My favorite breakfast bowl

I have been eating this a lot recently. I created it for a breakfast bowl but it could be eaten for lunch or dinner too. It is delicious and I have even packed it to go. (Once I even ate some when I was stuck in morning traffic on my way to Beverly Hills for work...)

So all you will need is:

1. A batch of cooked spaghetti squash which you can prepare in bigger batches ahead of time and just warm it up in the frying pan or microwave. How to prepare spaghetti squash. Add some salt, olive oil and fresh herbs to taste if you like.
2. Some fried ground beef or bison. Add salt to taste. You could also use any other leftover meat.
3. Sauerkraut or other fermented vegetables
4. Sliced olives (check ingredients so they are AIP compatible if following AIP)
5. You can also add any leftover salad or veggies or sliced avocado is delicious on it too.

Pur spaghetti squash in the bowl and top it with all the other ingredients. Enjoy!

PS. This would make an excellent camping or travel food too that you could prepare ahead of time and eat cold or find a way to warm it up. Don't heat the fermented veggies though, keep them separate. Heating would destroy beneficial bacteria.

Ready Steady Eat: Fast Wraps for Any Meal or To Go (AIP, paleo, grain free, dairy free)

Some days when I have to whip up a meal from the random ingredients at hand it feels like I am on the British Ready Steady Cook show (to be honest I sometimes in my mind pretend I am on it!). They had a similar show in Finland and I used to love to watch it. In the show two chefs competing with each other create delicious and inventive meals from a bagful of random ingredients. They don't know before hand what ingredients they get and they have a very limited time to complete the task. What fascinated me about the show was how these chefs were able to come up with delicious meals in such a short time without any recipes or previous planning from a bagful of random ingredients they had no say over. There was usually also a limit how much the ingredients could cost (not much at all). Those chefs are my heroes especially as I have never been a much of a recipe follower.
I felt like a chef from that show today as I had to prepare lunch quickly to starving family members from the ingredients I had at hand. This is what I had:

1 lb ground beef (organic from Rainbow Ranch Farms)
1 carrot
1 zucchini
a handful of crimini mushrooms
an avocado
coconut wraps (you could also use other tortillas you have, big lettuce leaves, collard leaves or for instance these plantain wraps)
fermented ginger carrots (you could replace this with sauerkraut or just leave out)
lettuce (I picked some from our container garden!)
cucumber (diced)

I also had spices, coconut oil etc. basic ingredients of course (I used garlic powder, oregano and salt).

I put the ground beef on a cast iron pan with some coconut oil on medium heat mixing and chopping it and turning it over every now and then. In the same time grated the carrot and zucchini and chopped mushrooms in small pieces. I tossed them in the frying pan as well. I added some salt, oregano and garlic powder.

The I ran out to get the lettuce and fresh oregano, chopped them and diced the cucumber and avocado.

When the meat and vegetables were cooked I piled all ingredients on coconut wraps and rolled them. Note: Don't cook the fermented carrots to preserve the probiotics.

Alternatively, if you don't have any wraps or leaves to use, you could just mix it all up to a salad and add homemade coconut kefir from your fridge (or olive oil and balsamic vinegar) for a dressing.

Ready, steady, eat!

PS. You could prepare all the ingredients and pack them in your backpack to go and roll the wraps while you are hiking, running errands, at the beach or park.

Have you already taken part in my giveaway that will end in a couple of days?

This recipe has been published on Autoimmune Paleo Recipe Roundtable in Phoenix Helix Blog.

What to Eat on Autoimmune Paleo? How to combine it with low-FODMAP diet?

There are many lists and directions online for what to eat and what not to eat on paleo or autoimmune paleo diet. It is quite a jungle when trying to figure out what to eat and what not to eat! Take a deep breath, it is just food after all and listen to your body. There is no one diet. We are all different. But I have been trying to figure out the Autoimmune paleo diet (AIP) last few weeks so I thought I'd share some resources. I also made a chart what to eat if also FODMAP's bother you. read on to find out more.

AIP is a stricter elimination diet where you eliminate a lot of possible gut irritants for 30 days and then slowly introduce foods back to see if any of them triggers something. New food should be eaten for three days before introducing a new one. It might sometimes be a good idea to wait even longer in between new foods. Especially if it causes a reaction I would withdraw the food again and wait a week or two before introducing something new to get the other stuff out of your system.

