Some recipes and some MDA catch-up

Hey guys! Just wanted to stop by real quick and drop off some links. That’s about it for today, honestly. Not too much else to report, overall. I just had a pot luck lunch at work (I brought deviled eggs, because I always bring deviled eggs) and got to tell everyone about the changes I’ve seen since starting this paleo journey back in mid-October. That really isn’t all that long ago in the grand scheme, but it feels like I’ve been eating this way forever. Anyone else have that feeling? When I think back to how I used to eat, it’s hard to believe that it was me making those poor choices.

Speaking of poor choices, I found a couple really great recipes for sweets today, and I wanted to share them with you. Keep in mind, these are for special occasions or something. Don’t eat them every day. Because that’s not the way we get abs.

Caramel Cheesecake Minus Cheese – I love this recipe. My Larabars prove that dates can be plenty sweet and can take on a great texture. I believe that this thing might just be amazing. I will try it and let you know.

Thick, chewy oatmeal chocolate chip cookies – These are the ones I made last week and they are really, really good. So good that they’re dangerous to have around. Even with gluten free oats, eating too many of them made me feel a little sick. One or two a day was fine, but they’re good enough that it’s really hard to keep yourself to that. So, be warned. Only make these if you’ve got good self control, or if you’re going to take them to a picnic or a party or something where you’ve got a lot of other people helping you get rid of them. Anyway, I made a couple batches of these when we got back home with the baby, and I split them half and half with chocolate chips and butterscotch chips. Oatmeal cookies with butterscotch chips (those of us in the know call them “Oatmeal Scotchies”) are my favorite cookies of ever.

Homemade Paleo Condiments – I’m mostly after this one for the ketchup. I’ve been getting organic ketchup for a while now, and using it pretty sparingly because of the sugar, but I’d really like to make some ketchup that’s full of quality ingredients so I can go nuts with it. Same sort of deal as the mayo. When you eat good food, you can eat as much as you want without feeling guilty. And that’s awesome. Plus, if i have paleo ketchup and paleo mayonnaise, I now have paleo Thousand Island dressing. And that’s an amazing thing indeed. If that actually comes to fruition, I will absolutely post a recipe/photo series. I’m also thinking I might try this ketchup recipe from PaleOMG because I like her a lot: PaleOMG ketchup

Okay, I also finally caught up on Mark’s Daily Apple, or at least rushed through frantically, trying to absorb as much as I can. The only problem with a daily blog is that it’s so easy to fall behind on reading it.

Why we don’t sprint anymore – A great post from Mark Sisson about sprinting. I’ve been trying to incorporate more of this into my exercise regimen, but I’m probably still not doing enough. And I know I’m not walking anough, but that’s an issue for another day, right?

Are humans hard-wired to be optimistic? – I like this idea. I’m absolutely an optimist, and I think it serves me very well.

How bad is peanut butter, really? – I don’t eat it anymore, ever since I discovered Justin’s Honey Almond Butter. If I want some kind of peanut butter-esque substance, Justin’s almond butters just blow everything else out of the water. It definitely has the potential for overconsumption though, so I try to be careful with it.

Top 8 Most Common Reactions to Your Grain-Free Diet (and How to Respond) – If I had a nickel for every time I’d heard one of these, I would have enough nickels to afford my Justin’s Almond Butter habit. But I don’t, because nobody is in the business of giving nickels to people every time a particular thing happens. And that’s a shame.

Okay folks, I’m out. Enjoy, and thanks for reading!

Post-race update and links

Hey guys! Just wanted to post up a bunch of links and give you a bit of an update on how things are in my world.

First off, I ran the Bolder Boulder this weekend, and came in with my fastest time to date. I ran 10K in 58:17 this year. Not bad for not having trained, eh? I think I actually ran maybe a handful of time in the past 6 months, and still managed to put up a decent time. Being so much lighter definitely helped, as last year I think I was in the 235-240 lbs range. My legs are definitely still hurting, but it’s nothing I can’t handle. It just means I worked them well. Also, I’m definitely inspired to keep up with my sprintervals. I enjoy them, and I do think they helped me, since I’m sore now in all the same places I’m usually sore after a sprint workout. I’m also thinking that I’ll make a concerted effort to clean up the garage and/or basement enough this weekend that I can put my rowing machine somewhere and leave it intact. I mean, I want to work out, but my desire for fitness in no way overcomes my natural laziness. If I have to drag my equipment out and set it up before I actually use it, that whole process has  a 0% chance of happening. Welcome to my mind, try not to run screaming into the night.

