I just got back from an awesome vacation in Seattle. I spent five days walking at least three miles every day, and ruining that by eating piles and piles of the best seafood in the world. One of my walks involved the obligatory trip to the Pike Place Market, where I stumbled into a spice store, and bought (among many other things) a small bottle of saffron salt. My brain spun a bit as I imagined what I’d do with it, and I came up with an adaptation of a recipe I used to make when I did not eat Paleo.

For the meatballs, first heat 1/4 cup of olive oil over medium high heat in a Dutch oven. While your pan is heating up, in a small bowl, mix 4 tablespoons of almond flour with a tablespoon of cumin, a teaspoon of turmeric, a half-teaspoon of cayenne, a teaspoon of salt, two thirds of a cup of finely minced onion, and 8 cloves of garlic. In a larger bowl, mix that spice mixture with two pounds of ground beef, ground lamb, or a mixture. Roll into small meatballs (you should get 25-30 of them) and brown on all sides in the olive oil. You’ll probably need to do this in batches.

When the meatballs are browned, put them all back into the pan and add two 15-ounce cans of tomato sauce and a cup of water. Stir, bring to a simmer, then reduce the heat to low, cover, and cook for 20-30 minutes.

While the meatballs are browning, you’ll want to get started on the rice. For this, you’ll want two heads of cauliflower. Remove the stem and core, and shred the florets with either a box grater or the grater attachment to your food processor. Heat two tablespoons of coconut oil in a large frying pan. While your oil is heating, heat up a cup of chicken stock until it’s boiling (I use the microwave so as not to dirty yet another dish) and add 1/4 tsp of crushed saffron threads to it. Let that sit for five minutes, while you fry the grated cauliflower in the coconut oil. After five minutes, add the saffron-infused broth and a half-teaspoon of turmeric (that’s how you get the nice yellow color). Cook until all the liquid is absorbed, about 10-20 minutes, stirring frequently. When the liquid is almost all absorbed, salt to taste. I used that saffron salt here, but you can use regular salt if that’s all you have.

This recipe is more filling than it looks! I got four meatballs, thinking I’d get seconds, and I didn’t need them at all.

I’ve been gone a while. A good portion of that while involved gutting my kitchen and basically doing a first-floor remodel. The good news is that now I have a bitchin’ kitchen (I bet somewhere there’s a blog with that title–if not, I should totally change this one) and can start posting here again. And my pictures no longer all look orange!

I just got my bimonthly delivery from Green Bean Delivery, which contained, among other things, four lovely boneless pork chops, a head of cabbage, and a bag of white button mushrooms. I also just bought a half-gallon of lovely heavy cream from the grassfed cows at Snowville Creamery. Gears started spinning in my head, and I whipped together one of my better whip-together meals in quite some time.

Here’s what you’ll need.

4 boneless pork chops, 1″ thick
Salt and pepper
Fat of choice for cooking (I used a mixture of grassfed butter and olive oil)
8 ounces fresh mushrooms, sliced
1 tbsp minced garlic or 2 tbsp minced shallots
1/4 cup cognac
2/3 cup heavy cream or coconut milk
3 tbsp Dijon mustard (I used half regular Dijon and half seeded Dijon)
1 head cabbage, thinly sliced
Bacon grease for cooking

For the cabbage, very thinly slice a head of cabbage.

Heat bacon grease over medium heat in a Dutch oven. Add the cabbage and salt to taste. Cook the cabbage, stirring frequently, until it wilts and begins to brown, about 15-20 minutes.

Salt and pepper both sides of your pork chops. Sear them over medium-high heat for five minutes per side, using your fat of choice.

When they’re done, remove them to a plate. Throw in your mushrooms and cook them until they release their liquid. Add the garlic or shallots and cook for another couple of minutes, until the mushroom liquid begins to evaporate.

Add the cognac and cook down until all the liquid is almost evaporated. Lower the heat, stir in the cream, and bring it to a simmer. Whisk in the mustard. Add the pork chops to warm them back up.

Serve over the cabbage noodles.

Can’t believe the finale of Game of Thrones is already here. This has been the fastest ten weeks ever. Tonight’s meal was grilled bacon-wrapped trout stuffed with lemon and sage, in honor of what I hope will be the debut of Riverrun tonight.

You’ll want one trout per person. Whole trout, butterflied and deboned as much as possible. Head-on if you can, although it’s certainly not necessary. To prepare it, first open it like a book. Brush the inside down with olive oil, then sprinkle it with salt and pepper. Put in some thin lemon slices and sage leaves–I find that four of each will fit pretty well without too much of a struggle.

