A Sweet Little Sunday Lunch

The weekends always mean great food for us.  This is a pretty typical Sunday lunch.  It's light and full of protein and plays up a lot of enjoyable tastes for us.  I purchased some delicious lemon chicken sausages at my grocery store.  We looove them.  Also, we went to our farmers' market this morning and picked up an amazing Galia melon.  It is SO sweet and juicy and omnomnom delicious.  I had to include some of it in lunch today. 

The Meat

- 2 lemon chicken sausages

The Veggies

- 1 cup raw spinach

- 1 large slicing tomato, sliced (duh)

- salt, pepper, basil to taste

- parmesan (as much as you want)

- 2 tablespoons balsamic vinegar

- 1 tablespoon olive oil

The Fruit

- 4 slices of Galia melon 

I cooked up the sausages on my griddle pan for around 15 minutes until the outsides were all crispy brown and greased up, and when I cut them open they were cooked all the way through. 

While the sausages were cooking, I made a small spinach salad and tossed it with the balsamic vinegar and the olive oil.  I melted some parmesan over the tomato slices and spiced them with pepper, salt, and basil.  

I put all the components of the meal on plates and let the flavors speak for themselves.  

Honey Pecan Roasted Chicken Delight!

Oh my goodness, this chicken is delicious.  It is gooey, sweet, crunchy, and the chicken is moist and tender.  You could alternatively use chicken breasts if you didn't want to deal with the bones in the legs and thighs.

The Meat

- 2 bone-in chicken legs & thighs

- 2 1/2 tablespoons butter

- 1/4 cup honey

- 1/3 cup pecans, chopped

- sea salt to taste

The Veggies

- 1 cup fresh green beans, ends cut

- 1 cup water

- salt to taste

- 1 zucchini squash

- 1/4 cup red onion, largely sliced

- 3 mushrooms, sliced

- 1 teaspoon butter, softened

- 1 teaspoon bacon grease, softened

Preheat your oven to 420 degrees.

Place your chicken on a baking pan and sprinkle it generously with sea salt.  Split the butter into four parts.  Dot one part of butter on each piece of chicken and cook it for 25 minutes.  After 25 minutes, take the chicken out briefly and cover it with the honey, the rest of the butter, and the chopped pecans.  Pop the chicken back into the oven for 5 more minutes so the pecans are all toasty and amazing.  Omnomnomnom.

I boiled the green beans in the water for 20 minutes.  I threw in a pinch of salt and left them plain since the chicken is so good.  I drained the pot and that was it.

I brushed the veggies with some softened butter and bacon grease, then grilled the squash, onion, and mushrooms on my griddler.  I grilled them on medium for around 10 minutes, and then they were soft and wonderful.

I truly enjoyed making this meal and also eating it.  I hope you do, too.

A Big Hunk Of Meat

Having a huge slab of meat on your plate can be one of life's greatest pleasures.  This tangy, juicy flank steak makes me feel like a cavewoman, but the roasted vegetables keeps the dish from losing any sophistication.   

The Meat

- 1 - 1 1/2 pounds of flank steak

- 2 tablespoons wholegrain mustard

- 1 teaspoon malt vinegar

- 1 teaspoon horseradish

- 1/2 teaspoon habanero sauce (or to taste)

- 1 teaspoon balsamic vinegar

- salt, chipotle pepper, rosemary to taste

The Veggies

- 1/2 cup cauliflower, chopped

- 1/2 cup broccoli, chopped

- 2 summer squashes, sliced

- 1/3 cup baby carrots

- 1/2 cup red wine (I used Cabernet Sauvignon)

- 1/2 cup water

- 1 tablespoon olive oil

- salt, pepper, dill, marjoram to taste

Preheat your oven to 400 degrees.

Mix all the ingredients for your meat marinade and slather it onto both sides of your raw flank steak at least 30 minutes before grilling.  You can play with the amounts of ingredients to match the marinade to your taste - some people like it spicier or less mustardy, it is up to you!  We liked this marinade because it was tangy and had a kick, plus we love the way the mustard, vinegar, and horseradish blend with the rich flavor of the steak. 

