Sun, Sea, & Surf 'N' Turf

I'm back from my week on the beaches of northern New South Wales, with a bit of a tan, sand in awkward places, and an overwhelming desire to get back in the kitchen to whip up tasty, varied foods! But first, a visual recapitulation of the eats from the past week (hover your mouse cursor over the image to read the specifics):

Sunday



Monday



Tuesday



Wednesday



Thursday




Friday



Saturday




I had an amazing time up north, soaking up a significant amount of sun, relaxing, socialising, and even getting some school work done! Notable note - I went swimming at the beach in just boardies and a bikini top!! I don't have a 'bikini body' as such, but I didn't look like a complete whale with folds of fat hanging out, so yay! It's great to be home though, since there are only so many days you can subsist on fried supermarket meat! And I'm steadfastly ignoring the fact that there are only a couple of days until I have to go back to you-know-where...

Recipe: Meatza!!

Tomorrow morning, the beau and I will be boarding a plane to the Gold Coast of Queensland, to meet up with his family for a week of relaxation and socialisation (and probably a hefty amount of Australian Open watching) at the family holiday apartment in northern New South Wales. I will not have Internet access, so I will be all kinds of offline until next Sunday at least.

To use up the last of the deli meats in the fridge before we leave, I made one of our favourite meals that I haven't posted as an official recipe as yet. Many primal/paleo peeps have had a crack at a meat-crust pizza, often going to elaborate lengths for flavour and consistency. For me, the flavours of grass-fed beef and some tasty toppings are plenty, and my choices this evening made for a very exciting carnivorous meal!

Recipe: Meatza!

Ingredients

500g beef mince
4 pastured eggs
100g shaved ham
50g salami or crispy bacon
50g grated parmesan cheese (optional)
Other tasty toppings: tomatoes, onions, bell peppers, olives, anchovies, etc.


Method

Preheat oven to 200°C. Line a pizza tray with baking paper.

Blend minced beef and eggs, either by hand or in a food processor. Using a processor or stick blender helps to create a tightly meshed crust.

Spread mixture onto baking paper, keeping the mixture even and as thin as possible. Mine appears quite orange due to the eggs that I used - from a friend's chickens raised on pasture. Little nutrition powerhouses!


Place the base into the hot oven until browned - around 10 minutes.

Meanwhile, prepare toppings - I chopped up my ham and salami, plus some green capsicum (bell peppers) and tomatoes for the beau, and grated some special Parmesan cheese.

Remove base from oven and remove any excess juices. Top with toppings as desired. (If using cheese, sprinkle the base with cheese first, then layer on other toppings, finishing with more cheese to bind toppings together.)

Bake until base is cooked through (and cheese has melted).

Serve while hot - also tasty the next day!



Yum! So that was dinner - my side sans veg, the beau's with copious amounts of veg & cheese.

Also of note was today's breakfast/lunch - an organic lamb roast, cooked to perfection, leaving a little pink in the centre... As always, far too much meat for just two servings, but I do love seeing my half of the meat piled up onto my tiny plate, even if I only eat half of it in one sitting :)


So off I go up north, where I will be able to continue my all-meat diet without issue thanks to the beau's mother being a follower of my blog and big supporter of my efforts and learnings :D I've just finished a few days of higher calorie eating to rev up my metabolism, so it's back to meat and eggs now to let ketosis do its thing. I won't be able to calculate caloric intake so I'll be eating to satiety and maybe sticking to breakfast and dinner to get my system in order.

Farewell for a week, and I'll leave you with a link to Dr. A's excellent article regarding why eating 'Pink Ribbon' cakes and cookies in order to spread awareness of breast cancer is a stupid, stupid idea. Read about the Wurzberg Diet for Cancer Patients. Bye!!

Sun, Socialising, & Slacking Off!

I must say, this week has been quite delightful. I've been feeling very healthy, thanks to my plan of only consuming animal products and absolutely no fibre, I've been getting a good dose of sunshine every day (even on days where the temperature hit 40°C - I made sure to get my sunbathing done before noon!), I've been spending time with good friends, and I've been indulging in some of my favourite pastimes: inventing recipes, designing and creating jewellery, watching great comic performers, and procrastinating! Perfection!

Now for the food:

Monday

Chipollatas from Jonathan's for breakfast. Yum!!!


Upped the fat with some cream cheese and double cream. Washed down with some sub-par ham from a packet - ew. Too hot to cook.