Close it up and wrap it with bacon, then use toothpicks or small wooden skewers to secure the bacon in place. If you use toothpicks, you may want to pierce it through with a metal skewer and then put the toothpick inside the hole, because the fish skin may be too tough for the toothpicks to withstand.

Grill them on medium-high direct heat for five or six minutes per side. Be careful for flare-ups from the bacon grease dripping on the coals!

Once the bacon is done, so is the trout. We served it with a small green salad.

Clockwise from top: Celery root “hash browns,” crabcake eggs Benedict, and sausage gravy and biscuits.

This was a really fabulous brunch–had it at 10 AM and was really not very hungry even when dinner rolled around.

The hash browns were amazing. I’ve really missed breakfast potatoes since I made the switch to a Primal diet, and these were amazingly good. The celery root shredded right up in the food processor, and they cooked into a wonderful soft texture that I’ve never really managed to pull off with actual potatoes. Cook them a bit longer than the recipe calls for–I gave them an extra five minutes per side and still didn’t get them as crispy as I could have. Otherwise, they’re dead easy–shredded celery root, salt, and pepper, fried in whatever oil you prefer–I used ghee. My mother-in-law couldn’t tell that they weren’t potatoes.

The sausage gravy and biscuits I made from this Robb Wolf recipe. About the only thing I did differently was omit the fennel in the gravy, used tapioca flour instead of arrowroot powder, and beat the egg whites into soft peaks for the biscuits (I shouldn’t have bothered–it took so much stirring to incorporate all the coconut flour that it deflated them completely). I’ll keep searching for a better biscuit recipe. The gravy was really good, though–couldn’t tell that it was dairy-free at all!

I’ve made crab cakes on here before–they’re one of those things that I make a little differently every time. The standard is crabmeat + egg + almond flour + green onions + Old Bay + salt and pepper. Sometimes I use a little bit of diced celery or celery seed. I fried them in olive oil for about 5 minutes per side, and then put them in the oven at 200 degrees on a cookie sheet to keep warm along with the hash browns while I made the rest of the meal. To make the Benedict, I made hollandaise sauce using my stick blender. Put 3 room temperature egg yolks in the beaker, and top with the rest of the ingredients. Put the barely-melted butter in last, let it settle for about 15 seconds, then whiz it with the stick blender until it’s smooth. You can do this in a regular blender or food processor too, but I prefer the stick blender version. You’ll want this to be the last thing you do for the meal, because if it cools off too much it’s really not very good, and it can’t be reheated. To plate it up, top a crab cake with a poached or fried egg, then pour the hollandaise over it.

The vast majority of great culinary discoveries I’ve made can begin with the sentence “Today, I had a wild hair up my ass.” Oopsie rolls started that way as well. This recipe is all over the Internet, but I remained skeptical. A bread substitute made from eggs and cream cheese? No way.

And then yesterday I was making burgers for dinner, and I had eggs and cream cheese I needed to use up, and oh what the hell, why not?

Separate three eggs–yolks into one bowl, whites in another. To the yolks, add 3 ounces of cream cheese and two pinches of salt. The original recipe also calls for a packet of Splenda, but yuck. If you’re desperate for sweetened hamburger rolls, try adding a bit of honey or coconut sugar to the yolks. Add a pinch of cream of tartar to the whites, which should be room temperature, and beat them with a hand mixer until they form stiff peaks. Use the same hand mixer to beat the egg yolk mixture until it’s smooth, then gently fold it into the egg whites. Put the batter into six circles on a well-greased cookie sheet (I used parchment paper to line it instead and it worked fine) and flatten them out a tad. Bake at 300 degrees for 30 minutes. Let cool slightly before removing them from the pan to finish cooling on a wire rack.

Sounds ridiculous, right? These bad boys held up to a half-pound medium-rare burger. Toddler saw it, said “I want bread!” and ate a whole piece, never knowing that no grain was harmed I. The making of her dinner. Seriously, these are fabulous. I probably won’t make them again for a while, as I’m doing Whole 30 in July, but when I do, I’ll make some extras to see if they freeze and reheat well. If they do, they’re damn near perfect. I already have visions of an heirloom tomato BLT between two of these.

There are some nights where I get stuck late at work, and I’m always scrambling to put something on the table for dinner that doesn’t take forever. And when it’s 90 degrees outside, you don’t want to do a frittata and heat up the whole kitchen. Today was one of those days. About halfway through my work day, when I had a moment to think and plan, I realized I had a container of crabmeat in the fridge. Costco had a good deal on wild-caught lump crabmeat a few months ago, and as the containers keep in the fridge for months, I bought two. One remained, and I decided to try to mimic a favorite appetizer of mine from McCormick and Schmick’s, a blue crab, mango, and avocado tower. I didn’t have mango, but I knew I had mandarin oranges, so I did some Googling around for a dressing recipe I could use as a base and went from there.

