Bacon Nut-o-la

Bacon Nut-o-la
Originally uploaded by thatgirljj

Sometimes I get inspired to be very, very naughty in the kitchen. Today was one of those days, I was randomly pondering what I could do with some leftover dried coconut, and then it occurred to me, granola... well, not grain-ola per se, but maybe a nut-o-la. And then that little devil on my shoulder whispered "bacon"... Bacon? Yes bacon!

Bacon Nut-o-la

5 slices natural, nitrate free bacon
1/3 cup unsweetened dried coconut flakes
1/2 cup sliced almonds (the kind that look like thin flakes)
1/4 teaspoon vanilla extract
2 tablespoons maple syrup
1 tablespoon reserved bacon fat
Dash of ground cardamom (optional)

Preheat the oven to 300 degrees.

In a large pan, cook your bacon slowly over low heat, you want to render out a lot of the fat and pour it out a couple times while cooking, so that the bacon gets nice and crispy. When it's crisp, take the bacon out and drain on paper towels, then chop coarsely with a knife. Mix the bacon crumbles, coconut and almonds together in a small mixing bowl. Separately, mix the vanilla, maple syrup, reserved bacon fat and cardamom. Pour over the bacon/nut mixture and toss to distribute evenly. Spread the nut-o-la out evenly on a cookie sheet lined with baking parchment. Bake for 15 minutes, stir it a bit, and continue to bake checking every 5 minutes until the mixture is lightly browned. Watch it carefully for burning. Remove from oven and allow to cool, then break up (it should crumble easily). Store in the refrigerator.

The sodium content of this seems like it would be stupid high. But you're not going to eat much of it, I'm showing just about a tablespoon over yogurt in the picture. Using low sodium bacon (70mg per slice) I'm guessing it's about 50mg per tablespoon.

Out with a whimper

Well, sort of. I ended on a rough note. Let me backtrack to Saturday night... a friend had a big blow-out birthday dinner. I went! I got dressed up fancy(ish)! I drank tea instead of cocktails! I interrogated the waitress and decided on scallops over a lobster & mushroom hash (hold the sauce and hold the potatoes on the hash). It was fabulous. Except that Monday morning I woke up at 4am with an obvious case of food poisoning. I'm pretty sure it was the damn scallops because my husband had the same entree and also had some tummy problems, AND I've had this happen with undercooked scallops before. Damnit! Scallops are so yummy, but I think I'm going to need to pass on them in the future.

Anyway, yesterday morning, I called in sick from work and spent most of the morning in the bathroom. I ate a banana and had some applesauce, but by noon I was really feeling rough. I was feeling shaky and having heart palpitations, and I just wanted to eat something starchy. I couldn't stand the idea of eating any protein and fruit was just making me more shaky. So I cooked up a little bit of tapioca and had it with some coconut milk (no sweeteners). I wasn't going to spend 12 more hours suffering just so say that I was totally 100% clean for 30 days instead of 29.5. Especially since about an hour after I ate the tapioca the shakes and palpitations were gone and I actually felt like eating a little chicken. I've been steadily feeling better ever since.

I'm going to call it as completed though. I lost 7 pounds without any real difficulty and no serious cravings for anything except diet coke. That continues to be the most amazing thing to me, that there are just no internal struggles if I eat this way. I'm going to make a big long post about just that issue... but really given my history with food this is just a revelation!!! I've felt strong and healthy the whole time, no trouble recovering from workouts or keeping up with an unexpectedly stressful month at my job. I hate to say this... but it was pretty easy. Way, way easier than I had thought.

So what now? Well, I want to try dairy products, but I'm going to hold off on them until at least next weekend. Right now I want to let my GI tract heal before I go eating anything different. I need to be able to tell if any symptoms are due to cheese or just residual suffering from the damn scallops.

