Lemon Pecan Mini-Scones

We're having a lazy day here today. I didn't get good sleep this week (time to reevaluate the coffee consumption again) so last night I kicked all of the animals out of bed and left the alarm turned off. When I finally rolled out of bed around 10 am, I decided it was a good day for a "big breakfast".

I much prefer savory food for breakfast. I'll take a plate of bacon and eggs over pancakes any day, but I admit that I do enjoy a nice pastry with a cup of coffee on occasion. In fact, my absolute favorite way to spend Sunday morning is to hit my local farmers market and while there, indulge in a cup of Zeke's coffee and a pastry from Stone Hearth bakery.

So this morning I decided I'd test out a new paleo muffin or scone recipe to have alongside my bacon and eggs. I searched around online a bit, but wasn't finding quite the inspiration I wanted. Since the lemon pecan scone is my most frequent choice at the market I decided to try my hand at making a paleo version of those. I chose this recipe for Cranberry Orange Scones from Elana's Pantry to work from and made some modifications. Here's my recipe:

Paleo Lemon Pecan Mini-Scones

2 c blanched almond flour (I used Honeyville)
1/4 t kosher salt
1 t baking soda

1/2 c chopped pecans

1 egg
2 T honey
2 t lemon zest
1 t lemon juice

I combined the almond flour, salt, and baking soda in a large bowl, mixed well, then add the chopped pecans and mixed to distribute.
In a smaller bowl, I combined egg, honey, lemon zest, and lemon juice and whisked well to incorporate the honey. The wet ingredients went into the dry and I kneaded the dough until everything was mixed well.
From there I followed her instructions to make the dough into scones and loaded them onto my parchment lined baking sheet:

I baked them for about 8 minutes and then let them sit in the oven with the door open and the oven turned off for another 5 minutes and then moved them to a rack to cool:

The resulting scone was pretty satisfying. I don't like my scones to be super dry and crumbly, nor do I want my scones to have the texture of a muffin like the "scones" at Starbucks do (if I wanted a muffin texture, I'd have a muffin!) and these seemed to really hit the mark somewhere in between.

I did have a non-paleo friend taste test them for me as well and he felt they were good and not obviously paleo, although he agreed that the lemon flavor was too subtle. Next time I will use a full tablespoon of lemon zest and I may also sprinkle some raw sugar on top before baking (I know, the horror, actual sugar! Hey, these are meant to be an occasional treat). I am also going to try baking them for a slightly longer time at 350 rather than the shorter time at 375 as I felt the edges got dark too quickly. All in all though, I would call these a success!

MRI Results

I saw my ortho yesterday to review my MRI results. Great news! There is no sign of a stress fracture. There was some evidence of a bone bruise, but the MRI wasn't perfectly clear and it wasn't exactly where my pain had been. The doctor generally seemed unconcerned about it and felt the injury was likely muscular, which is what I thought all along and what I got confirmed by one of the coaches at my gym last night. "Oh yeah," she said, "We see that here. It's from jumping, like in double unders". Darn, where was that conversation 3 weeks ago before I wasted my time with multiple doctor's appointments and an MRI?

Bottom line is I've got the okay to start slowly reintroducing the "high impact" work. I've already been doing weighted squats so mainly this means box jumps and jumping rope. I'll admit I'm a bit terrified of setting myself back to square one, so I really will be taking it slowly, mostly leaving them out of my workouts and just doing an increasing number at home each day. I did do 35 box jumps in my workout today (on a very short softer box) and so far, so good!

Need Some Input

I've been a bit of a bad blogger. My job has been really stressful the last few weeks so between that and all of the work I did getting ready for dinner club, I needed a bit of a reprieve. I also started another Foundations program at a new Crossfit gym that meets 4 times a week so that will be taking up a good bit of my time as well. So in the meantime, a couple of questions for you.