What else? Oh, I actually finished my whole batch of mayonnaise. I’m as shocked as anyone. It was a lot, and I couldn’t think of what I was going to use it for. I ended up doing a lot of tuna salad, since I’ve been wanting to eat more fish. And I have been! And the mayo definitely helped. Here’s the cool thing, though. When I used to be afraid of fat, I would only use a smidgen of light Miracle Whip in my tuna. It wasn’t great. Then when I learned that fat was good, I thought “Awesome, I’ll just use as much of this stuff as I want!” That’s not true, though, because it’s all soybean oil and that’s junk. So then I went back to only using a little, if I used it at all. But when I made my own out of good quality fats and pastured eggs, I realized that there was no reason not to use as much as I wanted. So I went nuts. And I actually cruised through that whole batch of mayo in maybe a week. This is very good news, because now I’m less afraid of making my own mayo. If I can actually finish it, and if I make it with good ingredients, that’s a legitimately delicious, healthy food. So next batch, which will be coming soon, I’ll take a lot of pictures and share it with all of you. Hooray!

Okay, let’s get to links.

Change is Coming – Tom Naughton, as always, is awesome. I’m glad people are listening to him, because the way he explains things just makes sense, and can make otherwise difficult concepts easy to understand. The more people who listen to Tom, the better off we’ll all be. Especially if the people listening to Tom are also in a position to spread his message to their own clients.

Tom Nikkola’s posts on the Lifetime Fitness blog – This is kind of a spinoff from the last link. Lifetime Fitness is a huge gym, at least in my neck of the woods. Big like 24-Hour Fitness, but kinda swanky. And this is the director of nutrition and weight management, going on the low-carb cruise and talking about low-calorie diets being futile. This is awesome. I read some of Tom’s posts and they’re really solid stuff. I love that he’s promoting this stuff, and that he’s in a position where he might actually be able to make something happen.

Could You Really Live the Primal Life? – It’s a fair question, and my answer is a vehement “No”. I would simply miss my lathe too much.

The Straight Dope on Cholesterol, Part VI – Dr. Attia changed the name of his blog, from waroninsulin.com to eatingacademy.com, though it appears that all subscriptions and all still work and the old url forwards to the new one. Anyway, this is the next in the series, and he talks about why we need to be measuring and paying attention to LDL-P in addition to (or instead of) LDL-C, which is what most people currently look at. This series is really blowing my skirt up, because it’s providing all the useful information. We’re learning what the problem is, what causes it, how to test for it, which tests are the best (and why) and I’m sure before too long, we’ll be hearing about what we can do to fix the problem. That’s awesome.

How Bad is Fructose? -Again, I dig on Dr. Guyenet. He always posts interesting things that challenge some of the subtleties of the larger ancestral paradigm, and that’s a good thing. Many people, myself included, have said that fructose, specifically refined fructose, is solely responsible for a lot of our problems. I still think that might be true, but it seems like it’s only a big problem if it’s consumed as part of a hypercaloric regimen. Now, in our modern age, that’s not exactly a challenge, so I think the point still stands. But since we want to be accurate and scientific about this, it’s important to have our subtleties right. There is one thing I’d question, though. If you look way down at the bottom, you’ll see his ** footnote where he asks why we’d worry about the fat rpoduced via DNL if fat isn’t bad. My understanding is that the fat that the liver makes with fructose has some direct effects on leptin sensitivity in the brain. Dr. Lustig mentioned that in one of his talks, I’m pretty sure, though I can’t find it at the moment. So maybe that’s why fructose is so bad? Maybe it has more of an influence on leptin sensitivity than the forms of fat we normally consume. I’m no expert, but that just popped into my head as a possibility.

