Coconut chicken, root mash and spinach

Hello guys and gals!
I have been terrible this week and haven't posted at all. Which means, I've got tons of stuff built up for you this week. Like, my first and second slowcooker experiences (why haven't I been doing this all along?), my very first hot yoga class (very nearly died) and A GETTING A DOG!
Super stoked about that one. We're picking her up tomorrow and we're going to name her Laika and I cannot wait to have a fluffy love ball.
But that's news for tomorrow.
Today we're going to talk about breadcrumbs. Mainly about how I love things dipped in breadcrumbs and it made me a sad, sad panda for a while because they are a no no for paleo eaters.
Fortunately, I have discovered that coconut makes a damn good substitute. To be totally honest guys, I actually prefer coconut breadcrumbs to bread breadcrumbs. Crazy, I know. But they're so light and crispy and they taste very...decadent. Very rich, without being heavy. They're perfect, basically.
The weather is finally, FINALLY picking up here. The hubs and I celebrated Friday with some beers on the patio tonight and it was indeed lovely. 68, breezy, perfect.

Anyway, since the weather has been picking up and it's not snowing every damn day, we can start eating things that aren't designed to keep a body warm in a dark, winter hellscape. Hooray. Mr. Idiot and I have been rotating through the various frozen meats in our freezer, and Monday is chicken day, and I'm trying to avoid the chicken, carrots and broccoli meal I see so many paleo people eating. I like my diet food not to taste like diet food. And so was born Coconut breaded chicken breast, winter root mash and fried spinach with tomatoes.

What you'll need for the whole meal:
1/2 bag frozen spinach (about 2 cups)
Handful of grape tomatoes, cut in half
1 tbsp coconut oil
2 chicken breasts
1 1/2 cup desiccated coconut (Mine comes in pretty large flakes, so I put it in the food processor to get it breadcrumb sized)
1 egg
1 tbsp cold water
3 parsnips, peeled and chopped
2 sweet potatoes, peeled and chopped
3 carrots, peeled and chopped
salt and pepper to taste
3 tbsp minced garlic

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees.

Combine the egg and the tbsp of cold water into a bowl. Get your coconut down to the desired consistency and put it in a bowl too.

Shameless plug for my AMAZING food processor. Miallegro, you are a star. 

Line an oven tray with tin foil.

Dip the chicken breasts first in the egg, and then coat it in coconut.

Put the chicken breasts on the oven tray and put in the oven for 30 minutes, or until the chicken is white and cooked through. The coconut should be browning and crispy.

While the chicken is cooking, peel and chop all the root vegetables.

Bring a pot of water to a boil and add the veggies for about ten minutes, or until soft.

Heat a pan over medium high heat and melt the coconut oil.

Mash all the vegetables together. I added some butter because mine were a little dry, but that's up to you. Season with salt and pepper to taste.

Add the spinach to the pan until it starts to cook. I just put mine in frozen and cooked it that way. No big deal. Then, add the tomatoes and garlic until everything is cooked.

Take the chicken out, plate everything and serve.

This was pretty easy in terms of the skills required to make it, though it was kind of labor intensive and had me running between tasks a little.

Though, I think it was worth it. Tasty, filling, and super healthy.

Greasy bar food, paleo style

So, if you're anything like me ( and if you're reading, I assume you are) you love yourself some tasty, greasy finger food. I love dive bars, partly because the beer is always cheap, but also becasue the food is always good and spicy and extra greasy, and I can eat it with my fingers and no one will judge me.
Double win.
Sometimes when you're trying to eat clean and be healthy you get cravings for things you really cannot have. Like hot wings, fries and ranch, or cinnamon rolls. But the goal is to not give in to those cravings. Though, don't torture yourself. Mr Idiot and I have Saturdays off. We can have a little ice cream, maybe some hamburgers, and we don't get nutso over the smell of McDonald's the rest of the week. I guess the trick is to set yourself a limit--I can have a break day, or meal, or week, and then I have to stick to the plan. It helps stop binge eating on stuff you've been denying yourself and then feeling guilty about it for ages afterwords. At least, that's what works for us. There are lots of great resources on making sure you don't crack and go crazy on a diet.
But, I've gotten off point. I had a craving for the bar food I love (and can't have) so instead of caving and ordering delivery, we made an attempt to recreate the joy of wings and fries without the grease and bad fats.
So, this recipe is kind of labor intensive. There's a few recipes that I combined to get this meal, but you can swap in or out whatever you feel like eating.
I wanted something spicy, and I really wanted finger food, so we made drumsticks and fries and Caesar salad with paleo friendly ranch dressing.
So, this is probably a thing you should start early, because the drumsticks need to marinade. I only marinaded them for an hour, and they were not nearly as spicy as I wanted.

