Epic Breakfast

This is why I hardly ever eat lunch:

Take that, MyPlate.gov

My breakfast included
     - free-range eggs scrambled in pasture butter with a little hamburger and fingerling
       potato hash from last night thrown in
     - baked delicata squash with cinnamon and pasture butter
     - grass-fed, whole-milk yogurt with pureed strawberries and a little stevia extract
     - aaaaand bacon, for good measure (uncured)

That will keep you full until dinner. Frequent meals and snacking are unnecessary
(and harmful to certain people) if your blood sugar is stable.

It took me a maximum of 10 minutes to put this together - I make the squash and yogurt at the beginning of the week. I have no idea why anyone would rather eat Special K.
Just sayin'.

*Disclaimer: I really don't eat bacon every day of the week. It's more like 3/7. I promise.

Weekend Eats

I've been in a major impending-winter funk, so this weekend didn't hold much excitement for this family. Farmer's Market, errands, toddler shoe-shopping and the like consumed the majority of the weekend (or so it seemed).

Friday afternoon, I scored some grass-fed cheese, Kerrygold butter, 85% dark chocolate, and tuna steaks at Trader Joe's on the cheap. I had never been before and now I'm going to have to make it a regular stop! The prices are fantastic - decidedly fantastic enough to suffer Green Hills traffic.

Food-wise, we had a pretty good weekend. We thawed a giant round steak earlier in the week (it takes a while) and we decided to tackle it Saturday evening. It must have weighed 3 pounds and was the size of a 12-inch pizza, I'd say. FYI, this is what 3 pounds of grassfed beauty looks like:

I was pretty excited about this meal because we'd had this spaghetti squash sitting in our produce basket for a minimum of 3 weeks - it was starting to look at me with sad eyes. I have made spaghetti squash pasta-style with pesto before and, frankly, I am not a fan. Fortunately, I stumbled across this recipe on Chowstalker and decided to give it a go. Best decision I ever made, because it was ah-mazing. I subbed cheddar cheese for Parmesan because, well, that's what we had on hand. The flavor was reminiscent of my grandmother's hashbrown casserole. We rubbed the steaks in my version of spicy Montreal steak seasoning (totally winged it) and seared them in a cast-iron skillet. After the outside was a nice color, we stuck them in the oven while the squash was cooking. I threw in turnip greens I made earlier in the week, and we had achieved the perfect meal.

*queue rays of sunshine beaming down and majestic-like music*

Baby ate steak like a champ. She's usually a little finnicky about meat, but not this time. She inhaled it while steak juice formed a nice trail from her mouth to her belly. Win!

Sunday evening was tuna steak night! After rubbing the outside with a little rendered pork lard and sprinkling them in sesame seeds, I seared them (w/ lard) in a cast iron skillet for about 3 minutes per side. I whipped up a sauce that consisted of olive oil, tamari, honey, wasabi powder and ground ginger. The tuna was a hit - the picky toddler gobbled them up and kept calling it chicken. Double win!

(On that note, I plan to do a post in the future related to my toddler's diet. I know how picky kids can be and I think I've figured out a few ways to get mine to eat all kinds of good stuff! Hint: it involves lots of butter.)

My dinner this evening was whipped up on the fly. I've been a little sick, so I didn't really feel like eating much or making anything labor-intensive. I've been meaning to incorporate more fatty fish into my diet for the Omega 3's, so that desire + a can of salmon in the pantry = this recipe. It was pretty good with a side of Wholly Guacamole. I'm not a huge fish fan, but the spicy, Mexican version of a salmon cake was just what I needed to make the leap. Hopefully, I can find more ways to incorporate canned salmon into our diets regularly because it's cheap and nutritious!

That's all for now. Later this week I want to share some natural skin and hair solutions I've been trying out (with success!). Stay tuned...

Um, P.S. -

Don't try to deny it.

My Monday: Cleaning and Lard Enthusiasm

Well, thanks to "Fall Break" I was left with an entire Monday to devote to activities of my choosing. Husband-less, child-less, and work-commitment-less, I spent my free day doing what any sensible girl would do. I channeled my domestic energy and...cleaned and cooked. What can I say? I lead a very glamorous life.

After purging closets, organizing, and a trip to Goodwill, I whipped up breakfast-lunch. I committed multiple restaurant sins this weekend and wasn't feeling awesome, so it needed to be something really clean. Since I was tired already, it also needed to be something super-easy.

It's no masterpiece. My hope here is to articulate that eating "paleo" (or whatever you want to call it) isn't as difficult as it may seem, nor is it limiting. My breakfast-lunch consisted of cage-free eggs scrambled in pasture butter, pastured applewood-smoked bacon and a banana.

Onward and forward. More cleaning, yadda yadda. I didn't get as much accomplished in this free day as I had originally hoped (admittedly, my goals for the day were pretty lofty), but whatcanyado.

For dinner, I made italian sausage and peppers with our yummy bell peppers from the farmer's market. I usually use hand-stuffed italian sausage from our local farm, but, alas we were out. The frozen, organic version from the store was not nearly as good. Despite boring sausage, dinner was still a win. I did not get a picture. It basically consisted of sausage, tomatoes, spices, white wine and a couple peppers and onion cooked in this beautiful pastured pork lard I bought this weekend:

Mmmmm lard. It's beautiful, right? I never thought I would be so excited about rendered pork fat. Delish.

I usually try to cook up our farmer's market veggies at the beginning of the week so that 1) they don't go bad and 2) cooking for the rest of the week is easy. I didn't get that accomplished to the extent that I wanted, either. I did make turnip greens cooked in chicken broth and bacon fat, and also oven-roasted turnip chips tossed in....lard :)

They were both insanely delicious. If you have reservations about cooking with artery-clogging-saturated-animal-fat, I would encourage you to do some reading here and here. There are links to legitimate sources inside those posts, I'm just too lazy to find them. Now, go forth and throw out your Smart Balance.

Happy Hump Day! I hope all three of my readers (HI MOM! HI DAD!) have a good rest of the week.

Start here?

So here it is! I've been kicking around the idea of a blog for some time now so I'm pretty excited to get this going. My goal is to make this a space for my ramblings, recipes, stories and humor (which is mostly inappropriate and which you may or may not appreciate. Oops.). I lack any sort of creative direction here and I'm also technologically inept, so this should be good times. As for the title - bacon, we'll eventually get to. Whimsy, because I try to find levity in everything. Mostly because life is funny.

It's important to note that I love food. I love talking about food, I love looking at pictures of food, I love cooking, and of course I love eating. Food. After a lifetime of junk food abuse and a series of unfortunate events (which I'm sure we'll get to at some point here), it finally dawned on me that the foodstuffs I had been eating almost my entire life were not, in fact, food at all. My philosophies on food are ever-changing and have been an evolution of sorts. I started a mostly Paleo/Primal diet (or as I like to call it: food) in April of this year and haven't looked back (enter, bacon). It's been a huge experiment, and both a learning and growing experience. I regard eating in a totally different way these days and it's kind of awesome. After being a slave to calories, weight, and body image issues my entire life, it's an incredible relief to just eat. I feel amazing and I want to share that with other people.

That should comprise the majority of my writing here. Maybe with a little family chaos thrown in for good measure. Also, sometimes I think of really funny things and my husband doesn't think I'm funny I need a place to write them down. You're welcome.