A Weeks Worth Of Paleo Dinners

My husband takes leftovers to work everyday and told me he was "the envy of all the other guys" because of all the yummy food he brings for lunch.  He then told me he gloated that his wife makes him breakfast, and packs his lunch for him every morning.  Just telling me that renewed my enthusiasm for taking care of him in this way.  (Mind you, it's taken me 7 years to teach myself how to cook, and to care enough to actually help Jese eat well outside of the house! lol Four years ago I would have laughed at him for asking me to pack his lunch for him!) Isn't it funny how something so small as complimenting me in front of others makes the inconvenience all worth while?  If men only knew it took so little to make us happy...  :-)

So anyway!  I've been on a roll with my meal prep this week and wanted to give you my menu to try in your house.  All are 95-100% Paleo:

MONDAY: Easy Taco Salad
Ingredients -

• 1# Ground Bison (you can also use beef)
• 1 Pack Taco Seasoning*
• Baby Spinach (enough for 2-3 salads)
• Salad Toppings - I like red/yellow/orange bell peppers, and onion (fresh)

Guacamole Dressing:

• 2-3 Avocado's**
• Garlic Powder to taste
• Lime Juice to taste
• Sea Salt to taste

*Taco Seasoning - this is a convenience item that is not 100% paleo... I look in the spice isle and compare all of the taco seasoning packets available and choose the "most paleo" one.  It usually means the one that has the most recognizable spices, no chemicals I can't pronounce, and sugar (which is the non-paleo ingredient).  You can easily mix your own, but life is busy and this is a convenience item I allow every once in a while)
**Avocado - Usually you can get away with 1/2 an avocado per person as a guacamole topping but since I am preggo I need more fat for baby's brain development and get to eat as much as I want!!! :D SCORE!

PROCESS:

• Brown bison in a skillet
• Add in Taco Seasoning with 3/4 cups water.  Bring water to a boil then turn down heat and simmer until water is almost completely evaporated.
• While meat is browning/simmering, cut up bell peppers and onions
• To make the guac, cut up as many avocado as you would like to use (again I do about 1 per person, but 1/2 per person is more of a non-preggo serving size).  Place avocado meat in a small dish and mash with a fork.  Add in Garlic Powder, Lime Juice, and Sea Salt to taste (add a little at a time as to not over do it!).
• Top baby spinach with fresh cut peppers/onions, taco meat, and guac.

ENJOY!

TUESDAY: Agave Grilled Chicken with Citrus Mint Salsa
Agave Grilled Chicken with Citrus Mint Salsa... YUMMM!!!!
RECIPE: INGREDIENTS:
2 large oranges
¼ cup extra virgin olive oil
¼ cup fresh lemon juice
½ cup chopped Italian parsley
2 green onions, finely sliced
3 Tbsp. mint, chopped
2 Tbsp. capers, rinsed, drained and coarsely chopped
2 Tbsp. orange zest
1 tsp. lemon zest
1 tsp. crushed red pepper flakes
Sea salt/ground black pepper
4 boneless, skinless chicken breasts
2-3 Tbsp. Amber agave nectar


CITRUS MINT SALSA:
Chop up oranges into small chunks. Place in medium bowl. Add the olive oil, lemon juice, parsley, green onions, mint, capers, orange zest, lemon zest, and red pepper flakes. Toss lightly and season with salt and pepper to tastes. Set Aside.


AGAVE GRILLED CHICKEN:
Heat a grill or grill pan over medium-high heat. Brush the grilling rack with olive oil so the chicken will not stick to it. Brush the chicken on both sides with the agave nectar and season with salt and pepper to tastes. Grill chicken until done. Spoon salsa over chicken.