As the heatwave continued, we decided to stay in the air-conditioned bedroom and scoff some rotisserie chicken from the local awesome store. Then some more fat-upping with cream cheese and cream.


Tuesday

Woke up to another decent drop in weight. Upping fat intake is the greatest! But I couldn't wait for my fresh supply of coconut oil and lard...

After the night stayed hot, cooking breakfast was not a fun idea. Fortunately, I had a fridge full of delicious chicken!


Then it was time for some more delicious sausages from Jonathan's - lamb & basil!


I ended the sauna of a day with some fresh sashimi, prepared by me of course! I could eat it every day - I think I need to go and seduce a fish merchant so I can enjoy fresh salmon without the price tag! Plus I just found out that most of the salmon in local stores is farmed in Tasmania :( The organic butcher sells wild salmon though, or so they say...


Wednesday

A reappearance by my new favourite cooked meat - the lamb & basil sausages from Jonathan's!


Then for lunch, a return to an old favourite - a lamb forequarter chop and some bacon, plus a bit of hungarian salami.


I hit Terra Rossa in the CBD to catch up with an old, wonderful friend, and their online menu was very exciting! Unfortunately, the reality was less exciting. First was a teeny piece of fairly tasty fish (on a bunch of ignored salsa)...


... followed by a wedge of the WORST French brie I have EVER eaten! Utterly grotesque: so salty that it burned my throat, and somehow the saltiness even got into my nostrils! I felt as though I was swimming in the ocean, was dunked by a massive wave, and had my sinuses ravaged by angry seawater! :( As you can imagine, I'm not about to dignify the cheese with a photo appearance on my blog!

Thursday

The day of the big board game party (not as lame as it sounds, I promise!)! The day was spent cleaning and cooking and getting ready to spend the evening with some of my favourite people :)

I ate light all day to leave room for much barbecued goodness in the evening, so I fasted until lunch, at which point I tried a new kind of sausage from Jonathan's - chicken and terragon. Delicious!!


And then it was party time!

First up, I served up a cheese platter - cheddar, brie, basil pesto, kabana, and salami. Of course, I was obliged to also provide crackers, but this time I added a primal option of my own concoction... First, a bit of background info - my mother loves her soy & linseed crackers, which I have now expressly forbidden her to consume (of course! There's about five kinds of unfermented soy in those bad, BAD boys!). I told her that I would create a tasty replacement for her... I originally planned to use linseed (flax) meal, but I decided to go for sunflower seeds that I would process myself. Since sunflower seeds leave some flavour to be desired, so I added sesame seeds into the mix... The full recipe will be coming soon, but here's a snapshot of these delicious wonders to whet your appetite:


Tasty, healthy, crispy, and solid enough to use with dips!

We barbecued various meats for the main, and I made two fresh salads to serve with the meats:

Shredded Salad - cos (romaine) lettuce, carrot, alfalfa sprouts, green & red capsicum (bell peppers), aged cheddar, and walnuts.


Circle Salad - butter lettuce, radishes, carrots, cherry tomatoes, sunflower seeds, and blueberries!


I, of course, ignored my tasty salads, and instead feasted on meaty goodness! Lamb forequarter chop, beef & chive sausage (yes, from Jonathan's!), lamb & basil sausages, and a chipollata. I could live on sausages from Jonathan's - the perfect amount of spices & herbs, and no sugar or grain!


For dessert - mini butterfly cake versions of the Chocolate Cream Cakes made of egg and cocoa!


A HUGE hit as always - less fruit than the full-size version (which I picked off and gave to the beau anyway), but still rich and satisfying!

Additionally, I enjoyed the surprising twist created by adding blueberries to the butterfly cakes - here's looking at you, deliciousness!

Ladies Don't Perspire - They Glow

Since I know that most of the readers of this blog are from the US, where I hear it is colder than a penguin's punani, I won't harp on about the heatwave currently attacking much of Australia. Australia is synonymous for summertime fun, but as the drought arrived early this season, we're all quite terrified that some freak lightning storm or bastard pyromaniac will hit us with a repeat of last year's Black Saturday horror. Tomorrow's set to be an absolute scorcher, so I will be hiding inside and eating cold meat!

The Carnivore's Weekend: In Review

Being Saturday, we didn't get out of bed til well past noon, where the temperature greeted us with full force. The plan? Eat a big breakfast, and then escape to the cinema!


