A Very AIP Christmas (and New Year)

The first morning I was home, I had a simple breakfast of bacon and kale:

I realized there was no fat for me to eat, other than coconut oil, so I made a whole pound of bacon for that fat, and I took my first stab at making lard.

The verdict is........ well, it took me two hours to chop all that up, and even then it probably wasn't as small as it should be. The food processor looked like it was going to explode when I tried that, so I had to do it by hand. I probably ended up with about 3 c. of lard, much less than I was expecting. Sure, it tasted good and I was able to not burn any of it. But until I get a meat grinder or something, I don't think my frozen pork fat is going anywhere. 

For Christmas Eve dinner with family friends, I made three recipes. The first as a simple pot roast, the second was a parsnip and white and yellow carrot mash (a big hit with many non-paleo folk, also included lard and broth), and the third was a new liver pate recipe: blueberry balsamic liver pate, except I used half chicken and half duck liver. I doubled it, and was left with almost twice as much blueberry topping as I wanted but I thought it turned out really well. The two other liver-lovers at dinner weren't thrilled with it. I think they prefer it more savory. But for me, as much as I love savory liver pate when it's fresh and warm, I really don't like it cold as leftovers the next day. But this recipe I'm enjoying eating days later and luckily I have a lot leftover.

For Christmas Day...

One little boy was very happy to have his own stocking

We started with an apple and fennel soup

The main course consisted of...

A beet and orange salad (I had to use regular oranges)

 Cauliflower and leek stuffing (so good, it felt just like grits)

Roasted brussel sprouts in bacon fat

 And a fresh ham (from my pig share) with apple sauce

I followed TPM's recipe, with some snafus in cooking times (I think I tried to stuff too much in the pan) plus I stuck in a lot of whole cloves

The night finished with another round of this pumpkin pie, this time with a little less gelatin. It turned out much better than last time and is shaping up to be a go-to recipe. 

As for New Year's Eve, I put some GT's kombucha in my champagne glass and snacked on caviar-topped cucumbers and then polished it off with some more pumpkin pie. It was later than some of us had stayed up in a while...

We (I) added another four-legged addition to our family. This is my first experience with a shepherd and he's shaping up to be a doozy :) 

Recent Eats

Lots and lots and lots and lots of final studying has been going on here...

And we're all kind of bored with it...

Unfortunately, upon returning back to MA, my sleeping abilities went even farther down the tube. I have a few culprits, one of which I'll get into in a later post, but the moral of the story is I've started waking up after about 5 hrs and can't get back to sleep, which led me to getting very, very sick for about a week, smack dab in the middle of finals. No bueno. But I'm on the upside now, just in time for our last one in physiology. And the good news is I was able to make it through 2.5h of standing during our anatomy practical yesterday. The second night I was sick, I had done a TON of batch-cooking to get me through the week. Unfortunately, I spent a few days where I ate nothing but broth, jello, and some ground beef, so most of it has gone to the freezer where it will most likely be used in emergencies early next semester. But here's what's been going down in the kitchen...

Chordae tendinae!

A renal pelvis!

This is a tangent off of this recipe (which I made for Christmas step-by-step last year and it was great).  I made a stew with some chopped up Boston butt, pork heart, pork kidneys, cabbage, butternut squash, prunes, and onions. I was a little crunched for time and I could've left it in a bit longer, but it's made for several tasty breakfasts. 

With the rest of the butt, I finally figured out how my mom makes some great "pulled pork." And by that I mean, I just asked her. But I had been under the impression she does it on the stove, but apparently that's just how she would warm up leftovers. But apparently you just preheat the oven to 350*, put the butt in a heavy pot after coating it in whatever you want (for me, just salt and garlic powder), fill the pot about 1/3 of the way up with broth (or water or wine), and stick it in the oven for 3-5 hours, depending on how big it is. My mom says she rotates it every hour or so but I didn't bother. I also added in some cabbage, which caramelized deliciously. I also take the lid off for the last 30 minutes or so. It turned out great!

This actually happened before the big batch-cooking night. On that night, I took another big butt :) and put it into my dutch oven with carrots, cabbage, garlic, and onions. I used water for the liquid, because I hadn't made broth (because I'm considering testing out a low histamine diet, but then I read The Paleo Mom's take on histamines and she hasn't found broth and slow-cooking to be an issue, so in the throes of illness, I whipped up a continuous batch of broth so I'm all stocked up again... but more on this later). Again, I put it in too late and as a result couldn't wait for all the caramelize-y goodness to occur, but it's been pretty tasty. 

I also don't have a photo, because during my almost/sort-of sick day, all I did was a ton of vegetable chopping, and so the next day, when I was sicker, I just threw it all in the pot and put it in (because a defrosted butt and several cups of chopped onions can only hang out in a fridge for so long). So maybe I'll get a plate picture up now that I'm eating again.

I also made 2 lbs. of ground beef with some onions and oregano, a butternut squash and fennel roast, carrots, some sauteed kale, mushrooms, and broccoli, garlic, and mushrooms. Most of it's gone to the freezer since I'm going home in a few days. 

And here's the end result in my fridge and little freezer. I also made lots of jello (for glycine, to help with the sleeping) and segmented a few grapefruits (I've decided to make some concessions in locality for AIP). 

But this is what was going on the weekend before all this started, when I had time for some fancy, non-left-over shenanigans...

I bought a tub of chicken liver at WFM. It's lower quality than what I would eat for actual chicken, but hey, liver's liver, right? So I had chicken liver twice a day for about four days straight. 

Anybody else think salting raw liver makes it look cancerous? Anybody?

Served over baked apples with Brussels sprouts and a sweet potato one night and over broccoli the next.

I came across this atrocity while I was at WFM...

I also brought back a bunch of fish from home that my mom was kind enough to vacuum-pack and freeze for me. We have two awesome fish mongers at our local farmers' market. They come straight out of Long Island. Even in the middle of summer, they open their case and all you smell is briny sea air. I'm seriously missing good fish here in central Massachusetts. One night I sauteed some scallops and wrapped two of them in two slices of bacon that were left over from Thanksgiving. 

Treat yo' self!

Aside from our physiology final on Friday, I'm seeing a new practitioner in a few hours to hopefully push my healing along. It's a ways a way (plus we got another almost foot of snow last night) but I'm hoping it will be worth it. I'll try to get some more meal photos up and before Christmas will try to get a post up that (gasp!) is about some recent animal experiences.

In the meantime, some lazy concessions are being made for the end of finals week...

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!