Dr. Weil Changes His Deal -Sarah’s back, and I think she makes a fair point in this piece. If full-fat dairy is okay because research doesn’t indicate any negative health effects from saturated fat, why are we still taking the skin off of our chicken? Why are we limiting our saturated fat intake to 10% of calories? That’s such an arbitrary number, and it’s really, really low. Maybe he just hasn’t had a chance to update the rest of his website, or maybe he’s worried about making too many big changes too fast? No idea. But anyway, I think this is a good thing overall. The more “mainstream” health/nutrition gurus who see the light regarding fat, the better off we’ll all be. He’s made good progress in coming as far as he has, and we shouldn’t ding him too hard for not coming all the way around to the “praise the lard” camp. He appears to be willing to change, so it seems likely that eventually, he’ll modify the rest of his recommendations as well.

Boldly Going Where No Man Has Gone Before – This is cool. Vitamin Cottage has been putting some really great stuff in their newsletter and on their blog recently. Not only are they my favorite grocery store, they’re also a good source for info!

Breakfast Casserole – This sounds really good. Having more breakfast options is always a good thing, too.

Thanks for reading!

I made a graph. Sort of.

I’ve been kicking something around a bit, and wanted to share with you all while I still have it more or less solidified in my brain. Here goes:

I’ve been trying to figure out just how restrictive I need to be with my diet to reach my admittedly modest goals. I keep coming back to the graph in this post from Dr. Attia, because I think it’s brilliant: What I actually eat

I’ve made my own, similar version, here:

Okay, so what is this about? It’s about how strict I have to be with my food, really. Dr. Attia is talking about carbohydrate restriction, but I see this in terms of generalized paleo eating as well. So for me, right now, I think I’m probably in the lower left hand box. Maybe on the line between the two bottom boxes, actually. My goals at this point are really simple, and I’ve got decent genes. Here are my goals: I don’t want to feel sick and I don’t want to be fat. I’m okay with being in the 12-18% bodyfat camp right now. I lost twice as much weight during my wife’s pregnancy as she gained (wacky, right?) when most guys I know put on a lot of chub during that period. I feel like a champion. And losing that weight took a little restriction, dietarily. But maintaining really isn’t all that hard. I have to screw up pretty badly to see anything register on the scale or in my waistband. Let’s be clear, I definitely screwed up badly enough to notice some slippage in the past month. But very little, relatively speaking. And I was eating really, really poorly for a lot of that month.

But this graph keeps popping into my head, so I wanted to revisit it, and maybe remind everyone else about it. It’s a great way to think about how much effort you really need to be putting forward. It’s not just about food, either. It can also be about exercise, sleep, and any number of other things. Everyone has to find out how their own personal body works with these various stimuli to move you towards or away from your goals. The thing that I take away from this is that I’m not really gaining anything by restricting myself more than I need to for my goals. So while I have a tendency to beat myself up for eating nachos as often as I do (dude, I seriously love nachos) the simple fact is that I can probably get away with it as long as it’s not holding me back. And right now, it really doesn’t seem to be. The thing that does hold me back from the goals I listed above is too much sugar consumption, and too much dairy consumption (I have discovered that even with grassfed dairy, I can push myself too far, specifically with sour cream, though butter, cheese and heavy cream all seem to be pretty much unlimited). Those are the things in my life where I tend to give myself a little too much slack, and I’ll push it until I feel a little sick or start getting a little fat. I don’t struggle at all avoiding grains or legumes anymore, so that’s a moot point. But anyway, I just wanted to share this with you guys, since I think it’s a useful way to organize thoughts about this stuff.

I ran some more sprintervals this morning, and felt pretty good about them. I think I’m going to rest up and let all my foot and leg muscles recover until race day on Monday. I’m running with a friend who is kind of a fitness maniac, and I’m really just hoping I don’t embarrass myself.

Okay, now for some links! Another good-sized batch today:

Calcium Supplements Linked to Significantly Increased Heart Attack Risk, Study Suggests – I think most people take calcium supplements to improve bone health, but since so many people are Vitamin D deficient, it seems like an easier, safer solution is to get your D levels in order rather than pushing a bunch more calcium into the system.

Blueberry Honey Coconut Cups – These just sound so freaking good.

Why Nutella Is Not Healthy (& A Recipe for Better-Than-Nutella Creamy Chocolate-Hazelnut Spread) -I loved this post from Heba. I’ve never actually eaten Nutella, but I loved the breakdown of all the ingredients in it, and why they’re not good for us. These same ingredients are in so many other processed, packaged food, that it’s easy to see why hardly any of that stuff is good for us. The recipe also sounds like it would be delicious, so maybe my first experiment with Nutella will be with the homemade variety?

