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Resistance is not only futile - it'll screw up your mind grapes.

Recipes: Seafood? Eat It!

I like seafood.

A lot.

Some types, I would go as far as saying I love.

You probably know that I quite like sashimi.

I get excited when I see something like this arrive at my table:


But when I see the $65 price tag, I'm less excited.

Fortunately, I know how to cook, am not afraid of making mistakes, and can usually figure out how to do fancy things using local produce and a few vaguely sharp knives.



Much better! And sooo much cheaper, despite being enough to feed four people! All wild-caught seafood, and organic vegetables - I doubt the same could be said of the 'starter platter' from Kobe Jones I first pictured.

My salmon sashimi platter was the generous starter for one of the multiple dinner parties I've hosted in the past week since holidays began. I've been having a lot of fun with seafood, especially given that the warm Spring weather is finally starting to appear on occasion, and soon it will be BBQ time!

Here are a couple of recipes from the 'I'll be making this again' file amassed over the past week:

Pancetta-Wrapped Scallops



Ingredients (per person):

75g fresh scallops
50g pancetta (as flat and long as possible)
Wooden skewers (soaked)

Method:

1. Pre-heat oven or BBQ to moderately hot (around 200 deg C)

2. Wrap one or two scallops in one slice of pancetta, and thread onto a skewer to hold the pancetta in place. If your pancetta is flat and long, you can simply roll it up around the scallop, like this:


If your pancetta is more of an oval shape, you will need to fold in the edges like you were wrapping a gift:



3. If you are using a BBQ, just throw the completed skewers on the hot plate (you could use the grill, but fat will drip and you don't want flare-ups).

If you are roasting them in the oven (like I do), I would encourage you to lie the skewers across the top of a cake pan so that all sides of the pancetta can crisp up. You can reserve the fat that is lost for cooking your veggies in!


4. Bake/BBQ for around 10 - 15 minutes, until pancetta is crisp.

Serve with pancetta-wrapped asparagus!



As an intermission, here's the way I prepare most meals nowadays, including a lot of my seafood:

Ingredients:

Meat, in bite-sized chunks (diced beef, lamb, chicken, or whole baby octopus, prawns, scallops)
Vegetables that are amenable to sautéing - onion, cabbage, capsicum, mushrooms, tomato, zucchini, spinach etc.
Coconut oil, butter, or lard/tallow.

Method:

1. Heat oil in a large frying pan.
2. Add items that take a while to cook (meat, onion). Stir.
3. Add items that take less time to cook (cabbage, mushrooms). Stir.
4. Add items that take very little time to cook (zucchini, tomato, spinach). Stir.
5. When everything's cooked, sprinkle with a little salt & pepper, and serve in a big ungainly bowl. Scarf it all down, contentedly.


Baby octopus, red cabbage & mushroom sauté.


Chopped chicken thigh, asparagus, button squash, and mushroom sauté.

And that's my typical meal. Admittedly, this has primarily been the norm whilst our grill has been broken and lacking in replacement. Now I have a new grill, but I can't seem to be arsed to go back to seared meat. I don't see the point of cooking the meat separately when I'm sautéing veggies anyway. But this way I can cook fish quickly and easily, and make crispy bacon...

Speaking of cooking fish, the beau won't eat raw salmon, so I had to find a fun new way to cook salmon for him that was dairy-free, and did not require a grill. The idea of dry-baking the fish in the oven turned my stomach, but I found a way to add flavour and maintain the moistness that was practically effortless. It was eaten so quickly, I barely had time to snap a photo.

Baked Salmon with Spinach & Tomato

Ingredients (per person):

1 salmon fillet, skin on or off
1 roma tomato
1 handful of fresh baby spinach
A few fresh basil leaves

Method:

1. Preheat oven to moderate (around 175 deg C)

2. In a baking dish, place salmon fillets side by side, leaving no gaps.

3. Sprinkle with basil and spinach leaves, and place whole tomatoes on top.

4. Bake until tomatoes are shriveled and starting to blacken. This took around 20 minutes in my temperamental oven.


Check to make sure salmon fillets are cooked through. If they aren't, return dish to oven for another five minutes and check again.

5. Once salmon fillets are cooked as desired, go to town on those tomatoes - rip them apart and smear their oozy inner goodness across the top of the fillets and leaves.


