Tzatziki

This is a simple Greek condiment that is cool and crisp and goes well with meat in the summer.

INGREDIENTS:

1 cup yogurt or sour cream (or combination)
1 small cucumber
1-2 cloves of garlic
1/2 tsp salt (plus more to taste)
1 bunch of fresh mint or dill
1 tsp lemon juice
2 tsp olive oil
1/4 cup red onion, finely chopped

METHOD:

Prepare the cucumber by seeding and either grating or chopping the rest into small pieces.

Let the cucumber sit in a bowl with the salt on it for 10 minutes.  Squeeze out the excess liquid and pour it off.

Combine the cucumber with the rest of the ingredients, chopping the herbs and crushing the garlic.  Mix well.  Add more salt and garlic if needed. 

Does Junk Food Make People Morally Lax?

You know I don't usually write about political stuff, but this article really irritated me! I hate the way the whole slant was to try to pit consumers against each other. I personally do not give two (organic and locally-grown) figs as to what people choose to eat, but I felt the need to write the following parody in order to illustrate just how bad this “reporting” is. I used the same data from the study* to come to this alternate (and equally ridiculous) conclusion.

Does Junk Food Make People Morally Lax?

Jane Doe has encountered her fair share of comfort food slobs, but a recent trip to a Des Moines diner left her feeling like she’d stumbled onto the set of “My Name is Earl”.

“I stopped in at the diner, hoping to get a nourishing meal to sustain me for the next leg of a cross-country road trip. When I had to visit the ladies’ room, I couldn’t help but notice the couple in the next stall loudly copulating. Imagine my shock when I heard them laughing about their being cousins! When I reported the incident to the manager, he said, as he munched on a brownie, ‘Lady, you need to take a chill pill and get over yourself!’ Seriously I could not believe that he had no problem with this behavior, and I couldn’t help but feel like I was in an episode of ‘My Name is Earl’ where junk food and morally suspect attitudes were weekly staples.”

“There's a line of research showing that when people transgress their own ethical codes, they feel the need to grant others a degree of moral license that they might otherwise find reprehensible,” says author Jack Smith, assistant professor of the department of psychological sciences at Something University in Sometown, USA. “I've noticed a lot of junk foods are marketed with morally indulgent terminology, like Chocolate Decadence, and wondered if you exposed people to junk food, if it would make them go easier on other folks for their moral and environmental choices. I [also] wondered if they’d be more eager-to-please.”

To find out, Smith and his team divided 60 people into three groups. One group was shown pictures of clearly labeled organic food, like apples and spinach. Another group was shown comfort foods such as brownies and cookies. And a third group--the controls--were shown non-organic, non-comfort foods like rice, mustard and oatmeal. After viewing the pictures, each person was then asked to read a series of vignettes describing moral transgressions.

“One vignette was about second cousins having sex,” says Smith. “Another was about a lawyer on the prowl in an ER trying to get people to sue for their injuries. Then the groups made moral judgments on a scale from one to seven.”

In another phase of the study, the three groups were asked to volunteer for a (fictitious) study, with each person writing down the amount of time--from zero to 30 minutes--that they would be willing to volunteer. The results did not bode well for the “comfort [junk] food” folks.

“We found that the comfort food people were much more likely to give the moral transgressors a pass compared to the control or organic food groups,” says Smith. “On a scale of 1 to 7, the organic people were like 5.5 while the controls were about a 5 and the comfort food people were like a 4.89.”
When it came to gratifying a fictitious researcher, the junk food people also proved to be more eager-to-please, volunteering 24 minutes as compared to 19 minutes (for controls) and 13 minutes (for organic food folks). Perhaps the organic food folks had gotten a short-term boost in their intelligence, realizing that volunteering for a fictitious study was nonsensical. Perhaps the junk food folks jumped at the chance to assuage their guilt in such a non-binding way.

“There’s something about being exposed to junk food that made them feel worse about themselves,” says Smith, “And that made them kind of morally lax, and eager to do some kind of [easy] penance I guess.”

Why does eating worse make us act worse? Smith says it probably has to do with what he calls, “moral mitigation”.