So, this is what you'll need for the drumsticks
However many drumsticks you feel like eating (we made eight)
2 jalapeno peppers, deseeded and cut into chunks
1/4 cup of coconut oil melted
2 tablespoons coconut aminos
4 cloves of garlic peeled
1 tsp ground cumin
juice of 1 lime
1/2 cup cilantro leaves

Blend all of that good stuff together in a food processor. Put the drumsticks in a freezer bag and pour in your spicy marinade. Shake the bag around to coat the drumsticks and stick them in the fridge for anywhere between one and eight hours. (I'd go for more than an hour, let that lime and jalapeno really sink in there.)

While those are marinading, you can prep the sweet potatoes and the dressing.

This dressing, by the way, is awesome. I used the leftovers to dip meatballs in, I used it as veggie dip, it's great.
So, here's the ingredients for the dip/dressing/awesome sauce

1 ripe avocado
3 garlic cloves
1 can of coconut milk
1 tbsp lemon juice
2 tbsp fresh dill
2 tbsp fresh chives
salt and pepper to taste.

Throw all of that in the food processor and blend it all up. I put a hearty squish of sriracha sauce into the mix because I'm a sucker for punishment.

I threw together a salad with some turnip greens and some lettuce that was leftover in the fridge. There were some carrots and...whatever in there, use your imagination.

So! Once your lime chicken is done marinading, make your sweet potato fries. You can get the low down on sweet potato fries from the Idiot Burgers recipe here.

The fries have to go in at 450 and the chicken cooks at 425, so make your choice which one you wanna cook first, it's no big deal.

Put the drumsticks on a wire rack over an oven tray covered in foil.
We don't have a cooling rack, so I used the rack from the toaster oven. Don't judge. Improvise, okay?

Anyway, cook the chicken at 425 for fifteen minutes, take it out, turn it and cook it for another 15. Make sure the juice runs clear when you cut into it.

That's it. You can make the fries or not, or just salad, or coleslaw or anything you like.

If you're in the mood for some really good barfood that's not nearly as bad for you as it tastes, this is the stuff for you.

Chicken and squash coconut curry

So, I haven't made anything that I can keep in bulk, and after last weeks "what the hell are we going to eat" problems, I figured making some big quantities wouldn't be a bad idea.
It's not that we're not buying enough food, I buy enough vegetables to feed a small country, but by the time the last few days before payday rolls around we've eaten all the fresh stuff, and I never know what to do with just frozen veggies.
So I'm looking out for recipes that I can cook and freeze.
Curry ticks all of those boxes. Freezes well, can easily be made in bulk and super easy to stretch out.
This particular curry is very...orange. It's got carrots, butternut squash and sweet potatoes in it, so there's lots of filling veggies in here.
This is the one time I listened to Mr. (baby) Idiot and didn't  make something stupid spicy, and then he had the gall to complain! So, the frozen half of this will be getting a heavy scooping of curry paste next time.

Anyway, here's what you'll need

4 carrots, chopped
1 butternut squash, chopped
1 sweet potato chopped
2 chicken breasts, cubed
1 cup of coconut milk
1 cup of chicken stock
2 tbsp curry paste
3 tbsp chili garlic sauce
2 tbsp grated ginger
2 tsp cumin
3 tsp paprika

The lovely thing about this is that you kind of just...throw everything into the pot and let it simmer for a while. Super easy, and you can ignore it and go watch 30 Rock on Netflix. That's what you guys do right? Right??

