Dabbling in Paleo: Coconut-Orange-Chocolate Melt-Aways

I'm not sure what compelled me at the library last week. Maybe it was the fact that the Neill Public Library had a very respectable collection of cookbooks, including my favorite from Joe Beef in Montreal. Or maybe I'm just curious about different approaches to life: Buddhism, Catholicism, the Zone. But there I was picking up, checking out, driving off with -- Practical Paleo! 

As I'm reading through it at home, I'm sort of nodding and sort of suspiciously scrunching up my face. Wait -- bacon fat is okay, but any kind of grain is not? With my obsession with overnight oats, I'm not sure I'm 100% on board with this kind of diet plan. I can see how it would be great for gluten-free people. I flipped through some more. There are some interesting facts about digestion. I noted the smoke points of different cooking oils. I flipped to the back for the recipes -- no, the WAY back. Treats & Sweets. Yes.

The Orange Cream and Mint Melt-aways caught my eye. Those refreshing-looking little candies in the wrappers. I'll make those. Just the orange ones, to start.

The thing that was both compelling and kind of strange about these treats was the amount of coconut oil. I like desserts that also have the capacity to be a little bit good for you (I should tell you about that tofu mousse I make for people that have no clue it's not real cream... sometime).

The truth about these melt-aways, though, is that they are way too greasy. Even when frozen solid. And the sweetener could use a little pump-up.

So here's my proposal: chocolate + orange, all wrapped up in those fun little mini-muffin cups.


Chocolate-Covered Orange & Coconut Melt-Aways

Ingredients
1/4 cup coconut oil
3/4 cup coconut cream
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
Zest of 1 orange
1 teaspoon cocoa powder
2 teaspoons maple syrup
1 teaspoon agave nectar

Instructions
Combine all ingredients in a small mixing bowl until smooth. (Tip: Heat the coconut oil so its easier to work with). Pour into paper liners in a 24-mini-muffin pan. Set in the freezer, and serve cold. 

Lemon, Thyme and Honey Overnight Oats

It is hard to get back into the healthy breakfast routine after the vacation I just had.

Waking up in the beach cottage on the coast of Maine last week, it was the unspoken rule that whoever was up first would start frying up the thick cut, smoky bacon. Usually the next person up would start scrambling the eggs or frying the potatoes with sausage and brussell sprouts or beets. A third person would brave the line to grab at least a baker's dozen (or two) at Congdon's Doughnuts. Then we'd sit around the coffee table in the living room with our bacon and a plate of the daily scramble and laugh about the missing G on the Doughnuts box. Who wants a Doug-nut?

Now that I'm far, far away from that fresh salty air and staying inside to avoid the dangerous air quality from the nearby forest fires, I am missing Maine tremendously. And wishing that I didn't have to brave two more years of the Inland Northwest.

Though it's tempting to return to the comforting breakfasts of Moody Beach, I knew the day I returned that I could no longer keep up that kind of breakfast routine. Not without all the brothers-in-laws and father-in-laws and cousins that make this kind of early morning gluttony possible. Plus... the health thing.

Before vacation, I had gotten in the habit of making overnight oats the easy way -- the morning of. I used quick oats instead of rolled oats, so they didn't need that 8-hour steepage. I covered them with yogurt and almond milk, added chia seeds and topped it with blueberries. Delicious, but after a few weeks? Boring. 

Luckily, I stumbled upon this amazing Lemon, Thyme and Honey overnight oats recipe by The Breakfast Drama Queen the other day. I still used quick oats, but gave it the overnight treatment it deserved. I added chia seeds and doubled the amount of oats used, because I get hungry in the morning. I have to say, I was immediately impressed. The lemon peel gave it the bright flavor of a dessert, and fresh thyme added a little fanciful green to the otherwise beige breakfast. I think it needs a topping -- maybe nectarine slices, or figs? I'll play with it. 

In the meantime, here's my version:

Lemon, Thyme & Honey Overnight Oats

Ingredients

• 1 cup rolled or instant oats
• Zest of 1/2 a lemon
• 2 teaspoons lemon juice
• 1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 1 cup Greek vanilla yogurt
• 1 cup almond milk
• 3 sprigs of fresh thyme, removed from stem
• 2 teaspoons honey
• 1 tablespoon Chia seeds

Instructions

Combine all the ingredients in a Mason jar. Close lid and shake well to combine. Leave in the refrigerator overnight, or at least a half hour if using quick oats. Top with more honey if desired, and enjoy!

