Crispy Chicken Tenders with Dijon Dipping Sauce

I strive for alliteration in my titles, can you tell?

I have been neglecting my posting. Life is full! But that's no excuse because people need to eat, and they need paleo recipes to do so! Good thing I'm not the only paleo blogger in town or we'd all be starving  :D I do have a long list of posts in mind, and I shall endeavor to get cracking with the actual writing of them down. So, without further ado, here's one that I've made at least 5 times since taking the picture of the first try and vowing that they were delicious enough to warrant a post. Chicken Nuggets! With Dipping Sauce!! Chicken is just so boring on it's own. It needs help. Help your chicken out.

  

Crispy Chicken Tenders with Dijon Dipping Sauce

I make mine coated in almond and coconut flour. I think they would be fine with just one or the other. A word of caution about the mustard. I made it once with a mustard that had some serious nasal clearing properties, and it was a bit much. Possibly horseradish? Anyway, pre-test your mustard is all I have to say.

 

Ingredients

Tenders

• 2 boneless chicken breasts
• ~ two handfuls of almond and/or coconut flour (I use roughly one each)
• seasonings, to taste (I use sea salt, pepper, and a bit of garlic powder)
• 1 egg

Dipping Sauce

• Two parts mustard (I use French's Original Dijon with Chardonay, pictured on the right...it's lovely, and I think it's paleo but for the Chardonay. You purists will just have to make your own mustard)
• One part honey
• 1/2 part olive oil
• ground ginger, to taste
• sea salt, to taste

1. Heat some olive oil in a pan. I use a bit more than normal so that my tenders are nice and crispy!
2. Get your batter ready. Mix flour and seasonings in a bowl, and beat an egg in a second bowl.
3. Slice your chicken in nugget sized pieces.
4. Coat each nugget in egg and then the flour mixture and toss in the pan (hmm..I just wondered for the first time if it wouldn't be sensible to mix the egg into the flour to make a batter, and then toss the chicken in it to coat.....gonna try that next time....)
5. Cook until crispy on both sides. Mine are done by the time I make the dipping sauce and tend to my side dish. I always crack open the thickest nugget just to be sure.
6. For the sauce, just stir everything together, taste it, and add whatever you think it needs to be worthy of your nuggets.
7. Dip and consume!

I would have loved these as a kid...SO much better than McD's.

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!

Stuff I've baked that tastes good

Last weekend, my sister made me THE BEST paleo birthday cake OF ALL TIME. This is not an exaggeration. In light of this confectionary wonder, I've decided to share some recipes for paleo baked goods that I've tried and that have actually turned out (wonder of wonders!) Actually, I suspect that paleo baking is actually easier than regular baking; it seems to be less of a science, and more "stir stuff together and stick it in the oven". The toughest part is finding some of the strange paleo ingredients that I'd never heard of before (I still don't know what coconut palm shortening is).

Anyway, here is the German Chocolate Cake Jess made me (from Elana's Pantry), after we ate some of it. It has coconut pecan frosting. You heard me. coconut. pecan. Frigging amazing.

Jess said she had a lot of trouble with the consistency of the frosting (too drippy) and so the weight of the top layer squished out the filling. The corrective process involved mom holding the top layer up while Jess stuffed the filling back in and pasted the whole thing with a layer of chocolate icing. Ashley says this surgical process can be avoided by first building a "dam" of icing around the edge of your bottom layer before putting the filling and the top layer on. I don't care how it happened, I just know it was delicious. The chocolate cake is as fluffy and moist as it looks. And then I proceeded to eat one of mom's very not paleo made from scratch biscuits. It was totally worth it. I have no regrets.

Coconut Banana Chocolate Chip Muffins
I've also made these really yummy Coconut Banana Chocolate Chip Muffins from Multiply Delicious. They're a super tasty snack and actually taste like real muffins. Although when I said this to Ashley, she suggested that we don't really know what real muffins taste like anymore. Valid point, but I've decided that it doesn't matter, so long as in my mind this is how muffins taste now. And that taste is delicious.

