Paleo Recipes & Expat Living
In my last post I mentioned that I have been on a bit of a sardine eating kick, and so I’ve been thinking up different ways to eat them. I like to keep things simple in my recipes, I’d like to think that just about anyone can cook what I share here on the blog, even if sometimes the steps to make something might be longer than others, I almost always use ingredients that most everyone has access to. [Read more…]
Can you believe that it’s been 6 months since Joe and I moved to England?! I SERIOUSLY can’t believe it! It’s a strange feeling because when I think back it doesn’t really feel like we’ve been here for that long but I swear the days just fly by! I went back today and read over this post I wrote just before we left the States… Joe and I miss a lot of things from our life in America, I think after 2 years it was starting to feel like home there and then we decided to come here and now we are working on settling down here. I’m not sure it will be a permanent thing… us living here but for now this is where we have to be 🙂 Who knows what will happen in another year, if we’ll be on the move again or if we’ll decide to stick it out here. In any case I often feel like a modern day nomad… the suitcases that have travelled with us since 2011 from Australia are big reminders of that for me! Anyway you gotta do these things when you’re young right! 😉
Now onto more important things like FOOD hahaha! I thought it would be fun to share with you my top 5 favourite vegetables, I know when some people think of the “paleo diet” they think we all just sit there eating bacon and eggs, and well I’m not saying we don’t but we (well I hope we do) also eat a lot of veggies and fruit! I’ve read from a couple of other paleo bloggers that when they made the switch people would often ask them what they ate if they couldn’t eat bread or pasta… as if these are the only two foods on the planet! Paleo for me personally has opened the doors to a much wider variety of food and things that I may not have ever tried before. Now I enjoy picking up a different vegetable or even fruit when I’m out shopping and I have fun experimenting with different ways to cook/use these things. For e.g. I recently picked up a cassava/yuca, I’ve NEVER tasted one before let alone cooked it but I wanted to try something different so I picked it up.
Is it just me or did last week just go by REALLY REALLY slowly? I can’t believe it hasn’t even been 2 weeks since I’ve been back from my holiday! And yes I will definitely be doing a couple of blog posts about it but I’m still trying to decide which photos to include in the posts since I have SO MANY! I should have something up this week and probably next week too.
For this post though I wanted to share a recipe I came up with over the weekend. Sometimes I get these ideas in my head of wanting to create a dish and then I just have to run with it and keep my fingers crossed that it will work… luckily 99% of the time it does!
This recipe uses pork loin steaks and Morello cherries in syrup. I’m not 100% sure if the Morello cherries can be classified as paleo since they have sugar in them BUT the ingredients on my jar of Morello cherries were clean and I believe the sugar is there to thicken up the syrup that the cherries sit in. In any case it’s not an ingredient that I use very often but there was something about pork and cherries together that had me thinking! I’ve heard that duck and Morello cherries go well together but I personally had never heard the same about pork. I knew that pork and apple went well together so I thought why not let’s give this a go! [Read more…]
A while ago I promised to write a post about my favourite Persian meal and I’m now finally sitting down to write about it.
I grew up eating this dish, it’s my ‘if you were stuck in a deserted Island and you could only have one thing to eat’ dish…. did that make sense? Anyway my point is that I LOVE LOVE LOVE this dish but for some reason I don’t make it very often. Maybe it’s because I prefer it when my mum makes it… I may be a little very biased!
So what’s the name of this dish? It’s called Loobia Polo (other spelling variations which you may find are Loobia Polow or Lubia Polow). Loobia means green beans and Polo means rice. Rice is a BIG staple in Persian cooking and most of our dishes are based around a sort of meat and vegetable stew that is eaten with rice. Loobia Polo is no different… it’s based on stew meat and green beans and is seasoned with a few different spices. Typically the stew is mixed in with rice, which is cooked very specifically…. Persians are known for their rice and the way they make it.
For this particular post I will be writing about how to make the meat part of Loobia Polo and leaving the rice out. Why? Well as you know from reading this blog I base most of my diet on Paleo and for a while I didn’t have rice at all. I slowly reintroduced it and found that I could do small amounts of white rice here and there but not all the time. So instead I decided to pair the meat and vegetable part of this dish with some garlic cauliflower mash.
If you are interested in knowing how to do the rice then leave me a comment in the comments section and I’ll see about doing a post on Persian rice at some point.
If you’re using fresh green beans then wash them and cut into about 2cm/1inch pieces. If like me you use frozen beans then cook them on the stove according to packet instructions, drain and quickly place into an ice bath to stop them from cooking and then drain and cut into pieces. Set aside.
Heat a skillet on medium heat and add in your ghee. Add in your onion and cook for about 6-8 minutes or until translucent. Add in the turmeric and mix together.
Next add in the meat and brown. Throw in your green beans, if you’re using fresh beans then cook them for about 8 minutes before adding in the next ingredients, if using frozen beans then as soon as you add them into the skillet, add in your tomato paste, tomato sauce, lemon juice, sea salt, freshly cracked black pepper and cinnamon.
Bring the sauce to a boil and then lower the heat to a simmer and cook covered for about 20 minutes. If you’re using fresh beans then you might have to cook it for a bit longer, just make sure the beans are nice and tender.
For the cauliflower mash add the cauliflower pieces into a large pot and cover with water. Bring the water to a boil and then lower the heat to low and cook for 15-20 minutes or until you can easily pierce the cauliflower with a fork.
Drain and add the cauliflower either into a food processor or a high-speed blender, add in your garlic powder and sea salt and freshly cracked black pepper to taste. Mix until smooth.
Now I’d like you to share with me what is your favourite food? Has it changed from when you were a kid?