Poblano breakfast hash

Poblano breakfast hash
Originally uploaded by thatgirljj

I've been doing a few variations on the same theme for breakfast these days. It's a ground beef & cabbage based breakfast hash, that's super easy to partially cook ahead and then throw it together in the morning. This particular flavor combo, with the poblanos & cumin is pretty yummy... but the basic model can be adapted ad infinitum.

Meat mix

1 onion
2 poblano chiles
1 pound grassfed ground beef
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 teaspoon cumin
1/2 teaspoon chili powder
1/8-1/4 teaspoon salt (lower amount if you're sodium sensitive)

Thinly slice the onion and the poblanos. Using a large saucepan, saute the onion in the olive oil until it starts to soften, then add the poblanos and continue to cook until they soften as well. Add the ground beef (break it up into smaller chunks before adding it to the pan), sprinkle the spices over the top, and cook it all together until the beef is cooked through. Store in the fridge.

Breakfast hash

3-4oz of pre-shredded cabbage (yes, the kind in the bag, I use about 1/3 of a 12oz bag, or 2-3 handfulls)
Olive oil
1/4 recipe of the meat mix above
1/4 sliced avocado

Heat a frying pan over medium heat, add enough olive oil to swirl over the bottom of the pan. Throw in the cabbage and saute until the cabbage starts to brown. Add the meat mix to the pan, and continue to saute until it's thoroughly heated and the cabbage is well browned. Serve with thinly sliced avocado over the top.

Obviously, you can change the flavor of the meat mix considerably according to your tastes... I'm a huge fan of southwestern food, so this is a nice combo for me. If you're not sodium sensitive it would work really well with some bulk sausage and mushrooms (yum). Or you could use a thai curry paste and go the southeast asian route. Endless possibilities. But the best part is that it assembles lickety split in the morning and you have a nice filling breakfast with almost no work.

Sodium: 1/4 of the meat mix with 4oz cabbage will run about 175mg of sodium when made with the smaller amount of salt

Day 28 and Day 31

Today is day 28 of my Whole30 and I've been doing a little bit of thinking about what I'm going to do day 31. Ohmigod you guys... I'm busting out here... with dinner I'm going to have my favorite low sodium spaghetti sauce* that has a wee tiny bit of added sugar!!! And I'm going to have it over baked eggplant with a nice Shelton's italian sausage on top.

So basically, the only thing that's changing right away is that there are a few natural convenience foods with a bit of added sugar that are going back in my diet. Pasta sauce, a little bacon... ummm... OK, so those two things are pretty much it. But man, on a busy weekday night (and Tuesday I'm seeing the eye doctor after work) it sure is convenient to pop open a jar of sauce rather than simmering a sauce from scratch, even if it means a wee bit of sugar.

And planning for this transition back to everyday eating is why I really liked having gone to hear Dallas & Melissa speak. They're big on context. Considering your food choices in light of your whole life. Are you insulin sensitive or not? How active are you? If you're active, how well are you recovering? What foods may have caused problems during the Whole30? What is your sleep & stress situation like? The Whole30 gives you an opportunity to see how food choices are affecting all those things.

If I step back and look at my life, here's what I see. I'm insulin sensitive and our whole family is active, so a few grams of sugar in otherwise good clean foods probably isn't going to be that bad. The artificial sweeteners on the other hand? Those have been messing me up badly, they're gone for good now, I'm not going back. I'm probably going to test out dairy and white potatoes carefully and see how I react. Duck eggs will come back, but only as a binder or occasional homemade mayo; chicken eggs are out, I'm just not going to play around with known intollerances anymore. Red wine, cider and beans will go back to being occasional party food.

Grains are another story. I don't think I'm even going to test out how I'm reacting to grains for several more months, or until I'm at the weight I want to be at for optimal performance. They just don't seem super necessary to eat, I'm fine without them. I don't even have really strong cravings for them. If I can get starches from sweet potatoes, root veggies and possibly white potatoes, then there's really no reason to add them back. On the culinary side, I've found plenty of veggies that can suck up yummy sauces... eggplant with Italian food, roasted cauliflower with Indian, extra cabbage in Thai curries. I may go back to sometimes having grains as special occasion foods (sushi!), but I'm not even going to try that out for some time. The same thing with eliminating seed oils, I don't have any good reason to make any changes there, so I'm just going to continue on the same path.

