Almond Tea Cookies

On my Facebook page recently I mentioned that I'm not much of a cookie person, though forces of the universe may conspire occasionally to convince me otherwise. Forces such as Sesame Street. And Pinterest.

So when the stars finally aligned for a moved-far-away friend and her chicklets to come and visit, I figured a little bite-sized treat snack was in order. Because I've been deluding myself about my tolerance for white foods like flour and sugar and need to get back to real stuff, and because there's no sense in training a child's palate to fake stuff when real is delicious, I went looking for a grain-free cookie recipe.

I found inspiration recipes at The Urban Poser and L.MichelleK. Sitting in my pyjamas with the baby sleeping is not the best time to run out and get groceries to fill in gaps in said recipes, but it is a great time to look up substitution guidelines and get busy.

The result is a light yet buttery jam sandwich cookie that isn't perfect paleo but is just right to go with a cup of tea for afternoon snack.

Slow-Roasted Leg of Suckling Pig

An unexpected find of a large piece of meat at half price the day before the best-before date and an hour before end of business day, a little help from Google and online friends as to what to do with it, and a day to play led to an amazing meal of tender, juicy meat under flavourful crispy skin with a veggieful sauce and enough of everything for a second meal (which is a miracle in itself around here). Since I came up nearly empty-handed searching for English-language and gluten-free, paleo-friendly ways to prepare a joint of suckling pig, here's an almost wordless tutorial on what I did and what came out.

Brownies

It's been freezing and horrible for weeks, as of this morning the heat is not working, I'm feeling lousy and it's a midweek holiday. What to do? Bake!

Chard, Pumpkin and White Bean Soup

Perhaps I'm a backwards cook - I see a lot of menu plans on blogs and sites, but rather than start with a wish list and shop for it I work from what's available, what called to me in the produce aisle, what appeared in my weekly veggie box delivery, and develop the meals from that. Google is my friend in this too, offering up recipes and flavour combinations for the most seemingly random crisper contents.

Fried Banana Fondue

We interrupt your regularly scheduled posting to bring you what some Paleo Hacks hack disparagingly referred  to as a "what I just ate for dinner" post. To be more accurate, this is a what we ate after dinner post, since no one in their right mind would feed a 2yo bananas and chocolate before getting something "real" into them, right? (I guess it depends on what kind of day it was. And this is super-delicious and home made. I promise not to judge.)

So, yeah; bone broth from ruminants will have to wait.

Sweet Potato and Carrot Soup

Late last week we had a total temperature crash here; we went from beautiful late summer weather to horrible, wet, windy and cold literally overnight. Fortunately sunshine has returned to our days now, though the frost has come and I hear we're in for a snowsuit Halloween (if only we had Halloween here!). This is just the soup to warm you from the inside on a wet day, bringing nourishing fats and aromatics together in a bowl of sunshine.

Baked Salmon

Sometimes it's just this easy.

Whole Alaskan salmon, from frozen:     3,90 Euros
1/2 pkg dill, 1/2 pkg parsley, frozen:     0,69
1-2 Tbsp (clarified) butter                      0,30?
Mixed salad: probably                           4,50 all up.

Stuff herbs B into cavity A.
Dot fish with butter. Package in tinfoil.
Bake 25 minutes @  175C
Prep salad and dress in olive oil and balsamic vinegar.

 This fed three people. Remaining salad and the last fish filet as lunch leftovers lowered the cost per serving even further.

So you can't tell me that eating real, paleo food is expensive or complicated.

This post is part of Pennywise Platter Thursday at The Nourishing Gourmet and Fresh Bites Friday at Real Food Whole Health.

Autumn Muffins (grain- and dairy-free)

I can deal with dietary restrictions; I've had them most of my life. I can walk past whole stores and grocery aisles without a quiver of regret or longing. What sneaks up on me sometimes is a craving for a certain mouthfeel - malted milkshake, for example, or cakey brownie. Being dairy- and grain-free makes it a bit hard to cater to those whims without causing serious and lasting ill-effects that totally negate the pleasure of the indulgence. (The next time someone asks me if I can't just "lighten up" and have something "just this once" I'm going to give them a details run-down of why, no, I can't. Those of you reading this now have fair warning!)

Grilled Skirt Steak Swirls and Pumpkin Custard

Ah, autumn! Crisp, foggy mornings with somewhere to go, watery blue skies to snooze under at naptime, rustling leaves to stroll through before dinner. And the dinner foods - oh, the foods of fall! Apples and peppers appear in bags in the shops and baskets at the market next to the muted jewel-tones of fresh nuts, figs, and chestnuts, and the earthy lusciousness of various mushrooms and braids of garlic. As far as I'm concerned you can take any two from that list and have a foolproof start on a delicious meal. Add fine weather and a firepit, and you really can't fail.