WEDNESDAY: Strawberry Bacon Chicken Salad
Serves 2 with chicken left over
Ingredients:

• 1/2 - 1 bag of Baby Spinach
• 3-4 chix breast
• 2 cups Chicken Broth
• Salt/Pepper to taste
• 1 container of fresh strawberries
• 1/2 red onion
• 4-6 strips bacon per salad (no nitrate bacon... nitrates act like a carcinogen in your body.  Look at the ingredient label to see if your bacon has it.  Usually health food stores sell no nitrates bacon)
• Slivered almonds
• Strawberry Vinaigrette (or any dressing of choice.  I use a store bought one I found with no high fructose corn syrup and only ingredients I could recognize as real food!)

PROCESS:

• In a covered skillet cook chicken breasts on med/high heat in a shallow pool of chicken broth (to keep them from drying out).  Add salt pepper to taste.
• I turn the chicken over every 4-5 minutes.  It usually takes 15-20 minutes to cook but my grocery store only sells REALLY thick breasts so just cut into the breasts periodically to check if it is done.
• While chicken is cooking, also cook the bacon.
• While chicken and bacon are cooking cut up strawberries, and red onion, throw in individual salad bowls with baby spinach.
• Once chicken and bacon are done, cut them up and toss into salad.
• Top each salad with slivered almonds and a small amount of dressing.

Use the leftover chicken tomorrow to make the same salad for lunch! :D Yummmm!

THURSDAY: Coconut Crusted Shrimp

• 1 lb large shrimp, tail on peeled and deveined
• 1/3 cup coconut flour
• ½ teaspoon sea salt
• ¼ teaspoon cayenne pepper
• 2 Tbs Mrs Dash Southwest Chipolte
• 1 Tbs Garlic Powder 
• 3 egg whites
• 2 cups coconut flakes

PROCESS:  Pre heat oven to 400. In a mixing bowl, stir together the coconut flour, salt, and cayenne pepper. In a separate bowl, beat the egg whites until foamy.  In another bowl, pour the coconut flakes.  Taking one shrimp at a time, dry well with a paper towel and dredge each shrimp in the coconut flour mixture, dip into the egg whites and then roll into the coconut flakes.  Bake on a lightly greased (with coconut oil) baking sheet for 12- 15 minutes or until the shrimp are pink and the coconut flakes start to brown.

FRIDAY: Chicken Salad
This is another 95% paleo recipe.  There are ways to make paleo mayonaise for chicken salad, but I've tried it a few times over the last year and it just takes WAY to freaking long!  So I just buy the Olive Oil mayo in the jar.  If you look at the ingredients they usually list canola or soybean oil before the olive oil so you know they use more of the first than last in the recipe.  Oh well! Also a lot of the recipe is not exact measurements.  Just put in however much you like and taste test as you go.

Ingredients:

• 3-5 chix breasts
• approx 2 cups chicken stock
• garlic powder/salt/pepper to taste
• appox 1-2 cups mayonaise 
• approx 1-2 tsp honey mustard (I buy in a jar and check the ingredients for any chemicals or mystery items)
• 1 cup craisins or raisins or both
• 1 cup chopped walnuts or pecans or both

Process:

• In a large skillet put chicken breasts, chicken stock, and garlic powder/salt/pepper together and heat to a boil.
• Once boiling, turn down to a high simmer and flip chicken periodically until they are cooked all the way through (usually 8-15 minutes depending on how think your breasts are). 
• Drain skillet and remove chicken and place in large mixing or salad bowl. 
• Shred chicken (I use my pampered chef lettuce scissors which are AWESOME for shredding meat)
• Now from here on out its up to you how much of the ingredients you want to put in the mix.  I usually use a small jar (approx 1 cup) of mayo for 5-6 breasts (but I like my salad a little bit dry so you  may want more).  
• Add in 1-2 tsp honey mustard - Dont add too much, it will ruin the salad unless you REALLY like mustard. 
• After mixing the mayo/mustard in,  add a little salt/pepper, and then stir in as many craisins/raisins/walnuts as you like... I like A LOT!   

I will pile the chicken salad on top of a big bowl of baby spinach, and fresh strawberries for a great dinner or lunch! 

Ahhhhh!!!! Don't get your nutrition info from companies trying to sell you something Mom!

