Hambulance! We Need Egg Cups, Stat!

To make:

Preheat your oven to 400 degrees

Have assistant deliver sliced ham via ambulance ( = Hambulance).

(This step works best if it's after school on Crazy Hair Day but work with what you've got.)

Lightly oil a muffin tin (I used coconut oil today).

Line each muffin spot with a piece of minimally-processed sliced meat (tonight we used ham and turkey from Applegate Farms).

Tear some fresh spinach into small pieces and put them in the meat slices, which have now formed a sort of cup at the bottom of your muffin tin.

Break an egg into each.

Sprinkle with salt and pepper, with optional Parmesan cheese.

Bake at 400 for around 13 minutes.

Serve with a cup of broth and something green.

Optional goodness: sprouted whole grain bread with your own salty home-made butter. Or should I say "butter with bread?"



Bon appetit!




Tomorrow, stay tuned for Totally Paleo Birthday Dinner: Dad's Birthday Edition. Featuring Grain-Free Pineapple Upside-Down Cake. (Wish me luck.)

Smell Pretty

We're talking healthy, non-toxic deodorant over at the natural beauty and wellness coaching blog.

Why not pop over and get the recipe to go from this:

to this:

in three steps for less than a dollar.

The recipe is here.

Easiest Sauerkraut Ever

Earlier over at my skincare and wellness coaching blog, I wrote that fermented foods are among the best things we can eat to achieve radiant health and clear skin. The natural probiotics in real fermented foods aid digestion and give powerful antioxidant protection. I see so many clients who struggle with treatment-resistant acne. These same clients tend to have poor digestion, low energy, allergies, and other signs of general low immune system health. One thing I always recommend is adding more raw, cultured nutrition to the daily diet. You can buy artisanal raw sauerkrauts at your local natural food store that are delicious, but it will cost you at least $9 for the real thing. Real raw sauerkraut is so easy and cheap to make, you may as well make your own. Here's how I do mine:

Real Raw Sauerkraut

Ingredients needed:

• ONE HEAD OF PURPLE OR GREEN CABBAGE, ORGANIC IF POSSIBLE

• 1 TABLESPOON HIGH-QUALITY SALT (I use pink Himalayan but Celtic sea salt is also mineral-rich and healthy.)

• 1TEASPOON CARAWAY SEED

Supplies needed:

• CUTTING BOARD

• A GOOD KNIFE

• MEASURING SPOONS

• A 1-QT WIDE-MOUTH MASON JAR 

Shred your cabbage. Chop it finely with knife and cutting board. It doesn't have to look perfect but be sure the pieces are small. You'll be squishing them into a jar.

Add the salt and put your cabbage into a large bowl. Squeeze and press the cabbage with your hands to get it nice and bruised and juicy.

Add the caraway seeds, then pack it all up into a quart-size wide-mouth mason jar. Important: Press the cabbage down firmly with a spoon or, if it fits, with your hand. The goal is to get all solid bits of cabbage submerged beneath the juices. This will prevent mold from growing on your sauerkraut. *

Keep your kraut-to-be at a nice, warm room temperature for at least a week. After that, taste it and see if you like it. If so you may refrigerate it at this point. For even better nutrient profile, let it ferment at least two weeks before throwing it in the fridge. I like a stronger taste and tons of good bacteria so two weeks works for me. Just be sure your cabbage-y bits have enough liquid in them to stay sunken until refrigeration.

Two 20-ounce jars and a mix of green and red cabbages. It's 5:32 somewhere.

* Optional:  In her wonderful and highly recommended book, Full Moon Feast, Jessica Prentice recommends weighing your sauerkraut down with a smaller jar, filled with water, to ensure that your mix stays under the liquid line. I don't and haven't ever done that; I just press my cabbage down below the liquid every day and have never had a mold problem.

That Wiggle in Your Walk

Yesterday I wrote that gelatin doesn't have to be the junk food it was when my grandma (bless her cotton socks) was molding that day-glo stuff in a box into wiggly, jiggly shape for every holiday of the year. (This reminds me- every year she made a delicious and no doubt highly traditional green St. Patrick's Day cake out of boxed yellow cake, boxed pistachio pudding and green food coloring. It sure wasn't anything approaching real food, but the memory of it makes me smile this week as I'm preparing for a healthy St. Paddy's feast with my mom and family.)

Last year I read and loved Deep Nutrition: Why Your Genes Need Traditional Food by Catherine Shanahan MD and Luke Shanahan.


Known on her web site as Dr. Cate, Shanahan writes with her partner, a chef, about the healing benefits of real, traditional foods. I’m a real food research junkie so the information presented in the book wasn’t very new. In fact, I was put off by the otherwise very enjoyable text because the writers clearly drew so heavily from the work of the amazing Weston A. Price Foundation but they say that their inspiration came from reading Dr. Andrew Weil - a lovely person, I’m sure, but his nutritional advices are usually far too soy-heavy and low-fat to be truly healthy. In any case, I won’t be offended if the WAPF isn’t, and Deep Nutrition is engaging and easy to read so I recommend it to my skincare clients all the time.

