Fall-apart ribs

You might have noticed I don't post on here a lot.  I had the best of intentions to do so, but this isn't my job.  It's not even my second job.  Or my third.  I haven't seen a penny of payment for this, in fact, so it's not a job at all.  That's not a complaint, I'm just saying - I guess I get out of it what I put in, right?

Anyway, since I started this blog, there's been a minor revolution in paleo - there are cookbooks (and I mean a LOT of them - I have a dozen myself, and I'll eventually start posting reviews here) devoted the the paleo way of eating.  In that respect, this blog probably isn't as necessary as it was, since there's lots out there now (a lot more blogs as well).  But I'm going to keep it, and I'll keep updating it when and where I see fit.  Like today, for instance.

Today, I want to tell you how I do ribs in the oven.  You might already know this, you might not, but the secret is this:  time.  Long time, low temperatures.  Here's what I do:

Ingredients

• 1-2 racks ribs
• barbecue sauce (lately I'm using Xyla brand, but I've also made my own)
• lots of aluminum foil (yeah, not environmentally friendly - try to recycle it!!)

Instructions

1. Preheat your oven to 300 degrees Fahrenheit, or the equivalent in Celsius.
2. For each rack of ribs, lay out a single piece of foil longer than the ribs.
3. Pour a bit of barbecue sauce down the length of the foil, lay the ribs on the foil length-wise, and pour some more barbecue sauce on top.  You can get pretty saucy now if you want.
4. Bring the edges of the foil up and crimp on top - if you need more foil because your ribs are too wide, make sure the seam is on top, not underneath. You want to make sure any juices don't leak out.
5. Lay the foil package of ribs on a baking sheet.  If you're doing multiple racks of rib, repeat with the other rack, and lay them side-by-side on the baking sheet.
6. Bake in the oven for at least two hours.
7. At this point, your ribs are technically done, and you have two choices:
1. "Crisp" them up on the grill with more barbecue sauce, or
2. Carefully drain the juices from the foil packets into a saucepan, thicken it on the stove by reduction, brush it onto the ribs as a glaze, and broil under your broiler for 1 minute.  Repeat three or four times until you have a nice thick coating of reduced-juice glaze baked onto the ribs.

Let them cool a few minutes, and dig in!  Napkins pretty much mandatory, by the way.

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..

Pulled pork (sort of)

One of the finer things in life (in my opinion, anyway) is pulled pork - particularly in a tortilla.  This recipe, sadly, isn't quite the same, but it will do in a pinch.

Ingredients

• 1-1/2 pounds pork tenderloin, in 2 inch / 5 cm cubes
• 1 quart vegetable stock
• 4 cloves garlic, crushed
• 3 bay leaves
• 1 tsp cloves (whole)
• 1 Tbsp pickling spice mix
• 1/2 tsp each salt and pepper

And for the "sauce":

Ingredients

• 1/4 cup red wine vinegar
• 1 Tbsp olive oil
• 1/4 cup sour cream
• 1 tsp orange zest (zesty!)
• 1 red bell pepper, finely chopped (minus the seeds and stem, of course)
• 1 stick (or stalk, if you prefer) of celery, again finely chopped
• 1 carrot, grated
• more salt and pepper, to taste
• a dash of hot sauce (or more if you like it SPICY!)

Instructions

1. Throw everything in the first list of ingredients into a big pot (well, not TOO big).  Bring it to a boil, reduce the heat, and simmer everything until the pork is tender, about an hour.
2. Remove the pork, allow to cool, and shred using two forks.
3. Now you have a choice.  You could do any of the following:
1. Combine the second list of ingredients above in a bowl, and serve with the pork.
2. Remove the chunky bits (especially the cloves and bay leaf) from the pot, and reduce the liquid until it's a nice thick sauce (optionally thickening it further with something like arrowroot), and then mix back with the pork.
3. Find a low-carb barbecue sauce (like the ones that Walden Farms makes, although that's not really an endorsement - they still don't pay me), or make your own, and mix that with the pork.
4. Now comes the hard part - how to serve it?  I'd prefer it on tortillas, but, you know.  Wheat.  Evil.  Enough said.  However, it's been suggested that you could serve this on large lettuce leaves, such as Boston lettuce (also sometimes called Bibb lettuce).

