Food ponderings & adventures: wheat, paleo, immune system & recipes
I thought about twittering bits of this, but really, even the small bits are too long for twitter. Also, need the longer format to work out some of this in my head.
Also, I do not seem to be smart enough for twitter today. Have had a dozen tweets I've started and given up on as I couldn't shrink them down to 140char. (None of them, I think, related to this post. Just apparently my twitter brain and my food brain are completely separate.)
I Beat my Wheat
So, I proved to myself, yet again, that my body Does Not Want wheat & sugar. 2 and a half weeks ago, I was surrounded by sick people. Sneezing, dripping, using up every tissue in the house sick people. I didn't get sick. I hadn't had wheat/sugar in 8 days and decided to deliberately NOT do so cause DO NOT WANT GERMS, thank you. And it seemed to have worked. 4 days ago I got back from cruise with sweetie in which I'd had wheat & sugar every day. Small amounts, nothing like I used to be able to put away. Half a dessert & a small dinner roll one day, a cookie or two the next. I figured "fuckit, I'm on vacation, I don't have to be smart enough to work with patients & I'm going to be sleeping in & spending my days in the spa anyway, so fuck intellectual rigor." The next day (after I came home) I was sick. Full on sore throat leading into fever & respiratory STUFF the next day. Feels like a flu-lite actually. Mrrph. Spouse suggested that what he'd had just had a really long incubation period, but honestly, his symptoms were different & he had no fever.
So once I got that through my head, I cleaned up the diet significantly. Definition of clean follows.
On Paleo
Over the last 4 months or so, I've been leaning more and more towards the Paleo diet. I'd already figured out that wheat & sugar didn't like me much, and the idea behind paleo is to ditch all processed food, especially wheats, grains & legumes. (Many include dairy in that as well, but that seems to be a some people thing, not everyone.) Basically, eat what the body evolved eating because the humans haven't been eating grains for long enough in history (only about 10K years) for our bodies to know WTF to DO with them & they're likely a causative factor (or at the least highly in why so many people are having autoimmune issues. (And as of a month ago, I'm one of them. I finally convinced my MD to test me for Hashimoto's Thyroiditis -- an autoimmune thyroid issue. And lo and behold, yes, I was positive. Sigh. This explains so freakin' much.)
Let me take a moment to remind the audience that I am the queen of carbs, and love love LOVE my bread, rice, pasta, etc. I have very good reason to be resistant to paleo-style diets. But the premise made sense to me. So I started reading. And reading. And reading. And more reading. And both the science and testimonials sound awfully good & has meshed with my experience. So more than cutting out sugar and wheat 95%, (which already made quite a difference to my pain & energy levels) I played a bit with cutting out grains & legumes (again, about 95%, except for white rice, which many paleo folk consider to be mostly harmless, except for the people it bothers), & increasing meat consumption and when I do that, my energy&pain improve yet more.
It probably says a lot that yesterday, 2 days completely grain free, that while my fever was higher, I was actually feeling better than the 2 days prior. *mutter*grumble* Yes, it is wonderful that I'm finding a solution (at least in part) to my health woes but GODDAMMIT, I LIKE CARBS.
On Meat & Cooking
I also do not cook meat well. Eating meat out is expensive, and I clearly feel better when I eat more of it (So Weird for this former borderline veggie), so I've been trying to learn. After several experiments, I've concluded that I can cook ground meat into quite tasty things, but I am on the sad side of mediocre when it comes to actual chunks of meat. I'm giving up on that for now - I'll try again when either bored or brave or have a Very Good Teacher.
One of my first really successful experiments was in trying to cook Keema. Keema is a ground meat indian dish that is tasty! Here, have a wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keema I have my doubts about how authentic it came out as "Keema" per se, but tastes pretty darn good. I was so proud of it that I actually submitted it to a Paleo food blogger who sent out the call for ground meat recipes. They loved it & posted it. See?
http://paleoparents.com/2011/this-week-in-red-meat-week-1/
They did, however, make it significantly more coherent than when I emailed it to them. They also made a couple of changes for their own dietary needs.
My Keema Recipe
(My = adapted from an online source or four)
Ingredients:
1 onion,
3-4 cloves garlic,
a metric buttload of spices, all measurements approximate as I'm still tweaking it: (2tbsp garam masala, 1tsp salt, 1tsp ginger, 1tbsp cumin, 2tsp cinnamon, 1tsp ground cardamom)
1 8oz can tomato paste,
1c beef broth
optional 10-16oz frozen veg (defrosted)
1 lb ground meat. (I've been using grass fed beef, & I understand lamb is traditional too)
oil/butter for sautee
1. Brown ground meat, set aside.
2. Sautee one diced onion for 5 min until soft. Turn heat down to medium & add several minced cloves garlic (the more the merrier, but I usually use 3-4, and put through the garlic press) & sautee another minute or two.