The more I grow as a fitness and health professional the more I am enraged (yes, enraged) by the messages the public receives from the media and advertisements.  There is so much conflicting information out there that none of us stand a chance of knowing what is and what is not healthy.  Most of this conflicting info comes from advertisements for products the company is trying to get you to buy.  So moral of the story... if something is trying to be sold, the "credible" research it is boasting about is probably not that credible at all.

Exhibit A:  

Corn Sugar or Cane Sugar: Body Can't Tell The Difference

HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA (okay you get the idea)- 

This drives me INSANE!!!  There IS a difference between High Fructose Corn Syrup and Cane Sugar.  HFCS is created in a lab.  There is nothing natural about it.  Fructose, although found in fruits and vegetables, is very dangerous in its unnatural forms and in high doses.  "A recent USDA report found that the average American eats 152 pounds of sugar each year, including almost 64 pounds of HFCS (Kresser, 2012)".  The problem with fructose is that the body does not treat it like natural sugar.  Rather than being delivered into the bloodstream and then taken into the cell with the help of the hormone insulin, fructose goes straight to the liver to be converted to fat (usually deposited around the mid-section).  The body treats fructose as if it were a toxin like alcohol.  AKA Your body treats it like poison because it IS in fact poison.  (Kresser, 2012)  So why is this important for preggos?  1) Whether you are preggo or not HFCS is BAD, poison, toxic for your body.  2) HFCS, and any sugar at that, crosses the placenta and enters your growing baby's body.  So not only are we poisoning ourselves, adding to our own midsection inches, and increasing our chance of developing diabetes (gestational and Type 2), obesity, heart disease, auto immune disorders, cancer, etc...... But we are ALSO poisoning our growing babies.  Enough said.

Hungry for more sugar education? Watch this:

Onto Exhibit B: 

Grain = Healthy - I call Bull Sh..!!!  

Ugh... this one is the worst I've seen thus far.  It truly plays to our "common sense" and to our own frustration with not knowing what is and what is not healthy.  They then insert their product at the end to help you come to the conclusion that their Grain is truly Great!  Oh they also have very tall, skinny model types telling you all of this... insert subliminal message of "eat this cereal and you will grow ten inches and drop 30lbs".

The next post I am going to write is about Grain and Soy (the two most toxic "health foods" out there).  I'll touch on grain just a little now.

Grain, like all living creatures, is equipped with a means for survival and reproduction.  Humans can run away from their predators, blueberries can be eaten and get their seeds deposited back into the earth in warm fertilizer to grow more blueberries, but grains can neither run nor be pooped out knowing that the next generation will live on.  When eaten they are destroyed.  Their plot against their predators?  Destroy the predator from the inside out.   They do this in multiple ways:  Upon consumption they produce toxins that damage the lining of the gut of whatever ate them.  These toxins then bind to the good nutrients we eat making them unavailable for our body to absorb.  Lastly they rip up our intestinal tract to leave lasting damage and make it harder for future nutrients (like protein) to get in.   Think of grain like a steel bristled grill brush scraping the insides of your intestines.  Yup.  Sounds fun!  But wait, I eat grain at every meal Cassandra and I feel fine?  I double dog dare you friend to take out all grain based products from your diet for a month.   30 days.  Thats all.  Then have a bowl of your favorite cereal.  The horrible pain that will ensue will show you just how much damage those toxins are doing to you.  Since most of us have eaten grain/flour based foods since infancy we do not realize the damage being done because we've always lived with it. 30 days.... I dare you.

Obviously this is dangerous for anyone and everyone, but it goes without saying that when growing a human your body and baby needs all the good nutrients it can get.  If our GI tract is damaged taking the time to put thought into what we eat for us and baby is a little silly since a lot of the good nutrients aren't able to pass through the damage and get into our systems.   Wait Cassandra!  Did you just tell me that since I don't want to give up my honey nut cheerios that I can eat crap all day because even if I ate the good stuff it wouldn't get in?  No friends, I am not saying that.  I am trying to make the point that this "health food" is not so healthy, and in the history of mankind has never been consumed in the amounts that our modern society consumes it (well maybe except for medieval times and I dont know about you but rickets, the plague, and God knows what else does not sound like a good time to relive in human history.  Their sickness was not about unsanitary conditions but mostly about a failure to thrive from the poor quality calories being consumed when replacing a hunter gatherer diet with the "civilized" farmers diet of that time.)