Look at that - DIY tomato sauce!

6. Scoop out fillets with topping intact, and serve on a bed of tasty veggies.


(Apologies for the dodgy photo - the guests were getting demanding after the aroma of roasted tomatoes filled the air!)

So that's what I've been cooking! This past week has been devoted to socialising, since I see so few members of my social circle other than work colleagues during the teaching term. I was also sick with violent gastroenteritis a week ago, which put a crimp in my plans, but also meant I pulled off an effortless 40 hours fast! I'm tracking my calories at the moment, but being a bit liberal with my carbs from veggies. Fruit & nuts are still my danger zone, so I'm avoiding them entirely, and dairy is confirmed to be the cause of my acne, so it's truly off the menu once more. So I'm on meat, eggs and veg, and couldn't really be happier. My gut is really flat, despite the sag of flab hanging in the front - yum. I'm going to be really careful for a while, since I'd like to be able to wear a proper belly dancing costume if I get asked to perform later in the year, and I'm a long way from that point.

Other than friends and fatness considerations, I've scaled back my hygiene routines given that it's the holidays. I'm trying out a no 'poo regime, and I have baking powder on standby if a just-water approach doesn't cut it. I'm using coconut oil as my facial moisturiser, though I use a basic astringent wipe to remove my make-up first. My make-up is organic and uses few harsh agents, though if my dairy-acne clears up I may be able to go without anything. Right now I just use tinted moisturiser and a powder to conceal spots and dark shadows under my eyes. I'm also getting as much sun as I can, now that the days are starting to break past the 20 deg C ceiling. I'm about to head to the farm for a few days, so I'll be doing lots of walking in the serene bushlands near my parents' property, though I want to wear my Vibrams so will stay out of the scrub - snake country. Walking along the gravel road is peaceful enough - traffic is very rare. I usually walk along singing my head off to any wildlife that might care to listen. A perfect way to unwind the tensions of this year - fingers crossed it doesn't rain!!

Recipe: Bacon-Wrapped Mini Frittata

Because everything is better wrapped in bacon..!


Ingredients:

Per mini frittata -

1 middle bacon strip
2 medium eggs
1T diced fennel
1T diced capsicum (bell peppers)
A few baby spinach leaves
1t finely chopped basil
1/2t minced garlic
1T chopped/diced meat (I used smoked salmon, but ham or cooked chicken would work well)
Optional - 1T diced cheddar cheese or feta cheese

Of course, you could make a vegetarian version of this by removing the meat (inc bacon wrapping, so sad!) and adding more veg, and conversely a carnivorous version by getting rid of the veggies entirely. The flavours are totally up to you.

I used a mega-muffin tray, and didn't trim my big slices of middle bacon at all. Perfect proportions.

Method:

Preheat oven to 175°C.

1. Line edges of muffin tray holes with bacon - you can trim the length to fit exactly, but overlap doesn't hurt. If your bacon still has it's rind, make sure it is along the uppermost edge so it crisps beautifully.

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2. Line the base of the muffin pans with spinach.

3. Combine veggies, meat, herbs and cheese in a bowl. Mix well so ingredients are evenly mixed.


4. Gently spoon mixture into muffin pans, layering spinach leaves (but don't cover the layers completely, as the egg mixture needs to travel between the leaves) as you go.


5. In another bowl, beat eggs briskly. Pour egg mixture into muffin pans, filling 3/4s of the way to the top.

6. Bake in oven until the frittata is golden on top and is firm to the touch. For me, this took around 30 minutes.

7. (Optional) Remove frittata from muffin tray, and place onto a baking slide. Return to the oven and raise the temperature a little in order to crisp up the bacon shell. Watch carefully for burning. I recommend this step if you want to enjoy the frittata cold.


A winner for me, taking me through dinner last night, and cold breakfast and lunch today! Very low in carbohydrates and not too shocking when calories are considered, especially given the satiety factor. Next time I'm going to get even more fiddly and try cutting up bacon to fit in my mini-muffin tray! Bite sized wonders!

