The Ultimate Skeptic Versus Stainless Steel

I am the ultimate skeptic. I don't believe in much. When I hear fantastic claims I might smile and nod but inside I'm going, "Yeah, sure. Whatever you say. Ummmm hummm." So whenever I saw those stainless steel bars of soap you're supposed to wash your hands with to get rid of stinky garlic smells, I always thought, "There's a sucker born ever minute".

But underneath that hard crusty skeptical exterior there's a little girl that believes in magic, unicorns, Djinni's, frogs that turn into princes, wizards who hurl lightning bolts from their fingers and so on. Every now and then I succumb to my desire to find magic in the world and buy something that over promises, usually it's in the form of nutritional supplements.

Ok, this time it wasn't longevity in a bottle I bought, but a stainless steel garlic press. I've been disappointed with garlic presses in the past, they just didn't work well. But I was assured this one was a really good one, it had rave reviews on Amazon. A number of people mentioned you could rub your stinky garlicky fingers on it after working with the garlic and it'd remove the smell.

So the press came in the mail and yes, it presses garlic very nicely. I had to try, even though I didn't actually need garlic for anything. But after cleaning it my fingers stunk (or smelled good, depends on your point of view I suppose). So feeling a little foolish I took the garlic press to the sink and rinsed it, and my hands rubbing my stinky fingers against it.

I dried my hands and sniffed...

There was NO garlic smell! It absolutely does work. I walked around the house in stunned disbelief. There is magic in the world!

Now please excuse me while I go and try to faith heal, commune with long dead ancestors, try to hurl a lightning bolt from my fingertips, and look for a Unicorn!

Flatten that Chicken!

I'm excited. I have found something I really love. It is thrifty and delicious. It is butterflied or spatchcocked chicken.

Basically what you do is buy a whole chicken and flatten it. It isn't difficult at all, but it is a bit messy. Be sure you save everything you remove from the chicken and freeze it for making a good bone stock later on. And I mean everything, giblets, neck, breastbone, backbone. After you eat some chicken, save the bones!

I bought two chickens at Costco, .99 cents a pound. Compare that to $2.99 a pound cut-up fryer from Trader Joe's. What a deal.

Here's a tutorial of how to "spatchcock" a chicken, complete with pictures.

Ok, the price savings is nice but there are other benefits:

• More surface area: It is great for holding onto any sort of coating, like... ummm... a mustard crust perhaps?
• Faster cooking time: A whole chicken might take an hour or more to cook. A flattened chicken takes 30-45 minutes, depending on method and temperature.
• More skin! I adore eating chicken skin but you miss out on a lot of skin if you buy pre-cut up chickens.

I caught a glimpse of Jacques Pepin on PBS recently making this Mustard Crusted Chicken recipe and I just had to try it. I've butterflied a few chickens, thanks to Alton Brown's wonderful show displaying the technique, and when I saw that this was first cooked in a oven-safe skillet (to brown up the back, I suspect) it looked to me like it was winner. I've had such great luck cooking steak in skillet, then oven, that I could imagine cooking a bird this way would be fantastic.

The only differences were that I removed the legs and wings, misunderstanding his instructions which should just have had me cutting through the meat so they cook faster. But it also made the bird fit into my cast iron skillet a little better.

This chicken recipe cooks in a mere 30 minutes in the oven and the smell is intoxicating. The taste? Wow! I'm going to be using this recipe over and over.

I was trying to play a computer game upstairs while this chicken was cooking but the smell totally derailed my concentration. I had to stop playing and come downstairs to be closer to my meal.

Thickening Revisted

I got a chance to use the Konjac flour today and it worked pretty well. I made a stir fry and used about 1/4 tsp of the flour. I mixed it with water first. It turns the water to a gel. Then you scoop that gel into the liquid part of your stir fry, as you're boiling it. In the future I might use 3/8th of a tsp as it seemed like the thickening power of 1/4 tsp wasn't quite as much as I needed. But I think this might end up being my favorite stir fry thickener so far!

Coconut Flour dalliances

I've been toying with coconut flour again. I made my sister a muffin from coconut flour, egg, lemon juice, sweetener and baking powder and she loved it. As usual I didn't measure, I just guessed. So I didn't have a recipe to give her. Now I'm trying to nail down a recipe and I can't duplicate it.

Well, sooner or later I'm bound to get it right and when I do I will post it here.

The Thickening Thicket

I'm back to experimenting with thickeners. My last stir-fry I tried to skip the cornstarch and used some not/Sugar instead, which is a mixture of vegetable gums. It got thick when I mixed it with water but promptly lost it when I poured it into the stir fry juices.

I have some xanthan gum and haven't tried that. But I stumbled upon something I hadn't considered! Glucomanan flour or Konjac flour. It's a type of plant sometimes referred to as a yam. I bought it a couple years ago thinking it was something I could use as flour and I had awful gastrointestinal consequences from that. But turns out, it really isn't something you should use like that, but more like a substance to create a gel or thicken stuff.

Here's an article out using Konjac flour to thicken things:
The low carb thickener - Konjac flour

So back to the stir-fry drawing board!

Stir Fry Crazy

All of a sudden I can't get enough Chinese style stir-fry. Broccoli in particular makes me crazy when it has been stir-fried. I found a recipe for a stir-fry sauce that I absolutely love. It does go out-of-bounds on the Paleo front a bit but the meat and veggies in a stir fry are absolutely positively Paleo.

This reminds me very much of House Special Chicken from Pickup-Stix.

1/4 Cup Wheat Free Tamari Sauce
1/4 Cup of Water
1/4 Cup (equivalent) of a sweetener (or honey)

Mix these 3 ingredients and marinate your meat (I usually use chicken).

Now I feel like veggies and meat used in a stir-fry should be the cooks choice. I generally use broccoli, mushroom, onions and whatever else I have on hand, like Bok Choy.

I like to stir-fry the broccoli and perhaps mushrooms and onions before anything else because they take awhile to get to the desired doneness. Something tender like boy choy should be last. Then I remove those from the wok and stir-fry the chicken (lift it out of the marinade with a slotted spoon, save the marinade). Then I add in the tender veggies and put back the pre-cooked veggies and fry very briefly.

Next you want to take about 2 Tablespoons of Cornstarch (yes, NOT paleo, but only 7 carbs each, and you probably won't use it all) and mix with enough water to get it liquid.

Now pour the marinade into the wok and when it begins to boil add enough of the cornstarch solution to get it thick enough to suit you.

Depending on how much meat/veggies you use, this will make 4 servings or so. So 1-2 Tbl of cornstarch divided over all those servings isn't bad carb-wise.

One could try using gums and I will give that a shot at some point and report back. But for now, the cornstarch seems like a minor transgression.

Still stuck on the egg crepes!

I often make these for breakfast and lately for dessert as a bed time snack. If I have any mostly-paleo lemon curd on hand, I might top them with that!