How to Make Healthy Jello – Another good one. My wife has been craving Jello recently, and I just got a bunch of the junky stuff, literally minutes before I saw this post. D’oh! Oh well, we’ll get this thing figured out.

Decadent Fruit Dip – I love dipping my food more than any person older than three has any right to.

What Are “Hydrolyzed Soy Protein” And “Hydrolyzed Wheat Protein,” And Why Are They In Everything? – A post from Gnolls.org, which I have come to really love. J. Stanton makes thorough, well-researched, well-reasoned cases in all of his posts. This is a great piece explaining these nasty food-like products that you’ll find in so many packaged, processed foods.

Your Whey Protein and Whey Isolate May Not Be Gluten-Free: Beware “Glutamine Peptides” – I don’t do whey protein (or any protein powders, actually) but I liked the explanation of what the stuff is and how it’s produced anyway. If nothing else, this is just good info to extrapolate to other foods.

Paleolithic Diet May Help Control Diabetes – A cool piece from UCSF on their research into the paleo diet. So far, everything is looking really promising for their trials. UCSF is just on point with all this diet research, it seems. Good for them.

Many more links

Hey guys! I’ve been working through my reader, trying to read all the things that piled up on me while I was out. There’s some good stuff!

But first, a few things about my life. For one, I’ve got that new baby I mentioned, and if you’re at all interested in such things you should check out my blog devoted to fatherhood. I’ll probably keep pimping that one, since it’s a lot of fun and is a great place to post pictures of my adorable spawn.

Secondly, I have been fully slacking on any kind of strength work for quite a while now, and it was starting to show. So today, I did my go-to “Oh crap I forgot to do any kind of strength work before I jumped in the shower this morning” workout, which I like to call Shower Dips. This is where I do tricep dips on the bench in my shower. It’s not as good as doing actual weight lifting in a gym, but it’s certainly better than nothing. I’ve still got high hopes for doing some other sorts of exercise, but my schedule right now is a little wonky. The nice thing is that the baby has inspired us to start going to bed earlier, which means I wake up earlier, too. That meant I had time to go sprint the other day, and it might mean I have time to do other things, too. Fingers crossed.

Finally, I made myself a couple of deviled eggs last night with the baconnaise and I also used some Plochman’s brown mustard instead of the usual French’s yellow. The eggs were different, but still quite good. The bacon taste was very subtle. I’m going to make some more tonight with the yellow mustard and see if the difference is more noticeable with less interference on the mustard side of things.

Think Twice: How the Gut’s “Second Brain” Influences Mood and Well-Being – A cool piece about the influence that our gut has on our brain and the rest of our body. Fascinating information, and it’s neat to see people taking more of an interest in gut health.

Lower Blood Pressure Naturally – Dr. Guyenet lays out some good ways to bring down blood pressure. Very good stuff, though I’ve heard mixed info on historic levels of salt consumption from different sources. Either way, going to a diet based on whole, quality foods as opposed to drive-through burgers will mean a much lower overall sodium intake, and you can probably season your grassfed meat to your heart’s content and still be eating less than you were before.

Crimson Slime – Making Americans Afraid of Meat. – Dr. Feinman is a little late to the party on this one, but it’s a good read anyhow.

How Green Smoothies Can Devastate Your Health – An interesting piece from the HealthyHomeEconomist. I don’t know that I buy the risk here, unless someone is drinking these in absolutely absurd quantities. Juicing, or…smoothie-ing your veggies can make it easier to consume far more than you would be able to do as whole food, which is one of the reasons I’m not a big fan of shakes and smoothies in the first place. But I also don’t know that I think eating a little more kale is going to do people more harm than good. Still, it’s worth reading and thinking about, I suppose. This might be one of those things that Dr. Attia would call a

Hunter-Gatherers and Horticulturalist Lifestyle Linked to Lower Blood Pressure Increases, Atherosclerosis Risks – This is cool, for sure. Obviously, these are observational only, but they’re pointing toward a more traditional lifestyle being protective. Maybe they might inspire some more clinical trials?

High-fat diet lowered blood sugar and improved blood lipids in diabetics – You’d think that eventually we’d have enough of these studies that everyone would stop arguing, but apparently we have not yet reached the requisite number.