I started with this salad dressing recipe, only leaving out the poppy seeds. Definitely use oranges packed in water rather than any sort of syrup–you can get those at Whole Foods. I added about a quarter to a third of the finished dressing to a well-drained one-pound container of lump crabmeat, just enough to moisten it well and get a little of the flavor into it. Do this in a bowl, and keep the can the crabmeat came in–you’ll use it later. Coarsely chop two ripe avocados.

Since the dressing only calls for half the oranges in the can, save the other half. Pack half of the crabmeat back into the can as firmly as you can get it. Top the crab with half of the saved oranges, then top that with half the chopped avocado. Invert the can onto a plate–if you’re lucky, it’ll keep its tower form. Pour additional dressing around the tower on the plate. Do this again with the other half of the ingredients to make the second serving.

You can do this with ripe mango instead of oranges if you have them. I can attest from having the McCormick and Schmick version that it’s good that way too.

More Game of Thrones food. This was yesterday’s offering, and while it would have been more appropriate for the previous week, we were only able to obtain the wild boar the day before during an otherwise disastrous road trip through Cincinnati. I was going to make it pan-seared, with a sauce from reconstituted dried mushrooms, but my husband said that King Robert probably wouldn’t have gone for pan-searing the boar, and with that I had to agree. Grilling it was, but I could find absolutely no recipes online that did what I wanted to do with it. As the morning turned to the afternoon, I said “Okay, I’m going to wing it” and managed to pull off something pretty interesting.

First, make the marinade. For two pounds of wild boar medallions, I used about 3/4 of a cup of frozen wild blueberries, a half-cup or so of white wine, a healthy splash (maybe 1/4 cup, if that) of blueberry-flavored mead (you can sub regular mead, apple juice, or a tablespoon or so of honey), a couple of tablespoons of lemon juice, a pinch of salt and a dash of pepper, and about 1/3 of a cup of olive oil. Blend it all together with a stick blender or food processor and pour it over the boar in a gallon-sized Ziploc bag. Squeeze out all the air and let it sit in the fridge for at least four hours, but overnight probably would have been better. I just didn’t have overnight to do it.

Drain the marinade thoroughly, and grill the medallions at 400 degrees for 5 minutes per side. I ended up slicing them up and serving them on a salad with homemade blueberry vinaigrette (1/4 cup blueberries, 1/4 cup olive oil, 3 tablespoons balsamic, salt and pepper, pureed until smooth), but you could probably eat them just fine as steaks as well.

First off, sorry for not posting in ages. I got an iPad 2 about…oh, a month ago, and while it’s an awesome surfing device, it’s not the best posting device. I think this is the first time I’ve opened my laptop since I got it. I’ll do my best to keep things up in the future. I spent part of last weekend out of town visiting my husband’s very large family, and one cousin mentioned that she’d been showing my food blog to her co-workers. So apparently I’m not just impressing my Facebook friends anymore.

I actually made the recipe I’m posting here about a month ago, during one of the brief moments this spring in which it wasn’t raining. We’ve actually been having a Game of Thrones themed main dish every Sunday night since the premier (in which I made the gigantic feast) and one of the earlier ones I did was Honeyed Chicken. I mean, seriously, what part of the combination of honey and chicken isn’t awesome? Back when I was a kid, my favorite thing to do was to dip KFC into the honey they served on the side. I seem to recall it being real honey and not that honey-flavored corn syrup abomination they serve now, but it could have always been that crap and I was just too young to know it. But I digress. The key point here is that honey + chicken = awesome.

Start with a whole chicken. You can either ask your butcher to spatchcock (remove the backbone) and split it, or do it yourself–there are plenty of videos on Youtube that will show you how to do it. Once it’s split, drizzle it with melted ghee (don’t use butter at this point, because the smoke point is too low) and sprinkle it with salt and pepper.

Heat your grill to about 375. Use indirect heat here–pile all the coals on one side then put your chicken to the other side, or use the platesetter on a Big Green Egg, or do whatever you heathens who have gas grills do to get indirect. Start it off skin and meat side down. Turn it after about 20 minutes, and put a meat thermometer into the breast or thigh. You’re shooting for a final temp of 160-165 in the breast or 170-175 in the thigh.

Meanwhile, as the bird slowly gets up to temperature, melt together a couple of tablespoons of butter with a tablespoon to two tablespoons of honey. Add a splash of lemon to taste. When the bird is about 10 degrees short of final temperature, go outside and baste the skin with this mixture. You can make more for dipping if you want. During the last 10 degrees of cooking, that mixture will caramelize on the skin a little bit, and eventually you’ll end up with this.