What makes Deep Nutrition particularly interesting is its focus on beauty as a manifestation of health. Dr. Price did so too, in his book Nutrition and Physical Degeneration. But Dr. Cate’s book is more of the how-to book to Dr. Price’s drier anthropological work. She has a lovely passage about skincare, inside and out, which I've written a little about over here. When I reread it recently, I was hot to go and rediscovered my love of making gelatin molds to add a sweetish and snacky alternative to my usual gallons of bone broth.

The incredible Cheeseslave has a terrific recipe here that includes freshly-juiced fruit to get a really nutritious gelatin. I'll bet it tastes divine but I'm not that committed. To reduce the sugar content, I use one part water to three parts organic unsweetened fruit juice and I follow a tootsed-up recipe I devised yonks ago off the back of the Knox box. I don't buy Knox, though. I boycott Kraft, its icky industrial food parent company, and I get Great Lakes brand gelatin online because it comes from healthy cows that are pasture-raised.

I like my gel-o really firm so my gelatin content is high. Here's how I do it:

Put one cup of cold filtered water in a bowl and sprinkle with 5-6 tablespoons of unflavored gelatin.

Stir gelatin into juice until it is dissolved.

Bowl 3 cups of juice.

Add boiling juice to the water-gelatin mixture.

Stir together and pour into a your mold or baking pan that has been laid with a shallow layer of the frozen organic fruit of your choice. (I use a silicone bundt cake mold that I got as a wedding gift and it is perfect for this recipe. Next week- ask me about Punch Bowl Kombucha!)

Let it set in your refrigerator overnight and by morning you will have a very firm, very delicious treat that is relatively low in sugar, very high in protein, and full of the collagen we need for healthy hair, skin and nails - or, as we say in our house: healthy claws and a shiny coat.

It's wee-beastie approved!

A Little Mid-Week Update, and Grain-free Pumpkin Bread

Yesterday I felt well, but so hungry! I had my little pumpkin bread* with butter and a hardboiled egg for breakfast with coffee and milk. For lunch I ate my too-small  but very nutrient-dense salad then went on about a crazy-busy day. By the end of my workday I was famished. By the time I finished my 6pm dance class I was ready to eat the house. I settled for some grain-free bouef bourguingon over cauliflower and called it a night.

Today I packed extra raw almonds and a banana to get through the day, but it brings up a useful question to me: What is the difference between buying nuts and packing them in my lunch and stopping at the store to buy a bag of nuts when I'm hungry? The answer is that I'm just not stopping in to buy anything this month. This is radical dining-in and that means If I Dont Pack It I Don't Eat It. My shopping and prep are on Sunday and that's all there is unless I realize I've run out of something crucial. So I am reminded that I need to start making kombucha again, because O! how I miss my daily fix of it from the GNC next to my office. (That commercial kombucha and two ostrich meat sticks have made a thrown-together lunch more often than I care to think about, and at $7+ for something so silly there is really no excuse for me not making my own at home. Easy-peasy. A recipe and tutorial are coming soon.)


*So. Pumpkin "Bread". . .

. . . is more like a bread-with-pie-center and maybe something that you eat if you are hankering for a baked good and unable to allow yourself one, even if it is Girl Scout cookie month and, come on, now- don't raisins and spices make everything just a teeny bit better? I make mine very loosely.  Since they're never perfect like a real baked good I feel like you can be a bit loose with the ratios and play around until you hit on something you like. The main idea is that they are heavy on the eggs so they're full of protein and a little piece can therefore function as an actual breakfast. Plus you only have to bake one once and you're set for a week. I add a tiny bit of stevia (an herbal-derived sweetener that doesn't seem to raise blood sugar levels) but you can use raw honey or maple syrup to add sunshine to the morning. Seriously, this recipe and its variations have been a work in progress I have been tinkering with for the past year. If you have a better method won't you send it my way? I will keep tinkering and post an update when I've figured it out. Here's how I did it this time.

Grain-free Pumpkin Bread

5 eggs

2/3 a cup of organic pumpkin puree
1 cup coconut flour (I also have used almond flour, which may work better for you)
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 tablespoon molasses
nutmeg, cinnamon, and stevia to taste
some raisins

some almonds

I preheated the over to 350 and oiled a square Pyrex sheet (8 x 8") with coconut oil.  I mixed everything well in a large bowl, and poured it into the baking sheet. Letting it turn very nice and brown on the outside will mitigate some of the "mushy center" issues so common in grain-free baking. Adding more almond flour as you go can also help, but don't add too much or you end up with that chalky, dry texture that is also so common in grain-free baking. You're looking for a raw texture that is more like cookie dough, less like pancake batter.

Bake until brown and toast up in squares. Add butter and your morning beverage of choice and you've started the day with a powerhouse of protein, beta carotenes, and good fats.

And you've staved off the Girl Scouts for another day.