I have three posts in draft and tons of comments that need reading and if necessary, responding to. I’m so gratified that the comment board is so self-policing and I don’t need to moderate. And that allows discussions to go on when I’m off doing something else or disciplining myself with book writing or drafting new posts (in the works: How Anthony Colpo needs to get a life; Does IQ mean anything? How to get of PPIs).
In the meantime, breakfast. First up is a simple one. I love over easy eggs on top of cubed potatoes fried in bacon drippings (I use a wok) with some onion. Nothing like warm liquid yolk coating those fries.
Bacon, Eggs & Fried Potatoes
Next is a bit more variety. Same bacon & eggs, but with leftover smoked salmon with crème fraiche, some cottage cheese with some yogurt stirred in for the gut critters, and some leftover camembert.
Bacon, Eggs & Variety
Ok, I should get that Anthony "The Asshole" Colpo post out soon. It’s not going to be long. He’s not worth it.
Now I’m thinking about going home and doing some “breakfast for supper”! I don’t think I will ever get tired of eggs. Here’s some of my breakfast food porn; free-range Omega3 eggs, wild boar ham, scratch hollandaise, and parsnip latkes:
http://www.delicat.ca/index.php/2010/01/15/eggs-benedict-with-parsnip-latkes/
Excdllent AmyT. I really have to make Hollandaise more often.
Are potatoes paleo? I guess we all need a little indulgence now and again.
Nick:
Debatable as to whether regular white potatoes are paleo, but sweet potatoes, yams and such certainly are.
Don Matesz did a whole series on the potato. You’ll need to read the posts in reverse order.
http://donmatesz.blogspot.com/search/label/Primal%20Potatoes
Thanks for the link. I’ll read through it and see what side I come down on. Either way, I think it’s important to keep it 80/20 and if potatoes in bacon fat do it for you I say go for it!
As Oscar Wilde said, “The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it once in a while.”
I just attended a lecture by paleoarcheologist Jack Harris. The evidence he presented is that the genus Homo evolved in distal flood plains forest, such as at Lake Turkana about 2 million years ago, where the abundant edible plants include: palm nuts, tubers of various types, and berries. There were also termites, snails, land mammals and birds. The archeological remains from this field site includes bones that appear to have been used as tools to extract termites and tubers by digging in the ground. So potatoes are paleo!
I used to think potatoes were a total no-no to be strictly primal (this was in theory: I wasn’t actually living paleo at the time), but Kurt Harris, I think it was, pointed out something that made me think.
Unlike a lot of people here, I’ve actually lived off the land as a teenager on Vancouver Island, in British Columbia.
Only for 3 months, but it was an eye-opening experience.
Not only did I go from obesity and sloth to leanness and energy (yet not realize the reasons for it, so therefore didn’t keep it up… instead I went to long distance running, and eating lots of grains, and finally working as a “cook” at Dairy Queen, and eating worse than you could imagine… which eventually even killed the running as I packed on the pounds)… I learned a lot about how our native people on the coast captured and gathered food.
Berries, while awesome, are highly seasonal. And there are NO bananas, apples, oranges, etc.
Rose hips, sure.
But there are a lot of tubers and rhizomes.
So as was pointed out to me, we got more starch than fructose in our natural diet, at least in most environments. My experience tracks that.
So while it’s great that modern fruit has a lot of water and vitamins, the pure quantity of fructose and sweet carbohydrate it contains exceeded what we would have got in nature.
Wow – thanks Christoph! That is something I hadn’t heard before. Think I’ll go buy a potato and ditch the berries for a few days.
While there are a lot of tubers, they are root tubers and potatoes are stem tubers. The only “edible” stem tuber I am aware of. The tubers being on the surface, and necessary for the reproductive cycle, have to have toxins to protect from being eaten by animals. Hence they are not edible raw. One of the guidelines of a paleo diet is the food should be edible raw.
They are a member of the nightshade/Solanaceae family. Nightshades are often rich in alkaloids, which can be toxic, especially for people with arthritis/osteoarthritis.
That rule does not really apply to tubers. The reason being they are easily cooked in a bed of ambers. Humans have been using fire for at least half a million years.
Just imagine cooking meat over fire and then putting the tubers in the ambers once the fire died out.
I think tubers were a great addition to the diet as it provided a lot of calories increasing survivability. The other thing is that there is a limit on how much protein we can use. The rest would come from fat, if we killed a large animal, but its not their when a small animal is killed. So tubers would help to balance the protein.