Okay, I need to catch you up on a couple series, too. The first is Dr. Peter Attia’s awesome explanation of everything cholesterol. I got you started on this a while back, and he kept going while I slacked off. Anyway, here’s what we have up to this point:

The Straight Dope on Cholesterol, Part III – How do we measure cholesterol?

The Straight Dope on Cholesterol, Part IV – How does cholesterol actually cause problems?

The Straight Dope on Cholesterol, Part V -Does the size of an LDL particle matter?

Second, you should catch up on “The Skinny on Obesity” from Dr. Lustig.This is a fantastic series as well, mostly about sugar and how it makes us fat and sick. it’s a cool series overall, and we have one more episode to go until it’s complete.

The Skinny on Obesity (Ep. 3): Hunger and Hormones- A Vicious Cycle

The Skinny on Obesity (Ep. 4): Sugar – A Sweet Addiction

The Skinny on Obesity (Ep. 5): Generation XL

The Skinny on Obesity (Ep. 6): A Fast-Paced Fast Food Life

The Skinny on Obesity (Extra): Diet and Lifestyle Tips from UCSF Experts

The Skinny on Obesity (Extra): Four Sweet Tips from Dr. Lustig

Back in the saddle

For the purposes of this blog post, saddles are office chairs now. I’m back at work! It was a good two weeks to spend with my wife and baby, but I have to win bread and bring home bacon so we can pay our bills with bacon sandwiches. I would really rather be home, even though home is a much more poop-and-yelling sort of environment these days. I don’t mind poop-and-yelling so much when they’re coming from my tiny boy.

This is what life has looked like for the past two weeks, incidentally:

Fatherhood is reading something manly by Edgar Rice Burroughs to your baby boy with one hand and trying to keep the dog entertained with the other, all without a shirt because it’s much easier to wipe baby-hork off of your bare chest than to change shirts 5 times a day.

Anyway, I’m back into my semi-normal routine now, which means there’s a lot of reading and writing going on. What else is going on? I’m glad I asked. I got up this morning at something like 4:30 to change diaper and jammies on a thoroughly damp baby, and wasn’t really able to get back to sleep afterward. I figured I’d take advantage and go get some running in, so I went and did a quick mile of sprintervals. I’m running a 10K on Monday called the Bolder Boulder, and I haven’t done any real training for it. I’m thinking I might go do 3 miles at a reasonably steady pace on Wednesday, then another sprint day on Friday. We’ll see how well my plans conform to reality, but I’m at least going to try.

My food has been improving over the weekend. There are still a few too many sweet treats, but I’ve reduced my pudding consumption considerably, and have gotten back to making great wads of meat and veggies for most meals. Incidentally, this is one of the best things we’ve bought recently: Nordicware Vegetable Steamer Our microwave has a “Steam” setting, and the manual recommends this container for maximum effectiveness. I had been using the Glad Simply Steam bags, but that always felt so wasteful. I’m glad to have gotten a good-sized, reusable steamer. The broccoli that comes out of this thing is perfect every time, and that’s exactly what I wanted. I love me some broccoli with butter, but I kept cooking it incompletely, and then I’d end up with half a mouthful of raw broccoli or something. Not the end of the world, but I really prefer the texture of steamed. So now, I can get that consistent result without having to throw away some packaging every time. Booyah.

Also, I know I mentioned the paleo mayo I made the other day. I finally had a chance to eat some in reasonable quantity and it was pretty darned good. I mixed it with some Wild Planet tuna and then ate is as a dip with some Kettle chips. Not the most paleo snack ever devised, obviously, but it was a fair test of the mayo and I really wanted some chips. Next thing I want to try is to make some deviled eggs with it. I think that could be really good. Here are some things I learned so far from my first batch: First off, I use too much oil. Seemingly every time. I should stop when it first comes together and starts looking like mayo. If I keep adding, trying to get the right viscosity in the blender, it ends up with an oily mouthfeel. Also, since this is stored in the fridge, it will set up a bit more once it’s cold, even if you just use olive oil. If you also use bacon fat, it will set up even more. So, because I overused the oil, and also added a load of bacon fat, my mayo is pretty darn thick from the fridge. It tastes good, and only slightly bacon-flavored, but the texture is a bit off. Not at all an issue in tuna salad, and probably not in the eggs either, but if I were trying to use it as a base for a salad dressing it might not work very well. Since I want to get good enough at making mayo that I can whip up a batch for various purposes without too much fanfare, this means I will need to do a little more experimenting. Once I get it figured out pretty well, I’ll post a recipe with pictures. I just wanted to give you all a little taste, as it were.