“People may feel like they’ve done something wrong,” he says. “They seek to mitigate their own guilty feelings by judging other people’s transgressions more leniently, so that they themselves seem less bad in comparison. It’s like when someone is eating a cookie and they offer you one, but you politely decline, and they become more and more aggressive with you, insisting that you eat the cookie, so they aren’t alone in cheating on their diet.”


*A link to the abstract of the study can be found here. I did not wish to pay the money to read the entire study, so I used the figures as reported on MSNBC.

Please vote for Roo's Clues

Hi, Sierra here.  As many of you know I have another blog called Roo's Clues that covers how I recovered my son from autism, including the GAPS diet of course :)  This blog has been nominated for Babble's Top 30 Autism Blogs for Parents in 2012.  The competition is based on votes, so if you would like to support my blog please go to it and vote by clicking on the banner:
http://roosclues.blogspot.com/



You can also go directly to the competition page, scroll down the alphabetical list, and click "like":
http://www.babble.com/baby/baby-development/top-autism-blog-nominate/index.aspx#

Thanks for your support!

Almond Flour Chocolate Chunk Cookies

I have thought about trying to make a GAPS chocolate chip since the very early days, but since chocolate wasn't strictly legal back then, and since I hate to waste a lot of food on experimenting, I never did get around to it. Thankfully, the folks over at Our Nourishing Roots did the job instead. I tried their recipe (linked below), but I used unsweetened chocolate in lieu of the cocoa butter/cocoa mixture. I'm not sure if that is why my chocolate came out sort of chewy, like a stiff caramel, or whether it's because I kept adding honey until the chocolate tasted bittersweet to me. Either way, it turned into a delicious and functional chocolaty substance. I left it to cool overnight at (Pacific Northwest, winter, unheated) room temperature. The next day, I cut it into strips and kept it refrigerated. I really needed to work quickly with this stuff to prevent its melting, but it held together beautifully in the cookies.

Do try the coriander. It is a secret little trick that I used to use with my old white flour recipe.

Did I mention they're delicious? They are only very lightly sweet, but my recently off-the-wagon kids gobbled them up as happily as they had done with premium conventional ice cream merely days before.

Ingredients

1/2 cup unsalted butter
1/4 cup honey
1 large egg
2 teaspoons vanilla
1/4 tsp. salt
3 cups almond flour
1 tsp. ground coriander (optional)
1/4 tsp. baking soda (optional)
2/3 cup GAPS chocolate chunks, cut into small pieces

Method

Pre-heat oven to 350 degrees F. Cut up butter and place it in an oven-proof bowl, and melt butter in oven while it heats. When butter is melted, remove bowl and add honey. Carefully mix in honey. At this point your bowl will probably be cool enough to touch. Blend in egg and vanilla. Add in salt and mix. Add in almond flour and optional coriander and baking soda. Stir well. Dough will be slightly stiff. Add in chocolate chunks and stir through. Place heaping tablespoons of batter onto a cookie sheet and press to flatten* (and round if necessary). Bake for about 10-15 minutes until lightly browned. Remove from oven and allow to cool for about 5 minutes on the baking sheet. Using a very thin offset spatula, carefully transfer cookies to a cooling rack. Once they are cool enough to touch, eat them and enjoy. They hold up well, at this point. When they are thoroughly cooled, I recommend storing, tightly wrapped, in the refrigerator.

*This dough does not spread, so you can place them close together, but you need to make each round as flat as you want the finished cookies to be, keeping in mind that if they're too thick, they won't cook through. I go for about 1/2 an inch high.

Kale Chips

Do you think your kids won't eat vegetables? Try these. I am generally against recipes that require me to stand around doing repetitive work, especially when the fruits of my labor are then gobbled up in less than 10 minutes. But I have to make an exception for a recipe that gets my kids chanting, "Kale! Kale! Kale! We want kaaaaaale!" I think we all know that kale is a "super food" and these delicious chips have the added benefit of being crispier than potato chips!

Enjoy!

Ingredients

2 bunches kale (the flatter varieties are easier to work with, but any type will do)

1 Tbsp. extra virgin olive oil* (or other oil/fat, if desired)

Sea salt and freshly ground pepper

Method

Heat your oven to 250 degrees F. Wash kale and remove tough central rib (you can skip this step, if your kids will eat up to the rib, and you don't mind having chewed on stems around). Pat kale dry. Place in a bowl and coat with olive oil (I use my hands to rub the oil on all surfaces). Place kale in one layer on two baking sheets. Sprinkle with sea salt and pepper (you can leave out the pepper. I sometimes do). Bake in the oven for about 30 minutes or until leaves are very crispy (they will easily break apart). Allow to cool until they are easy to handle, then watch the feeding frenzy begin.