June & Due For A Change

The play is done but the stress levels are still up, and the constant frustrations of my fat gain is the primary suspect. I've seen a number of prominent figures in the online Paleo community crashing and burning of late, perhaps due to the increased interest in the evolutionary perspective governing our lifestyle and dietary choices, and the increased pressure from commenters and critiques to nail down exactly what it means to be paleo/primal, and the demand for us to be 'golden children' for the movement. Given that many of us come from a background of obsessive & emotional eating, health problems, and other causes of over-weight, it makes sense that increased focus on the successes and failures regarding our weight and health can trigger old psychological problems. Even Dan, from At Darwin's Table, has admitted that he has fallen off the wagon and into his old eating behaviours, and is having to start again. I wish him all the best as he tries to take control of his food addiction once more, although he seems to be starting at what I found to be the wrong end of the perspective telescope; he is monitoring macronutrients and calories with acute detail.

My choice, however, is to finally let go of those measures. I have been logging my food on SparkPeople since January 1st, 2009. I have watched my carbs, primarily, but lately have been watching my calories just as closely. I would allow the numbers to dictate whether I should eat more or not, ignoring my own hunger signals. Post-Deptran, I found that I had no satiety trigger anyway, so calorie-counting became even more of a crutch. Given that Primal eating is designed to help us understand our bodies more accurately, I recognise that I have been consistently severing my mind's connection with my body, and this must have added to my stress and frustrations.

The obvious, but scary solution? Stop the tracking. Stop photographing every single meal. Stop worrying about fasting. Stop worrying about my metabolism. Stop eating for the wrong reasons.

Instead, I will be eating my lovely, grass-fed meat when I'm hungry, photographing particularly special meals only (i.e. recipe experimentation, such as last weekend's Savory Zucchini Bread & today's Coconut Crusted Salmon), and stay off the scale for a few weeks. I will be prioritising my need to relax and get back in touch with my body, so I'm going to build some Yoga back into my usual body-weight routine, and hopefully keep other stressors out of my life. It's report-writing time, but I've never found that terribly stressful, just time-consuming. In three weeks, we're heading off to Canada, and I've been in touch with a grass-fed beef farmer & a grass-fed exotics farmer so I'll be set for the duration of my stay in Ottawa. The trip is free of financial burden, so other than the usual travel issues, hopefully the holiday will be appropriately relaxing.

I'm in no rush, but I look forward to being rid of what I call my 'Cortisol Belly'! I'm glad that, even though 9kg of my 14kg loss has returned, and my body fat percentage is higher than it was pre-primal, my overall appearance is slimmer than before. My gut - and, to a lesser extend, my hips and thighs - is the only area I've put on weight, and my reading tells me that elevated cortisol levels tend to promote fat storage in the lower abdominal area. The evidence weighs heavily upon the dirty c-word...

This week's eats list will be the last of its kind for a while. I won't bother taking shots of meals I've shared with you before; I will record particularly interesting meals, especially if they're fresh experiments, and feature them here for your viewing pleasure. Other than report-writing, my weekday evenings are commitment-free, so I'll have lots of chances to play around in the kitchen.

Breakfast - salmon sashimi & Bertocchi's porchetta-style roast pork.


Dinner - coconut beef curry.


Breakfast - lamb chop & bacon.


Lunch - a chunk of raw cacao butter; my first try. What an amazing aroma! while there was no real taste, but my metabolism enjoyed the hit of fat.


Dinner - beef scotch fillet, pure beef sausage, lamb chop, and fried eggs.


Breakfast - lamb chops, bacon & eggs. Don't you hate it when you over-cook the eggs and the yolks cook through?! Boo...


Dinner: entree - mussels! Hooray for a fresh seafood delivery!


Dinner: main - salmon fillet topped with buttery marinara.


Breakfast - lamb chop.


Dinner - gummy flake fillet topped with buttery marinara mix.


Breakfast - bacon and eggs, classic!


Lunch - salmon sashimi whilst out shopping with Mum.


Dinner - Farmer Dan's leg of lamb, rubbed with garlic and rosemary, and roasted with veggies: fennel, onion, pumpkin and capsicum.


And my share of the roasted bounty - amazing! Served in its own juices.


Snack - purple kale chips!


Breakfast - that's right, I chowed down on the leg of lamb leftovers, straight off the bone!


Lunch - leftover lamb off the leg, curried with coconut cream until tender and succulent. I know what I'll be doing with my leftovers from now on!


Dinner: entree - sauteed marinara and scallops.