I certainly was satisfied after that feed of cheddar omelet, bacon, and lamb chop, but sadly the film left me wanting a little more...

We decided to try a fancy seafood place on the way home, named Ink. As you know, I'm an avid squid fan, and could happily live on the stuff. I was imagining a gorgeous plateful of fresh squid and other seafood delicacies, and was particularly looking forward to it being served in squid ink! No such luck. The menu was incredibly basic, and priced quite steeply despite the limited atmosphere of the restaurant. I toyed with leaving and picking up some seafood from a supermarket instead, but the beau was starving, so I gave in and ordered a lobster, natural.


As the discerning eye will note, that ain't a lobster. That's just a (freshwater) crayfish, like I can pick up at my local supermarket for $40. How much did this place have the gall to charge me? $120. And they served it with fries. At least they didn't carry on the pretense on the bill, where my meal was labeled as 'Crayfish'. We will not be returning.

On Sunday, we woke fairly early (for us), and set about the business of the day. For me, that was making my breakfast, making a new batch of the beau's grain-free granola (almond, walnuts, coconut, Splenda and egg whites this time - I'm all out of sugar alcohols and stevia), tidying parts of the house in preparation for a party on Thursday, getting some sun with the guinea pigs, making lunch, doing some research online, losing a couple of hours to French & Saunders videos on YouTube, making dinner, drinking loads of water all day, and now blogging. The beau? Play Playstation, eat breakfast, play Playstation, eat dinner, play Playstation. Super. Anyone know how to decimate a PS3 without leaving evidence of tampering? Oh well, he only has about fine more games to finish, and hopefully his mates will run out of games to lend him... They're not making any new games, right? :)

My breakfast: Jonathan's chipollatas! I am officially in love! We stopped it at my old local supermarket (the wonderful Piedimonte's on St. George's Rd, North Fitzroy) to pick up some essentials, and as I was browsing through the fresh meat section, a poster advertising the products of a local butcher caught my eye. I let my gaze drift across the range of gourmet sausages, assuming that they would be packed full of grain flours. But when I looked closer, I noticed that most of the snags were nothing much more than meat and spices! Hallelujah! Spicy chipollatas! Lamb & basil sausages! Delight! I stocked up quickly, safe in the new knowledge that I had access to good quality, primal snags! Best of all, I wouldn't need to go tripping all the way out to Piedimonte's next time, as Jonathan's butcher shop is right near the beau's workplace! The chippies are absolutely delicious, and are anything but lean, so I am looking forward to trying out the lamb & basil!


Aren't they sweet? Little finger-sized gems, and not as spicy as one may imagine - just a nice flavour and a perfect moistness and tenderness in the meat.

I lunched on what is fast becoming my pride and joy - salmon sashimi, made by me! I tried to cut the anything-but-uniform fillet into uniform pieces, and did okay overall. I 'cooked' them very lightly in lemon juice, only leaving them for perhaps one minute. There was a detectable 'cookedness' to the outer edge, but the inside was still raw and delicious. Not dead yet! I washed down the meal with a few spoonfuls of creme fraiche to get my dietary fat intake up.


Finally, although it required the oven to be on for a long period, and the kitchen was already a sweatshop, I stuck with the plan to roast pork for dinner. I have now consolidated my hairdryer experiment - dry the skin of the roast thoroughly with a hot hairdryer before cooking - you don't need to add salt or extra oil this way (the oil would always burn in the pan, even when there was water added, and splash the sides of the oven). An hour later - perfect pork roast? As always, I inherited the beau's portion of crackling, and only had room for a smidge of lean. :)


My shed-the-haunch-and-holiday-paunch mission is going well, and I've knocked off a full kilo in the past two days - most of which will be water loss as I clear out remaining carbs in my gut and use up stored glycogen, of course. However, I have noticed a bit of keto-breath in the evenings, so things are working well! My level of physical activity is much lower now than during the teaching term, although last week I spent three days 'gathering' (wandering around shopping centres for hours - enough to wear out the feet and shoulders and spirit), and one day completing a massively arduous gardening task (6 hours). I have also set a challenge for my beau and myself - push-ups! I want us to do at least ten every day, together if possible. Lately, the memory has been weak, but we remembered yesterday, and are paying for it today! My main goal is to help restore the beau's biceps back to their former glory, since I'm a major arms girl! He doesn't have to use his arms much, so he was holding onto his young adolescent form, I suppose. He's now past the 30 milestone, so his muscles has shriveled a bit, with their bulk being transferred to his gut. He does eat a mostly primal diet, but obviously could use some work to held make up for the garbage he eats during the work days. I'd love to be able to show him off as my Primal Guy, but his hedonism is holding strong... for now...