First, the intent of my dinner club was only to make food that I could eat. It wasn't in any way an attempt to convince my friends that they should start eating paleo. I was still excited however when I got an email from one of my friends saying that he and his girlfriend were interested in trying it and would like some links to help them get started. So here's my first question for you:

Do you have websites that you love for meal planning purposes? I know of a couple, but since I tend to do most of my cooking pulling from various blogs that I like or just modifying recipes that I'm already familiar with, I don't have any personal experience using these types of sites. So if you do, could you please post the links in the comments section?

Also, I went on a bit of a pull-up bar search, but I really don't want to have to install a bar and I'm concerned that the ones that hang on your door frame won't support me during kipping pull-ups. I may just get the latter and settle on doing strict pull-ups at home just to work on strength building, but I wondered if anyone had a bar they particularly like?

Speaking of kipping pull-ups, I learned today that the band I've been using to assist me actually supports much less of my weight than I originally thought. So I may be much closer to my ultimate goal of completing one kipping pull-up without assistance than I thought. Pull-ups are on the agenda for Friday's class, so we'll see where I get then, when I haven't already done a full WOD beforehand. Let's hope!

By the way, because of dinner club I also needed a brief reprieve from the menu planning and cooking as well. So when I realized this morning that my leftovers had run out and I had nothing for dinner tonight, I quickly settled on something simple. I pulled a Polyface ribeye from my freezer to defrost and when I got home from Crossfit, I seasoned the steak and got a pot of greens on. At the last minute I seared the steak and nuked some frozen haricot verts with a bit of ghee. With minimal work, I had a great dinner:

Paleo Dinner Club

Well after a busy week of cleaning and food prep, I finally had my paleo dinner club last night. We always start dinner club with a cocktail. Since it wouldn't be particularly paleo-friendly to make a cocktail with simple syrup, I went for something boozy and close to my currently bourbon-loving heart and made a twist on a Red Hook. A Red Hook is a Manhattan with one of my favorite liquors, Luxardo maraschino added. I took it a little further by subbing in Campari for about a third of the sweet vermouth to give the drink more bitterness and added a few dashes of orange and a dash of Angostura bitters.

With some alcohol in our bellies we eagerly moved on to the first course, a charcuterie plate served with Cava:

That's the bacon jam from Zenbelly on the bottom, country pate from my "meat up" at Stachowski's above it, Against All Grain's raisin & rosemary crackers, homemade pickled onions, and sliced red pear and cornichons. Incidentally, I ended up making the crackers with both the finer almond flour and the courser meal just to see what others thought and the overwhelming consensus (other than me) was that the crackers with the finer flour were better, and tasted more like "real" crackers. Good thing I made both!

Our second course was the Brazilian seafood stew I posted about a few weeks ago, served with a sauvignon blanc. I made a slight modification this time and added about a cup of shrimp stock I made from the shrimp shells and was satisfied that it gave it a slight additional depth of flavor that I thought it had been missing earlier. I always forget one thing every dinner club, no matter how detailed of a list I write out for myself. This time I forgot the plantains until I was about to serve the stew, but I didn't miss them as much as I expected.

Our third course was my favorite, confited pork belly using Thomas Keller's recipe from Ad Hoc (you can read up on how to do it here) served with the caramelized turnips I recipe tested earlier in the week, a fennel, radicchio & citrus salad and a garnacha that at $10/bottle was not only a great pairing, but a steal (thank you I.M. Wine for the recommendation)!

I've always said that it's nearly impossible to screw up pork belly (unless you don't remove the skin and cook it until it's hard as a rock), but if you want to impress your guests, I highly recommend this preparation. And, I'm not gonna' lie, I've made and eaten a lot of pork belly in my time so my recommendation should count for something. If you don't have enough lard...well, if you don't have enough lard you should make some, but you can also confit the belly in olive oil. I recommend brining first regardless of how you prepare it. It's a simple step, but so worthwhile. The result of the entire process was a belly that was melt in your mouth tender and falling apart (the word unctuous comes to mind) with a perfectly crispy later of fat on top.