Almost all people near the coast, eat a lot of fish. The fish has too much protein, compared to fat and must be balanced by carbs. This is the reason much of coastal population either eats tubers or rice.
Now for something offtopic.
Richard have you experimented with fermented foods.
I did last week. I ate a whole lot of aged kefir (more than a week in the fridge). I normally don’t have a very good digestive system, but for the last week it was really good. Now after a week it is feeling like it has returned to its bad self. I guess I need to eat a lot of that stuff.
I am realizing that we need a constant supplementation of good bacteria. Possibly our ill health is also related to the invention of fridge. With the refridgerator, food stays fresh longer but it does not get the healthy bacteria. Our digestive system depends on it.
I think that may be the reason that so many people in the west get allergic symptoms. In India and other countries, where people don’t live in a septic environment, don’t have such allergic symptoms. I found out that my friends children living in Canada have allergic symptoms. I looked at their diet, and its too septic.
Re: Using fire for a half million years
Yes, but all that evidence is from people that moved out of Africa and died off. We are all descended from the last migration out of Africa 50,000 years ago. I am not aware of any evidence of fire use in Africa before then.
Since meat is edible raw there is no reason they would have gone to the hassle of maintaining a fire to cook it.
Why would they have wanted tubers to balance the protein? They knew nothing about protein/fat/carbs. It was just food to them.
Besides potatoes are New World and they couldn’t have been in our ancestors diet. And if you are a Native American they weren’t in the diet until recently.
Re: kefir
There is a coconut kefir that is more paleo than dairy. The problem with it, besides the guar gum, is it is over engineered. To stabilize it (no shaking needed) they ended up with a slimy product. See:
I don’t think you believe traditional recipes try to balance proteins by using grains and legumes together. Obviously they don’t know anything about incomplete proteins.
The thing you are not realizing is that nature teaches a lot of empirical results. Ofcourse they would balance their protein with fat or carbs, if the body does not accept too much protein. That is a basic requirement for survivability. Rabbit starvation is a very important reality in traditional people living in northern climates.
The problem with warm climates is that everything gets digested by the bacteria, and nothing remains for the archeologists. How will they find evidence of fire, in warm humid, Africa. That doesn’t mean that would not have known about fire. Read about AMY1 expansion during the last 200,000 years.
I don’t think coconut kefir will be more paleo than dairy, if you need to put a whole lot of things to stabilize it. I am an Indian, and my body is able to digest lactose very well. Also Kefir does not have much of lactose. For me and other lactose tolerant people kefir is quite good, doesn’t matter if it is not paleo.
You could just leave your meat outside with some lactobacillus on it. I don’t know where you would get it. You could dip in water till it starts to ferment ;-), ala inuits.
There would be no problem with rabbit sickness. Besides eating all the fat in the animal, fruit is plentiful in Africa. It is unlikely that they completely left the forest where they came from and were most knowledgeable. They most likely lived at the edge of the forest and the savanna, or edge of the forest and ocean.
The problem with dairy is not the lactose. It is just a sugar. The problem is the casein protein. Do a little search. You will find numerous medical issues with casein. One of the reasons to be on a paleo diet is to avoid diseases of civilization. You won’t avoid them all if you continue to consume casein. You won’t find any issues with guar gum, other than it is a bean.
One thing I see here and elsewhere is people have favorite foods that they don’t want to give up. So they do what they can to argue keeping that food as being paleo acceptable.
I think most proteins are not a problem if you have good level of stomach acidity. Its there to break the protein down to its constituent amino acids. The problem happens when due to possibly fibers the acidity reduces. Then proteins don’t get properly broken down. Also if you have leaky gut syndrome, which happens due to too little gut bacteria and one of the reasons is also too much fiber, the protein might escape into blood. This is when all sorts of problems start to happen.
I think food allergies are more of an indication of a compromised digestive system than anything else.
I know that casein causes a lot of problem. But also understand that the problems are related to leaky gut syndrome.
In my case its not that I cannot give up these foods, but I live with a vegetarian. Also I don’t think that its actually that much healthier, to give up cheeses and home made yogurt (sort of like kefir).
I don’t really have any other easily available fermented food.
Yeah, that’s why Kurt Harris leaves dairy elimination as the final step in PaNu — many if not most people find that eliminating grains fixes their leaky gut enough that dairy is no longer an issue.
As far as fermented foods, sauerkraut and such aren’t quite as quick and easy as kefir, but still pretty simple and requiring minimal effort.
