restaurants

Weekend meals are waaay fattier for me since I have time to cook and Chris is here and lower in carbs since I seem to suck at storing roots and found that all my potatoes had sprouted. 

Friday: fasting, ate some Thai Papaya salad at office lunch

Saturday: 

Breakfast was eggs, plantains, and Spring Lake Farm bacon from Meatshare. Chris had some yogurt and berries. 

Dinner was at Takashi with Patrick from PaleolithicDiet.com. I've mentioned this temple of raw and lightly grilled meat before. The first course is raw meat and the second is cooked. We enjoyed the raw liver (seriously it's good and I don't know how they make it taste so awesome), raw chuck flap with sea urchin, raw chuck eye tartare, and flash-boiled shredded achilles tendon. Second course we had "the tongue experience," heart, kalbi, sweetbreads (HIGHLY recommended, like a piece of delicious fat), and beef belly. I also recommend the stomach and cheek.

Sunday: 

Oops, I exhausted my eating out budget for the week, so I only ate what was already in the fridge. For breakfast we had "double yolk" baked eggs adapted from Michael's Genuine Food, a cookbook from a chef in Miami. They have a layer of tomato sauce and sour cream, a layer of eggs (mostly yolks), and a layer of cheese. I just made a small dish of these baked in the toaster oven (my summer oven since it doesn't heat up our tiny apartment) and it was very satisfying. 

For lunch we had some pork chops from Spring Lake Farm and yogurt with berries. We drank some cold-brewed Oolong tea. 

For dinner we had a leftover hash inspired by the hash at Red Rooster in Harlem. I baked some sweet potatoes in the toaster oven until crispy, tossed in some chopped bacon, cooked some plantains in the bacon fat, and topped with key-lime Hollandaise sauce. Fantastic! We had some small, but fatty goat chops from Glynwood farm and some hibiscus cinnamon tea. I like that Hollandaise tastes pretty darn good even when I mess it up and it's lumpy...I'll try the Alton Brown method next time. 

 I'm dedicating this week to Soybean Oil, an ingredient I think all rational people should be able to rally against. Despite massive amounts of scientific evidence that large amounts of omega-6 oils are bad for anyone, this ingredient remains common in our food supply. 

This year I was VERY VERY disapointed to find that Chipotle uses it in almost all their ingredients besides their pork. I don't know why I never knew this, I guess it was an instance of "maybe if I don't look at the ingredients I don't be upset."

Chipotle is one of the rare fast food outlets that tries to source meat decently and the salad bowl has been a favorite of mine for a long time.  

This week I'm going to devote a blog post a day on why we shouldn't use this ingredient. This will culminate in a paleo flashmob of sorts at the Chipotle Test Kitchen in NYC. If you are in New York, please join us!

Between moving, work, school, and the very very sad state of my inbox, I haven't had much time to post. 

I haven't had much time for anything, which is why I've been eating out quite a bit. I've had a bit of a sea change recently because I found out that my staple eating out food, Chipotle, isn't so great. It just reminds me that you have to question things you love after awhile or you'll get burned. First I found out via Diane from Balanced Bites that Chipotle uses soy oil. I hadn't looked at their site for awhile, so I guess I hadn't noticed. And since carnitas has SO MUCH natural fat WTF are they using soy oil for? It makes me very afraid that for "health" reasons they are skimming off the pork fat and replacing it with soy oil or something awful like that. 

Also, it turns out the meat is sourced less carefully than I thought. A few years ago I heard some Chipotle executives speak at a conference and I thought they were pioneers at sourcing well, but according to Nate Appleman, their new spokesman "The chain uses local and organic ingredients when practical and meat from animals raised without antibiotics or added hormones."

What does "when practical" mean? And without antibiotics or added hormones is a sad low standard. It's like saying "we raise these animals without tormenting them with daily sessions of Justin Bieber's greatest hits." 

Once I started getting disillusioned with Chipotle, I started thinking...why bother? NYC is full of nice restaurants using pastured lard, duck fat, and other good foods, but to be honest I don't live or work near those restaurants. So if Chipotle is not that great, why not patronize the local Thai joint that uses a mixture of olive and canola oil? I even found that after talking with the owner, I could get some dishes made with just coconut fat. Supporting a local business + delicious food = win. After moving I kind of went on a bonanza of doing this and honestly I feel great. Maybe it's because coconut is so dominant in many of the local cuisines (which include Thai and Filipino)? Maybe my gut is fully healed? Maybe conventional meat isn't so evil? (though I definitely want to get more local/grass-fed meat on the market). Either way, it's amazing to be eating out and having great digestion too. I'm really enjoying exploring all the cuisines of the world, which is a major benefit of living here. Whenever I can, I ask these local restaurants about what fat they use. If people ask, perhaps they'll change. The local Thai joint even brags about having wheat free food now. Trans fats are banned here, so the only ones I worry might be used are corn or safflower oil. 

It brings me to the point that while I think lard/tallow/duck fat are great for me, they probably aren't a public health solution. If I went to a health conference and said restaurants should use them, I'd be laughed at. But high-oleic seed oils ARE definitely better for you and perhaps not even bad for you. They are possible to produce cheaply and are considered highly by almost every conventional standard. Imagine if they replaced soy and corn at restaurants and in schools? That would be a solution that would benefit everyone. 

