Paleo Chinese food SUCCESS! Lemon chicken and Mushroom fried rice

My apartment is right next to a chinese food restaurant. And this place serves Seriously Good Chinese food. If it were gross, I could ignore it, but try having to walk past the smell of Seriously Good Chinese food wafting at you every time you come home, and then having to go inside and cook something for yourself that probably won't be quite so Seriously Good. This is after convincing yourself to pass by the Seriously Good Burrito place that's in between my apartment and where I park my car.

Because of this, I have been attempting to make my own lemon chicken since I moved here. And not some healthy smealthy lemon and rosemary seasoned grilled chicken breat with a side of steamed green beans. I'm talking about the kind with the weird, gelatinous, gloopy sauce that you just know is full of who knows what but is still somehow the most appealing thing ever dispite its weird gloopy nature. Well folks, after some disasters whereby I misunderstood the properties of arrowroot powder, I have succeeded, and it is glorious, because not only did I manage to make credible lemon chicken that made Ashley go "Tastes like Chinese food!", but I also made almost-actually-fools-you Mushroom Fried "Rice" to eat with it. You're welcome.

I can't take full credit for these recipes. I went searching for a recipe for chicken fried rice and found this wonderful entry at Paleo Effect. I modified their rice recipe a tad, and adapted their General Tso's Chicken recipe for the lemon chicken. Their wonderful guidance was what I was missing in my attempts to make sauce thickened with arrowroot. Previously, I was trying to make the sauce and then add the arrowroot near the end. Don't do that, everything goes sloooooop and blobs up into jello-like lemon clumps instead of sauce. And it's not as tasty as jello...

Lemon Chicken

Ingredients
2 chicken breasts, chopped into bitesized pieces

Batter:
2 tablespoons arrowroot
one egg
salt (the recipe called for coconut aminos, which is a soya sauce substitute, but darned if I know where to find these, other than ordering them)

Sauce:
2 tablespoons arrowroot
1 tablespoon honey
3 tablespoons coconut sugar (or more honey?)
~2/3 cup lemon juice
1/8 teaspooon ground ginger
1 tablespoon vinegar
salt (or coconut aminos) and garlic powder to taste

1. Stir up the chicken cubes with the batter, and fry in some oil (I used olive) until cooked and set aside.
2. Whisk the sauce ingredients together and pour into the hot pan. Stir for a couple of seconds and it will start to thicken right away (when it starts to boil I think?).
3. Add the chicken back in and stir the gloopy goodness all together.

Paleo Mushroom Fried "Rice"
This is a tasty stand-alone version of the plain cauliflower rice I normally make for stiring in with curries and other such runny sauce things. The oil combination isn't important, except for the sesame oil, which gives it the Chinese food vibe.

Ingredients
1/2 head cauliflower (makes enough for 2-3 servings)
lots of cremini mushrooms (or whatever sort you like)
sesame oil
coconut and/or olive oil
garlic/onion powder
salt to taste (or coconut aminos if you have them) and pepper

1. Chop mushrooms fairly small and sauté in some olive oil with garlic and onion powder and sea salt.
2. In the meantime, mulch up your cauliflower (I have a hand crank food processor, or use an electric one. There are also things called "ricers", apparently, or if you don't mind a mess you can just chop it up but there will be cauliflower everywhere, fair warning).
3. Add the "rice" in with the mushrooms once they're good and sautéd. Add a generous helping of sesame oil, and I also added some coconut oil for extra moisture. Add more salt and pepper if needed. I like salt.
4. Stir intermitently and fry until it's the desired tenderness. The original recipe also added a beaten egg and stirred that in but I left it out.

Serve together with the lemon chicken! Or apart, however you feel about these things.

I plan to try this next with orange juice on the chicken instead of lemon, stay tuned!

Creamy chicken avocado alfredo

I'm newly obsessed with the song "A Warrior's Call", by a Danish band called Volbeat. I've never heard of them before, but apparently they've been around since 2000 (says Wikipedia). Every time this song comes on the radio I feel a strong urge to get to the gym and lift/throw heavy things. My friend points out that while he wouldn't have thought of it on his own, it seems somehow fitting that the perfect crossfit anthem would be by a Scandinavian metal band. I'm going to have to add it to the request list for the Games workouts.