I roasted my vegetables in some wine and water tonight.  I coated the veggies with the seasoning and olive oil, then popped all the veggies into the oven together in a ceramic baking dish with the liquid at the bottom.  I baked them uncovered for around 40 minutes.  By that time most of the liquid had cooked off and the carrots were firm to the touch but soft to the bite - I prefer this over mushy carrots soo much.  The squashes we soft but alos a little crispy, and the broccoli and cauliflower still had a hint of crunch to them.  We love our vegetables like this.

I grilled the steak on my griddler for around 13 minutes.  I used the double-sided grill to sear the meat.  The cut I had found was 1 1/2 pounds and mostly around 1 1/4 inches thick, the perimeter was a little thinner.  We like our meat pink in the middle, so grilling it for this long left us with a rare-medium rare center.   If you prefer it more medium-well done, leave the steak on a few more minutes.  

A Classic With A Twist

Mmmm, meatloaf.  Who doesn't love the classic family dinner?  This turkey meatloaf has tang and a kick, and you might end up drinking the leftover gravy like soup it's so good.

The Meat

- 1 pound of ground turkey
- 1 teaspoon of apple cider vinegar
- 1 teaspoon of horseradish
- 1 teaspoon olive oil
- 1 tablespoon Greek yogurt
- 1 tablespoon whole grain mustard
- 1 teaspoon organic ketchup
- 1 baby carrot, minced
- 4 cloves garlic, minced
- 1 bay leaf, dried and shredded
- dill, pepper, salt, savory to taste


The Veggies
- 1 pound of fresh spinach, cleaned and loosely chopped
- 1 cup thick baby carrots
- 1/2 cup red frilled lettuce or raddichio
- 1 green onion, sliced
- 1 tablespoon butter
- salt, pepper to taste


The Sauce
- 2 teaspoons dehydrated beef bouillon
- 2 large white mushrooms, sliced thinly
- 1 cup water
- 2 teaspoons butter
- 1 1/2 teaspoons arrow root powder
- drippings from meatloaf pan


Preheat the oven to 375 degrees.


Mix all of the meatloaf ingredients together in a large mixing bowl - make sure to squish it up a lot with your fingers so everything mixes evenly.  Then pick up all the meat mixture and pat it into a loaf-like shape in your ceramic baking dish.  I make mine into a log - roughly twice as long as it is high.  Pop it in the oven for 40 minutes.  I usually brush a little ketchup or gravy on the outside to keep it from drying out but still getting a little crispy.  At 40 minutes it will be moist on the inside still.  If you keep it in longer, you will run the risk of drying out your meatloaf.


I boiled the carrots in a 3" deep pan for around 25 minutes and then drained most of the water out.  Next I added the spinach and raddichio with some butter, salt and pepper.  I only sauteed the leafy vegetables for around 6-8 minutes, then the veggies were ready to go.


The gravy sauce was very easy to make.  First I sauteed the sliced mushrooms in a small pan on medium heat with the butter.  After around 2 minutes I added the water and bouillon.  I turned the heat down to low and let it simmer for another few minutes.  Then I added the arrow root powder and the dripping, stirring with my whisk for around 4 more minutes.  The arrow root thickened up the gravy like flour usually does.  