Further Reading:

There have been some wonderful posts flying about the Webernets lately, and I've been collecting my favourites in earnest. The size of said collection is a little overwhelming, however. Certainly too many to discuss individually! So instead, here's a list of Team Players (posting strong, interesting articles regularly) and a couple of particularly note-worthy posts from a variety of sources.

Team Players:

Dr. A. continues to hit them out of the park, with varied topics ranging from dissections of scientific literature, book reviews, personal accounts and recipes! Some memorable performances of late include: Your Doctor Is A Liar!, Vitamin D & Cancer, Lemon & Lime Gateau, Smug Food Puritans, Carbs, Fibre & Breast Cancer, and the accessible and concise delight which I will be sharing with all of my friends and family, Carb v. Saturated Fat (or as I labeled it in an email to a friend, 'Why eating 'Low-Fat' is pointless). Love your work, Dr. A.!

Dr. T. (what's with all the Dr. X. pseudonyms?) from NephroPal always presents interesting information regarding nutrition and health. I was fascinated by the collection of foods and their origins in the post entitled, shockingly, Origins Of Food. Coconut & Red Wine also gave us a give-to-the-friends breakdown of the effects of coconut oil vs. soybean oil on our health, as well as some technical reasons to booze up occasionally. And to point out the questionable nature of rodent studies re: saturate fat's impact on human health, as well as to look at the real impact of such fats (all positive), came the tongue-in-cheek title, God Bless Evolution.

Dr. John Briffa (lookit, a full name!), in his straight-forward and accessible style, puts forward goals for the layperson to follow to improve overall health. I hear of many peple who vow to lose a certain amount of weight by a certain date (a trend being cashed in on by sites like Lose It Or Lose It... ergh, don't even get me started on how damaging that concept is!...), but it would be much better for them to follow Dr. Briffa's 10 realistic and achievable New Year's goals worth considering. His next post looked at an editorial examining the importance of looking to our nutritional past to improve our future health. Another straight-forward and inoffensive piece that you could gently pass on to your less-than-healthful mates...

Hit Singles:

The Schmaltz lists what he has learned

Dr. Michael R. Eades gives Dr. Oz a swift boot up his ignorant rear-end

Dr. William Davis points it out again - excessive carbohydrates are BAD!

Tom Naughton & Asclepius from Natural Messiah each reviews/discusses Lierre Keith's continuing-to-be-ground-breaking work, The Vegetarian Myth.

Well, I think that's enough! What has excited me most is the increase in posts explaining the importance and harmlessness of saturated fats in the human diet, provided the excessive carbohydrate intake is abolished. It makes it ever-more likely that this decade will see the conclusive disproof of the Lipid Hypothesis, and maybe we'll even see an intelligent return to a diet based on animal protein and vegetables - real food! I do suspect, however, that once people realise that the cheap carbs are bad for them, meat prices will sky-rocket and recognised healthy living will become truly elitist... Maybe permaculture-based animal husbandry will be subsidised? We can dream!

Lazy Daze

Ah, holidays. Melbourne is at the start of a predicted major heatwave, so there's not much I can do (since I don't drive) without melting. My houseguest has left, and I have a week of nothing much before the next event in my current calendar. Ahhh... So I've been catching up on those things I like to do around the house - I completely made over the garden yesterday; I restored my herb garden and extended it to include some new additions, I designed and created jewellery for my Mum to wear to my cousin's wedding later in the month, and I even tolerated about ten minutes of sunbathing this morning before the sunbeams started to really sting.

Given the heat, and the absence of air cooling or circulation in the kitchen, cooking has been one of the last things I've wanted to do. As of yesterday I started back on a carnivorous way of eating, stripping back to meat-only today. I'm already in ketosis, so hopefully the scales will starts showing progress as I'd really like to have shaken off this Christmas weight before I head off for my beach holiday in just over a week! I know my chances aren't good...

Here's a quick account of my eats over the past three days:

6/1/10

Breakfast: Camembert omelette, made with extra cream and butter. So rich and satisfying!