For dessert, I knew I wanted to make the Maple Bacon Coconut Ice Cream from Apron Strings that someone made for the paleo potluck I went to, but that I missed out on because I was doing my Whole 30. What I needed to go with it was a paleo chocolate cake recipe that would taste the same as any cake containing gluten and processed white sugar, but I was struggling to find one that I thought would be a total success. Until Michelle at Nom Nom blogged about a Zenbelly pop-up dinner she went to, that led me to this No Joke Dark Chocolate Cake recipe. Success! From the cake to the whipped filling (I did use grassfed cream for this layer) to the bittersweet ganache this cake was delicious and tasted like the real thing. And, for a non-baker, was really quite easy to make. I ended up cooking the batter in 2 8" round pans and baking for about 20 minutes. I wish I had a better photo of the entire cake, but guests were clamoring for dessert so I only got this crappy shot:

And here's the final dish with the ice cream:

Incidentally, and I can't believe I am going to say this, I think I would have preferred the ice cream without the bacon. It offers a really nice contrast in flavor, but we all found the bacon a bit chewy. It may have been the particular bacon I used though so I encourage you to try it.

And that's a wrap on my first officially paleo dinner club. The feedback seemed positive and I have some great leftovers to eat tonight so I'm going to call that a win-win!

Weekly Check-In

It's actually been 2 weeks since I checked in, and since my Whole 30 ended. My original intent was to continue to stay strict Whole 30 during the week and "regular" paleo on the weekends (aside from possibly an occasional dinner out). I've been successful with the paleo part (okay, okay, I had salad dressing a few times with sugar and bad oils and I ate a tiny bit of cheese and bread at the winery last weekend, but otherwise I've been on track). The Whole 30 part has also been close, but I'll admit to having a maple lard scone here and there and a lot of banana chips for snacking. But, all in all, I'm comfortable with how I'm progressing. The ultimate goal in the end is balance after all. I just wanted to tend toward the stricter side for a bit longer to get my gut issues back in check and to continue to boost my weight loss.

In any event, I weighed and measured myself this morning (didn't bother to last week given that I was coming off a very non-paleo weekend). No weight loss, but both my waist and hip measurements were down another inch! Further evidenced by the fact that I went down another belt buckle as well. And I continue to notice an increase in muscle mass that is evident not only in the mirror, but in what I'm able to do in Crossfit.

So I'm pretty happy with where I'm at. I also hinted in an earlier post at the fact that the doctor (I saw an ortho last week) tenatively diagnosed me with a stress fracture in my tibia. I'm pleased to say that I've been pain free for a week now, while adding in some things like squats and lunges that would have been painful a week or two ago. I'm headed out in a couple of hours to get an MRI so I can know for sure so if you don't mind, please keep your fingers crossed that it was just the highly unusual muscle pull and not a stress fracture!

Rosemary Raisin Crackers

Back around Christmas I was stocking up at Trader Joe's on horrifically unhealthy non-paleo snacks as I was about to get snowed in for a day or so and needed something in my stomach to go with the >=1 bottle of red wine I planned to drink. French onion dip and chips, a variety of cheeses, their pita crackers (which I am obsessed with, so good with some of their brie on top) and a cracker I had never encountered before, Trader Joe's Raisin Rosemary Crisps. The crackers were really good, especially with a bit of blue cheese on top. Alas, they're not so paleo-friendly.

So I was super excited when I came across this recipe from Against All Grain that was inspired by them. I decided they'd be the perfect accompaniment to the country pate and bacon jam I'm serving at my dinner club on Saturday so I set to making a test batch tonight. The original TJ's crackers have a consistency more like a melba toast than an actual cracker and while Against All Grain provides a second recipe using almond pulp that looks like it gets closer to that, I didn't feel like messing with making almond pulp on top of everything else. So, I decided to make a half batch of the ones using blanched flour, as well as a second half batch using the same recipe, but with Bob's Red Mill almond flour/meal, which is courser and still has the almond skins to see which one I liked better. By the way, I left the sunflower seeds out of both batches because I didn't have any.