Toddler KILLED this bird. This may be the most Toddler-friendly meal I’ve made to date.

Today was the first farmer’s market of the year. I look forward to this day to a ridiculous degree, and very rarely does it live up to my expectations, as there’s just not too much in season right now. But this year? AWESOME. I found a bunch of stuff I rarely ever see, including the world’s most perfect ramps. Ramps, for those of you who don’t know, are a wild spring onion, also referred to as wild leeks, even though they look nothing like the leeks you’re familiar with. If you can only find the bulbs, use them in the same way you’d use garlic. If you’re lucky enough to find them with the leaves still attached, they look like this.

Whole wild ramps make awesome pesto. Take 10-15 of them. Remove the bulbs and chop them coarsely. Chop the stems and leaves coarsely as well. Make a pile of bulbs, a pile of stems, and a pile of leaves.

Over medium heat, saute the bulbs only in olive oil for about two minutes, until they start to brown a bit. Add the stems and saute it for another minute, then add the leaves and saute until wilted, about another minute more.

Put them in the food processor with about a half cup of toasted walnuts or pine nuts. Pulse a few times. Add a half-cup of Parmesan cheese and a pinch of Kosher salt. Pulse again a few times. Slowly add a half-cup of olive oil, pulsing occasionally. You don’t want it to be a puree–you want some chunkiness to it.

Sunchokes, or Jerusalem artichokes (which are neither artichokes nor from Jerusalem), are a nice low-starch tuber. They’re ugly as hell, though, and they supposedly make you quite flatulent, although I ate mine about 3 hours ago and have yet to get that particular symptom. You can eat them raw or cooked–they’re quite versatile. To roast them, start with two pounds. Peel half of them, and leave the skins on the other half–you’ll want to scrub those with a sponge under warm water to get all the dirt off. Cut them in bite-size chunks.

Toss them with olive oil, salt and pepper and roast at 400 degrees for 30-40 minutes. I did mine for 30 but they could have gone 10 more minutes and been a bit creamier. But like I mentioned, you can eat them raw, so it’s not like they’re gross if they come out a little undercooked.

For the planked salmon, heat your grill to about 450 degrees. Soak an alder or cedar plank in water for at least an hour. I let mine soak for most of the afternoon. When your grill is ready, put the plank on it for 10 minutes, lid down. Flip the plank and put your salted and peppered salmon filets on it, skin side down. A standard-size plank should fit 4 salmon filets–if you’re making more than that, you’ll need more planks. Close the lid again, and let the salmon cook on the plank for 12 minutes. Remove promptly. The skin should stick to the plank, leaving a nice soft salmon filet to put on your plate.

Serve it with ramp pesto and the sunchokes. Eat it outside, take a bite before you take a picture, and marvel at the new leaves, the birds and sunshine, and all the bounties of another wonderful spring.

Speaking of the bounties of another spring, tomorrow I’ll show you the morels.

Every now and then I manage to surprise myself. Last Saturday night, I did it by completely winging it and making a dish so good that I wish I’d paid more attention when I was making it.

I’ve been trying to eat more coconut lately, so when I had a package of chicken breasts I needed to use, I decided to go the curry route. Problem was, I couldn’t find a recipe I particularly wanted to follow, so I just came up with my own. All measurements of spices and such are approximate, because I wasn’t really paying much attention–I was just throwing stuff together.

Take two pounds of boneless, skinless chicken breast and cut it into bite size pieces. Brown it in batches over medium-high heat in 3 tablespoons of coconut oil, putting the browned chicken pieces in a bowl when they’re finished. After all the chicken is browned, open a bag of frozen cauliflower and brown those as well. Put it in the bowl with the chicken.

As the chicken and cauliflower are browning, prepare your spices. I used one minced shallot, three cloves of minced garlic, about two teaspoons of grated fresh ginger, a tablespoon of red curry paste, two teaspoons of red chili and garlic paste, and a teaspoon or so of curry powder. Once the chicken and cauliflower are done, add another tablespoon of coconut oil if the pan is dry, and then put in all the spices. Toast them all for about two minutes. The pastes will likely stick to the bottom of the pan a bit, and that’s fine.

Pour in a can of coconut milk and a quarter-cup of cashew or almond butter. Scrape up the stuff that’s stuck on the bottom of the pan and let it dissolve into the sauce. Add the cauliflower and chicken back to the pan and simmer over medium-low heat until it’s all heated through–about five minutes.

I didn’t take a picture until it was almost done, because it was so good that I forgot.