Skirt Steak with Chimichurri, Farro Salad, Walla Walla Wine

I think I've got down the equation for a perfect Sunday dinner: two parts slow, one part fast.

By this I mean two ingredients that need to sit and let the flavors mingle together in the fridge for a couple hours. You can prepare at will and then let it finish preparing itself while you nap off the effects of a hike. Yesterday, this was an Italian-inspired farro salad and an oily, bright green chimichurri sauce. The farro was adapted from Giada's recipe; I added some goat cheese and avocado to make it a little more exciting. I added a dash of red wine vinegar to the vinaigrette, to intensify the balsamic. And instead of chives, I gathered fresh basil from our garden. The chimichurri I copied exactly from Chow.com. Only I used more garlic. I always do.

The second part of the Sunday lazy meal equation: a meat that you can grill up on the back deck and have ready within minutes. In this case, it is a skirt steak, seasoned simply with salt and pepper, topped with the chimichurri. 

A bottle of red washes it all down nicely. We opted for a local(ish) Stateline Red from Gifford Hirlinger winery in Walla Walla. It was reminiscent of the day we spent tasting at the vineyards over Memorial Day weekend.

A pretty good choice for a Sunday, where the prep is as slow as you want, and the assembly is as quick as finding the bottle opener.

Sidenote: the bird in the top left of the picture opens beer bottles, not wine bottles, but I like it cause every good picture has a bird in it somewhere.

The Only Five Ingredients You'll Need for Sunday Meal Prep

If you're like me, Sunday meal prep is really hard.

Pinterest makes it look easy to pre-package a dozen meals into a neatly organized set of Tupperware, but when you get down to it on Sunday afternoon, it’s easy to get overwhelmed. How do you know in advance what you’re going to want each day of the week? And when you hit the grocery store to get ingredients for five different meals, it’s easy to rack up a huge bill with too many one-time-use ingredients. Sure, this crostini starter calls for a little goat cheese, but do I really need a whole log of it?

The trick to effective Sunday meal planning is to make the same foods in bulk every Sunday. With the versatility built into these ingredients, you can switch up your lunches and dinners so you don’t have the same thing twice for months. Plus, it takes some of the pressure off the last day of your weekend, so you can still have plenty of time for Sunday Funday.

Quinoa/Farro/Bulgar

Whether you prefer the red, black or the white kind, quinoa is a superfood packed with protein, vitamins and fiber. Same goes for the other types of whole grains, which you can easily find in any grocery store. Boil a few cups of this good stuff with water or chicken stock, fluff it up and refrigerate until you need a quick carb with dinner. You can also make a flavorful and filling quinoa salad with chopped veggies, beans, herbs and cheeses. Try a Mexican-inspired version with black beans and cilantro, or a caprese with mozzarella, tomatoes and basil. Throw on top of a salad or use as a side dish for the week.

Here's a bulgar salad I threw together last night with avocado, peppers, mozzarella cheese, cucumber and lemon juice. Refreshing on a hot day, and great with some grilled chicken!

Eggs

Eggs get a bad rap for its high level of cholesterol, but the fact is that the health benefits of the egg far outweighs any preconceived heart risk. It’s even been argued that the egg is the most nutritious natural food we have! Hard boil a half dozen on Sunday and slice them up in salads, add them to ramen-style soup or just pack them whole for a quick workday snack. If you’re feeling ambitious, make yourself deviled eggs, or whip up egg salad with olive oil-based mayo or Greek yogurt.

Chickpeas

Even straight out of the can, chickpeas can add flavor and dimension to almost any meal. Add them to chili, cook them up with eggs or fry them in oil ‘til they’re light and crispy. For a quick Sunday prep, try a simple chickpea salad of lemon, olive oil, parsley, parmesan and garlic and use as a salad topper interchangeably with the quinoa. Or blend up a batch of hummus to snack on all week.

Veggies

Peeling, chopping and slicing when you’re in a pinch can feel like an annoying chore, but getting into it on a Sunday afternoon is almost meditative. Ready up your carrots and other snacking veggies for the hummus, wedge potatoes to roast later, and prep your greens with a good rinse and spin. You’ll be more likely to eat your veggies if they’re all sliced and ready to go.

A Whole Chicken

In the wintertime, I love to roast a whole chicken with fennel, carrots and onion. This definitely is not ideal for the summertime, as I think most people would hate to turn the oven on at all, let alone for a long stretch. Instead, grill a bunch of chicken breasts and/or thighs and slice them up to add to salads for the rest of the week.