There is already so much information online that I am not going to research it and write it down all over again. But I will tell you where to look. Here are some sources of information, food lists, shopping lists and meal plans and ideas.

If you are not quite ready for AIP yet, try first paleo diet that allows more foods than AIP. If you are not ready for paleo diet, try going partially paleo. Switch some foods to paleo friendly foods. Or start with one paleo meal a week. Or "paleo" because can we really eat in modern days like the people in paleolithic era did? Or is it even necessary? That is another blog post but just wanted to make a point that we shouldn't get too hung up on the word. Paleo for me means eating one ingredient real foods that make you feel good. It can vary a little from person to person. But there are some general guidelines that work out for most people.

Here is what to eat on paleo diet:

What to eat on paleo diet?
The Ultimate Paleo Diet Food List

An excellent place to start learning about the autoimmune paleo protocol (Phoenix Helix, a blogger who is healing her rheumatoid arthritis with AIP):
What is autoimmune protocol?

Article from Paleospirit: "What is the autoimmune paleo protocol?"

Lots of information about autoimmune protocol by Paleomom

A great detailed grocery list for Paleo AIP by Phoenix Helix 

A wonderfully clear shopping list for autoimmune paleo. I will print several copies of this.

Autoimmune Paleo Print Out Guides

Meal ideas (by me)

All autoimmune paleo labeled posts with recipes on this blog.

And what about FODMAPs? What are they?

FODMAP means "fermentable oligosaccharides, disaccharides, monosaccharides and polyols". They are carbohydrates and sugar alcohols found in grains, beans, some vegetables and fruit (check full list of FODMAP's here). They don't absorb well and feed gut bacteria that start fermenting them and this can cause bloating, stomach pain, gas, diarrhea, constipation or both and other gastro-intestinal symptoms.

What has this to do with the paleo diet? When we remove grains from our diet we often increase the amount of vegetables and fruit. Instead of feeling better on our brand new diet that was supposed to heal us, we get more stomach issues. The FODMAPs, that some vegetables and fruits are higher in, could be the bad guys!

But there is a solution. A low-FODMAP diet. You don't have to leave all vegetables and fruit, just some of them. But there will be plenty left to eat. And it can be combined to the autoimmune paleo diet!

It sounded like too much to me first. But after getting comfortable with the autoimmune paleo diet and noticing that on days I overdid FODMAPs my stomach hurt in the evening, I decided to try this.

It seems overwhelming first if you are just mourning after the foods you'll leave on autoimmune paleo or paleo diet, I know. My suggestion is not to do it all at once. Baby steps. Baby steps.

I couldn't find a list of foods that would take into consideration both AIP and low-FODMAP diet so I made one! I looked at many lists and they all had a little bit different views about what is ok and what is not so listen to your body too. Keep a food diary if you still have symptoms.

More information about FODMAP's by Chris Kresser

A list of foods to eat and avoid if you follow both Autoimmune paleo and low-FODMAP diets.

Rutabaga is the New Sweet Potato (and Turnip the Old Potato!)

Turnips on the left and rutabagas on the right.
They both taste good cooked and raw.

Paleo diets often replace potato with sweet potato. We don't tolerate it very well in our family so I have started using more turnips and rutabaga. Turnips make great fries and rutabaga is delicious mashed, roasted or boiled. Or raw actually too. I like turnip raw as well, cut in sticks.

In Finland I grew up eating both of these root vegetables, raw sticks for snack and especially on Christmas we ate rutabaga casserole. Turnip on the other hand was eaten in Finland before potato.

Rutabaga is white when cut raw but it turns beautiful yellow when cooked. 

Here is how we used rutabaga for dinner:
- Pressure cooked rutabaga cubes with mushrooms and sea weed (The recipe was from this book but basically you could just boil the rutabagas and mushrooms and kombu sea weed until soft if you don't want to use a pressure cooker - we have a pressure cooker because we plan to live on a sail boat and there it would be super handy!)
- Pork roast (Basically just salt the meat and stick in the oven on 350F until cooked)
- Steamed rainbow chard with coconut oil and sea salt
- Green salad with naturally cured olives, cucumber, lemon juice and olive oil

TIP: Eat rutabaga and turnip sticks for snack just like carrots.

PS. Paleo diet is sometimes criticized for huge amounts of meat. Look at the photo above - we eat mostly vegetables. They are our main dish and meat is the side!