Anyway, even if that's not what you do with your 25 minutes of free time, but chop all your veggies up and throw everything in the pot.

Side note. I have never peeled a squash before. Know what you're getting into before you start peeling, because your veggie peeler will not work here. The skin is like an inch thick. I just sliced the skin off and called it a day. I'm sure there are other ways to do it, but..I got frustrated so it happened.

Add in the chicken stock and bring it up to a low boil.

Add in the coconut milk, as well as all the spices and let it simmer for a while.

After about 15 minutes, check on everything and keep letting everything cook until the chicken is cooked through. Plate, and serve. Hey presto. I had TONS of this left after I'd made two servings, so this is going in the freezer for next weeks dinner.

I made cauliflower rice to serve this on, which is basically ground up cauliflower. I used my (amazing and wonderful) food processor to get this to the right consistency, but if you have a grater (and the patience of a saint) you can grate it down to rice-size. I also ground up some coconut flakes in with the cauliflower and heated it up in a pan with some coconut oil.

Monday salad: extra easy because I'm extra tired

It's nearly 9pm here at la casa des Idiots, and I'm finally sitting on my bum. FINALLY.
Today Mr Idiot had the day off, so we used our Monday much more productively than last week (in which we binge-watched Netflix and ate bacon) and ran all of the errands. ALL. THE. ERRANDS. We prayed at the alter of the Army Gods (aka the Soldier Support center) to get some of the cost of the move back, (YAY MONEY!), we visited Mr. Idiots long-ago-neglected UPS box only to find out that they only keep mail for thirty days before they return it to sender. And his has been closed for at least three months. Oh well. We also needed to pick up some groceries, but it's my least favorite time of the month, which is the time three days before payday where we have maybe a $60 buffer, and we're all out of almost everything. My fridge is a sad, mostly empty mess right now, and it gives me a big sad. But! We're trying this new thing where we space out our bills so we don't get completely drained by the 3rd of the month, so here's hoping come February we won't have these shitty three and four day periods where we've got zilch in the bank. To make that long story short, we need some more food, but we had to really scratch out what we've got left. So, thirty bucks poorer, we've got enough nosh to see us through until payday.
We even remembered to return my (shockingly) overdue library books, which I think they've written off as lost by this point.
By the time we got home, I was ready to cook dinner and just flop on the couch, but nope. Mr. Idiot has plans for his Monday and they've gotta happen. We spent almost an hour moving a couch from the spare room into the living room, and moving the pull out couch into the spare room. I know that sounds like no biggie, but the movers tried to get that sucker into the spare room and failed. The people whose job it is to make things fit through doors couldn't get it, so these two Idiots figured they'd try. Yeah, pro tip, if the movers don't do it, don't try it yourself. Eventually we got it through the door with only minimal doorframe damage. I was sweaty, grouchy, had pulled something in my back, stabbed by invisible couch nails, and had yelled at Mr. Idiot at least six times to NOT DROP THE COUCH ON ME, the last thing I wanted to do was actually cook dinner.
But, what did I do? I went and made some awesome salad thanks to Michelle Tam over at nomnompaleo and as luck would have it, it was easy as hell. I did make a few modifications to her recipe, because I'm lazy and I need to improvise sometimes...

Asian nut salad
This salad is awesome because it makes enough for both of us to be full, and to have leftovers for our lunches tomorrow. And just let me say, Mr. Idiot eats A LOT for both lunch and dinner, so the fact that there's leftovers is saying something.

For the sauce, you'll need:

2 tbsp almond butter (I used peanut, sue me)
1 tbsp fish sauce (I'm pretty sure you could sub coconut aminos for this and be okay)
1 tbsp white vinegar.
1 tbsp coconut oil
2 tbsp applesauce (unsweetened)
1/2 tbsp garlic chili paste

For the salad:
2 chicken breasts
1 whole head of romaine lettuce
3 or 4 carrots, grated/julienned/sliced however
2 apples, sliced

This salad has shredded chicken in it, and before we got a hand mixer/food processor (THANKS MUM <3 ) we had to shred chicken by hand (like savages). So, my advice is boil the chicken breasts while you're doing everything else to cook them. If you don't have a mixer or anything, you can shred by hand once the breasts are cool, or use two forks to rip it to bits. Your call. IF however you just got God's greatest invention, the food processor, you're fine.