Links:

The Benefits of Fermented Food: Introduction – I know I’ve mentioned several times that I want to get some fermented foods into my diet. It’s a whole food probiotic, so it’s good on all the levels. I know that I have probably done huge damage to my gut throughout my lifetime of bad food choices, so if I can find new ways to add more healthy flora into my insides, I’m on board.

We Want Paleo – This is a great idea. Put in your email address and your ZIP code and the folks running the site will start looking for pockets of paleo power. When they find an area with a significant concentration of paleo enthusiasts, they’ll use the list sort of like a petition, showing local businesses that there is a market for paleo foods, and hopefully inspiring them to start making paleo-friendly offerings. I’ve noticed an explosion in the number of gluten-free offerings available at restaurants and groceries in my area, due to the increased demand. I know that many butcher shops (or meat departments within larger groceries) are offering grassfed beef now because of increases in demand, WholeFoods especially. Having an organization that is looking for areas primed to go paleo, and then making inroads with potentially-friendly businesses is just genius.

Nutrient Loaded Butter Frosting – I can get behind this idea. If you’re going to kick your heels up and have some cake, why not make the cake as nutrient-dense as possible? I’m not talking kale cookies here, I’m saying that if you’re going to make a real for reals cake (still gluten free, but sugar-full) for a special occasion, you might as well jam-pack that baby with some omega 3s and CLA, right? Right.

The Joel Salatin Interview – Joel Salatin is the man behind Polyface Farms, and you know just how hard I love them. In this interview, Joel gives me a massive brain-on by talking about how agriculture can work for America without gov’t subsidies. He also addresses some of his detractors, and absolutely demolishes their arguments with his intelligent, rational, agricultural eloquence. I think I love him.

Is the Paleo Diet Sustainable? – Robb Wolf goes after the environmental argument against paleo, mostly coming from vegans who claim that meat consumption will kill the planet. He makes a great case, and cements my everlasting fanboy status.

Why the Campaign to Stop America’s Obesity Crisis Keep Failing – Taubes being Taubes. ‘Nuff said.

Okay all, that’s it for now. Thanks for reading!

 

Links I’ve Had Sitting In My Browser For Days Now

I’ve been reading little bits and pieces of stuff when I can, and they’ve been gathering in my browser tabs for days now. So here you go. Enjoy!

Paleo Diet Risk Assessment: Update – Robb gives us an update on his project. Such good news!

Comparing High-Protein/Low-Carb diets vs High-Carb/Low-Fat diets – My friend Amanda sent me this one. Very cool breakdown!

Grassfed Meat Should Be Savored Not Gulped – I struggle with this so hard. I’ve always been one who hasn’t chewed food thoroughly, and it’s a hard habit to break. I’m trying, though.

Mixed Berry Creamsicles – I’ve been eating my little frozen pineapple/coconut cups again, as well as some all-fruit frozen pops we picked up. The pops are expensive, though, and the pineapple cups would work much better as pops. So I picked up a popsicle mold, and I’m going to start making my own pops at home. This is a recipe I’m pretty excited to try!

Pepperoni Pizza Pot Pie – Looks tasty! I love me some Applegate Farms pepperoni, and any way I can figure to get more of it into my bacon-hole is a win for me.

The Worst Idea I Ever Had – I like this post a lot. I’m willing to bet there are a bunch of people out there who have had very similar experiences.

Also, I finally made my paleo bacon mayo! I’m still not sure how I feel about it, though, so I’m not going to post my recipe until I have a chance to tweak it a bit more. I also think I need to make much smaller batches, as i don’t go through mayo in the kind of quantities most recipes provide. I’m working on it, though. Don’t you worry your pretty heads, eventually I will conquer this task and then I’ll share the glory that is paleo Baconnaise with everyone.