Enjoy!

Pumpkin Pie

Well, I don't know where in the world you might be when you read this, but here and now it's Thanksgiving in Canada.  Recently, at a family gathering, we discovered something:  I'm the only person in my family who likes pumpkin pie!  Now, most pumpkin pies come with a flour-based crust, and lots of sugar in the pie filling, but not this one...

Ingredients

• 1-1/2 cups canned pumpkin (NOT pumpkin pie filling, just pure pumpkin)
• 3 eggs
• 3/4 cup unsweetened vanilla almond milk
• 3/4 cup spoonable stevia (or equivalent of your favourite sweetener)
• 2 tsp "pumpkin pie seasoning" (I used 1-1/2 tsp today, and I think it could use a bit more)
• 1 cup whipping cream
• 1 dropper full of liquid stevia (or to taste)

Instructions

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.
2. Spray six 3-inch aluminum tart pans with non-stick spray (I use an olive oil-based one), and place them on a baking sheet.
3. Combine the first five ingredients in the blender, and blend until smooth (and roughly the consistency of pancake batter).
4. Fill the tart pans evenly with the pumpkin mixture.
5. Bake in the oven about 30 minutes.
6. Let them cool for a while on the counter, then put them in the fridge overnight (or at least 30 minutes).
7. When ready to serve, whip the whipping cream with the liquid stevia until it forms peaks, then put a dollop on top of each tart.
8. Enjoy!

Meat-zza!

I'd previously used an almond-crust pizza (as seen here) whenever I started craving pizza, but I recently tried this variation instead, and I'm hooked.  Of course, it's mostly meat, so it's VERY filling.  Oh, one warning - this will make a mess of a cookie sheet, which will be hard (but not impossible) to clean.  I recommend a good soaking.  I don't think you can grease the cookie sheet, but I will try that for next time.

Ingredients

• 2 pounds ground beef (or mix it up - ground pork, chicken, etc.)
• 2 eggs
• 1/2 cup grated Parmesan cheese (the weird stuff in the cardboard tube is okay for this)
• 1 tsp dried oregano
• 1 tsp dried basil
• 1/2 tsp dried thyme
• 1 tsp salt
• 1/2 tsp pepper
• 1 tsp garlic powder
• tomato paste OR tomato/pizza sauce
• pizza toppings (I went with plain old thin-sliced pepperoni)
• cheese for top (I used a four-cheese pre-grated store blend)

Instructions

1. Pre-heat your oven to 450 degrees.
2. Combine the Parmesan, herbs, garlic powder, salt, and pepper in a small bowl (do this first because it's easier when your hands aren't covered in raw meat).
3. Combine the ground meat and the eggs by hand until well-mixed.
4. Add the combined herbs/cheese/etc to the meat and egg mixture (if you add before the meat and egg are well-mixed, the egg just causes the herbs to clump up).
5. Pound it flat onto a baking sheet, as thin as possible (it will shrink back up during cooking).
6. Bake the meat "base" in the oven for 10 minutes, remove, and crank the oven up to "Broil".
7. Drain the excess grease and water that's come out of the meat base while it cooked.
8. Add your tomato paste or sauce (tomato paste, while my preferred pizza sauce for the intense taste, is admittedly hard to spread here).
9. Add the toppings and cheese.
10. Broil for about 5 minutes (keep an eye on it!) until it looks pizza-ish (i.e. top cheese is melted and browned).
11. Let cool for a couple of minutes, and dig in!.

Additional:  If you substitute a package of taco seasoning for the spices, use salsa in place of the tomato sauce, and cover with a cheddar-jack cheese blend, you get something different, but awesome!