And there you have it! You can still come up with a ton of different weekday lunch and dinner ideas with these staples. You get to be lazy and creative at the same time!

Pasta Stra-sha-na-da

There's pasta primavera for the springtime, but what's an Italian to make in the summer? The answer is this: Pasta Stra-Sha-Na-Da.

As a kid, my mom always whipped up the same quick pasta dish in the summertime: Long fusilli pasta with a garlicky herb oil sauce. It was quick to throw together: she'd boil the water while my sister and I snipped the herbs from the back deck. We'd have dinner quick before getting back to the pool or playing with the neighbors or whatever else we did on long summer days when the sunlight filtered in long past bedtime. 

To be honest, I never really loved pasta stracchianata (taking a stab at the spelling here because I've never seen it written down). I guess the browned garlic was a little strong for my young tastebuds. It was just a means to an end: get the pasta down your throat and then you can get back to pool noodles instead of egg-and-flour ones. 

I hadn't thought about pasta stra-sha-na-da in a long time. But when my mom briefly mentioned she'd made it for dinner the other night before going on to tell me about the rest of her summery evening, I interrupted her mid-sentence: "Wait! Pasta Stra-sha-na-da. How do you make that?"

She was pleased I asked. Maybe she knew one day my taste buds would grow into it.

Basically, it's just an aglio e olio with a handful of herbs thrown in. But when you add some grilled chicken like I did, and use fresh pappardelle from the refrigerated part of the grocery store, it becomes so much more than the sum of it's parts. And you can still get it made quick so you can spend the rest of the evening gardening, reading, and having a cold beer on the deck.

Pasta Straccianata

Ingredients:
2 TBS butter
2 TBS olive oil
6 gloves garlic, chopped
dash of red pepper flakes
lemon juice
Parmesan cheese
1 spring fresh oregano
about 6 basil leaves
a handful of fresh parsley
a few mint leaves
1 package fresh refrigerated pasta (tortellini works well too)

Instructions:
Get a pot of cold water boiling for the pasta. In the meantime, heat equal amounts of butter and olive oil in a large saucepan over medium heat -- about two tablespoons each is good to start. When the butter melts, add the garlic and red pepper and turn down the heat to low. If you're worried about the garlic browning too much, turn it off entirely and just let the spicy garlic flavor infuse the oil.

Make a chiffonade of oregano, basil, parsley and a little mint. Chop coarsely. 

When the pasta is done, add to the oil and garlic. Turn the heat up to medium. If needed, add a little of the pasta water.

Sprinkle with the herbs and mix well. Off heat, add a little lemon juice and Parmesan cheese.

Foraging for Morels in Elk River

It was about mid-May when my friend finally said: It's time to go foraging!

I'd been asking repeatedly when we could go hunting for morels, which grow locally around the inland Northwest. She kept telling me that it had to be above freezing at night, but not too hot during the day. We hit that sweet spot a few weeks into May, and packed up a few cars with friends and dogs and supplies on the first nice Sunday.

The two-hour drive to Elk River, Idaho gave me time to think and reflect. In New York, morels were among the most coveted and rare items on a menu. We'd had them (and by "them" I mean two, cut in half, or maybe it was just one big one) with trout at Recette, and I think we found them on the menu at Dressler, too... maybe with that giant pork chop they used to have? Anyway, we used to think ourselves lucky to have access to that special fungi, and to take a day to forage it yourself -- isn't that the Brooklyn foodie dream? I mean, anyone can eat a mushroom soaked in butter at a city restaurant and nod approvingly, but not many can say they've strapped on their boots, rolled up their sleeves and found some themselves. 

Recette's Fancypants Trout w/ Exactly 3 Morel Morsels

We pulled into the secret woodsy area that I was threatened with my life not to share. And then we let the dogs loose to channel their inner truffle pig and be our mushroom muses. Only Honey Badger the corgi actually used her sniffer to actually find us any, but the rest of the pups were good and stayed close as we spread out.

It was a little slow finding the first morels, but we stuck to the rule: Look for lady slipper flowers and morels typically grow nearby. This was usually near a big tree, where the ground was still a little wet. At first, we would shriek with excitement when we found one. And then it got quieter as we secretly filled up our little laundry bags with as many as we could find. They seemed to be everywhere once we moved past an area that had obviously already been picked over. I was overwhelmed by the abundance.