In other news, avocados are super! So versatile. When it was suggested to me that one could use them as a base for a creamy pasta sauce, I was sceptical, but it turned out to be delicious! The avocado somehow simulates the creaminess of a proper alfredo, it's marvelous. I cobbled together several internet-searched recipes and ended up with this pesto-alfredo hybrid. I ate mine over zucchini noodles but I think it would go well with spaghetti squash as well. Oh! OR perhaps as a cold salad with cucumbers and cherry tomatos...must try that.

Creamy chicken avocado alfredo
All of the sauce ingredients are to taste. I fail at measuring stuff. For the pesto I used my hand crank processor, which worked well. An electric one would have made it all smoother but I think I like the texture. This made enough for 2 meals.

Ingredients

2 chicken breasts
Garlic/onion powder, salt and pepper, and olive oil for the chicken
3 small zucchinis (or enough for two servings of noodles) (or spaghetti squash)

For the sauce:
1 ripe avocado
a small handful of fresh spinach
basil (I would have used fresh but I only had dried)
a good squirt of lemon juice (2-3 tablespoons, roughly?)
a smaller squirt of lime juice
olive oil (maybe a tablespoon)
some crushed walnuts for texture (about 2 tablespoons)
1 clove of garlic, chopped or minced
salt to taste

1. Chop chicken into bite-sized pieces. Season with salt, pepper, onion powder, garlic, etc, and saute in some olive oil.
2. If you're making zucchini noodles, boil some water, and cook them for about a minute and drain. I normally just let my sauce cook them, but this sauce isn't heated.
3. Meanwile, dump all of the pesto/alfredo ingredients into a food processor and blend well. I may have accidentally knocked some parmesan cheese in there as well...
4. Toss the sauce with the chicken and noodles and enjoy!

Warning: the internet says not to heat the avocado sauce, so if you made enough for leftovers, set aside your sauce separately and reheat the chicken/noodles on their own.

Tim Lim's Tasty Every Time Burgers. And a Bowl of Vegetables.

Tim made these most excellent burgers for a Paleo potluck last summer. Actually, he prepared the beef for the burgers, which somehow never got cooked over the course of the party. Those of us who deemed ourselves too full of wine to go home benefited enormously from this lapse the next morning. Burgers, salsa and scrambled eggs: Breakfast of Champions, I tell you.

Imagine my happiness to discover that these gourmet delicacies are super simple! This is now my standard burger recipe, and it's all thanks to Tim Lim. He told me I didn't have to give him credit, but it's too late, Tim. You're in the title now, and there's nothing you can do about it. :)

I topped this particular burger with my first attempt at guacamole. It is only very lightly spiced, and therefore would not be Tim Lim approved. I ate it with my standby bowl of vegetables.

Tim Lim's Tasty Every Time Burgers

Ingredients
1 or 2 eggs per lb of beef
hot sauce (I use tabasco)
Wheat free Tamari (a fermented soy sauce that Mark's Daily Apple says is ok...some people use coconut aminos instead but I have yet to try them)
salt and pepper to taste

Squish it all together (you know you want to use your hands) and grill/fry. Top with salsa, guacamole, mustard...all that good non-bun stuff. When I next have my planning hat on, I intend to try portabello mushrooms as a bun....

Not-as-hot-as-Tim's Guacamole

Ingredients
1 ripe avocado
1 small tomato
a bit of hot sauce
lime and/or lemon juice
salt and pepper

1. Extract your avacado from its casing and smoosh it all up with a fork.
2. Dice the tomato and add it in.
3. Add a few shakes of hot sauce, several more shakes of lime juice, and some salt and pepper until it tastes good.
(I added a bit of cumin. Don't do that, it wasn't good, I had to drown the cumin flavour with more lime)

Bowl of Vegetables

Ingredients
Vegetables
Oil and Balsamic vinegar

I realized very early on in the Paleo challenge that I get really bored of chewing on lettuce, and that I was using the lettuce more as a vehicle for all the more substantial stuff. So one day, I just left the lettuce out. I felt so free! This is an extra easy side when you come home from a WOD and can't imagine mustering the effort to cook a vegetable to go with your slab of meat.

My standard vegetables to have on had for this purpose are:
Bell Peppers
Cucumber
Radishes
Mushrooms

I dice up the veggies, top with some grated beats, and dress with ground pepper, olive oil, and balsamic vinegar. I don't even mix the dressing together before I add it, because I'm kind of lazy, but it all works out.