2b. Sautee note: I've used olive oil, and it's good. I'm sure Ghee would be better, but I don't have that. I throw in a tbsp or two of grass-fed butter with the spices in a later step to roughly approximate the ghee flavor. Definitely improves the dish.
3. Dump the bowl o' spices on top of the onion garlic (and stir) & let cook briefly to bring out the best fragrance of the spices. I usually panic and add liquid to this stage too early to avoid burning them, but I'm fairly sure you're supposed to actually brown the spices for a minute.
4. Re-add browned meat. Also add broth, tomato paste, and optional veggies (stirstirstir, get it all mixed up & all the stuck bits off the bottom), and simmer for 5-15 min to reduce liquid to thick gravy. It always seems to reduce faster than I expect.
5. Taste it! If you added veggies (in my case, generally chopped spinach or that mixed pea/carrot thing from the supermarket), it may need more salt. If your spice tolerance is SUPER high, you may want more cayenne, though I find the garam massala adds enough pepper for me. If it's too spicy, you can add some coconut milk. Like I said, I'm still tweaking it, & think it might want a slightly more acid flavor, and plan on trying it with diced tomatoes added next time. Real ones if I can find decent this time of year.
Serving: I've eaten this straight & I've eaten it over rice, depending on how grainy I'm feeling. If you're making rice, toss some salt, cinnamon sticks, cardamom pods, whole cloves & a spoonful of coriander seeds into the rice cooker along with the rice.
Context: I'm a white girl raised jewish, living on the border of a neighborhood of NYC that might as well be called little pakistan. So while I am personally not remotely authentic & I based the initial recipe from something online, my taste buds know what the food SHOULD taste like & I've been tweaking this to try and get it more authentic. It still tastes a bit americanized to me, but definitely tasty.
-----
Loose Meat
My favorite way to work on a recipe that I like/has potential is to do it over & over, tweaking just a little each time. I don't get bored of a food I like easily. My sweeties however, do, and I know this from experience. So I've been trying to remember to try other things. I remembered coming upon a recipe for "loose meat sandwiches" a while back, made via crockpot, that looked tasty. Tasty, cheap, perverse sounding name & crockpot, so it's a must-try, right? Just because it's for a sandwich doesn't mean I need to eat it with bread. That's what potatoes are for. Or rice. or for making faux sandwiches out of romaine lettuce or filling small sweet peppers with. It sounded an awful lot like a tomato-free sloppy joe recipe, and I was game to try!
The original recipe is here:
http://crockpot365.blogspot.com/2011/02/slow-cooker-loose-meat-sandwiches.html?m=1
I made it with lean ground turkey, as the author suggested. (I also halved the sugar; I was going to skip it entirely, but decided to try the recipe more correctly for the first time. Next time, I think maybe maple syrup or no sweetener.) But it came out a little funny. I probably should've taken a picture. Rather than being all gravylicious, it has turned into a shallow meatloaf, pulled in 1/2" from the edges, with edges pretty badly burnt. I think my slow cooker is hotter than that of the author of the recipe. I set it for 10hrs & left it overnight.... clearly, if I try again, I'll set it for 8 & add more liquid besides.
As what was left was tasty, if a bit dry, I spooned out the unburnt 90% (occupycrockpot?) & warmed/lightly simmered it for a few minutes with about a half cup of water and a half can of coconut milk. The results were quite tasty, though not particularly pretty. Looked quite a bit like grape nuts as hot cereal. I stood at the stove and thought, "my god, I think I made baby food." I ate it over a sweet potato & steamed green beans. Healthy & tasty, but... not pretty. Possibly I smushed all the ingredients together too much in addition to the overcooking, because really, it was a loaf! Possibly I should also brown the meat first next time so that it keeps a sense of intact texture. But... I rebel at the idea of browning something before crockpotting it. The whole idea of a crockpot is to make food EASY.
I believe the lesson here is that it's near impossible to go wrong by adding coconut milk to anything.
----
Next recipe?
I'm thinking of playing more with either indian cookbooks to get a feel for spicing things properly, or trying the sweet potato "spaghetti" mentioned on the same food blog page as my Keema. I'd actually really like to try the Pasketti, but shredding raw sweet potatoes sounds like a LOOOOOOT of work to me. And I am sick.
btw, I'd love ground meat recipe suggestions from you guys. Preferably once without too many processed ingredients that I'd have to work around. Eventually, I'll get bored of ground meat and/or brave enough to try solid pieces of meat again, but for now, I would like to try things I can *do.*
Also, I do not seem to be smart enough for twitter today. Have had a dozen tweets I've started and given up on as I couldn't shrink them down to 140char. (None of them, I think, related to this post. Just apparently my twitter brain and my food brain are completely separate.)