Ingredients
6 eggs
1/3 cup coconut milk
1 tablespoons maple syrup (optional)
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/4 cup coconut oil, melted
3/4 cup coconut flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1 cup mashed ripe bananas (about 3 bananas)
1/2 cup dark chocolate chips, plus additional for sprinkling on tops of muffin

Preheat oven to 400. Line a 12-cup muffin pan with paper liners.

In a large bowl, combine eggs, coconut milk, maple syrup, sea salt, and vanilla extract. Whisk to combine and set aside.

Sift coconut flour (I never actually sift, because I'm lazy, and I don't have a sifter), baking powder, baking soda, and cinnamon into the wet ingredients. Whisk vigorously until no lumps remain. Stir in melted coconut oil until well combined. Fold in banana and chocolate chips until incorporated (exactly how many words are there for "stir"?).

Using a large ice cream scoop (or a spoon??), add one level scoop to each muffin cup. Sprinkle each muffin with a few additional chocolate chips. Bake muffins for 15 to 18 minutes or until muffins are golden and spring back when pressed gently. Once baked, cool for 10 minutes.

Paleo Gingerbread Cookies
I made these at Christmas for our paleo cookie exchange and they were a big hit. Or at least, everyone said so, and I don't think they were lying. Zoey the dog tried to swallow a Christmas tree cookie whole, if that's any evidence. On a side note, when I went to buy molassas, I had no idea what the difference was between the regular kind and "fancy" molasses. Apparently fancy is better. I did not buy the fancy, but it still worked. This recipe is pasted from Modern Paleo Warfare but came from the book Make it Paleo.

Ingredients

1/2 a cup of molasses or maple syrup
1/4 cup pure maple syrup
3 tbsp palm shortening
1tbsp coconut milk
3 cups blanched almond flour
1/2 tsp cinnamon (I added more)
1/2 tsp ground ginger
1/2 tsp ground cloves
1/2 tsp ground nutmeg
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp baking soda

Preheat the oven to 350F.
Heat the molasses in a sauce pan then add the maple syrup, palm shortening and coconut milk to the sauce pan. Stir, then remove from heat (My second batch of cookies burned in less time than the first took to bake, and I think it may be that I heated my molasses too long here?). Mix the dry stuff together then into the wet stuff until it looks like fully blended batter. Stick the dough into the fridge for about 20 mins (I left it a bit longer) then roll it out to about a quarter inch thickness. The dough cut with cookie cutters surprisingly well and didn't fall apart during transfer. Bake on parchment paper or cookie sheet.

Paleo Buttercream Icing
I found this recipe here at "The Label Says Paleo". It went well on the cookies, although I added way more coconut sugar than suggested. It piped well though (with my dollar store icing bag!), but needed to go into the fridge to harden.

Whisk in a bowl:

1/2 c. coconut butter
1/4 c. coconut milk
1/8 c. palm sugar
sprinkle of arrowroot powder

Feel free to play around with these measurements to your liking. Whisk for awhile–at least 5 solid minutes–but even if the icing is lumpy, it’ll taste good. I added red or green food colouring to be festive, and it worked nicely.

Spicy Citrus Coconut Chicken

I started out thinking I would make a creamy mushroom sauce for my chicken. But then I remembered I had some clementines threatening to shrivel, and no body wants to waste a good clementine (don't you hate when you pick one up that looks great on one side, just to find that it's covered in blue mold on the underside and threatening to contaminate the rest of the basket with its grossness?). So, I ditched the mushrooms, kept the creamy sauce part, and came up with this delightful concoction, if I do say so myself. It looks a little bland in colour because by the time I remembered about the red peppers I had planned to add, everything else was all ready. Also, I forgot the ginger, and felt the whole thing was slightly lacking, but I added it to my leftovers, and happily my lunch the next day was more complete. Ginger is always a good idea. Like bacon. Except bacon jelly beans, seriously, don't do it.

