and vitamins. Further, the study does invalidate an oft-repeated claim that organic versions of produce contain "way more vitamins and minerals" (as I've heard claimed).

Second, the study did not consider the pesticide residues and their potential effects on human health. This is a valid criticism, but the study explicitly wasn't looking at that. Furthermore, it should be pointed out that organic produce is not pesticide-free - they simply use pesticides that someone, somewhere, has declared are "organic". You know what? Mother nature has made some pretty vicious poisons that I wouldn't want to be eating. Poison is poison, whether it comes from a lab or it's extracted from some beetle's venom. There are also standards for how much pesticide residue can be left on a piece of produce by the time it gets to market - I'm not sure that the same is true of aflatoxins.

The thing that the organic crowd never mentions is that organic crops, by their nature, generally have significantly lower yield per acre. If everyone on the planet switched to organic produce, we'd need to commit a whole lot more land to farming, which means a lot less land for parks, forests, and so on. Further, even organic crops generally use seeds which have been "tweaked" genetically, even if it is through years of selective breeding instead of a snip of some DNA in a lab. (For example, carrots shouldn't have nearly as much sugar in them as they do.)

While I'm on the topic of produce, someone was recently talking to me about irradiation of food. The way they were talking, it sounded like the entire produce section should glow in the dark! The truth, at least in Canada, is somewhat simpler. The only things that can be irradiated, according to government regulations, are certain spices, onions, and potatoes, and they must all be clearly labelled as such. (The fact is that there is no residual radiation in the foodstuffs so treated, but some people wonder how the treatment affects the nutritional content of the food, and I'm not 100% convinced this question has been answered to date.)

Ultimately, if you want to be sure of your own food supply, you need to grow it yourself, ideally using "heirloom" seeds (which allows you to use a few seeds from each year's crop to sow the following year's bounty). Next best would be your local vegetable stand (ideally where you can see the field your veggies just came from!), and your super-mega-food-mart is a distant third, whether you're buying organic or whatever's on sale. Being a locavore (eating food from within 100km of home) is the ideal, but I live in Canada - six months of the year all I'd get to eat would be snow! Well, not really, but you get the idea.

Update - this article raises a curious question - if pesticides are so bad for us, then why do farmers (who work with the stuff in much higher concentrations than most of us ever run into) have a cancer rate substantially lower than the rest of the population?

Chocolate freaking pudding!

Chocolate isn't exactly paleo. But, on the other hand, it's rich in antioxidants and a source of dietary fibre, and there's an awful lot of literature out there suggesting that good, dark chocolate has a place in our "preventative medicine cabinet". Now, when I say dark, I mean dark - minimum 60% cocoa, preferably at least 70%. We often seek out 85% to 90% cocoa mass chocolate - milk chocolate just tastes too sweet now.

Ever since I was a young lad, my favourite dessert has always been chocolate pudding. I wanted to create or find a recipe that would be not-too-objectionable to the paleo diet, yet still give me my chocolate pudding fix. My first experiment, with a chocolate custard recipe, wasn't completely inedible, but it wasn't what I was hoping for. Fortunately, I don't give up easily. This recipe is based on one over at Elana's Pantry, but substitutes stevia for the agave syrup she uses.

Ingredients

• 1 can coconut milk (14 oz size)
  
• 1 pinch salt
• 2 Tbsp arrowroot powder
  
• 1/2 to 1 Tbsp stevia, depending how sweet you like it (use chocolate or other flavoured stevia for extra flavour)
• 1 Tbsp vanilla
• 200g dark chocolate (70% is sweeter, 90% is richer), broken up.
  

Instructions

1. Heat the coconut milk and salt in a saucepan until it's hot, but not boiling.
2. Sift in the arrowroot, stirring all the while, and then whisk for 2 minutes non-stop. At the end of it, the mixture should be thickened slightly and should coat the back of a spoon dipped in it nicely.
3. Whisk in the stevia and vanilla, turn the burner off, and allow the mixture to cool for a few minutes.
4. Stir in the chocolate until melted.
5. Spoon into 4 dishes and place in the fridge for 30 minutes. Hint - to keep a "skin" from forming on the surface, place some plastic wrap on each bowl so it's covering the surface of the pudding.
   

Well, I was fooled...

Since the paleo diet discourages the use of sugar and artificial sweeteners, adherents are generally looking for other ways to satisfy the "sweet tooth". I've already talked about stevia in a previous posting, but we had lately been using agave syrup as well.