The Delights of Land and Sea

This is a feast of land and sea!  The chicken and shrimp go really well together in a lemony, buttery sauce, and the light side of veggies keeps you from feeling too laden down or heavy.  I make this meal for my husband when he's craving extra protein. :)

The Meat

- 2 fresh chicken breasts

- shaved parmesan cheese

- salt, pepper to taste

- 1 pound of wild shrimp, peeled and deveined

The Veggies

- 2 golden beets, cubed

- 1 large heirloom tomato, chopped

- 3 green onion stalks, sliced

- 4 white mushrooms, thinly sliced

- 1 cup fresh spinach, loosely chopped

- 1/2 cup water

- 1 teaspoon olive oil

- 1 teaspoon lemon juice

- salt, pepper to taste

The Sauce

- 1 teaspoon olive oil

- 2 tablespoons butter

- 3 teaspoons lemon juice

- parsley, dill, mustard seed, salt, pepper to taste

You can bake or grill the chicken breasts - I fake-grilled mine on my griddle pan, but if you'd prefer to bake it, heat your oven to 400 degrees and pop the chicken in there for around 20 minutes or until the juices run clear.  Since I had such thick pieces of chicken, it took around 16-18 minutes for me to cook my chicken on the pan, turning twice.  In the last minute I placed some shaved parmesan on top of my chicken to melt onto it and make it extra tasty.

I boiled the beets in the water for around 20 minutes until they were soft and their flavor wasn't so intense.  I enjoy beets, but sometimes their earthy flavor is overwhelming.  After the beets were ready I sauteed the rest of the veggies without draining the leftover liquid from the beets.  I cooked it all on medium-low heat with the lemon juice, olive oil, and the shrimp.  Stirring continuously, I cooked the whole mixture together for around 8 more minutes, until the shrimp were pink all the way through.  

For the sauce I just threw together some lemon, butter, and a little more oil with some seasoning.  I melted down the butter in a small pan on low heat and then tossed the sauce in with the veggies and shrimp, coating everything lightly.  It's a great meal, totally satisfying.  The softness of the tomato and spinach go well with the texture of the chicken and the shrimp are a delight.  I poured the veggies and shrimp on top of the chicken, so the chicken had a chance to soak up a bit of the lemony sauce throughout the course of the meal.  Yum.

Cupcakes??? A (Mostly) Primal Dream Come True...

Dream of this:  Lemon Cupcakes with a Raspberry filling and a combo of flavored icings that make the cupcakes look like sunflowers.

Welcome to reality.

This recipe takes a LOT of work and a LOT of time/money the first time around, but once you have all the ingredients and get the mixtures down, you can make (mostly) primal cupcakes with relative ease.    There is a small amount of brown rice flour and white rice flour in the dry ingredients which keeps the recipe from being completely primal, but they are vegan, gluten free, processed sugar free, soy free, and xanthan gum free. You don't have to be insane like me and stuff them with homemade jam, or spend hours decorating them to look like flowers.  You can, but they'll be delicious even if you don't.  These cupcakes are fluffy and light and unbelievably tasty.  They are the cake you've been searching for.

I wish I could take full credit for these awesome creations, but I can't.  I stumbled upon this recipe during my search for a primal cupcake, and I love this woman and her blog: http://www.myrealfoodlife.com/ 

She is an inspiration and I wish I lived nearer to her - I'd become her faithful apprentice; really, she's amazing, and she gets the credit for the recipe.  I just found it and followed it. 

I stuck to her recipe for the actual cake part with only a few small changes, but deviated a bit from her directions for the raspberry filling and icings.   I made my cupcakes and filling the night before, and then stuffed and iced them the next morning.  I think the night of cooling/solidifying really helped the cupcakes keep their form, since they seemed wet/crumbly right out of the oven.  By morning they were able to withstand being cut open and handled for icing.  

The Cake

Wet Ingredients

- 1/3 cup frozen banana, thawed

- 1 cup unsweetened applesauce

- 1 tablespoon arrow root powder

- 1/3 cup olive oil (or light oil of your choice)

- 1/3 cup coconut milk 

- 2 teaspoon apple cider vinegar

- 1/4 cup water 

- 2 teaspoon homemade lemon extract (see below)

- zest of 1 lemon

- seeds of 1/2 vanilla bean (or 2-3 teaspoons of vanilla)