* Note on the Enrico's sauce: The jars I get locally has a slightly different ingredient list than healthyheartmarket.com, mine does have some sugar, but then has less overall sugars/carbs in a 1/2 cup serving. I don't know if they need to update their info, or I have a slightly different product (Enrico's has a few no salt added options).

STOP THE PRESSES!!!

People, I have found nirvana! Breakfast nirvana at least. I stopped by our local indie health food store today and they'd rearranged their freezer section. So I had a peek and right there they had some new frozen products from Sheltons a local company known for good quality (though not pastured) poultry. Without much hope, I turned picked up the turkey breakfast sausage and read the stats... HOLY COW 170mg of sodium??? And no sugars, fillers or other junk in the ingredients? This is too good to be true... normal sausages run 300-350 for a single sausage patty and often have added sugars on top of it. But nope, this is the good stuff, turkey, turkey fat, water, sea salt & spices.

You see, once you start looking around at anything that's processed in any way, you're going to find salt & sugar. Usually together. Some smaller companies are catching on, they realize that people want processed foods with less junk in them. But invariably if they take out the sugar they add in more salt. Or if they take out some of the salt, they add sugar that never needed to be there in the first place. It's like they feel compelled to "amp up" the food for fear no one will eat it unless it fits with hyperprocessed tastes. When in reality, I think there is a genuine demand for honest food. Not oversweet, not oversalted, just plain honest food.

Anyway, cheers to Shelton's... they get it.

And now I have another breakfast option! :-)

Whole9 Foundations of Nutrition

Yesterday I was fortunate to attend the Whole9 Foundations of Nutrition workshop. I was lucky enough that they were scheduled to speak at a local crossfit studio in the middle of my Whole30. And by local, for once, I don't mean on the OTHER side of Los Angeles, I mean up in Monrovia which is a foothill community right down the road (OK freeway) from me. So here's my highlights & thoughts.

1. Melissa leads with the psychological impact of good food choices and this has been SO important to me. I'm going to write a long, intimate post on this when my Whole30 is over. But so far the last 21 days have been a revelation to me about the interaction of my neurochemistry, my mind and the food that I eat. Basically, her discussion made it very, very, VERY clear to me that my reliance on calorie free pseudo-foods (especially for me Diet Coke) has been a massive problem in my life. When she asked people in the audience to picture the thing they'd want most to eat, something really amazing, they all jointly came up with a chocolate cake with snickers on top... my brain just totally shorted out and all I could think of was Diet Coke. Melissa would say "Snickers Cake" and my brain just kept snapping to a picture of a 20oz bottle of Diet Coke next to an ice filled glass half full of Diet Coke with a straw in it. Yeah, things are that bad. I think I'm giving up Diet Coke for good... nothing that's such a big obsession can be good for me.

2. The technical discussions on hormonal interactions & gut permeability were interesting. Most of the insulin stuff I knew, but some of the details about other hormones like glucagon & leptin were interesting. I think it's the kind of thing that if I was an endocrinologist, I could understand in depth, but when I try to dig into it on my own I get really confused. Stats I can do, biochemistry ain't my strong point. Dallas did a really good job of explaining a lot of complex interactions without being obtuse. Well... maybe his diagram was a little messy, but we all got the point. The gut permeability issues were something I understood roughly with regards to a couple of my friends who have celiac or severe food allergies, but I didn't understand the ways in which it affects someone with relatively normal gut function... Which leads me to my next point.