Instead we have public health programs that encourage things like eating low-fat and "moving more." I was somewhat amused when I read that Rush Limbaugh said Michelle Obama had gotten fat from eating ribs. It's quite clear that Michelle is not fat and I wonder if Rush got the right conclusion

Michelle My Belle, minus the husband, took the kids out to Vail on a ski vacation, and they were spotted eating and they were feasting on ribs, ribs that were 1,575 calories per serving with 141 grams of fat per serving. Now I'm sure some of you members of the new castrati: "This is typical of what you do Mr. Limbaugh, you take an isolated, once in a lifetime experience, and try to say that she's a hypocrite." She is a hypocrite. Leaders are supposed to be leaders. If we're supposed to go out and eat nothing -- if we're supposed to eat roots, and berries and tree bark and so show us how. And if it's supposed to make us fit, if it's supposed to make us healthier, show us how.

 Hmm, I'd venture that she's healthy because she doesn't follow the government's advice- because she's eating ribs rather than tofu. Wouldn't that be hilarious. Kind of like how her kids don't attend government schools perhaps? Meanwhile, Rush is losing weight by restricting his calories, which may have caused a recent bout with chest pains. Maybe he should just eat ribs and stop worrying about calories? 

Some of you asked if I could re-post my list of meat priorities I did on paleohacks. Here's how I chose my meat:

1. My first choice will always be grass-fed local meat from farmers I know. 

2. Generic grass-fed beef or lamb, wild fish. 

3. Organic beef or lamb because of highly favorable fat content.

4. Pastured poultry or pork. 

5. Halal beef or lamb(or goat) is more likely to be grass-fed because it's often imported from New Zealand. In addition, some Hispanic restaurants import their meat, particularly Argentine places. New Zealand and Australia pasture most of their ruminants. 

6. Natural beef or lamb. Natural is kind of vague, but it's better than nothing I guess.

7. Feedlot beef or lamb. Spends at least some of its life on pasture. 

7. Natural chicken = really just a factory farmed mass of soy.

Things I won't eat: farmed salmon, CAFO pork

Notice I will eat a wide variety of meat. For me, not being hungry and being nourished is more important than anything. I'm not the kind of person who will order a plate of greens in the absence of perfect meat. 

It's funny because when I eat out, the places that make me feel the worst are the healthy places. Ugh, I think hell is other people's idea of healthy. Like my office cafe, which stocks such healthy options as low-fat strawberry shortcake yogurt, those sugar-packed Odwalla smoothies, Special K, and Vitamin Water. I would definitely get really sick if I ate those things, but I feel awesome after going to the local Argentine place for a skirt steak and plantains. Another offender for me is BBQ places. At first I thought it was the meat that was bad for me, but then I realized that the sauces at most BBQ restaurants is full of total crap. Sugar + meat = bad. 

Palo Santo is a small restaurant in Park Slope, Brooklyn that has a bit of a cult following in the paleo community. Robb Wolf has praised the food there. It's also popular with members of local Crossfit gyms. I've eaten there many times and the food is incredible!

So when I saw that chef Jacques Gautier would be teaching a cooking class on Pre-Colombian Cuisine: Indigenous Foods of the Americas, I signed up right away!

Jacques had never heard of paleo, but he is an ardent defender of traditional foods. You'll never find bottles of the ubiquitous canola oil in his kitchen. At night he collects all the fat from the meat he has cooked and uses that as the cooking fat the next day. He never uses MSG-leaden bouillon, instead he makes his own traditional bone stock. In the restaurant industry, this is quite rare.

The concept of this class required Jacques to research what was cooked in the Americas before contact with Europe. Luckily, this food is less dramatically different than Pre-Colombian Indian (NO peppers!) or Italian (NO tomatoes!) cuisines. Of course, it's hard to know exactly what was cooked back then and some delicious liberties were taken. Some ingredients omitted included wines, oil, cilantro (we used native Culantro instead*), and onions.

Foolishly, I forgot my camera, but I was too busy enjoying the experience to take many pictures anyway. First everyone in the class had to chop up some vegetables like sunchokes and pumpkin. Then Jacques showed us how he uses stock and a traditional fermented corn drink called Chicha to build delicious sauces with meats, seeds, and peppers. Building such moles was time consuming, but the end result was worth it. We had venison in a smoky red mole and turkey in a refreshing bright green mole.

We also cooked some succotash with clams. I thought it was a brilliant and easy recipe that I will attempt at home. We used stock to cook the vegetables in: corn, pumpkin, lima beans, and sunchokes. The steam from this helped open up the clams:

Another cool thing we did was cook sea bass on a bed of seaweed, which added flavor and prevented the fish from burning.

We also ground our own masa! Jacques explained how we "limed" the corn to increase its digestibility, a traditional practice. Stone grinding gave me new respect for what people had to go through before the advent of Cusinarts...needless to say, we didn't have extra tortillas at the dinner table.

We fried our tortillas in pork fat :) In the Americas they wouldn't have had pigs, so they would have used other animal fats like turkey. Jacques told us how he saw a traditional stone-cooking setup where they had meat braising in crevices and they would scoop up the fat to fry the tortillas in.

Finally we sat down to eat our delicious foods! My favorite was the venison with cactus.

I'm definitely going to be working on building better sauces and trying out the method of cooking succotash with calms. If you are in Brooklyn, definitely check out Palo Santo.

* gardeners, growing Culantro is a great idea because unlike cilantro it doesn't go to seed and stop producing leaves