Dry Ingredients

   - 2/3 cup white rice flour

- 2/3 cup (don’t pack the cup) shaved palm sugar

- 1/4 cup tapioca starch

- 1/4 cup potato starch

- 1/3 cup almond flour 

- 1/4 cup coconut flour 

- 1/3 cup brown rice flour

- 2 teaspoon of baking powder

- 1/2 teaspoon of baking soda

- 1/2 teaspoon of salt

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

First I made my lemon extract.  It took me 7 medium-large lemons to squeeze out the cup of fresh lemon juice I needed to make the extract.  I let the juice boil down to a dark syrup, it took around 25 minutes. Make sure you store it in tupperware or glass immediately, because it gets hard as it gets cool.  I keep my leftovers in the fridge and when I want to add some to a dish I just pour in a tiny bit of water and then quickly pour the water back out.  This stuff is SUPER potent and you don't need much at all to get an intense lemon flavor. 

Then I mixed together the wet ingredients (minus the lemon zest) and beat it in a medium mixing bowl with my electric beater for around 2 minutes.  I stuck it in the fridge for a little while to let it rest and so the arrow root could thicken up the mixture a bit. In a larger mixing bowl, I sifted together all the dry ingredients.  I folded the wet ingredients into the dry ones and mixed them thoroughly, adding in the lemon zest. Then I spooned the mixture into cupcake liners in my baking pan.  I spooned it almost up to the top of the liner. 

I baked the cupcakes for 21 minutes until the tops were golden brown and I could stick a toothpick in cleanly.  I let them cool in the pan for 5 minutes before pulling them out - they seemed fragile.  The bottoms of the liners seemed a little wet, and they were also a little greasy, I think it's from the olive oil.  I let the cupcakes sit out overnight before icing them.  They seemed much more firm in the morning, and they were easy to handle.  

While my cupcakes were baking/cooling, I made the raspberry filling.  I deviated from Alea's recipe here and winged it a little bit.  Also, I didn't strain my filling because we don't mind the seeds, and to be honest...I was already putting in a ton of work and didn't want to deal with the pain of straining a jam-like substance. Feel free to be ambitious if you want seedless filling.

The Raspberry Filling

- 1 package frozen raspberries

- 1 package fresh raspberries

- 1 small package fresh strawberries

- 2 tablespoons grated palm sugar

- 2 tablespoons seedless raspberry spread (I used Crofter's because it has fair trade sugar)

- 1 teaspoon vanilla extract (optional)

I put all the frozen and fresh berries into my deeper saucepan and cooked them, occasionally stirring the mixture so it didn't stick, for around an hour.  By the time it was done, all the berries had turned into soft, warm goop.  I added my sugar, spread, and vanilla and stuck it in a bowl to cool.  I refrigerated the filling overnight.  The filling had the consistency of jam and was sweet without being too sweet.  It worked well with the crumbly, soft cupcakes.

In the morning, I cut circles into the tops of the cupcakes and very gently pulled out a cone of cake, making sure to leave plenty at the bottom so the filling would not fall through them.  That would be bad.  I cut off a bite of cake (which my husband quite gladly disposed of for me) and put a dollop of raspberry filling inside.  There is a bit of finesse required to do this.   My first cupcake top didn't fit right because I had put too much filling inside, and then filling squished out when I pressed down on it and my cupcake top looked...well...bloody.  Ew.  We want beautiful, delicious looking cupcakes, so err on the side of safety and put in a little filling at a time, making sure not to overstuff.  

Finally my cupcakes were stuffed and ready for some icing!  I made three types of icing: coconut flavored icing (for the leaves), chocolate icing (for the centers of the sunflowers) and lemon icing (for the sunflower petals).  They were all sort of coconut-y though because I used coconut oil as my base.  The icing was delicious but DIFFICULT to work with.  The coconut oil would make the icing a little liquid-like if it got too warm, so after mixing my icings I stuck them in the fridge, and took them out in shifts to decorate my cupcakes.  Don't leave the icing in the fridge too long though, because then it will get HARD and be stuck in the mixing bowl.  Sigh, it was pretty much a pain, but the taste was worth it! My kitchen was a disaster zone afterward and I was a mess, but the cupcakes were worth it.  When I was all done I kept the cupcakes in the fridge - they seemed more solid compared to being left out, and the icing definitely needed to be kept cool.