3. I think I gotta give up the duck eggs. I've known for a long time that I have a moderate gut intolerance to chicken eggs... it waxes and wanes, but I've never been able to down an entire chicken egg without some problems. Then late last year I discovered duck eggs and HEY, I can eat these! Except that on the Whole30 I've been eating one every day, and at day 21 I'm still having GI symptoms. GI symptoms that I did not have before the Whole30 (with the exception of eggs I've always had an iron gut, in the face of everything I throw at it). I discussed it briefly with Melissa and she was really thinking the eggs could be a problem, maybe they're cross reacting, maybe I'm just not very good at breaking down egg protein. Who knows, maybe I'll be able to reintroduce them later. So from now on, I'm egg free... I need some help with meat/veggie breakfast ideas if anyone has them. I've never been the kind of person who's able to face a leftover roast first thing in the morning. :-/

4. The rest of the day was devoted to going over food types and what works and what doesn't. Most of it is stuff that's covered in some way on the Whole9 website, but we got a little insight into how Melissa and Dallas implement things, as well as which guidelines go out the window when they're vacationing in Mexico. But most valuable, we took some time to swap local resources for grassfed and pastured meats. I need to check into a new option for a pastured chicken supplier that looks cheaper than our old supplier AND may have livers (our old supplier would bundle the chickens with feet for stock but no organs). The one kind of dangerous thing is that Melissa was really pushing the superiority of macademias over other nuts, with regards to fatty acids. The only problem: macademias are like crack to me. I can eat a small handful of almonds and be fine, but macademias I just keep coming back until the bag is empty. Maybe I need to try some hazelnuts... monounsaturated fats, tasty, but not tropical nutty nut-crack.

5. There was an extensive discussion of pre & post workout nutrition for crossfitters that was interesting, but I'm not entirely sure how it applies to me. Circus arts are challenging, but it's more like a 1.5 hour gymnastics class than an all out punishing workout. There are portions that are all out, then there are portions that are conditioning and recovery, and portions where you're not doing anything except getting instruction, or watching someone else work through instruction. However, I'm starting partnered aerial work, and that's definitely verging on "punishing", since for portions of the class I'm lifting someone else my own size. There's two ways of pairing people up, either a strong base and a light flyer, or two equally sized strong people who trade off base & flyer. My partner and I fall into the latter category, so it means we're going to be lifting each other a lot. Anyway... this means I may have to get more serious about post workout nutrition. I feel like I kind of have some tools, but I'm still a little shaky on how to apply the ideas to my situation.

6. After the workshop there was a fish oil tasting with Stronger, Faster, Healthier. Yeah... I know... a FISH OIL TASTING! Just those three words had my husband cracking up over the dinner table. But honestly, their stuff is GOOD! And I've taken some fish oil in my day, but this stuff was nearly tasteless except for the flavors. I was not entirely impressed with the chocolate, but the lemon & tangerine were good and OMG... THE VANILLA SMELLS LIKE CUPCAKE BATTER! It doesn't taste quite as sweet as cupcake batter (no sweeteners), but it's still very mild and vanilla-y. The thing is, personally, I like to get my fish oil from eating actual fish rather than a disembodied oil. My son even likes fish quite a bit, so we do eat it often in our house... I'm not sure if "often" is optimal or not, especially considering that >50% of our beef is grassfed. But this stuff might be helpful for my husband who has to travel a lot, and eat sub-quality meat (SFH even makes a TSA compliant sample pack!!!), if I can get him over the idea of actually tasting it.

Pork & mango cole slaw bento

Pork & mango cole slaw bento
Originally uploaded by thatgirljj

This is my bento lunch for the week. I didn't post last week's because it was yummy, but not very colorful. Today's lunch though is tasty AND good looking. It's a bunch of leftover cuban pork roast with the Kids Love Cabbage cole slaw from Everyday Paleo. Forget the kids, I love this cole slaw enough to hoard it for myself. :-)

A note on the bentos: Bento lunches can look small, but the idea is to STUFF the food into your little bento box so there's no extra room left over. That right there is probably 1/2 of the full cole slaw recipe and about 4-6oz of pork. I also typically pack an apple or another piece of fruit along side my bento box. It doesn't look like a lot of food, but it's plenty filling.