Lemon Cranberry Cabbage Salad

Pictured here alongside my Kentucky Fried Haddock, this is my go-to paleo potluck dish. It's got a certain tang to it that I love, and it always seems to go over well. I've put it in rotation as one of my regular side dishes, although I use "rotation" losely because once you buy the cabbage, and if you live alone like I do, you end up eating cabbage salad for about a week straight, after which it takes a while for you to desire cabbage again...I'm really selling this one aren't I...I swear it's delicious. Sorry again about the vague measurement system, but really it's all to taste. Some day I'll put the stuff in a spoon before I put it in the salad so I can report proper ratios.

Lemon Cranberry Cabbage Salad

Ingredients
Chopped cabbage
Lemon juice (a lot)
Cider vinigar (some)
Olive oil (just a little)
Salt and pepper to taste
Dried cranberries
Seeds of some description for texture(I usually use flax and sunflower)

Mix all of the above together in a bowl. Let it sit for a minute or two, then taste test your cider to vinigar ratio. Add extra dressing ingredients as needed. Be sure to let the juices soak in before taste testing. Sometimes by the time I get the ratio right I end up with too much juice pooled at the bottom, in which case i just drain it off (otherwise you'll end up with some seriously lemony bites at the end).

I've also tried it with currents instead of cranberries, which is also yummy and less sugary, but also less flavourful. Which reminds me, be warned that the dried cranberries usually have sugar in them, so not strictly paleo. I hear legends of dried cranberries sweetened with apple juice at Whole Foods, but as I rarely have occasion to venture to Oakville I have not investigated these claims.

WARNING: The salad does not keep well, so don't make leftovers (or don't make it too far in advance of your potluck!). There's some sort of weird slimey-fication process that makes it much less excellent the next day. It's pretty quick to make though, so I often whip up a container in the morning to take to work for lunch.

Banana Macaroon Pie

I've hated bananas for as long as I can remember. The texture really grosses me out (and also Mom says I had some sort of banana related incident as a child). But since bananas are a very convenient snack (they come in their own container!), and work so well in smoothies, I decided to give them another try. As I'm finding with many things that I've previously resisted due to unpleasant texture (like broccoli...it's fuzzy...) if you disguise it at first, you can make it edible (often with bacon), and eventually you even get used to it. Recently, I've embraced the banana, and it has become a part of my new favourite dessert:

Banana Sundae(ish)

Sliced banana (1/2 to 1 whole, hunger dependent), drizzled with almond butter and a bit of honey, and sprinkled with cocoa nibs.

The day after inventing this banana camouflage (and just one week into the 10 week paleo challenge), I was confronted with an invitation to a birthday dinner involving double chocolate cake. Keeping in mind my "plan to not cheat" motto I decided to make my own dessert to bring along. My manfriend suggested I make something to share, and proposed that I make my banana sundae into a pie to "make it look less healthy so that other people will try it". Google found me this recipe, which I modified (ditched the strawberries and replaced the crust with something chocolatey) to create the masterpiece below.

Banana Macaroon Pie

Crust
3/4 cup blanched almond flour
1/4 teaspoon sea salt
1/2 cup unsweetened shredded coconut, toasted
1/4 cup cocoa
1/4 cup coconut oil, melted over low heat
1 tablespoon honey
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Filling
2 ripe bananas

1 tbsp lemon juice

½ tsp vanilla extract

3 eggs, beaten

2/3 c. coconut milk
honey and cocoa nibs for the top


The crust is modified from Elana's Gluten-free Almond Flour cookbook. Her crusts are all variations on a theme. I adjusted her coconut pie crust to make it chocolatey, although I think I would put a bit more coconut/almond flour and a bit less cocoa next time.
1. Combine dry ingredients in one bowl, whisk the wet in another bowl, and stir the wet into the dry.
2. Press into a 9 1/2" pie pan.
3.(?) I then baked it at 350 for 10 minutes (without the filling), but realized afterward that this was probably unnecessary; Alana's crust recipe was for a pie with chilled filling (and thus needed separate baking), and the original banana pie recipe did not pre-bake the crust. Thus, the top edges were a little crispy, so I'll try without pre-baking next time (there's nothing in it that really needs baking anyway).

4. Mix bananas, lemon juice, and vanilla extract either in a food processor or by hand (you’ll need to mash the bananas first if you mix by hand). Then gently mix in coconut milk and eggs.
3. Pour banana filling into pie crust.
4. Bake at 180 C for 35 minutes, or until set in center. Let pie cool.
5. Drizzle honey and sprinkle cocoa nibs on top (or stick with the strawberries and blueberries suggested in the original recipe).

Note: other people actually ate it, and took a second slice for later!