Cauliflower and bacon soup

The end of summer is upon us. The sky's blue is a little thinner, the treetops are burnished with rust as exhausted green slides back into the earth, berries peek from bush and tree with red and purple juiciness, and a hedgehog loudly helped itself to the neighbour-cat's dish late last night, building up stores for the winter from whatever is at hand. But this biggest tip-off for me is that the air is warm but the breeze is cool. The sun can only warm what it can touch. Evenings come earlier, and the light above the kitchen table is on at dinner.

This, and what is so inevitably coming, is my favourite time of year. I love cafés in the weakening sunshine, the sweaters and leather boots, the foliage swan song, and the soups. This cauliflower and bacon soup came about because of some lingering items in the fridge, but will return because we all enjoyed it so much that I'll plan for it the next time cauliflower appears in our weekly veggie box and nighttime temperatures are in the single (celcius) digits.

Chocolate banana brownie pie

I hope this is the last banana recipe for a while. I'm a little over bananas at this point, to be honest.

This dessert is also probably the banana-est of the recipes I've posted lately, in that the fruit is a dominant flavour here. One person I served this to considered it "borderline" for banana overload. You are warned.

That said, it's easy, legal on pretty much any but the most stringent diet, and looks good. I'll even give it to you in two versions - brownie, and pie. How's that for a finale?

Banana Panna Cotta

We're drowning in bananas over here. First was the grocery bag full for one Euro, then the local fair trade shop had a box of over ripe, unsellable bananas out front with a sign "FREE! Take some".  I was feeling both cheap and compliant, so I did.

Did I mention that I don't actually like bananas? My mother reckons I ate my lifetime supply in my first three years of life, because they used to have to buy them by the flat to keep me in my banana habit.  5 kilos of less-than-favourite fruit for almost nothing is not an offer I can pass up, but I did need to be creative about using them. Many (oh. so. many!) were sliced and flash frozen before being dumped in to a freezer bag for later. The rest became desserts like ice cream, a chocolate meringue pie to be blogged later, and this panna cotta.

Banana Ice Cream (almost wordless tutorial)

This recipe is not mine, I got it from the always-inspiring Mummy I Can Cook! recently. Unlike the original, my bananas did not come from a tree in my backyard but rather a grocery-bag-for-a-euro deal at the market. In future iterations (and I will be doing this again), I will quarter the bananas lengthwise before slicing to make it easier on my blender.

Molesque Stew

Habaneros showed up in my grocery store this weekend. Exactly what thought process put them in my basket I'll never know, but now I've got 7 extremely spicy little peppers to deal with. Enter Google.

Coconut Milk Chai Marsala

Call it a failure of resolve, or a pitfall of stay-at-home parenting, or injudicious selection of lunch foods, but I like a snack at about 3pm. I don't stock snack foods in the house. I'm off gluten and dairy, so a sandwich or cup of yogurt are out. I'm not a big fresh fruit eater (I can hear your gasps and rumbles from here) and if I'm the least bit peckish it's not a good idea to get into preparing something if that involves a knife. All of which is to say that pre-made chai syrup is a precursor to a great fill-you-up snack.

Creamy Celeriac Soup with Chantrelles

We've had some good eating around here the last few days, if I do say so myself. Saturday was spicy lamb liver with these creamed onions (more or less). Yesterday I started from this braised pork butt recipe and got somewhere else entirely, which was delicious anyway. Today I had one celeriac bulb in my crisper next to a whole lot of chilled air, language school at supper time, and our veg/milk/egg delivery at 8pm, and that turned out even better than I expected too.

Not bad for nothing in the house there, Mother Hubbard.

Love chocolate? Got a food processor?

I've been dying for chocolate lately. Not Snickers crappy chocolate-esque stuff, but real, dark, bitter chocolate. However, as Nourishing Days recently pointed out, if I crave sugar I'm probably not ready to add it back to my diet yet so I figured even my 3-ingredient fudge was out for now. Considering that I'm only halfway through my (admittedly wobbly) 30 days that's not surprising, but still sad for me. BUT! The rule is no added sugar of any kind. Reading a Slightly Indulgent post I was reminded of this panforte nero recipe I've been meaning to make for ages, and subsequently how sweet natural figs can be.

Recipe execution fail - sole in walnut crumb

I've been having a run of recipe fails this week. It's getting discouraging, I must say. Partway through prepping macarons yesterday the egg whites wouldn't whip. They just went all glossy goopy and stayed that way, no matter what I did. I can honestly say I've never seen that before. But with the oven preheated and a toddler expecting cookies any second, plus the fact that I was making the damned things to use up 8 egg whites I had leftover after making this molasses custard, I just dumped them in and hoped for the best. Bad move.