*NB, Dr. Campbell-McBride advises against heating olive oil. Personally I do not have a problem cooking with extra virgin olive oil at low temperatures (below its smoke point). I have not read any scientific studies that corroborate the claim that heating olive oil causes it to take on unhealthful properties. I would be happy to peruse any such studies that my readers might know about. (I'm not interested in links to claims, only to actual studies or reports of actual studies, where the journal of publication is cited). If you wish not to use olive oil, any fat would work, but the flavor would be different (though almost surely very tasty). Obviously hard fats would need to be melted first.

Almond Flour Brownies

Imagine my delight when I discovered that Dr. Campbell-McBride had decreed that cocoa powder was OK for us advanced GAPSters. Then imagine my sadness when I discovered that there were zero decent almond flour brownie recipes out there on the internet. Of course I had to fill the void. Some things are worth a little trial and error! I believe I have finally got it right. These babies could definitely give the old gluten-laden variety a run for their money. I made these today, and there is one left (only because I don't think anyone else realizes it!).

These make a dense, moist, chewy, chocolaty brownie.

So here it is in all it's simple glory :)

Ingredients

2/3 cup honey
1/2 cup melted butter or coconut oil
1 Tbsp. vanilla extract
3 eggs
1 cup almond flour
1/2 cup cocoa (I used raw cacao)
1/4 tsp. baking soda (this can be omitted)
1/4 tsp. sea salt (omit if using salted butter)

Method

Heat oven to 350 degrees F. Mix honey, butter, vanilla and eggs until smooth. (If omitting baking soda, beat eggs until foamy before adding in other wet ingredients.) Add almond flour, cocoa, baking soda and optional salt. Stir to blend. Pour into greased 8x8x2 inch pan. Bake for approximately 25 minutes, until center no longer jiggles and top feels cakey.

Cool on a wire rack at least until sides pull away from the edge of the pan before cutting.

Chili

The problem with chili is that it doesn't photograph well. It's not exactly an elegant dish, but it is delicious and a crowd pleaser. Giving up most beans does not mean you have to give up chili! Real chili doesn't include beans anyway (but you can add navy beans, if you don't mind the look). I have been making this chili for a while now, and it is a big hit with my family and with company. It's also a lot of fun to prepare a variety of toppings for people to add as they desire--chopped tomatoes, chopped avocado, chopped jalapenos (or other chilies), chopped onions (or scallions), minced fresh cilantro, olives, guacamole, salsa, sour cream, hot sauce, etc.

This is another recipe I don't measure precisely with, plus I always make a huge batch and freeze any leftovers. Also, I tend to make my "spicy" dishes mild and let people add more hot sauce, if desired.

Ingredients

2 Tablespoons fat (for browning meat)
Salt and pepper
5 pounds beef stew meat, cut into cubes
1 1/2 large onions, finely chopped (my kid doesn't like chunks of onions)
3 Tablespoons dried ground paprika
2 Tablespoons dried ground cumin
1 Tablespoon dried oregano, crushed in palm before adding
1/8 teaspoon cayenne pepper
2-4 Tablespoons red wine (optional)
2 Cups beef broth (or water)
3 cloves garlic, crushed

Method

Sprinkle salt and pepper over meat. In a large cooking pot, brown the meat in the fat over medium heat. You will probably need to do this in batches. Add onions, and saute until softened and translucent. Add all meat back to the cooking pot. Add paprika, cumin, oregano, and cayenne to meat and stir over medium heat for about a minute to coat and allow spices to "activate". Add optional red wine, and stir to blend. When simmering, add beef broth to cover meat at least half way. Bring to a simmer then lower heat to keep at a low simmer and cover. Cook for an hour or two until meat is tender. Add garlic at the end and stir through. Taste and adjust seasonings as desired.

If you want to do this in a slow cooker, just add all of the ingredients after you've browned the meat and softened the onions. If you put everything in together at once (raw), it will still taste good, but the onion flavor will be stronger, and the meat will have less depth of flavor and color.