After a few hours, we were all exhausted and hungry. So we headed into town and got huckleberry ice cream at the general store. TripAdvisor says it is world famous, but of course that's the only site that you can find that it even exists. They don't do much of a Web presence out here. But after hearing about it the old fashioned way, I was excited to get a giant cone and sit out on a bench enjoying the sun.

When we got home, it took a long time to cut, clean, soak and store our morels. The rest of the week there were sauteed morels, morel omelettes, morels with trout as a replication of our New York days past. But that night I made something to truly celebrate our hard work: a risotto! We bought a few scallops from the store to add to the asparagus and morel rice that I stirred constantly in chicken broth for 45 minutes. It was worth every stir. Having morels in this sort of homemade luxury made me scoff at our old ways of overpriced stinginess.

I'm not saying I'm a country girl now and won't move back to the city eventually. But a day like May 17? It changed my perspective in a haunting way that I can't shake. Where will we end up living, when we can finally decide for ourselves again? I'm not certain anymore. But in the meantime there will be morels in the freezer that I can thaw out at any time, and remember what I've learned.

West Coast States are Big.

It used to be that seven hours got us from Brooklyn all the way down to the outer banks in North Carolina. That's New York, New Jersey (almost into Pennsylvania), Delaware, Maryland, Virginia and North Carolina. Six states! Now, seven hours gets us from southern Washington to northern-central Oregon. I don't understand how it's possible, but then again maps have always eluded me. "Cartographer" was my least favorite profession back in third grade, up there with "Hairdresser." Twenty years later and I'm still lost and my hair is still a mess.

Regardless of how long it took, I consider myself to be pretty blessed to have the opportunity to drive down to Camp Sherman for a long President's Day weekend. This is exactly the sort of thing that we would never fly across the country for, so why not pack up the car and experience it all now, while we can?

After a 5-hour drive to Portland last Friday night, which would have been pretty boring had we not debated about the destructive powers of the DSM and Fifty Shades of Gray, we stopped at Ecliptic Brewery to taste test a few brews and have dinner at the bar. This is exactly the sort of place that gives me hope that life exists after Brooklyn. North Portland is sort of like East Williamsburg before all those little fancy bars opened up and people started coming from Manhattan and ruining the gritty little part of Brooklyn that used to feel like a refuge. 

There were some interesting brews, but the best was definitely the Orbiter IPA, which "unites a constellation of "C" hops (Cascade, Centennial, Chinook and Columbus)". Those C hops create a crafty beer that is citrusy, clear and crisp (See what I did there?).

The next morning we were had fantastic breakfast sandwiches from Random Order and hit the road toward Sisters. And I have to say that the Heartthrob sandwich, with herbed cream cheese and sundried tomatoes, definitely made my ticker skip a happy beat. 

What a gorgeous drive from Portland to Camp Sherman. After the first hour or so of highway driving, you seem to descend into a dense forest, alongside a rippling blue creek. Slowly you to ascend again, scaling the sides of giant hills as snow-capped mountains loom in the background. A few acres are totally destroyed from forest fires or volcanoes, their stumpy and charred tree remains stretched out like sunbathers on a beach. Then back into the canopy of trees until you reach your destination: a cozy cottage in the woods.

Our cottage was cozy and woodsy, a fabulous weekend retreat. A two mile riverside hike from the REAL family cottage: a blacksmith-detailed, antler-hanging DREAM of a getaway. I walked in and seriously just about hit the floor. 

But soon I got comfortable and had no trouble relaxing into the coziest moment of my life: fireplace, golden retriever, newspaper. 

Sunday we hiked Black Butte, a challenging two-mile hoof from the parking space about 3/4 of the way up the hill just outside Sisters, OR. The view from the top was rewarding, enough to offset the two days of leg pain that followed. It also bought me two days of dog exhaustion that almost had me worried but mostly had me feeling satisfied that I had never before challenged the pup this much. It was also validating to those spaghetti legs of mine.

Driving home and feeling rejuvenated on Monday, we cut across the northeast part of Oregon towards I-84 instead of stopping through Portland again. With snowy Mount Hood looming in the background and miles and miles of red-dusted, cattle-grazing land, I felt like we were in a cigarette ad. 

It's a freeing feeling, though. Back home everyone is shoved into the subway and shuffling across the street with hoardes of people. And here we are, driving 70 on an empty road with good tunes on the stereo and nothing in our way. The homesickness has whittled itself down to a sliver and in it's place, I feel free.