A Leftover Stir Fry and Soup (and 11 days on AIP update)

We had meat, mushrooms and vegetables left from our shabu shabu dinner the other night and we fried them and some extra greens (rainbow chard) in coconut oil, added the juice from half a lime, some coconut aminos, sliced garlic and some Himalayan pink salt and it was absolutely delicious. More vegetables should have been added. One always forget how they shrink while cooked.

I used the same method to make yet another slow cooker soup overnight to eat for breakfast and lunch. I made this without white cabbage to make it lower in FODMAPs. This soup consisted of home made chicken broth, chicken and all the oldest vegetables from our fridge (daikon and daikon greens, bok choy, turnips, carrots, zucchini, squash, kale), chopped in small pieces. Added some salt. No other spices this time. After eleven days on a very simple autoimmune paleo diet I am starting to appreciate plain tastes and don't crave spices as much. Didn't expect that to happen.

After 11 days on the diet we feel pretty good. We sleep better. The world looks sharper and we feel calmer but also energetic. Our blood sugar regulation is better (I don't have to snack!). When I get hungry, I don't get weak or irritable, get this piercing hunger pain in my stomach or feel like I have to get something to eat immediately or I will collapse. I just feel this little hunger tickle my tummy and if I don't eat right away, it goes away and comes to tickle me later again but without all the extra sensations I described before. Stools are beautiful (sorry if too much information but stools are important, read more about - and look at pictures - how poop should be like here). The first week we were tired and had some headaches and food cravings but I think we are over that. We are so glad we started this experiment.

Shabu Shabu - Paleo Fondue Night!

My husband works for a Japanese company and he has loved to eat shabu shabu during his business trips to Japan. He suggested we make this at home - it is perfect for autoimmune paleo diet! It is pre-sliced veggies and meat that you cook in the table by swishing them (shabu shabu means "swish swish" if I understood correctly) with chopsticks in boiling broth. We used our camp stove to cook the food. We didn't have the meat cut thin enough so we had to let the meat cook in the broth for a while and then pick the pieces up. Vegetables need also a little more time. This dish is great because you can also make a vegan broth by using kombu sea weed and by having it in a separate cooker you could have vegans as dinner guests at the same time.

This is how you organize a shabu shabu night at your home for your family or friends:

1. Cut vegetables in bite size pieces / or just a little bigger so you can easily grab them with chopsticks. For autoimmune paleo friendly meal, remember not to include night shades. We used bok choy, zucchini, endives and different kinds of mushrooms (oyster mushrooms were my favorite) - I think some don't include shiitake in the AIP protocol because it is a medicinal mushroom. 

2. Prepare very thin slices of meat. You can also use uncooked shrimp and fish.

TIP: To cut the meat in super thin slices that cook in a few swishes (or shabu shabus) you should freeze it for an hour right before.

3. Prepare a broth.

Broth

2.5 cups water

a couple of strips of kombu sea weed

2 cups home made chicken broth

salt to taste

TIP: To make a kombu broth use a lot of kombu and use water instead of the broth. Boil the kombu in water for 10 minutes. 

4. Prepare a sauce to dip the boiled veggies in.

Sauce

(found the original recipe from here and modified it to AIP friendly)

1/4 cup fresh lemon juice

1/4 cup coconut aminos

1/4 cup apple cider vinegar

3/4 cups water

1/4 tsp grated fresh ginger

(fresh crushed garlic)

This was a lot of sauce, we froze the leftover sauce for our next shabu shabu night. 

5. Have a boiling pot of broth in the table and add veggies and meat to be cooked in the broth by using chop sticks. Or fork if you prefer. Give everyone a small plate for the sauce (recipe above) that they can use to dip the food in. Lift cooked pieces of food to everyone's plate and add more to the broth. Repeat. And eat. And talk and have fun!

We had way too much meat purchased by my husband. My favorites were the mushrooms, veggies and shrimp. As the flavors of the broth and sauce are very subtle, you can really taste the flavors of the individual vegetables, mushrooms and meats. I loved that. The leftovers can be used for a stir fry the next day.

What to eat on (autoimmune) paleo diet? Meal ideas!

After returning from our New Year's trip to Sequoia tonight we ate a feast of sushi, some Californian Sauvignon blanc and coconut milk ice cream from Wholefoods before starting the autoimmune paleo protocol tomorrow. I have been brainstorming on meal ideas. We eat mostly grain/legume/nut free food already so this is not a big change. Biggest change is leaving out morning coffee, chocolate, occassional rice and legumes, nuts, seeds, processed foods, sugar and such things.