Lunch: to our delight, Mum & I found roast meat & veg available for lunch in the Westfield Doncaster food court, for $12.50! Such a huge amount of really great-tasting food, with tender, slow-cooked meat and fresh vegetables. Sold by "Rhumba's" or some such, right next to Borders. If you're a local, go get it!


Dinner: I made an interesting salad for the beau, with an adventurous combo of fresh produce - capsicum, carrot, snap peas, pea shoots, and blueberries! It lasted him three meals, and he adored it!


Mum and I had the last of the sashimi salad (still with some salmon roe, but no sashimi) to accompany our serving of the main, which was t-bone beef steak, with Camembert cheese.


To wash down our dinner, and accompany our guilty-pleasure movie of the evning, "Never Been Kissed", I made some guilt-free single servings of Chocolate Cream Cake with Berries, and this time I used less sweetener and mixed the eggs all together, not bothering to whip the white separately. The cake was denser, but somehow softer, and the extra sweetener was not missed. Trial and error to find the amount that suits you best...


7/1/10

Breakfast: A couple of Camembert omelets, served with four slices of shortcut bacon. Needless to say, I certainly didn't need lunch after this wonderful breakfast!


Dinner: After a day of toiling in the garden (a very warm day for physical outdoor activity, involving hacking down overgrown vines, ripping an old watering system out of the ground as well as off of patio ceiling beams, potting and transplanting various succulents and herbs, and hoisting soil and filled pots to useful places. And let's not count the amount of watering can refills I would have done, lugging the big bastard from the tap back to the patio, again and again...), I could not be arsed cooking dinner, so I sent the beau to the chicken place. Yum! I took the legs for dinner, the beau took the breasts, and I saved the rest to pick at.


8/1/10

Breakfast: picked clean the leftover chicken carcass from the night before. I possibly ate more bones/marrow than meat. Yum!

Lunch: a lamb forequarter chop, and two slices of shortcut bacon. They were the only items that were thawed and could be thrown on the grill - by lunchtime, the kitchen was starting to roast in and of itself, so no time to fuss around with frying things (or photograph them)!

Dinner: a delicious, organic porterhouse steak! I took the photo before I topped the hunk with a copious amount of butter. Mmmmmmmm! Tender and juicy, even though I tossed it on the grill straight from the freezer! Naughty!


And now I'm well and truly in ketosis! Feeling good, and even though my weight is still up by a couple of kilos compared to before Christmas, my body composition doesn't show it except for a bit of jiggliness in my lower abdomen. If I can get rid of that before hitting the beach resort in just over a week, that will make things much more pleasant! Bring on the meat!

Meanwhile, my Mum has begun her attempt at Drs. Eades' The Six-Week Cure for the Middle-Aged Middle, starting with the shake weeks of course. She's 58 years young, so her experience on the program will be much more revealing of the potential of the Eades' design. Stick with it, Mum!

Finally, I'm thinking about decreasing my posting rate (i.e. working at the same rate as I have done this week). I have a huge working year ahead of me, with some big after-school commitments as I am directing another show, going up in May. So I am toying with reducing my rate to twice a week - one on Sunday/Monday to look at my weekend eats/reads/etc, and one on Friday/Saturday to recap the eats/events of the week. I may start using Twitter more frequently instead, tweeting about my meals as I eat them, with photos when convenient, and linking to interesting articles so that there is more immediacy to you finding out about them. With 400+ followers of the blog and on Twitter, I'm guessing a lot of you double-dip anyway, and my tweets will be listed in the siderbar of my blog, but if anyone would be saddened by this change, please let me know!

I hope the first week of 2010 has been sweet for everyone, even though it seems like most of us are dealing with the extremes of our usual weather patterns at the moment (very cold or very hot - I'd live near the equator for the consistent weather, were it not for the natural disasters and whatnot...). If you're back at work, I hope you're buoyed along by peppy New Year promise and excitement, and that you're not counting down the days til your next break! I'm still on holidays for a while, it's true, but as of Monday I'll have to get cracking on preparation for the year ahead. Fortunately for me, as the Year 12 Lit teacher, my preparation involves reading classic texts. What a chore... :P And for some of the time, I'll be doing so whilst lying beside a pool in northern NSW... It's okay if you hate me right now :) You can laugh later in the year when I'm so busy with work and the production that I have no time to cook, and all that's offered to me by the well-meaning catering team is carby garbage, which I will refuse and, instead, go hungry! Cold chicken-ville, here I come again!