Sweet and Crunchy Green Beans

Vegetables were the worst nightmare of many of us when we were younger. Now a lot of us have learned to like/love certain ones. One vegetable I never learned to like, until I made this new dish, was green beans. My dish today is 'Sweet and Crunchy Green Beans'. What I love about this dish, and adds for a lot more flavor, is bacon.

               This specific recipe by Juli Bauer, author of Paleo Cookbook, calls for thick cut bacon (Bauer 198), but seeing as I did not have thick cut, I used regular cut and it turned out delicious. This was overall a very fun dish to cook because I loved sautéing the onions and making the bacon in order to mix it with the green beans. The key ingredient in this recipe was to “leave 3 tablespoons of bacon fat in the pan” (Bauer 198) because it allowed for that bacon flavor to soak into the green beans. It may sound like too much bacon, but the fat combined with the onion, does not make give the green beans an overpowering bacon flavor.

               Once the green bean mixture of green beans, onions, and bacon was completely done and cooked, the recipe calls for Almond slices (Bauer 198) to be sprinkled on top. As you can see in the picture to the left, I did not do that, but if you ever make this dish you certainly can. I would definitely recommend this dish to anybody who is looking for a slightly sweet and savory vegetable dish. I made this to be on the side of a steak dish, but it would be good for most any meal.

What are your favorite vegetables? What types of dishes do you pair them with?

Bauer, Juli, Bill Staley, and Hayley Mason. Juli Bauer's Paleo Cookbook: Over 100 Gluten-free Recipes to Help You Shine from within. Las Vegas: Victory Belt, 2015. Print.

Garlic and Steak

Garlic. Garlic is my absolute favorite spice/herb/vegetable. I try to use it in most of my foods if it is appropriate to include it. I love the smell of it, the look of it, the smell of it, pretty much every aspect of it. So for my dish today, I really wanted to do a more everyday Paleo food, that obviously included Garlic. I made 'Steak Frites with Herb Garlic Roasted Butter'.

               The nice thing about this dish is that it is naturally Paleo, so you don’t have to go specialty shopping for different flours or any other non-common ingredients. Most of us have probably previously eaten some form of steak so it’s not a super weird or unusual food.

               Steak is steak, but the key aspect to make this a delicious dish, is the Herb Garlic Roasted Butter. To successfully make this garlic butter, I needed to roast some garlic. Juli Bauer, author of Paleo Cookbook, gave a tip on how to roast the garlic butter: she said, “Cut ¼ inch off the end of the bulb to expose the cloves inside” (114). I, while making this recipe, accidentally overlooked that step, and did not do it. However after I roasted the garlic for 30 minutes in a 400 degree oven (Bauer 114), it came out just fine and perfectly roasted. Some of you might think, ‘Why not use powered garlic?’, well that’s because you get a more authentic and rich garlic flavor if you roast it.

               After my steak was coated with a simple dry rub made of several spices, it went on the grill. Since I’m far from able to cook a steak well, I had a bit of help from my step-dad, my house’s grill master. The picture to the right shows the final product of the steak, along with a dollop of the garlic butter on top.

What is your favorite spice to either eat or cook with? Do you like steak? Did you know you were eating something naturally Paleo?

Bauer, Juli, Bill Staley, and Hayley Mason. Juli Bauer's Paleo Cookbook: Over 100 Gluten-free Recipes to Help You Shine from within. Las Vegas: Victory Belt, 2015. Print.

"Peanut Butter" and Jelly Cups

               I love Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. I get it from my father, we both Loveeeeee them. When I was looking through Juli Bauer’s “Paleo Cookbook” I happen to run across a “Peanut Butter” and Jelly Chocolate Cups. This excited me. I knew I had to make it. The jelly part of it seem odd to me but I was willing to test it.

The Paleo aspect of this dish, is that it doesn’t use real peanut butter. Instead, Juli Bauer has us combine sunflower seed butter and honey (Bauer 218) in order to make our own peanutless peanut butter. Since I did not have Sunflower Seed Butter on hand when I was making this, I used Almond Butter instead.

It was pretty easy making these, and fun too. I think the hardest part of this recipe was to attempt to get it decent looking. I know it should be all about the flavor, but sometimes things gotta look pretty too. But I totally failed in that category. The third recipe of the recipe says “Place less than 1 tablespoon of melted chocolate in each muffin line, spreading the chocolate over the bottom of the line and up the sides” (Bauer 218). When I was doing this step, instead of making a nice chocolate outside, it looked like a 5-year-old had come in and tried to do this. Chocolate on the outsides of the muffin liners, chocolate dripping on the counter, and uneven sides. Let’s just say spreading chocolate isn’t my forte.