Dinner: main - baked barramundi with a lemon myrtle salt rub, with zucchini.


Dessert - savory zucchini slice, served with raw cream! Yes, I finally found unpasteurised dairy, but the company doesn't have a website yet... Melbournites, look out for Swampy's Real Milk - wonderful stuff!


Enjoy the voyeurism, food porn lovers, and make it last - it'll have to do you for a while! ;) From now on, each week you'll be getting just the best of the best that comes from my kitchen and other adventures. I also want to help people find their local suppliers of high-quality, primal-friendly foods, so be ready for more posts in that vein.

Mmmmmmeat!

I'm running awfully low on subject ideas, given that's it's all meat meat meat for me again. I'm loving the return to digestive comfort, tasty meals, minimal preparation, and fat loss! My energy levels are back to normal, probably due to the conclusion of the school play more than diet, although now I'm battling the 'too-much-free-time' boredom demon that has me sneaking up to the Nola container far too often! I'm resisting its charms for now though, spurred on by the numbers on the scale.

I spent some time this week looking into new lamb & beef suppliers, after my concerns regarding the nature of the 'organic' label placed on my current supply of red meat had me worried that my animals were raised on organic grain. My butcher couldn't tell me exactly which farm my meat was from, as they buy from a range of farms, some of which were grain feeding their animals. Organic Direct remains a reliably grass-fed option, but their once-a-month delivery restriction often left me in a pickle. My research led me to a local farm, The Farmers Market. I chatted with the owner, Farmer Dan, via email, to enquire why he has not had his farm certified as organic, though his methods would easily qualify for certification. His answers were fascinating, and I will share the interview with him in my next post. But in the meantime, here is a choice extract from the website:

The Farmers Market is a subsidiary of Farmer Dan, an all natural, branded beef and lamb company based in Gippsland Victoria. Suppliers to The Farmers Market raise cattle and sheep using natural production methods, on natural feeds without added growth hormones or antibiotics in a free range environment. The company was started in 2005 by Farmer Dan and is dedicated to supporting family farms.

You can also read an independent review on Cows In Clover.

Given the lack of the organic label, Danny can sell his meat at a much more affordable price, but my preference to buy in bulk to minimise traffic meant that I bought an 1/8th beef pack and a full lamb pack, judging the amount via the price, assuming comparability to my usual orders from Organic Direct. Wrong!

The beef and lamb were boxed separately, and I left them both resting on my dining table as I gathered up my wicked packing skills, bound to be necessary were I to get all that meat into my freezer compartment of my fridge (a space barely the size of the small of the two boxes!)


I opened up the lamb box, and laid out the pieces on the kitchen bench. The pile in the photo below is four layers high at its thickest, and do note the massive legs and what I assume to be racks at the back...


I somehow, miraculously, managed to fit all the lamb into the freezer, but I knew that there wouldn't be the slightest chance of fitting the beef in as well. So I took out one leg roast and one rack, as well as the sausages that I wouldn't be able to eat thanks to their rice flour content (I had asked for them to be replaced with mince, but Farmer Dan forgot).

I then tackled the beef container:


All but one package of round steak fitted into the other area of the freezer, so I was only left to deal with the excess of lamb. The solution was simple - be an awesome sister and give it to my little brother. He was very happy to accept the gift, especially given his Uni student status, although it means that Dad has now lost both of his meat recipients! Dad loves giving us meat, as its one connection to the farm that he can offer his kids, but it's not as though he raises the animals himself. And given that mystery, I'm not comfortable as I don't know whether the animals were dipped in pesticides (quite likely) or fed grain (less likely).

Thus far, I've been LOVING the lamb forequarter chops from Farmer Dan, and I'm very picky about my lamb chops! The beau has also tried the round steak, which smelled as amazing as it apparently tasted. I'll be sure to give more detailed reviews as I make my way through my immense supply!

Farmer Dan is also expanding his offerings to draw on other Gippsland farmers that follow his ideals, so soon I'll be able to get wonderful free-range chicken, pork, and maybe even dairy for the beau! It's too much to hope for raw dairy though, since that's still near-impossible to get a hold of on a regular, convenient basis. Fingers crossed...

And now the usual run-down of my eats this past week - hover over the image to read the description:













And now forward I march into another working week - it's report writing and exam marking time! Yay! Have a good one!