As it turns out, this is a mistake on my part, and I'm just glad I never got around to encouraging its use here in this blog. Agave syrup is not "natural" or "organic", no matter what the label may say. To make it, they take the root bulbs of the agave plant, which are starchy tubers comprising 50% inulin fibre (a non-digestible long-chain saccharide with a slight sweet taste, often used to "cut" stevia to make it spoonable), and they "chop up" the inulin with enzymes to release the sugar molecules within, then run it through various not-particularly-natural processes to "purify" it. Unfortunately, these sugar molecules are all fructose, and our bodies just aren't meant to handle quantities of fructose - it has to be digested by the liver, and damages the liver in the process.

There are other potential problems with it as well, and I suggest if you're interested in reading why both agave syrup and high-fructose corn sweeteners (HFCS, or "glucose-fructose" as it's called on labels in Canada) have no place in our food then you might want to go read this report from the Weston A. Price foundation.

So what sweeteners can we use? Well, honey is about as raw as you're going to get, and maple syrup is also good (both in moderation, of course). Sometimes things are sweetened with concentrated juices (apple and/or grape are popular, but you can use concentrated orange juice in some cooking to good effect as well). I'm also looking into something called "yacon syrup", but I don't know enough about that one yet to form an opinion. Ultimately, though, all sweeteners should be used in moderation - they would not be common-place in the diet of early man, so they should not be a frequent guest at our table either.

FAT isn't a four-letter word!

One of the "criticisms" of the paleo diet is that you're eating a lot of meat, and thus a lot of fat, and "all that artery-clogging saturated fat is bad for you". Except it's not. It's actually one of the better forms of fat for you, and it's a heck of a lot better than vegetable oils, which tend to go rancid at the drop of a hat (and rancid oils are BAD oils). Further, the conventional wisdom that "fat makes you fat" is completely wrong - fat is, in fact, the only one of the three macro-nutrients that can't be converted to sugar and crammed into your fat cells by insulin (which is how you get fat). And yes, consumption of animal fat increases your LDL ("bad cholesterol"), but increases your HDL ("good cholesterol") right alongside it.

I could rant about this for a couple of hours, but instead I'm going to give you two links. The first is a recent article from Mark's Daily Apple, and the second is the website for the guy who made the movie Fathead. I haven't seen Fathead yet, but it would be in my Netflix queue, if I used Netflix.

Go. Read. Learn why fat is good, and animal fat is very good. And tasty. And then go make some bacon. :-) Personally, I'm saving my pennies up to buy this cookbook.

Bet you never had broccoli-slaw like this!

You'll often see "convenience packs" in the grocery store, even in the produce section. Cauliflower and/or broccoli pre-cut, pre-washed, and ready to steam or boil, for example. While it is more expensive because you're paying for the additional processing, the vegetables themselves are just as healthy as the rest of the produce section.

One of the things we do buy in the pre-packaged bags of vegetables is "broccoli-slaw". Basically, it's shredded "hearts" (AKA stems) of broccoli, carrot, and red cabbage. If you added some mayonnaise it probably wouldn't be bad, but if you saute it up, it's pretty darn good, in my opinion.

Ingredients

• 3 Tbsp oil (coconut, olive, or similar - you can also try a "chili oil" for a spicier dish)
• 1 medium onion, skinned and sliced
  
• 2 cloves garlic, minced
  
• 1 x 340g (12oz) bag of "broccoli slaw"
• juice of one lemon or lime
• salt and pepper to taste

Instructions

1. Slice the onion in half, remove the peel, and then slice into thin "half-rings".
   
2. Heat the oil in a saute pan or wok.
3. Saute the onion in the oil. Add the garlic after a couple of minutes.
4. Add the bag of broccoli slaw and saute.
5. When it's just about done, pour the citrus juice in and mix well.
6. Season to taste.
   

Arrowroot - the paleo-friendly starch

There's one problem with not allowing flour or cornstarch in the paleo diet - you can't thicken sauces. Actually, you can - if you use arrowroot. At one time, in fact, the preferred starch for sauce-making in fancier kitchens was arrowroot, because the sauces end up clearer and glossier. However, because it was expensive, it fell out of favour. These days, you can pick up a decent-sized bag of arrowroot for around $10, at least in my neck of the woods, and it will last for a long time if you only use it for making sauces.

Quick Cheese Sauce
Ingredients

• 1 Tbsp butter
• 2 Tbsp arrowroot (approximate)
• 1 cup milk, preferably 2% or 3.5% milk fat
  
• 1/2 cup grated cheese such as cheddar or parmesan
  
• salt and pepper to taste (use white pepper so your sauce isn't full of black specks)

Instructions

1. Melt the butter over medium-high heat, and allow it to just start to brown.
2. Whisk the arrowroot in - it should form a thick paste, which then thins up again quickly.
3. Gradually whisk in the milk and bring the mix to a simmer or low boil, stirring continuously with the whisk. As the sauce nears the simmering point, it should thicken up and the lumps of arrowroot should disappear.
   
