Paleo for kids????

[sarena kopciel]

Hey thanx for the compliment but I never in my life made blak bean brownies. I do have a faint recollection of seeing it and think that sounds really weird. Although I did recently make several recipes that were totally paleo incl choc zucchini bread and blueberry muffins. I do not have the recipes with me. The chocolate zucc was from Nikki though! And they were both great!

[Suzanne Buffie]

I just made a great black bean brownie...


1/2 cup butter
4 oz cocoa
1 can black beans pureed
4 eggs
2 tbsp ground flax
4 tbsp ground almonds
1 tsp vanilla
3/4 cups lankanto ( a great sweetener from body ecology diet)

melt butter and cocoa, add beans eggs, flax, almond, vanilla and Lankanto.

butter 9X9 pan and bake at 350 for 30 minutes.


Before finding Lankanto, I used to use honey or maple syrup to sweeten the brownies.

I have also made a "coconut cake" version of this, using navy beans instead of black beans, adding 1 cup coconut, omit cocoa, add 1/2 cup can coconut milk, increase flax and almond ground almonds to 10 tbsp each, the rest is the same.

[Jason Naubur]

By the way,

I made the fried almond meal chicken last week. It was good, and the kids loved it too.

However, the frying was time consuming. I might try to make a 'bake' version for simplicity. Anyone who has baked chicken with almond 'breading' let me know!


Jason

1 less Shake and Bake meal!

[Gittit Shwartz]

I have - baked in 200 degree celsius oven. I used walnuts and seasoned them with curry and lemon zest. It was terrific.

[Garrett Smith]

Jason,
I make the Paleo fried chicken just like the original fried version, egg wash and almond meal. I use the organic free-range chicken tenderloins from TJ's (more breading that way!).

Spray a Pyrex baking dish with some olive oil, sprinkle some almond meal in the pan to discourage any sticking, egg wash and bread the chicken, lay them in the dish, bake in preheated oven at 400F oven for ~40 minutes. I season them afterwards with some pink salt, fresh ground pepper, and garlic powder. I may be making some tonight, actually.

I like baking it, partially because the breading soaks up an obscene amount of coconut oil, the breading falls off in the pan, and I really just don't like the splattering oil.

[Bryan Friedman]

Originally Posted by Tirzah Harper

One of the best things I did was to take some time for a couple of months and write down the basic meal contents that we just ate and how the kids responded to it. That netted me a dozen favorite meals and another dozen can-make meals - that's quite a while with no repeats.

Hey Tirzah, would you mind sharing what some of these meals are? I have been having trouble coming up with a variety of Paleo style meals. I just don't seem to have the creative touch.

[Tirzah Harper]

Man, I wouldn’t mind sharing, but the meals were vegetarian, not paleo! Sorry.
This is part of the reason why I read cookbooks for entertainment: It seems to build up a database of ideas in your head, and then when you go look at your cupboards you start putting things together from “instinct”…
Here’s what I’d suggest though, and what I’d do in your shoes:

First step: get a list of paleo foods.
Mark the foods on that list that you know your kids like (apples, nuts, steak, eggs, whatever).
Make sure you keep those foods in stock.

Second step: Start a hobby (even just for a month) of reading about paleo cooking and recipes and recipe ideas. Find the forums, the books, whatever. Get your head full of thinking about these foods and ways to cook them.
Especially make note of – bookmark, copy, or just remember – the recipes that use the foods that your kids like, from step one.

Third step:
Combine steps one and two (actually, I’d do steps two and three at once). Start cooking paleo, with an emphasis on the foods your kids already know and like.
Log your meals. Log what you ate, the basic ingredients if you won’t remember, what the kids said about it (I have a one-complaint rule, but that’s just me), what you thought. Obviously if the kids loved it but it took an hour to make, that’s a great special occasion meal. Quick & easy & palatable are what will become the everyday staples of your diet.

Keep up with steps two and three until you’ve got about twenty meals that pass muster. With 20 meals you can just rotate the same meals ad nauseum (sorry) or you can kick in a new food every so often (I do) just to spice things up and expand the kids’ taste buds. A lot of times I’ll do one tasty & one not-so-liked dish per meal – you get a lot of the preferred food, and a few bites of the not-so-preferred one. Variety in nutrients + ability to eat food they don’t care for. But I don’t make them eat foods they HATE, just practice eating the foods they don’t like.

Hope this helps. Also remember that their taste buds develop with age, from liking sweet and really hating bitter to liking bitter more and not the sweet so much. They’ll come to like peppers and onions someday, just because their tongue changes.
Also, it’s hard to be a bad cook with teenage boys in the house. I am so flattered these days when they eat every bite!

[Jason Naubur]

Garrett, thanks. I did it similarly last night but: no egg wash - I dipped in coconut milk instead, and baked on a foil lined tray. Worked great. Kids ate it up - though we still call it 'shake n bake'. This will be a regular. Now I have to find some cheap almond meal. One observation: The almond didn't stick so well, maybe I'll try the egg wash next time.

I also put the spices in the almond meal for dredging - why do you do it after? Any reason?

Tirzah - thanks for the tips. I have been thinking of making a list, maybe now I will start.


Jason

PS - if you had told me 10 years ago that I'd be swapping healthy recipes online I probably would have laughed my butt off. Oh how we change.

[Garrett Smith]

Jason,
I would guess the egg wash is "stickier". I also really dredge the chicken--I put it in the almond meal, cover the top with almond meal, tap those layers on, then I flip them and do the same to the other side. That gets a pretty uniform coating with no "holes".

I feel I have better control of the herbs/spices if I add them later. Also, I feel that I can add less salt this way because it is the first thing one tastes in a bite. I also tend to under-season if I add spices to a pound of almond meal and it is easier to change spices if needed for the preggo wife if I add them later.