Having now eaten a large number of crackers, I can say first that these crackers are incredibly easy to make (just toss a few ingredients in your food processor, pulse for a few seconds, roll out, cut and bake). They're also delicious and definitely have the flavor of the TJ's crackers. As for which one I liked better, they're both good and I think which you make depends on what you're looking for. The batch made with the blanched almond flour (I used Honeyville) was more like an actual cracker, with a very firm texture and a great snap when you broke them. No one would ever know those crackers didn't contain regular flour. The ones made with Bob's Red Mill were my preferred cracker though. They weren't as dense and had a better mouthfeel.

The latter didn't require any adjustments to the recipe, they just cooked a bit faster (I also ended up accidentally rolling them a bit thinner so that could have contributed) so I would keep a close eye on them and check them 5-7 minutes in. One other tip - when you roll them, make sure the edges aren't thinner than the rest or the crackers won't cook evenly.

And what's a recipe testing if you don't test the finished products together so I had to try both crackers with the bacon jam. It's a rough life!

Indian Curry Meatballs

I had a hankering for something Indian so I went searching the web for some inspiration. I initially thought I'd take a stab at making one of my favorite eggplant dishes, baingan bharta, but in the end I decided to do my own take on this Curried Meatball recipe from Everyday Paleo.

For the meatballs, I mixed together the following:

1 lb ground turkey (higher fat, not the lean 1% fat)
1 lb ground pork
1/2 c finely diced red onion
1/3 c finely diced, peeled apple (I used my food processor for both this and the onion)
1 egg
2 T curry powder (I used Trader Joe's)
1 t black pepper
~2 t kosher salt

After mixing the ingredients together really well, I scooped up the mixture in large rounded tablespoonfuls, formed them into meatballs and browned them in a nonstick pan with a little coconut oil in two batches:

Once the meatballs were done, I moved them to my 4 qt crockpot and added a little more coconut oil, 1/2 of a medium onion, diced and 1 t of crushed garlic to the pan. Once the aromatics had softened a bit, I added 2 T of curry powder and let that cook for about a minute. Then I added half of a can of tomato paste (about 2 1/2 T), 1 c of pork stock, a 14.5 oz can of diced tomatoes, and a can of full fat coconut milk. Once everything was well blended and the sauce was simmering again, I poured it over the meatballs in the crockpot and set it on high:

You could also easily let the meatballs simmer in the sauce on the stovetop until cooked through, but I was multi-tasking and didn't know when I'd get around to actually eating. When I was ready for dinner, all I needed to do was make some cauliflower rice to serve the curry over. I removed the florets from the stem and rinsed them off, then processed them in my food processor in batches until they were the size of grains of rice:

Make sure you don't overstuff your food processor or you'll end up with mush on the bottom and whole florets on top. You really don't need to pulse long to get the size you need. It also helps to make sure the cauliflower is pretty dry. From there, I only needed to saute some diced shallot in a bit of coconut oil:

then add the "rice", cover and let it steam until it was soft with just a bit of bite left:

I plated the meatballs and sauce over the cauliflower rice in a bowl and that was dinner:

The best part of cauliflower rice, by the way...the fact that you can dig into a bowl of food that feels like a carby indulgence when really you're eating vegetables!

Thanks to my office being closed as a result of the "snow day" I also got my pork belly confited (in lard, how awesome is that?!) and there's a batch of Zenbelly's Bacon Jam in my oven as I type. I can't wait to try it on a bit of apple when it's done! Here's a photo of the belly before it went into the oven:

Even with all of that, I got a lot of work done. Yay for working at home and productive snow days! Did anyone else take advantage of the weather (or lack thereof) to get any cooking done?