4. Season with salt and pepper.
5. Stir in the grated cheese until it melts.

ALTERNATE method - mix the arrowroow with a bit of the milk before adding it to the melted butter. It will look funny at first because the butter won't mix in with the milk (it will just float on top), but when it thickens up it will be fine. I don't think you'll get lumps if you do it this way.

Use this to top steamed vegetables for a cheesy break from the ordinary. If it doesn't thicken, add a bit more arrowroot. If there are lumps (it happens sometimes), put the sauce through a strainer.

Crazy for coconut oil

You may have noticed that in a lot of recipes I tend to call for coconut oil. There is a lot of information out there suggesting that this is a relatively good fat for human health. Add to that its relatively high smoke point (the point at which oil used for cooking starts to break down), and coconut oil makes a pretty good choice for cooking.

What is coconut oil? Well, it's pretty much exactly what it sounds like - although if you had visions of tiny oil derricks drilling into coconuts, you'll be disappointed. In practice, the oil is usually extracted from coconuts by drying and then pressing the "meat" (the same stuff you buy as shredded coconut in the store).

Does coconut oil add a coconut flavour to everything you cook? Well, some oils have more flavour than others, but the flavour is usually so subtle that you won't notice it unless you're taking a spoonful of the oil directly (and some people do this as a daily supplement).

Coconut oil is a saturated fat, so it's relatively stable (but it's one of the good kinds of saturated fats - it appears to raise the "good" cholesterol in your blood). It lasts for up to two years without going rancid, but it lasts somewhat longer when it's in the solid form. The melting point of coconut oil is around 25 degrees Celsius, so depending on how warm your kitchen is, you may want to store it in the fridge if you're not going to use it all up right away. (I find a standard jar of coconut oil only lasts me a couple of months anyway, so I keep it out on the counter.)

If possible, buy your coconut oil as "virgin" oil - while there is no standard for what constitutes "virgin" oil, this generally means that the oil has been only minimally processed. Watch out for hydrogenated coconut oil - this is sometimes done to increase the melting point, but it's just as questionable in coconut oil as it is in vegetable oils, nutritionally speaking.

There are a lot of health claims associated with coconut oil, including (as noted above) that it raises your HDL (or "good") cholesterol, thus improving your overall cholesterol ratio. It is also reported to raise your metabolism, and may have antiviral, antibacterial, and antimicrobial properties. Additionally, the main fatty acid in coconut oil is lauric acid, which may strengthen the body's immune system. Oh, one other thing - you can also use it on the outside of your body, it's supposed to make a wonderful moisturizer.

Whether you down a spoonful a day as a nutritional supplement, or you just use it for frying foods, coconut oil deserves a chance to be in your kitchen, in my opinion. Of course, I'm not a doctor, I'm just a caveman.

Food for thought about food for food

The next time you're in a super-mega-food-mart, try an experiment. Go over to the frozen fish section, and find some salmon fillets. If you have any luck at all, you should be able to find some that are marked "wild" and some that aren't - which generally means they've been farmed.

If you flip both over, and look at the nutritional information, you will hopefully see the amount of calories, protein, fat, and carbohydrates (probably not much of the latter, unless you've accidentally picked up a box of fish sticks, in which case put that down right now).

Usually, these days, the fat section of the nutritional information will include a breakdown of the Omega-3 and Omega-6 (O3 and O6) fatty acid content. Now, I'm going to really simplify this explanation, but basically, both kinds of fatty acid are used by your body. The problem is that our diets currently contain way too much O6 fatty acids (which can cause inflammation of tissue, among other things), and not nearly enough O3 fatty acids. The ideal ratio is at least 1-to-1, but most people get something like 1-to-40 (in favour of O6 fatty acids).

Okay, back to the fish at hand - not too cold, I hope? Anyway, look at the O3 and O6 fatty acid content of both the wild and farmed salmon. The wild salmon may have an O3-to-O6 ratio of 3.5 to 0.5, or 7-to-1 (this is an example, but pretty typical). The farmed salmon, on the other hand, may have an O3 to 06 ratio of something like 2 to 5, which (at 0.4-to-1) is much worse than the wild salmon.

Why is this? Well, to be blunt, it's what they feed the farmed salmon - grains. Wild salmon doesn't run into a whole lot of grain while it's swimming the ocean deep - it chows down on krill and such, and gets a healthy O3-O6 ratio naturally. Farmed salmon, on the other hand, hangs around the pen all day, eating "food pellets" which contain, among other things, grains.

The same is true of beef, to an extent. If you can find grass-fed, grass-finished (i.e. fed on grasses instead of grains right up until its last trip to the slaughterhouse), its O3 content is much better than typical grain-fed beef. Personally, I also find that the meat tastes better - almost sweet.