Spicy Citrus Coconut Chicken (with Cauliflower Rice)
This made 3 meals for me

Ingredients
1 can coconut milk
2 large chicken breasts
~ 3 tablespoons lime juice
~ 6 clementines (4 juiced, 2 for garnish)
~ 2 teaspoons chili flakes (more or less depending on your level of spiciness)
fresh ginger
a pinch of cumin (if you like that sort of thing)
1/2 head of cauliflower
leaks or onion
other veggies? (red bell peppers or snap peas, mayhaps?)

1. Sear the chicken breasts on both sides in olive/coconut oil for a couple of minutes and set aside.
2. Chop and saute the onion or leaks briefly. Also saute sliced peppers here, like I forgot to do.
3. Add coconut milk, ginger, lime juice, clementine juice, cumin (optional), salt to taste, and chili flakes. I recommend adding a small amount of the chili flakes at a time and taste testing, because the hotness seems to intensify as you go along. I put a bit too much for my liking.
4. Put the lid on and let simmer while you "rice the cauliflower" in your handy dandy hand crank food processor, or your electric one if you're one of those fancy folk.
5. I added my cauliflower to the sauce at this point to let it cook. Ashley tried this recipe after smelling my leftovers, and cooked hers a bit separately first with some chicken broth, then added it to the sauce at the end. Either way, the point is to get your cauliflower cooked somehow, so long as it ends up in the sauce at the end, because I've decided it's better that way.
6. Slice the chicken into bite sized pieces and add back into the sauce to finish cooking.
7. Add some clementine wedges, if you please, and serve! Ashley also added orange juice to her sauce concoction, by the way, and something else but I don't remember what....hm....oh well!

Banana Curry Chicken on Cauliflower Rice

You know what's awesome? Cauliflower rice. You know what else is awesome? Kitchen gadgets that can chop the cauliflower without it flying all over the kitchen. The first time I made the stuff I tried just chopping it, with the result that I had to actually sweep the floor afterward. I also tried grating on the mandoline, but cauliflower is too structurally unsound and, again, ended up all over the kitchen.

BUT THEN for Christmas mum got me a hand crank food processor thinger, in which the cauliflower was contained while I mulched it into rice format. AMAZING! Also, much cheaper than the fancy electric food processors.

Cauliflower rice is a really excellent substitute vessel for your meats and sauces. The texture is similar to rice, and it soaks up sauce flavours nicely so that the cauliflower taste is not overpowering (which is good, because I happen to think cauliflower is gross). It's also easy to make, albeit quite messy without the proper tools (thanks mom!!). I've tried it with a few different curries. I hadn't ever made curry in my previous life so I'm still trying to find a recipe that tastes as good as my favourite Indian restaurant (next time, I'm trying something with pineapple!). This recipe is the best one I've found so far, and was pretty darn tasty. Original recipe here.

Banana Curry Chicken

Ingredients
Sliced veggies (bell pepper, carrots, zuccini, etc)
Chicken breasts
Sea salt and fresh ground black pepper, to taste
1 large banana, peeled
1/2 cup light coconut milk
2 large scallions, sliced
1 tsp curry powder
1/2 tsp ground turmeric
1/4 tsp ground cinnamon
1/8 tsp ground cayenne pepper
1 tbsp grated fresh ginger
Fresh chopped cilantro, for garnish

1. Preheat oven to 425ºF. Place sliced vegetables and a chicken breast on a piece of foil. Season chicken with salt and black pepper.
2. In a blender (or with a fork), add banana, coconut milk, scallions, curry powder, turmeric, cinnamon, cayenne pepper and ginger and process (smoosh) until smooth. Pour banana-coconut milk mixture over each chicken breast, dividing evenly. Seal foil packets, place on a rimmed baking sheet and cook in oven for 22 to 25 minutes. Set aside to cool for a few minutes before opening. (NOTE: I had to cook mine much longer, perhaps they were thicker).