My wife and son are both doing very well, and all your well wishes are very much appreciated. Our diet has definitely been less-than-ideal of late, but we’ve stayed wheat free for the duration, and have continued to focus on protein and fat. There’s been a little too much pudding in my diet, and a few too many gluten-free oatmeal cookies, but I’m slowly getting us back on track. I’ve been making bacon and eggs for breakfast every morning, and made a nice big pot of zuppa toscana last night. If you haven’t tried that recipe yet, seriously do yourself a favor.

Okay, that’s it from me. Thanks for reading!

I’m a dad!

Hey guys! Just wanted to pop in real quick and let you know that my son was born last week, so that’s why I’ve been so quiet. I’m hoping to get back to regular posting before too long, though. Thanks very much for your patience.

Another quick link post

Found more good stuff for you guys!

I’ve been following “The Grass Fed Girl” for a little while now and she’s posted some great stuff. These two are probably my favorites, though. The first is Paleo, Law-Carb and Gluten Free chain restaurants, a list of a whole mess of chain restaurants that have menus friendly to folks on a paleo/low-carb/ancestral type diet. It’s not going to be as great as that grassfed liver you’ve got in your freezer, but it’s a great way to grab a meal with friends or when you’re traveling without making yourself sick. The second is Grassfed Beef Tallow, a great piece on the wonderful stuff that is beef fat. When we got our last cowpool order they had given us the suet with our meat, but we didn’t quite know what to do with it at that point. If it’s any indication of where my head was at that point, the best we could come up with was candles. Seriously?

The Straight Dope on Cholesterol, Part 2 – Dr. Attia’s giving us all a short course in lipidology or something, because there’s just a huge amount of information in this series. I’m going to have to read it a few more times and probably chase a few links down their respective rabbit holes to feel like I have a proper handle on all this. He does a great job making it as accessible as possible, though, and even if you don’t get it all, there’s a ton of great info in here that I think anyone can benefit from.

Burgers with Liver – I was wondering how to get liver into the mix? I think this is the ticket. I’ve been meaning to make some meatballs or meatloaf recently, and I think mixing in some liver is a fantastic idea.

Art’s Essay on Evolutionary Fitness – Robb Wolf has said multiple times that he thinks Art’s take on fitness is absolutely the best return you can get on your time investment. It’s not going to get you to Olympic athlete levels, but for a busy person with more moderate goals, it sounds like it’s the absolute ticket. When I finally get my butt back into gear to start working out semi-regularly, I think I’m going to give this method a solid shot.

Okay, folks. Short and sweet. Thanks for reading!

More links, because links are what I do best

Some links, you say? Happy to help.

Okay, let’s get to it.

You need these sites: EatWild.com and LocalHarvest.org They’re a great way to find local sources for quality foods.

Through them, I found these two: Touchstone Angus and Lasater Grasslands Beef, which are both 100% grassfed beef sources in CO, pretty close to where I live. I think I mentioned before that the place we had been getting our beef from finishes their beef on corn and flax, instead of finishing on grass. They seem like great folks and the beef is certainly delicious, but I want to go 100% grassfed with our future purchases. We still have a ton in our freezer so we won’t be buying anything any time soon, I don’t think, but when we do, these two are going to be at the top of my list to check out.

Okay, then there’s this guest post by Chris Kresser on Mark’s Daily Apple: 5 Primal Superfoods for Fertility and Pregnancy I’m turning into such a Chris Kresser fanboy, I won’t lie. Anyway, these are things he advises specifically for fertility and pregnancy, but I think they’re solid choices for all people all the time. I already eat quite a few egg yolks (average two a day, I think), and I try to get some good quality pastured dairy (cheese, butter, cream and yogurt, I don’t really drink much milk) on a regular basis. The other things I know I should be better about. I don’t eat enough fish, I don’t supplement with cod liver oil and I don’t eat liver. I actually did buy some liver from VC the other day, though. 100% grassfed and it’s like $3/lb, I think. Crazy cheap for how nutrient dense it is. My wife is not excited about it, so I haven’t actually done anything with it yet, but I’m going to figure something out. It’s one of those things that I know I should be eating like once a week and I’m actually eating not at all. Fish I should be eating 2-3 times per week and I’m actually eating maybe 2-3 times per month. That’s not ideal, either. We’re definitely looking to get some cod liver oil into our lives, though. We want to get the stuff from Green Pasture, since that’s supposed to be the best, with all the good still intact. They also have a butter oil/cod liver oil blend, but what sort of madman has to supplement butter? If you need more butter in your life, you just eat butter. It’s really delicious, I promise. Also, the CLO-only capsules are about half the price of the blend, which I like.

