Product review - Walden Farms sauces

Have you seen these "Walden Farms" products?  They have websites for Canada and the United States.  They sell "no calorie, no carb, no gluten" sauces, syrups, dressings, and so on.  What they really are, are water with thickeners and flavours and various chemicals, and therefore they're really not paleo per se.  However, if you're just starting out on paleo (or you're a low-carber rather than full-on paleo), they might be worth a look.

We've tried several of their salad dressings, including creamy bacon (decent), Thousand Island (a bit runny, but otherwise okay), balsamic vinaigrette (stick with a mixture of olive oil and balsamic vinegar, if you ask me), and Caesar salad (okay at first, but the taste gets strange after a while if you're eating a big salad).

We've also tried several other products, including their chocolate syrup (on homemade ice cream), which we found disappointing.  The "ketchup" isn't bad, and makes a nice break from using tomato paste (our usual condiment on burger patties, along with good mustard).  The mayonnaise was okay, but I think I prefer my homemade variety.  Finally, we've tried two of their dips, the bacon dip (nice and thick and bacon-y) and blue cheese (I was disappointed, but Mrs. Caveman liked it).

Other products they have (but that we haven't tried) include jams and jellies, barbecue sauce, and a "peanut spread".

So, long story short, I find their products to be uneven in terms of how much I like them, but they might be worth a look if you are looking at "normal" foods longingly while gnawing on your chunk of meat.  In Toronto, we generally find their products at the Low-Carb Grocery (as mentioned here previously) as well as at our local Valu-Mart grocery store.  Both the Canadian and US websites (as linked above) have "store locator" links so, if you're interested, you can find their products near you..

Notice:  I have not received any compensation or consideration for this post from the manufacturer of this product, or from any other third-party.

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?

Mashed carrots, anyone?

Carrots are a pretty good all-around side dish, but my usual methods of preparing them (steaming or baking) tend to get monotonous after a while. Try this one instead.

  Ingredients

• carrots, peeled and cut into chunks (as appropriate for the number of people you're feeding)
• butter (as appropriate for the amount of carrots you've got - be conservative, it's easier to add more than take away)
• milk (as for butter)
• salt and pepper to taste
• cumin to taste (optional)

Instructions

1. Peel and cut up your carrots, if you haven't already
2. Boil them until they're very tender
3. Drain them and combine with the rest of the ingredients
4. Process in a food processor or mash up "real good"

It's not rocket science, but it will make "something different" as a side. You could also try adding other things (like honey or dill), or substitute orange juice for the milk. Warning - I haven't actually tried that, but I think it might be good... Orange-dill carrot mash?

An unsolicited, if qualified, product endorsement

Disclaimer: I do not receive any compensation from the company below, nor have I received any free samples or any other consideration from them or from any other agency for this statement.

Now that the legal stuff is out of the way, have you tried Quest protein bars? I'm liking them a lot. There are two different product streams on their website, "99.95% natural" (sweetened with sucralose) and "100% natural" (sweetened with stevia). Unfortunately, my suppliers here in Cave-ville haven't managed to get any of the 100% natural bars in, so I guess I'll have to put up with that 0.05% for a while.

So what's in them? Well, the bar that I just ate (peanut butter and jelly flavour, from their 99.95% natural line) lists the following, in order, as its ingredients: protein blend (why protein isolate, milk protein isolate), isomalto-oligosaccharides, peanut butter, almonds, water, peanuts, natural flavors, sea salt, lo han guo, and sucralose. Other flavours, such as the Chocolate Brownie bar I'm saving for afternoon's snack, don't have peanuts in them.

The nutritional information lists 10g fat, 20g protein, and 21g carbs, of which 17g is listed as dietary fibre. So, with 4g "net carbs" (as the Atkins people say), depending on your particular interpretation of "paleo", these might be worth a look. Of course, if you're following the no-dairy paleo, then the whey and milk proteins would be problematic, and if you're following Mark Sisson's Primal Diet (which says you should be eating less than 100g of all carbs, including fibre), these would be a large chunk of your daily carb. But, I like the fact that there's no soy in them (not even soy lecithin, which is used in a thickener in just about everything), that there's also no aspartame in them, and that the health food store closest to my office generally has most of the "99.95% natural" line in stock. I've already started bugging them to get the "100% natural" line in as well.