All in all, everything turned out good. It may not have looked nice, but it sure did taste good. I have to say that “peanut butter” and jelly tastes pretty dang good with chocolate. But next time, I think I’m going to stick with a dish that doesn’t require spreading chocolate. 

                                                 [Picture of Final Product]

Would you consider eating this dish? What do you think about Peanutless Peanut Butter?

Bauer, Juli, Bill Staley, and Hayley Mason. Juli Bauer's Paleo Cookbook: Over 100 Gluten-free Recipes to Help You Shine from within. Las Vegas: Victory Belt, 2015. Print.

That Pizza Life

               This whole Paleo foods thing has been quite the interesting experience. A fun experience no doubt, but very different from normal cooking and eating.

               I’m a HUGE lover of pizza. I think a lot of people are. Good thing that my “Paleo Cookbook” by Juli Bauer had a Pizza Crust recipe. Toppings are pretty straight forward. You place whatever edible thing you desire and can call it a pizza. The crust on the other hand, is not as straight forward and either makes the pizza, or it completely ruins it. Contrary to normal pizza crust, and like everything in a Paleo lifestyle, it is completely Gluten Free. Now gluten free does not mean flour free, it just means you can’t use ingredients that contain gluten, such as wheat. Instead of using wheat flour for this pizza crust the recipe calls for “Tapioca flour/starch . . . [and] Coconut Flour” (Bauer 288).

               After following the recipe and making the dough, to make a pizza, you have to put it into the iconic pizza shape. When I tried to do this, it didn’t exactly work out as I had planned. There was a little too much dough which caused me to have to make a more square shaped pizza (see below). The recipe did say that it would make a 12-inch crust (Bauer 288), but because my pans were limited, I could not do that. Suffice to say, next time I might try to make two pizzas out of the dough.

               12 minutes after putting my crust in the oven, it came out puffy and really tasty. Most gluten free crusts are more flat so this was a great surprise. Several toppings, and a bunch of cheese later, my family and I had a wonderful half cheese, half vegetable pizza that was incredibly delicious [see below picture].

What do you think about using other flours in cooking? What is your favorite type of pizza? Any weird combinations of toppings? 

Bauer, Juli, Bill Staley, and Hayley Mason. Juli Bauer's Paleo Cookbook: Over 100 Gluten-free Recipes to Help You Shine from within. Las Vegas: Victory Belt, 2015. Print.

Coconut Cashew Chicken

           Around the world, there are many eating lifestyles such as Vegetarianism, Veganism, Mediterranean Lifestyle, High Fat Low Carb lifestyle, and many more. One that many people don’t really know about, or know very little about, is the Paleo Lifestyle. In Juli Bauer’s “Paleo Cookbook”, she describes the Paleo Lifestyle as being “based on what our ancestors ate and what our bodies were created to eat; simple, unprocessed foods that can be hunted or gathered. But since most of us don’t hunt or gather . . . what we 21^st-century people can do is search for the best-quality meats, plants, nuts, and seeds and BOOM, we’re off to eating Paleo” (Bauer 20). The reason that I picked this book specifically is because I want become a better version of myself by eating healthier and loving myself, become a better cook, if only by a little, and because Paleo foods may change my life in the long run.  

I’m not an expert in cooking, nor do I cook very often. But when I do cook, I find it very enjoyable and it makes me happy when I can serve other people great, healthy food. The recipe that I tried out from Julie Bauer’s “Paleo Cookbook” was Coconut Cashew Chicken Fingers with Spicy Mango Dipping Sauce as shown in the picture below.

                                                            Final product of the dish.

For the amount of cooking experience that I have, and according to my parents, who I cooked for, my dish came out good and delicious. However, the chicken was a little too salty, even with the mango sauce that should have counteracted it. The authors recipe calls for 1 ½ teaspoons of salt for the chickens’ breading (Bauer 88), and next time I decide to make this dish, which will not be too far away, I will use either 1, or a ½ of teaspoon of salt.  

Questions: What are your thoughts on the Paleo Lifestyle? What kind of chicken dishes do you like the most? 

Bauer, Juli, Bill Staley, and Hayley Mason. Juli Bauer's Paleo Cookbook. Las Vegas: Victory Belt, 2015. Print.