The Icing

- 1/2 cup grated palm sugar

- 1 tablespoon almond butter (we had no cashew butter which sounds yummier)

- 3/4 cup coconut oil

- organic, chemical free, natural food coloring

I mixed my icing and then separated it into three small bowls.  If the consistency is off for you, add more sugar/almond butter/whatever as you deem necessary.  I added 1 tablespoon of organic cocoa powder to one bowl to make it chocolate icing.  I added some yellow food coloring and 1 teaspoon of my lemon extract to make the yellow lemon icing.  I added just some blue and yellow food coloring to the last bowl to make the green leaf icing. 

First I dabbed on the chocolate icing over the tops of the cupcakes, and stuck them all in the fridge.  Then, one at a time, I took them out and added the green leaves to the cupcake tops.  I used a decorating bag with icing tip #352 for both the leaves and the petals.  I have two #352 tips, which was awesome, because it would have stunk having to clean the tip halfway through the process.  I made each cupcake a little different - have fun with the decorating process!  Some had three leaves, some had four, and one even had five.  

After the leaves were all on, I switched to the yellow icing and had some fun filling in the spaces left.  I tried to ripple the icing up and away from the center, and didn't worry too much about if it was a little messy, because flowers aren't perfect and the texture made them look more realistic!  I tried to have some of the tips of the petals twist up into the air, also.  I think they came out great (well, some better than others - you get the hang of it after a while)!

They tasted amazing and were sooo much fun to display on my tiered plate.  It made us all feel really great to enjoy a cupcake without worrying about eating refined sugar or chemicals or fake stuff. Now that I've got all the ingredients and have a better idea of how to make them, I'm going to experiment with different flavor combos and new decorating ideas. :)

Tomato-Basil Cream Sauce with Pork Cutlets

Oh how I love fresh basil.  We got some in our farmers' market box this week and I couldn't wait to make a tomato-basil cream sauce to smother on top of some perfectly thin cut pork cutlets.  When tenderized and cooked properly, the pork reminds us of veal, an extravagance we rarely indulge in.  

The Meat
- 6 thinly sliced center cut pork loin cutlets
- salt, pepper to taste
- a pinch of fresh basil, finely chopped


The Veggies
- 2 small purple potatoes, peeled and cubed
- 1 turnip, cubed
- 2 summer squashes, sliced
- 1 cup broccoli, chopped
- 3 heirloom carrots, sliced
- 2 cups water
- 1 teaspoon butter
- oregano, thyme, rosemary, marjoram, garlic powder to taste


The Sauce

- 1 tablespoon of sunflower oil or olive oil based mayonnaise (gluten and soy free)

- 1/3 cup of heavy cream

- 1/2 cup chopped fresh red tomatoes

- 1 teaspoon of lemon juice

- 1/2 teaspoon of capers

- 3 cloves crushed garlic

- 1 bunch fresh basil, finely chopped

I boiled the purple potatoes, turnip, and carrots together in my 3" deep saute pot with the water, seasoning, and butter for around 25 minutes.  After around 15 minutes I added the broccoli and squash.  By the end of the cooking time, most of the water had boiled away and everything was soft and delicious.

I prepped for my sauce by chopping up all the basil.  I mixed everything together and sauteed it on low for 15 minutes in a small saute pan.  The sauce is rich and creamy and has tang.  We love it and use it often as a go-to for an Italian style sauce.

I tenderized the pork cutlets with my great tenderizer and sprinkled them with salt, pepper, and a bit of the finely chopped basil.  I cooked them on my griddle pan for around 4 minutes per side.  

After everything was cooked I layered the pork on top of the veggies, then spooned the sauce on top of everything.  We love the tenderness of the meat and how great the sauce is.