“Just imagine cooking meat over fire and then putting the tubers in the ambers once the fire died out.”
Oh yes, and all these years later, it’s still a damn good way to cook potatoes. :-)
Paleo eating has always been easy and natural for me…except the “ban” on potatoes…I boil them, cut them up and fry them along with onions in lard/bacon grease….German style…once every week or two is good for me….Arghh
Yep, German style is the way to go. My favorite.
Thanks for your “potatoe” link above…somehow I missed this guy…he likes steak tartare as much as I do…though I do it a little different…I like his food ideas
American bacon always look weird – thin and crispy.
I like it like this http://shop.hotscot.net/customer_images/E5EF3591-DC95-4F40-86AC-F4B558D092A6/large/organic%20bacon%20-%20large.jpg
or
http://t3.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:HKFzQlnF5T7SGM:http://www.scottishgourmetusa.com/images/products/M4BB.jpg
Yea but that’s uncooked, cooked looks different. Plus. That looks like what we call prosciutto:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosciutto
It’s basically cured. You eat it without cooking.
It’s usually served as apps. One of my favorite uses is to wrap it around asparagus and in this case, grill it.
Sounds nice.
I think maybe much of our bacon is more like what you would call ham or a bacon joint.
Fuck, now I’m hungry.
Then EAT, Aaron.
I will as soon as I get home. I only have chocolate in my office at the moment.
Only chocolate? What happened to the sardines in olive oil? Coconut butter? Lay in the supplies! But chocolate is an ok start…not that I have a stash in my office!
Let’s just say a trip to the supermarket is long overdue.
Hi Richard,
Speaking of Anthony Colpo, I got this from him yesterday. Back attacking Dr Mike Eades only this time I think he must be on too many steroids. I’m ashamed to be a fellow Australian.
If you can get through the vitriol the guy really is very smart. Pity his message gets lost in the anger.
http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=K69Zp&m=1eegLigsyQ3NdL&b=K1F9_NNHSE7dp6IZ5mED.w
Those are a couple of fine looking meals! Love the eggs on potatoes. I did something like that with ham and onions on the base and two eggs cooked sunny side up on top of the ham.
Richard, perhaps you can help me. Do you know anything about New Orleans Creole cuisine? If you do, an ingredient used in many of the dishes is roux–a thickener made up of cooked flour and fat. I no longer eat flour/grains, but I sure do miss some of those dishes, and I am jonesing for Shrimp Etouffee. Do you know of any paleo ways to make a roux? Do you think that creme fraiche would work? Any thoughts would be welcome by you or your readers.
Thanks,
redcatbicycliste
Actually, I did a roux the other day using potato starch but I suppose one could use any or the tuber starches and see which one works best.
Richard, I don’t find your breakfasts to be paleo at all: I discussed potatoes above. Bacon is a processed food with chemicals that are not paleo. Sausage would be better. And dairy certainly isn’t paleo.
I make a large breakfast and then only eat most of it, with the rest eaten later. It consists of:
1 1/2 Pakistani kabobs
4 eggs (bought from the farmer)
~.15 lb of freshly ground organic walnuts (using old style oval Krups coffee grinder)
~1 cup homemade applesauce
6 oz frozen raspberries (Dole or Wymans)
5 oz frozen Wymans wild blueberries
1 plain coconut yogurt:
All in a big pile layered as listed above. (Berries defrosted either partially in the refrigerator overnight, or entirely in the microwave. I use a scale to split the bags of berries up evenly, and knowing the weight allows me to learn the microwave times.)
I’m not too much into nit picking what’s paleo and not so long as we’re talking about real food. I get most of my bacon high quality smoked, uncured, sliced by the butcher. Don’t really see a big difference between that and grinding up meat & added fat to make sausage or ground beef.
Uncured is fine. One can’t tell from the picture.
Richard – my latest weekend treat is a variation of the breakfast you made, except I fry the potato (cut into thin rounds) in lard/bacon fat and make a spanish type of omelette out of it…
I eat it with organic ketchup (no HCFS) and Pepper Plant Hot Sauce – divine!
Again, one must beat the dead horse. Pastured butter is better for you than berries. Pastured yogurt is more nutritious than root vegetables. Full fat, raw milk and potatoes are much better for you than honey. Honey, berries, and vegetables are paleo. If something wasn’t eaten 10,000, 1 million, or 3 million years ago ( whatever the date de jour is for the evolutionists) that makes it inferior? Nonsense.