Cauliflower Rice

Mulch up some cauliflower until it's the size of rice grains. As per the discussion above, I recommend some sort of food processor. I haven't tried the blender but it might do. Heat a generous amount of coconut oil in a pan. Stir in the cauliflower to cover with oil. Cook with a lid on medium-low, stiring occasionally, until the cauliflower is the desired squishiness. I do mine for 15 minutes or so.

For when there's nothing in your cupboard but a can of tuna...

That's what happened to me today. I got home from work to discover that I'd forgotten to take a meat out of the freezer, I had used up all of my eggs for breakfast, and I was feeling too impatient to wait for something to thaw. But there were two cans of tuna in my cupboard! Below is the dinner provided by the internet, along with a couple other google discoveries.

Zingy Tuna Salad

Recipe here from PALEOdISH. It was pretty darn tasty for lacking mayonaise! Someone in the comments suggests adding smooshed avocado for creamy texture, but mine wasn't ripe enough to try. I served it on a couple slices of toasted Paleo bread and it was almost like I was eating a tuna melt. I'm really not certain I can give up cheese for life....


Turnip Fritters

I found this recipe (from Paleo Foodie) when I decided it was time to use up the turnips sitting at the bottom of my veggie drawer, like they always do when I get them in my veggie box, because turnips are gross (acceptable ways to eat turnip include disguising them in a stew where they don't really taste like turnips. NON acceptable ways include mashing them up and putting them next to the bowl of mashed potatoes so that 12 year old Jen takes a heaping scoop of mashed turnip and is then forced to eat it so as not to be wasteful).

Aaaanyway, the ginger and raisins cover up the turnip grossness quite nicely. They have a hashbrown texture (but bonus: vegetable!), and I even heated some up in the toaster oven for breakfast the next day. If you're fancy, you can even grate your turnips with a mondolin, like I did, because my manfriend decided I was hopeless at choping things and bought me a mandolin. I'm not normally one for gatgets, but this one is pretty great.


Paleo Pecan Brittle

This last recipe I found when I had a craving for peanut brittle. It's not at all like peanut brittle, but satisfies the sugary roasted nut desires. They're super fast to make (plus half hour baking time), and I just made a batch to take to a family Christmas dinner this weekend. Bonus: my house now smells like cinnamon toast crunch.

I have also hired Ashley to make me her awesome paleo brownies so that I have a variety of desserts with which to avoid cheating. Speaking of not cheating, I realized last week that I can make stuffing with Elana's paleo bread!!! AMAZING! Well, I hope it will be. I'm going home Friday night so mom can show me how to make her worlds best stuffing. Stay tuned.


That awesome pumpkin spice bread that Jocelyn made for the Halloween potluck

It's awesome. 'Nuff said. I've linked the recipe from Primal Palate so as not to have to search in the CrossFit Altitude archives every time.


Protein balls etc

Speaking of Ashley, this is the original protein ball recipe (and posted below for convenience). The ones at the front of the gym are modified by paleo pastry chef extrodanaire (Ashley B) and, frankly, are much better than the ones I haphazardly mush together for myself. Mmmmm mocha tasty balls.

1/2 cup of nut butter (cashew, almond)
2 tablespoon of raw honey
2 tablespoon of cocoa nibs
2 tablespoon of shredded coconut
3/4 cup of protein powder ( natural, not sweetened)
1 teaspoon organic, alcohol free vanilla
2 tablespoon crushed nuts (raw almonds)

Mix nut butter, protein powder, honey and vanilla until smooth. Then add remainder of ingredients. Rill into 1 inch balls and place in an airtight container in the fridge for storage.

For when you get a little tired of that particular protein snack, which I did after my 5th batch, I tried these goji protein bars. They're quite tasty (less sweet, more nutty and seedy), but they're a bit crumbly. Perhaps an extra egg? I also soaked my goji berries in boiling water for a few minutes to soften them.