(On Guard!)

Modern food pyramid diets of 5-7 portions of "healthy" grains does not equal looking like a model in a field of wheat! It equals modern diseases in our later years.  So if you don't want a side of cancer with your Cheerios you might want to read more on this crazy Paleo thing we're all talking about!!

Don't listen to these commercials friends.  They are full of it.  They are sleezy car salesman dressed up like a handsome dad or mom.  The devil shows himself in the cover of beauty and pleasure.  Don't believe what he says!  (Yes I just called these companies the devil lol)

Here is a very pleasurable recipe that the devil has not touched:

Pineapple-Glazed Chicken Skewers - 

"Make It Paleo" Cookbook

INGREDIENTS:

• 1 cup pineapple diced
• 1/3 cup extra virgin olive oil
• 3 cloves garlic
• 1 TBSP ginger, minced
• juice of 1 lemon
• 1 tsp salt
• 1 TBSP cilantro minced (I didn't add this in)
• 3 chicken breasts
• 3 cups pineapple cut into chunks

PROCESS:

• Combine diced pineapple, olive oil, garlic, ginger, lemon juice, and salt in a small bowl
• Puree mixture in a blender or food processor
• Pour back into the small mixing bowl and stir in the minced cilantro
• Set mixture aside to use as a glaze during grilling
• Preheat grill to medium-high heat (we don't have a grill so I used a broiling pan and broiled the skewers in my oven)
• Skewer pieces of chicken and pineapple on metal or presoaked bamboo skewers
• Grill skewers for 12-15 minutes (or until chicken is done), turning every 4 minutes
• Each time you turn the skewer brush them with the pineapple glaze (I practically drowned my skewers in the glaze because I had so much of it!)

Be prepared for awesome in your mouth! Yummmm!



Kresser, C. (2012). 9 Steps to Perfect Health. 

Delayed Umbilical Cord Clamping: Beneficial or Doesn't Matter

I know this isn't Paleo but it goes along with the "primal" way of doing things.

Here is a very simple explanation of why not cutting the umbilical cord right away is beneficial to baby:

I also thought this next video was interesting.  It's 15min long so here are some good points he makes if you don't want to watch the whole thing:

The umbilical cord is the baby's oxygen source inside the mom.  As long as the placenta is attached oxygen rich blood is still being delivered to the baby and breathing solely through the respiratory system (lungs) is not a necessity.  By cutting the cord while it is still filled with blood (pulsating) we are cutting the primary oxygen source that the infant has been relying on for 9 months and forcing them to breath on their own.  Main question to ask yourself is why would the risk of cutting off an oxygen source to your baby be created if there is no benefit or reason to cut the cord immediately?  Obviously some high risk situations need the baby rushed to a different location for treatment, and that would constitute a reason to cut off the oxygen source.

The main point is:  "We are the only animals that do this (cut the cord right away).  I would claim that we don't do it because we really think that it is a good idea or that we have any conscious thought that we really need to cut the umbilical cord right away.  I think we do it because it's just a development of our technology...  I think if you go back a few hundred years there wasn't a pediatrician there.  There was a mother, there was a blanket, there was a breast, and the baby was born put on the mothers belly and there was no real reason to cut the umbilical cord right away.  But now we have a warmer, we have nurses, we have all kinds of things and it seems convenient to just clamp the cord, get the baby off to the warmer and people don't really think about it." Dr. Fogelson

If there is no advantage to cutting the cord right away... why not leave it alone until all of the blood, oxygen, stem cells, and nutrients are delivered to the baby and breathing through the respiratory system has had a long period of time to be practiced and established.

Here is another (shorter) video on the same subject: