Walnut Crusted Wasabi Salmon

 As a fair warning, this recipe was something that I found on the internet, as a not paleo recipe. I had it written down, but didn’t try it until after we were paleo. I made a few easy changes to make it paleo. I’m not sure where the original recipe came from. I’m really not trying to be shady. I promise. (If anyone knows where it came from, let me know, and I’ll be happy to link it.)

Walnut Crusted Wasabi Salmon
-Serves 4

Ingredients

1/2 tsp wasabi powder

2 tsp coconut aminos

4 pieces of fresh salmon, 3 oz each

4 oz finely chopped/crushed walnuts

Directions

Preheat oven to 350 degrees

Mix wasabi powder and coconut aminos in a bowl.

Add the salmon and allow to marinate for 20 minutes.

Coat both sides of salmon in the crushed walnut pieces.

Bake salmon for about 20 minutes, or until it’s reached your preferred level of done-ness.

Eat

Paleo, there’s an app for that….

While it’s not very cave person like, we live in a world full of technology. In some ways, it’s a tremendous burden, keeping us always connected to the outside world, and preventing us from just being in the moment, but in other ways, it’s so unbelievably helpful. This blog, for example, is a direct result of technology. There are also a wide variety of smart phone apps that can help make navigating paleo much easier.

myKitchen from the Food Lover’s Primal Palate This app has loads of their recipes that you can search and save. You can create meal plans, menus and generate shopping lists. There is an ad when this app loads, but that’s because it’s free.

Caveman Feast from Civilized Caveman Cooking Creations
This app is beautiful, has a lot of recipes that are broken down by category. You can save recipes, but there isn’t a search feature on this app. I paid $.99 for it, but I think it’s regularly $2.99

This next one isn’t a paleo app, but it’s a great app if you cook. It’s called KitchenDial, and it’s an app to figure out how many of one measurement are in another measurement. For instance, if you need to know how many cups 7 tablespoons is, or how many tablespoons are in an ounce (or 10) of something, this app will answer that for you. It’s also free, and so helpful.

There are a bunch that I don’t have that look really helpful, like the Fast Paleo app for $.99, or the NomNom Paleo iPad app for $5.99.

I love having these recipe apps on my phone because sometimes, I forget to write something down on my list, or I forget my entire list at home when I go to the store. Other times, I get to the store and something is on sale, so I change the menu, or I think that I can just buy a bottle of salad dressing, but when I look at the ingredients in them, decide that it’s better for me to make my own. These apps keep me from having to make two trips. Are there any apps that have made your lives easier?

General Tso’s Chicken

I love General Tso’s Chicken. It was always my go-to dish whenever we would order Chinese Food back in our pre-paleo days. When I heard that there was a recipe for it in Gather, it was just one more reason for me to get the book. The recipe is a bit complicated though, so I hadn’t gotten around to making it yet. However, I thought I would give it a shot. I made it, and the shrimp fried cauliflower rice, but I substituted leftover Chinese Barbeque Pork in place of the Shrimp in the recipe.

To minimize the amount of work at dinner time, I chopped as much as I could ahead of time. I did this during nap time, figuring that it would be easier for me to get dinner made if I had a few things done ahead of time. It did help, but as soon as I turned the sauce on, the baby started crying. I didn’t want to risk burning the sauce, so I just turned it off. It turned into a giant goopy mess. I was able to thin it out by adding some of the oil back into the sauce, but it was still frustrating. I thought for sure I had ruined dinner. I actually ended up really frustrated over all trying to get this recipe made, and take care of the baby. As delicious as this recipe was, it’s just not new mom friendly at all.

Mongolian Beef

So, I found this recipe for Mongolian Beef on Pinterest and thought it looked like something that I might be able to make some changes to, and come up with a paleo version. Whenever I see a recipe, I keep a few easy swaps in mind

Recipe Says:                                                                   Paleo Swap:

Soy sauce                                                                       Coconut aminos if you avoid soy, or gluten free soy sauce

Cornstarch                                                                     Arrowroot powder

Vegetable oil                                                                  Coconut oil

Sugar                                                                               Maple syrup/honey

These work for me in a 0ne to one swap. There are lots of other paleo substitutions in recipes, but some of them involve making other changes. (For example almond flour doesn’t replace flour in a recipe without making other changes, like adding more eggs or liquid).

2 teaspoons coconut oil
½ teaspoon ginger, minced
1 tablespoon garlic, chopped
½ cup coconut aminos
½ cup water
¾ cup maple syrup (This can be reduced to make the dish less sweet).
coconut oil, for frying (about 1 cup)
1 lb flank steak
¼ cup arrowroot powder
2 large green onions, chopped

Directions:

Sauce:
Heat 2 tsp. of coconut oil in a medium saucepan over medium/low heat.  Don’t get the oil too hot.
Add ginger and garlic to the pan and quickly add the coconut aminos and water before the garlic scorches.
Dissolve the brown sugar in the sauce, then increase the heat to medium and boil the sauce for 2-3 minutes or until the sauce thickens. Remove it from the heat.

Beef:
Slice the flank steak into 1/4″ thick bite-size slices. Dip the steak pieces into the arrowroot powder to apply a very thin dusting to both sides of each piece of beef.  Let the beef sit for about 10 minutes so that the arrowroot powder sticks.  As the beef sits, heat up one cup of oil in a wok (or a deep skillet). Heat the oil over medium heat until it’s nice and hot, but not smoking. Add the beef to the oil and sauté until brown. Stir the meat around a little so that it cooks evenly.  After a couple minutes, use a large slotted spoon to take the meat out and onto paper towels.  Dab excess oil off meat with a paper towel and add to medium saucepan with the sauce in it.  Put the pan back on the oven over medium/low heat.  Add chopped green onions and let sauce simmer until warm. I served this over cauliflower rice.

Chicken Nuggets

Here’s another recipe from the Food Lover’s Primal Palate’s cookbook Gather. Generally, we don’t eat a lot of fried foods here, but I was in the mood for something different, and luckily had all of the ingredients for these bad boys on hand…..

I wish that I had taken more pictures of the process of making them (I’m still getting the hang of this blogging thing), but they were much easier to make than it first looks like. They came out deliciously as well. I did make a small change to their recipe. I didn’t have any lard on hand, and didn’t want to use that much coconut oil for one recipe (we were getting low, and I need to use it in the baby’s formula), so I use bacon grease that I had left over from baking bacon. I threw that into the deeper cast iron pan that we have, and it worked really well. It added another layer of flavor to the chicken nuggets that my husband really liked.

I also didn’t make their honey mustard dipping sauce. Their recipe calls for lemon juice, and with interstitial cystitis, I can’t have lemon juice. (Techincally, I can, but it’s not good for my interstitial cystitis, so I simply don’t eat it, or things made with it, when I can avoid it). Sometimes, I will leave it out of recipes, or try and substitute something else in it’s place, but I wasn’t sure how to substitute it. (I am certain that if I had sent a message one their blog or social media, the nice folks at Primal Palate would have given me some suggestions). Instead, I made my own my combining 1/4 cup honey (raw and local is best), 1/4 cup mustard (check the label to make sure there aren’t any crappy ingredients hiding in there), and 1 tsp sea salt and 1 tsp black pepper. I just whisked the ingredients together and it was pretty darn tasty.

Bacon, minus the burning flesh…..

Yummmmmmm…..bacon. We love bacon. Bacon is a great addition to lots of meals, as well as a nice snack all on it’s own. What I don’t love, however, is the grease splattering everywhere and burning the crap out of me. For real. The solution is easy, though. Oven baked bacon. Here’s how you do it…..

Line a baking sheet with parchment paper. (This is optional, but it makes cleanup really easy, and easy is good).

Put the bacon on the parchment paper.

Put the bacon into a cold oven. (If the oven is preheated, the bacon sticks, and that’s annoying).

Set the temperature to 400 degrees.

Go do something for about 20 minutes, more or less, depending on how you prefer your bacon

Enjoy.