So, what I'm trying to say to you is don't just be concerned with what you eat - be concerned with what it ate!

Sweet Sweet Stevia Rebaudina

I want to talk briefly about stevia, aka stevia rebaudina to the biologists. You may already have heard of it, and if you haven't, you probably will soon.

Stevia is actually one of about 240 plants of the genus stevia, all related to the sunflower. It's a plant of South American ancestry, and it has been used for more than a century for one very important thing. It naturally contains compounds called stevioside and rebaudioside that are many times sweeter than sugar, with pretty much no calories. Yes, you read that correctly - it's an all-natural, low calorie sweetener.

So why isn't this thing all over the place? That's a very good question. There was one study done, back in 1985, which suggested that stevia compounds could be mutagenic (i.e. cancer-causing). However, and I want to emphasize this, no other studies have found such a link. In fact, in 2006, the World Health Organization not only cleared stevia of this sort of thing, but strongly hinted that it could have benefits for hypertension and/or type-2 diabetes. (If you have either of these conditions, check with your doctor before using stevia, please!)

Currently, its status in the USA is a bit odd - despite the fact that it should have "Generally Recognized As Safe" status (because it was in use before 1958), it can't actually be marketed as a sweetener in that country, only as a "dietary supplement". (There are conspiracy theories about why this is, but I won't get into them here.) However, new products are coming out in the near future from various manufacturers which incorporate stevia or stevia-derived compounds, including diet sodas and a "half-the-calories" orange juice. Its status varies in other countries. It's banned as a food additive in some countries, including Europe and Singapore, but used widely in others such as Japan and parts of South America. Here in Canada, we appear to be mimicking the US approach in calling it a "dietary supplement" - even when it's sold in the same stores as artificial sweeteners, it's usually not located anywhere near them, but over with the health supplements and protein powders.

You can buy stevia in two main forms - liquid extract (in a suspension of glycerin or alcohol) or powder. If you buy a stevia powder, read the contents carefully to see what it's "cut" with - if your stevia powder is pure then you only need a teensy bit for your morning coffee, so it's often cut with something like inulin fibre, maltodextrin, or rice starch to make it "spoonable" (one spoonful of stevia mixture is equivalent in sweetness to one spoonful of sugar).

If you decide to use stevia in any form other than the spoonable one, you'll need to know the equivalent sugar sweetness for baking and such. For example, many of the liquid extracts are so sweet that one tablespoon of the liquid is equivalent in sweetness to a cup of sugar. This is good if you're sweetening iced tea (for example), but can cause problems if you're using it for baking, as you may need to add something else to make up for the missing "bulk" of that cup of sugar. And, of course, stevia won't caramelize or "brown" in cooking or baking.

But, if you're looking for a sweetener that wasn't made in a laboratory and won't spike your blood sugar, you could do worse than taking a close look at stevia.

All About Almond Flour

The first ingredient I want to discuss is almond flour, sometimes also called almond meal. It's exactly what it sounds like - blanched almonds (i.e. with the outer skins removed) are ground into a fine meal.

Why the heck would we want to do that?

Well, the first rule of paleo (...is that you don't talk about paleo! Oops, sorry, wrong movie!) is that you can't have any grains. This includes wheat. This means that starch is, as they say, "right out". But, having grown up on a steady diet of baked goods, I'm not ready or willing to give up muffins, cakes, pies, or pancakes just yet. And this is where almond flour comes in - with it, you can make incredibly dense, sweet, moist baked goods - and I promise you'll see recipes featuring this ingredient in the near future.

The only problem with almond flour is that it can be quite expensive. The ideal (from a price perspective anyway) would be to have your own almond tree, so you could harvest, shell, blanch, peel, and grind your own almonds. (If you can go this route, just be careful not to grind the almonds too much, or you'll end up with almond butter, which is delicious, but doesn't make good muffins in itself.) That's also a lot of work. Fortunately, many "bulk" stores (or the bulk sections of many grocery stores) do typically carry almond flour, but you should understand and expect a bit of "sticker shock". Here in Toronto, Canada, where my kitchen-cave is located, we typically pay $20 (Canadian dollars) for a bag containing around 4 or 5 cups of almond flour - and we go through almost that much a week.

One more thing about almond flour - it's not "real" flour, and because of this it doesn't form rigid structures when heat is applied. You're not going to get a crusty French bread using it. It also can't be used to thicken soups or sauces. On the other hand, it doesn't contain gluten (which causes a lot of problems for some people), and it's high in protein (thus filling you up more quickly) and low in simple starches (which can play havoc with blood sugar, among other things).