I Beat my Wheat
So, I proved to myself, yet again, that my body Does Not Want wheat & sugar. 2 and a half weeks ago, I was surrounded by sick people. Sneezing, dripping, using up every tissue in the house sick people. I didn't get sick. I hadn't had wheat/sugar in 8 days and decided to deliberately NOT do so cause DO NOT WANT GERMS, thank you. And it seemed to have worked. 4 days ago I got back from cruise with sweetie in which I'd had wheat & sugar every day. Small amounts, nothing like I used to be able to put away. Half a dessert & a small dinner roll one day, a cookie or two the next. I figured "fuckit, I'm on vacation, I don't have to be smart enough to work with patients & I'm going to be sleeping in & spending my days in the spa anyway, so fuck intellectual rigor." The next day (after I came home) I was sick. Full on sore throat leading into fever & respiratory STUFF the next day. Feels like a flu-lite actually. Mrrph. Spouse suggested that what he'd had just had a really long incubation period, but honestly, his symptoms were different & he had no fever.
So once I got that through my head, I cleaned up the diet significantly. Definition of clean follows.
On Paleo
Over the last 4 months or so, I've been leaning more and more towards the Paleo diet. I'd already figured out that wheat & sugar didn't like me much, and the idea behind paleo is to ditch all processed food, especially wheats, grains & legumes. (Many include dairy in that as well, but that seems to be a some people thing, not everyone.) Basically, eat what the body evolved eating because the humans haven't been eating grains for long enough in history (only about 10K years) for our bodies to know WTF to DO with them & they're likely a causative factor (or at the least highly in why so many people are having autoimmune issues. (And as of a month ago, I'm one of them. I finally convinced my MD to test me for Hashimoto's Thyroiditis -- an autoimmune thyroid issue. And lo and behold, yes, I was positive. Sigh. This explains so freakin' much.)
Let me take a moment to remind the audience that I am the queen of carbs, and love love LOVE my bread, rice, pasta, etc. I have very good reason to be resistant to paleo-style diets. But the premise made sense to me. So I started reading. And reading. And reading. And more reading. And both the science and testimonials sound awfully good & has meshed with my experience. So more than cutting out sugar and wheat 95%, (which already made quite a difference to my pain & energy levels) I played a bit with cutting out grains & legumes (again, about 95%, except for white rice, which many paleo folk consider to be mostly harmless, except for the people it bothers), & increasing meat consumption and when I do that, my energy&pain improve yet more.
It probably says a lot that yesterday, 2 days completely grain free, that while my fever was higher, I was actually feeling better than the 2 days prior. *mutter*grumble* Yes, it is wonderful that I'm finding a solution (at least in part) to my health woes but GODDAMMIT, I LIKE CARBS.
On Meat & Cooking
I also do not cook meat well. Eating meat out is expensive, and I clearly feel better when I eat more of it (So Weird for this former borderline veggie), so I've been trying to learn. After several experiments, I've concluded that I can cook ground meat into quite tasty things, but I am on the sad side of mediocre when it comes to actual chunks of meat. I'm giving up on that for now - I'll try again when either bored or brave or have a Very Good Teacher.
One of my first really successful experiments was in trying to cook Keema. Keema is a ground meat indian dish that is tasty! Here, have a wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keema I have my doubts about how authentic it came out as "Keema" per se, but tastes pretty darn good. I was so proud of it that I actually submitted it to a Paleo food blogger who sent out the call for ground meat recipes. They loved it & posted it. See?
http://paleoparents.com/2011/this-week-in-red-meat-week-1/
They did, however, make it significantly more coherent than when I emailed it to them. They also made a couple of changes for their own dietary needs.
My Keema Recipe
(My = adapted from an online source or four)
Ingredients:
1 onion,
3-4 cloves garlic,
a metric buttload of spices, all measurements approximate as I'm still tweaking it: (2tbsp garam masala, 1tsp salt, 1tsp ginger, 1tbsp cumin, 2tsp cinnamon, 1tsp ground cardamom)
1 8oz can tomato paste,
1c beef broth
optional 10-16oz frozen veg (defrosted)
1 lb ground meat. (I've been using grass fed beef, & I understand lamb is traditional too)
oil/butter for sautee
1. Brown ground meat, set aside.
2. Sautee one diced onion for 5 min until soft. Turn heat down to medium & add several minced cloves garlic (the more the merrier, but I usually use 3-4, and put through the garlic press) & sautee another minute or two.