Here is my go to list of meal ideas for the coming weeks:

Breakfasts/lunches:

-Soup from home made bone broth, greens, mushrooms, chicken (I buy our organic meat from Rainbow Ranch Farms), ginger, sea salt and herbs

-Wraps: Using either collard green leaves, other cabbage leaves, lettuce or coconut wraps (made yourself in a dehydrator - google for recipes - or buy from here or here) wrap in them anything that is allowed on the diet like cooked chicken, cucumber, fermented veggies, avocado, naturally cured olives, quacamole made with avocados, garlic, lemon and sea salt, carrots etc. etc.

-Smoothies: greens, berries and coconut milk or greens, apples and limes and kombucha (remember to keep the amount of fructose per day in minimum though, some recommend max 20g/day).

-Avocado and cucumber with smoked salmon or cooked shrimp - you can also put all these in nori wraps "taco style"

-Stir fry with beef or chicken or pork and zucchini, asparagus and mushrooms - spinach or kale might be a nice addition (for faster mornings, chop ingredients already in the evening and store in a jar in the fridge), add sea salt and herbs

-In the toaster oven: bake sliced zucchinis (put some olive oil on them and for instance Herbamare salt) and premade breakfast sausage/meat patties / meat balls (fry or bake ground meat in any shape you like, you can add herbs, salt, apple sauce, mashed boiled cauliflower, coconut flour etc. to the "batter"). Eat with sauerkraut or carrots.

-baking some coconut flour biscuits/muffins, will have to look into the fructose contents first

Dinner ideas:

-Spaghetti squash (recipes coming soon!) with olive oil and herbs, steamed broccoli and baked/fried/roasted chicken or ground beef patties or sauteed shrimp (sautee in coconut oil with garlic if not avoiding and sea salt)

-Soups with home made bone broth - AIP legal veggies and meat (see the breakfast soup, it works for luncha and dinner as well :))

-Fried or baked fish with steamed veggies (I like to add some coconut oil and Herbamare on the steamed veggies, my faves are kale, bok choy, spinach, cauliflower)

-Mashed cauliflower, beef patties spiced with salt and grated carrots and/or rutabaga with orange juice

-Sweet potato fries (sweet potatos, coconut oil or olive oil or lard and salt and baked in the oven, will post a recipe later), beef patties in lettuce wrap with fermented cucumbers (will post recipe later) and avocado slices

-Roasted chicken (herbs, salt, oil, lemon, maybe garlic if you choose to include that in your AIP, I think some avoid it), roasted cauliflower (toss cauliflower in olive oil/coconut oil and salt and bake on a baking sheet in one layer) and sauteed greens (sautee any greens in bone broth or coconut oil or lard and add salt and garlic if you choose).

-This idea is from a dear friend, Kristin (thanks!!!): Fry some chicken strips in lard or coconut oil and add some broth and greens and simmer until ready.

-slow cooker stroganoff: ground beef or stew beef, coconut cream, home made broth, salt and eat with boiled sweet potato or rutabaga cubes or as is. Top the stroganoff serving with home made chopped pickles.

More ideas and actual recipes later!
-Creamy cauliflower soup
-Finnish Cabbage casserole (without pepper - I have heard mixed opinions about including black pepper on AIP - and without or with only very little molasses and no Earth balance that might be mentioned in the recipe, palm shortening instead will do)

Snacks (I am personally torn on snacks, I prefer to just eat 3 full meals per day but will sometimes snack too):

-If you choose to have fruit on your AIP diet - not everyone does, you can snack on fruit in small quantities (better to be eaten alone, not with meals anyway)

-Carrot/rutabaga/turnip/cucumber sticks (some choose not to eat starchy veggies on AIP)

-raw cauliflower

-avocados (I squeeze lemon on the avocado halves and sprinkle some Herbamare on the top).

Drinks: Water, kombucha (if not avoiding black tea/green tea that kombucha is made of) and water kefir, herb teas

Click on this link to see all autoimmune paleo diet friendly recipes from this blog.

More recipes:

http://autoimmune-paleo.com/recipes/

(I made the raspberry "cheese" cake and it melted in my mouth and tasted so good but it was almost too rich, we froze most of the cake and will eat it for a very long time!)

Excited to start this new experiment. It will be an adventure and I think I will learn a lot and feel great. I will try to post as many recipes as possible and also let you know how it is going. Talk to you soon!

XOXOX,

Sirpa