Lately

Here's a midweek splurge:

I slow-cooked hot Italian elk sausages over cabbage and carrots (with the last of the Merlot). It sort of dried out the sausages, but I really just wanted that sweet and toasty vegetable taste. These were SUPER spicy. I've turned into even more of a wimp about spice since this whole Paleo thing (which I'm totally ok with).

However, I did decide to go FULL ON autoimmune protocol this week. I cleared out ALL possible spices (including black pepper!). I didn't throw them out, just removed them from the kitchen. I'm going to do this thing right for once and hope it makes a difference because taking dairy out? Turns out the effects have been pretty subtle. I haven't truly started yet, obviously. Hot Italian elk sausage doesn't fit the bill - I'm just trying to clear out my freezer for the half pig, so I figured I'd better get all the sausage out of the way. I also made broth before I really scoured the AIP spice list, so it has black pepper in it.

These were the main dishes of the long weekend. I made some pork breakfast sausages and vegetable dishes separately. This here is a liver pate:

It contained:

• beef liver
• 1 lone chicken liver
• 1 lone chicken heart
• garlic
• onions
• salt
• Merlot (ok, maybe THIS was the last of it)
• rosemary, thyme, sage
• avocado (secret ingredient!)
• broth
• beef tallow

I'd never used avocado before, but I was looking to make it extra creamy. I'd also never really used broth before, I don't think, but my food processor is kind of crap, so it had to go in the blender (no one likes gritty liver pate). It was the BEST I'd ever made. It was more thick soup than pate, but it had a nice creamy fluff to it, and I don't like beef liver the best anyway, and I often use bacon fat, so that could be why.

Eaten warm and with a spoon!

This soup was kind of disastrous... Ok, that's an overstatement. I roasted two different kinds of winter squash the night before and then the next day blended it and roasted the chicken. As you can see, I have terrible spatial reasoning skills in the kitchen....

So that was the first problem. What you see is a combination of...

• a lot of winter squash
• cilantro, turmeric, cinnamon, ginger, salt (and that's about it for AIP curry spices)
• coconut milk

It actually just barely fit. And that was some delicious stuff, even cold!

Meanwhile I was roasting a chicken. Let's just say it's a good thing there's a gaping hole in my ceiling where the fire alarm should be. This is my second time trying to roast chicken in my apartment, and each time it just fills up with smoke. I stuck it out for almost an hour at 415* and since it was a pretty skinny bird, I thought that'd be ok. Turns out not. By an hour, it was still juicy pink and not cooked through. So after a quick call to my mom (I need to be told what's sanitary and what's not with meat... and even then, my family has fairly low standards), I put the chicken in a slow cooker, and put this winter squash puree over it. I wasn't thrilled about this. I don't know if anyone else has this problem, but there's something about cooking cinnamon and turmeric that just... doesn't work. It never tastes as good on the other side. And so this happened here. What was my beautiful, delicious chilled soup turned into an ok-enough curry-like puree the next day. Don't get me wrong, it's not bad, it's just not... delicious. Let's just say it'll be a while before I go around buying whole chickens again... (or even parts, because then I just feel bad for the rest of the bird, and real farmers don't sell their parts for any kind of reasonable-to-me price).

That's it for now, but I do have a happy-rant from PChem this week coming up!

Recent Eats and Rants

Blogging is not yet a habit... and it may never be. But here are some of my recent meals.

My favorite stew I've made so far (I don't have a picture of it yet) included:

• lamb stew meat (100% grass fed, but unfortunately from Whole Foods and therefore, New Zealand)
• lamb heart (the butcher at WFM pulled it out of the back for me and it was only $3 and change/lb)
• carrots
• celeriac
• butternut squash
• onions
• lots of Merlot
• salt, pepper, sage, rosemary, and thyme

I froze quite a few containers of this and so I've been trying to spread them out to punctuate some of the not so successful stews as of late.

This is a meal I made the Sunday before our second anatomy exam. I used a Dutch oven instead of a slow cooker, so it was done in about 3-4 hours. I would've left it on longer, but it was getting late. I definitely prefer the oven taste, but sometimes I just need to leave it for longer.  This mixture included:

• beef short ribs
• crimini mushrooms
• carrots
• red cabbage
• onions
• garlic
• Merlot
• rosemary, salt, pepper, sage

Served with a sweet potato and coconut oil on the side. I recently took the dairy-free plunge (again). This is the third time I've challenged dairy in the last year, and for the first time, I see a substantial difference. I'd come to rely on raw cheddar and 24 hr fermented yogurt (both always 100% grass fed) as quick and easy sources of fat, and so it was probably the hardest this time to give it up. But my "seasonal" allergies were just getting to be too much. I was sick of sniveling all through lecture and always needing to make sure my pockets were stuffed with tissues. I was going to try to finish my butter and cheese, but one day I decided enough was enough. I still have a hunk of cheese and a mostly whole stick of butter in my fridge, plus a few small jars of flavored ghee sitting around. The improvement in my allergies isn't a miracle by any means--I'm still a bit sniffly but the other day I forgot to bring a tissue with me to class, and it wasn't a big deal. Maybe it would be totally gone if I could consistently get at least eight hours of sleep. Who knows? I guess I needed to get more healing done to be able to see a difference at all. Maybe once I finish my round of SIBO supplements and go back to a leaky gut supplement protocol it will improve even more. That said, I'm looking forward to getting some raw heavy cream to on top of pumpkin desserts at Thanksgiving.

Here's a picture of the two slow cookers going at once (broth and maybe the lamb stew). I could definitely use some more counter space. 

These came out of the pork neck bones I had going in that broth. Anatomically relevant cervical vertebrae for our second exam!

This was one of my more boring stews. As usual, I was overly optimistic as I was chopping things, and ran out of room for more vegetables. So this only included:

• ox tail
• beef stew meet
• green cabbage
• onions
• Merlot
• salt, pepper, rosemary

Served over spaghetti squash.  

These were some weekend vegetables: the carrots that didn't make it into the stew and broccoli, drowning in tallow and sprinkled with rosemary, then baked. 

This was a fancy weekend dinner: 

• simply steamed carrots (with coconut oil) 
• steamed green beans (tossed with Dijon mustard)
• spaghetti squash
• sauteed mushrooms and onions in bacon fat and Merlot, tossed with mussels from a can

Definitely plan on repeating that one. 

In other news, my head banging impulse control has been sorely tested over these last few weeks. 

I had a few of "Hallelujah!" moments when...

1. I posted that British/fat/anti-statin article on Facebook and a couple of friends (including one of my classmates) liked it (I'm not alone!)
2. I found out that one of my classmates used to work at the integrative animal hospital I've begun taking my pets to. I haven't sought her out yet, but I will (maybe I'm REALLY not alone!)
3. Our physio lecturer said that fevers were a good thing, as long as they didn't get too high (ok, so in animals it's a bit different since we don't go around bringing down fevers and owners probably don't know their animal has a fever until they bring it in, but still, he was sort of talking about us as people patients, too)
4. He also consistently repeats that ketone bodies are the brain's preferred fuel source (as in, over glucose)! But he's a bit hypocritical because he also says ketosis really isn't a good thing (it's only good in a compensatory manner). 

And then, unfortunately, there were more times when on the outside I was taking notes like a good little schoolgirl while on the inside I was screaming, "YOU DON'T UNDERSTAND!!!!!" Let's take a look at some...

1. A few people behind me in lecture one day got into a conversation about how one is gluten-free and probably should do things like use a separate toaster, but doesn't and another tried being gluten-free for a while because her doctor thought she might be sensitive, but it turns out she isn't. I happen to know that this person has an autoimmune disease, too. They went on to talk about how they think some gluten-free pancake mixes are "better than the real thing." One of them wants to get into more gluten-free baking from scratch, but the flour mixes are too complicated and expensive, so she buys the premade mixes or just the premade products. 
2. That same person who's gluten-free is also vegetarian and was talking to another vegetarian (who definitely had a morally superior attitude) about how it was so hard for her mom to cook for her, since she's such a great cook but all of her recipes contain animal protein. Ok, I get this. I go through the same thing with my aunt who loves making us pies and cakes. But the way she said animal protein, it was like her mom's recipes all had dirt in them (ok, maybe that's not a good analogy for the traditional foodists out there... let's says she said it like... it was a Twinkie). I think there was definitely talk about sustainability in there too. Oy vei...
3. Plaques, lipids, and statins... oh my! It's being beaten into our brains that a high fat diet is the devil's diet. And that cholesterol builds plaques and yada yada yada. And as I've said before, cats and dogs really haven't been built on high fat diets; however, our lecturer keeps bringing it back to human medicine. And if cats are our obligate carnivore as we're repeatedly told, why doesn't all the corn and wheat in conventional diets raise red flags?
4. This one here was my downfall. I made it a little over two months without rolling my eyes at our lecturers. This was a guest lecturer in one of our pass/fail classes. Our "philosophy" class, if you will. Today's topic was pet therapy, and as someone who's trained a decent therapy dog, I feel really strongly about this and enjoy this topic a lot. Unfortunately, at this school, the head nutritionist is deeply tied to our therapy group. And so when talking about the rules for therapy animals, they mentioned that raw diets are not allowed. Someone raised a question about this and the answer was, "What do you think about bringing a dog who's eaten raw meat into a hospital full of immuno-suppressed patients? Seems like grounds for lots of infections to me!" and then they basically gave themselves a big pat on the back that they're the only organization with this rule, all thanks to have a nutritionist (a nutritionist?! Wow!) on their team. CUE EYE ROLE. So later I went up to them and asked if it was a last meal kind of thing. The answer was, "Absolutely not. No raw meat ever. It's just too unsafe." Right. Because THAT'S where an immuno-suppressed patient is going to get an infection in a hospital, from a raw-meat eating dog. To be fair, I would totally be on board with a 'no raw meat for 24h' kind of rule. That makes total sense to me, because there IS a slight risk involved in eating or handling raw meat. But while you're suggested to wash your hands before and after a visit, it's not like the humans coming in can't ever touch raw meat. It just makes no sense. 
5. We had one slide on the benefits of omega-3's in pet food, and then one slide on the negatives. At the end our lecturer says, "Would you supplement your patients with omega-3's? I wouldn't." *FACE PALM* The negatives included: increased risk of bleeding, lipid peroxidation with vitamin E deficiency, contamination of heavy metals and pollutants, reduced immune reactivity, and reduced insulin release. He summarized by saying, "Currently, there is a lack of good research data on specific cause-effect relationships." Maybe that's true. But maybe, just maybe, it's because any research that's been done is from crudely extracted and processed omega-3's put into diets in ridiculously high quantities removed from their natural food source. Do I have any qualms about supplementing my pets with appropriate doses of Green Pasture's FCLO or adding whole fish, like sardines, to their diets? Not. At. All. 
6. (This may surprise you... this is an anti-paleo rant, but bear with me) So clearly, we've been talking quite a bit about diets in physiology. Which is why it really bothers me when people hate on doctors for not having any nutrition classes. You don't need specific nutrition hours to talk about nutrition! We talk about nutrition every day in physiological chemistry and physiology (because these are classes that can easily be combined between vet and med students). So that's total crap that doctors don't know anything about nutrition. Ok, most don't, because what's being beaten into our brains is bad fat, bad cholesterol, bad low carb, supplements are worthless, and drugs are gold, but it's still nutritional training even if it's not in a nutrition class! Frankly, I think it's a greater disservice to have all these laypeople (ok, they want to help and that's great) becoming "functional medicine practitioners" and various other "health/medicine" degrees that don't mean anything when they have NO physiological education whatsoever. It's a HUGE turnoff and very disappointing to work with a "practitioner" and have them say they're "prescribing" 5-HT, which is a precursor to serotonin, or they can't pronounce the compounds they're looking at in my test results, but coming up with supplement protocols based on it or don't understand what I mean when I say I virtually have no parietal cells left and they want to sell me supplements that boost my own stomach acid production. And so, once again, I find myself practitioner-less.