2b. Sautee note: I've used olive oil, and it's good. I'm sure Ghee would be better, but I don't have that. I throw in a tbsp or two of grass-fed butter with the spices in a later step to roughly approximate the ghee flavor. Definitely improves the dish.
3. Dump the bowl o' spices on top of the onion garlic (and stir) & let cook briefly to bring out the best fragrance of the spices. I usually panic and add liquid to this stage too early to avoid burning them, but I'm fairly sure you're supposed to actually brown the spices for a minute.
4. Re-add browned meat. Also add broth, tomato paste, and optional veggies (stirstirstir, get it all mixed up & all the stuck bits off the bottom), and simmer for 5-15 min to reduce liquid to thick gravy. It always seems to reduce faster than I expect.
5. Taste it! If you added veggies (in my case, generally chopped spinach or that mixed pea/carrot thing from the supermarket), it may need more salt. If your spice tolerance is SUPER high, you may want more cayenne, though I find the garam massala adds enough pepper for me. If it's too spicy, you can add some coconut milk. Like I said, I'm still tweaking it, & think it might want a slightly more acid flavor, and plan on trying it with diced tomatoes added next time. Real ones if I can find decent this time of year.
Serving: I've eaten this straight & I've eaten it over rice, depending on how grainy I'm feeling. If you're making rice, toss some salt, cinnamon sticks, cardamom pods, whole cloves & a spoonful of coriander seeds into the rice cooker along with the rice.
Context: I'm a white girl raised jewish, living on the border of a neighborhood of NYC that might as well be called little pakistan. So while I am personally not remotely authentic & I based the initial recipe from something online, my taste buds know what the food SHOULD taste like & I've been tweaking this to try and get it more authentic. It still tastes a bit americanized to me, but definitely tasty.
-----
Loose Meat
My favorite way to work on a recipe that I like/has potential is to do it over & over, tweaking just a little each time. I don't get bored of a food I like easily. My sweeties however, do, and I know this from experience. So I've been trying to remember to try other things. I remembered coming upon a recipe for "loose meat sandwiches" a while back, made via crockpot, that looked tasty. Tasty, cheap, perverse sounding name & crockpot, so it's a must-try, right? Just because it's for a sandwich doesn't mean I need to eat it with bread. That's what potatoes are for. Or rice. or for making faux sandwiches out of romaine lettuce or filling small sweet peppers with. It sounded an awful lot like a tomato-free sloppy joe recipe, and I was game to try!
The original recipe is here:
http://crockpot365.blogspot.com/2011/02/slow-cooker-loose-meat-sandwiches.html?m=1
I made it with lean ground turkey, as the author suggested. (I also halved the sugar; I was going to skip it entirely, but decided to try the recipe more correctly for the first time. Next time, I think maybe maple syrup or no sweetener.) But it came out a little funny. I probably should've taken a picture. Rather than being all gravylicious, it has turned into a shallow meatloaf, pulled in 1/2" from the edges, with edges pretty badly burnt. I think my slow cooker is hotter than that of the author of the recipe. I set it for 10hrs & left it overnight.... clearly, if I try again, I'll set it for 8 & add more liquid besides.
As what was left was tasty, if a bit dry, I spooned out the unburnt 90% (occupycrockpot?) & warmed/lightly simmered it for a few minutes with about a half cup of water and a half can of coconut milk. The results were quite tasty, though not particularly pretty. Looked quite a bit like grape nuts as hot cereal. I stood at the stove and thought, "my god, I think I made baby food." I ate it over a sweet potato & steamed green beans. Healthy & tasty, but... not pretty. Possibly I smushed all the ingredients together too much in addition to the overcooking, because really, it was a loaf! Possibly I should also brown the meat first next time so that it keeps a sense of intact texture. But... I rebel at the idea of browning something before crockpotting it. The whole idea of a crockpot is to make food EASY.
I believe the lesson here is that it's near impossible to go wrong by adding coconut milk to anything.
----
Next recipe?
I'm thinking of playing more with either indian cookbooks to get a feel for spicing things properly, or trying the sweet potato "spaghetti" mentioned on the same food blog page as my Keema. I'd actually really like to try the Pasketti, but shredding raw sweet potatoes sounds like a LOOOOOOT of work to me. And I am sick.
btw, I'd love ground meat recipe suggestions from you guys. Preferably once without too many processed ingredients that I'd have to work around. Eventually, I'll get bored of ground meat and/or brave enough to try solid pieces of meat again, but for now, I would like to try things I can *do.*