They're also available at the Low-Carb Grocery (up in Markham, Ontario, as well as online), which I should also post a review of at some point. (In fact, I thought I already had, but I'm not seeing it in my posts list...)

These look delicious!

Found in random wandering on YouTube - I haven't tried them yet, but they look like a paleo "granola" bar, and with all the nuts in them they're bound to be good and filling!

What is paleo? And who gets to decide?

Over on Chris Kresser's blog is an article, itself linking to another article over on PaleoNu, that raises an interesting point. There are a lot of people who spout off about "paleo" and "primal" diets, but they all seem to have slightly different takes. Some say beans are okay, others say they're not. Some say dairy is good, others say no. Same thing for cashew nuts. And so on.

Much as I'd like to just copy-and-paste the last 8 or 10 paragraphs here, that would be rude. So, I'll urge you to go read his article instead. Essentially, it's impossible to know *exactly* what a paleo diet consisted of, and it probably varied over time and by region anyway. But the fundamentals work - a diet that emphasizes nutrient-dense, whole food without a lot of refined starch and sugar is known to be good for us. So, find what works for you personally, and I'll find what works for me personally, and we'll both be happy. Unless you're one of those people who isn't happy unless everyone else is doing what you want, in which case you're never going to be happy anyway, sorry.

Bolognese-style pasta sauce - with lots of hints

I don't think I've posted this before, but it's pretty easy. Heck, most of you probably have your own pasta sauce recipes anyway. Here's mine. I used to have this with spaghetti squash. Then I discovered shirataki noodles.

Ingredients

• One pound ground beef (or mix equal parts beef and pork, or use other meats)
• One (or two) medium cooking onion, diced
• Olive oil or other fat suitable for cooking, 3-4 Tbsp (lard works well!)
• 2 cloves garlic (or 3, if small), peeled and chopped
• One can (680mL) tomato sauce (Hint - "pasta sauce" often has sugar added, "tomato sauce" usually doesn't)
• One can (769mL) diced tomatoes
• One green pepper, seeded and diced
• 2-3 Tbsp tomato paste
• 2-3 tsp oregano (fresh is better, but dried is fine - see below)
• 2-3 tsp basil (ditto)
• 1-2 tsp thyme (and again, ditto)
• salt and pepper to taste

Instructions

1. Cook the beef and onion in the fat over medium heat until the beef is browned and the onion is waxy-looking. (I have no idea why they say the onion should be "clear" - I've never seen a clear onion, and I'd be kind of freaked if I did. Invisible onions?!?)
2. Add the garlic, and cook, stirring, for about a minute.
3. Add pretty much everything else (Hint - if you're using fresh herbs, add towards the end of cooking; if using dried, add near the start).
4. Simmer over low heat for a couple of hours until thickened somewhat, stirring occasionally.
5. Adjust seasoning to taste. (Hint - only add salt at the end of the cooking process - otherwise the salt taste tends to 'vanish' and you end up adding more anyway.)
6. Serve over shirataki noodles, or spaghetti squash if you can't find the noodles. Or just eat a big bowl on its own.

Note - there's some controversy right now about using canned tomatoes and tomato sauce - there's a possibility that the acidity of the tomatoes could cause certain unpleasant chemicals to leach out of the lining of the can into the food. However, I don't see jars of tomato products in my local mega-lo-mart (with apologies to Alton Brown), so I'm stuck with cans. This time of year, you can probably get bushels of fresh tomatoes cheaply and make this sauce up totally from scratch, but come January, the only tomatoes I'm going to see are hard, pale pink, and almost as well-traveled as I am. Hence, this recipe calls for canned ones.