Sleep Duration and BMI in twins – Yeah, sleeping helps keep you lean. It’s science.

Never Leave the Playground – I love this man.

Is eating fish safe? – This is another really important piece by Mr. Kresser. So many people worry about the mercury content of seafood that they just go without, but that’s just bad news. There’s so much good stuff in seafood that we’re really much better off eating it than not eating it, and Chris will tell you why.

Majority of clinical trials don’t provide meaningful evidence – This is sort of disheartening, but it’s better to be aware of it so we can fix it. Science works marvelously if we do it right, but it seems like it doing it right less and less often these days.

Okay, that’s all for today. Thanks for reading!

Gah!

Didn’t mean to go so long between posts, folks. We’re really just on BabyWatch 2012 at our house, and I’m nesting enough for both of us, so things are a little hectic. I’m also trying very hard to get everything set at work so they can manage without me for a few weeks once the baby gets here.

Anyway, things have been pretty quiet on the homefront. I’m trying to keep the fridge stocked with foods that will last a few days, and to cruise through anything that’s likely to go pear-shaped on us if we have to roll out. So last night, I browned some ground beef from our stash I’d thawed out a few days back. I picked up some taco seasoning from the same company that makes the French Onion soup mix we like to use for dip when we have friends over. They’re both gluten-free, which is surprisingly hard to find in pre-made seasoning packets. I’d like to do more of my own scratch-made seasoning things but it’s also nice having some I can just throw together and know they’ll be good every time without relying on me to measure stuff during the cooking process. Unless it’s “add one package of this to one package of that, then stir” I get a bit lost. Anyway, I made some taco meat and made a big dang plate of nachos for my wife and I. She’s not normally into them, but the meat made the whole house smell pretty divine, so she was enticed. For chips and cheese, I go with the Costco organic tortilla chips and either Organic Valley or Rumiano’s grassfed cheeses. Rumiano’s is a newer brand that VC started carrying, and they had them on a great sale so I picked up a ton and stocked our freezer.

I know what you’re thinking. Nachos? That’s not even vaguely paleo. And it isn’t. But it’s one of my comfort foods, and I try to do it with the best ingredients I can, at least. Sometimes, I’ll feel kind of sick after eating them, especially if it’s a big batch. But other times, they give me no trouble. Here’s what I’ve determined. A few times recently, when they’ve made me feel sick, it was when I was going through some of our remaining Tillamook cheddar, which isn’t grassfed by any means. I can do a little of that stuff, but not very much. I think it’s all gone now, so that shouldn’t be a problem anymore. The driving force behind my sometimes eating things I shouldn’t is that I have this thing where I hate to waste food. I have a bunch of crackers and girl scout cookies in my basement, and I just can’t bring myself to throw them away. I’m never going to eat them, unless the zombies rise and it’s all I have left. But still, I can’t get rid of it. And since we buy things in bulk, I still have some of my “pre-paleo” foods around that I’ll try to get through just because I don’t like feeling like I’m wasting it. Most of them follow my rule of “don’t make me feel like butts” but with the conventional cheese, I can push it a little and end up in Buttsville. I’m pretty sure that’s all gone now, though, so all my cheese from here on out will be the good stuff that I can eat my the truckload without feeling sick.

So anyway, where was I? Oh yeah, foods. I eat them. It works for me.

Now to the links!

Pankoconut Fish Sticks – I like the wordplay in the title, and something crunchy-breaded does sound pretty tasty. I think this could make for some extremely tasty shrimp, for sure.

An Apple a Day Does Not Keep the Doctor Away – This is a cool piece by Zoe Harcombe about a lot of the bad science, bad recommendations and unfounded food myths that dominate the landscape. I’ve been curious about the role of insoluble fiber in digestive health of late, and it seems that it was with good reason. I’ll have to keep reading on that, for sure.

Dirt: A Paleo Superfood? – This is Chris Kresser’s take on the hygiene hypothesis. I think playing in the dirt is important for all of us, kids and adults alike.

Breastfeeding linked to healthy infant gut – Yeah, it is.

That’s all, my friends. Talk to you soon, and thanks for reading!