So, put the breasts on on boil and start grating/julienning/slicing your carrots. I used four medium carrots for this, but use your judgement. Whatever ratio of carrots to lettuce to apples you want is good.

A mandoline makes your life easy

Put your carrots in a big bowl.

Chop up the apples. I didn't peel them because I love apple skins, but that's totally your call. Slice them into eighths and then in half long-wise, so they've still got some chunk to them and toss them in the bowl with the carrots.

Hopefully, your chicken is done boiling, so let it cool if you're using your hands, or cut it into quarters and process that bitch.

Wash off the lettuce and rip it into bite-sized bits. I hate the giant...spines, whatever they are on lettuce, so I just ripped off the leafy parts.

Throw that into the bowl and mix it all up.

Combine all the ingredients for the sauce and pop it in the microwave for 30 seconds to melt the coconut oil and soften the almond butter. Mix all that goodness together, pour over the salad and serve.

I was too damn tired to take any pictures after I'd added the chicken or the dressing or plated it, because I was so excited to eat and sit down.

This blog entry took longer to write than the salad took to make, so it's AWESOME when your feet hurt and you're hangry.

Easy cheesy (but not paleo) chicken and veg

So, I'm a little behind on the posts. We've been back at home for about a week now, so I've got some recipes to share from last week.

This one isn't paleo (sorry guys...). But it was pretty tasty, if that counts for anything.

This is kind of a...whatever you can get your hands on recipe. We ate this the night we got back from vacation. We drove back from Raleigh, and we were both pretty pooped, so a trip to the grocery store was definitely not happening. Before we left for AZ we'd gotten rid of pretty much all the perishable food items in the house so I threw this together with whatever we had. This was pretty damn tasty, and it'd be really easy to sub out whatever veggies you want, or whatever meat you have in the freezer to customize this however you like. The pasta and the cheese sauce are what make this non-paleo, but it would be easy to make this a paleo meal. I made a really basic bechamel sauce because I didn't have any pasta sauce handy, and I was waaaay too tired to make one from scratch, so I made a cheese sauce for the pasta. Dairy isn't exactly paleo (though it isn't exactly not paleo either) and you need a lot of milk for bechamel sauce, but I think coconut milk or almond milk would make a decent substitute, as well as almond flour instead of all purpose flour. My particular version of paleo includes dairy, but if you're stricter about it you could sub out the milk. The cheese is optional in bechamel sauce, I used sharp cheddar because I think it's a bit bland without cheese, but you can leave it out.

Easy cheesy chicken and veggies. Feeds two.

Ingredients

2 chicken breasts

½ a box of spaghetti

1 bag “California Style” frozen vegetables (broccoli, carrots and cauliflower)

For the bechamel sauce

5 tablespoons butter
4 tablespoons all-purpose (or almond) flour
4 cups milk (whole, coconut or almond, your call)
2 teaspoons salt

As much cheese as you feel is necessary. I used about two cups of grated sharp cheddar.

In a medium pan, heat the milk until it's almost boiling. DON'T let the milk boil, it gets all nasty.

In another pan melt the butter over med-low heat, add the flour and mix until all the lumps are gone. Turn the heat up to medium and let the butter and flour cook for about five minutes, or until it gets golden brown.

Add the heated milk to the butter mixture one cup at a time, whisking it constantly until smooth. Bring it to a boil and let it sit, mixing regularly for about ten minutes, adding in a handful of cheese at a time until it's all mixed in. Take it off the heat until you need it.

Cook the chicken breasts—I put them whole in the pan with the lid on over medium low heat and turned them every five minutes or so until they were cooked through. It's easy to burn them this way, but just pay attention to them

Once the breasts were pretty much cooked through, I added the frozen veggies, put the lid on and left it for a few minutes. While the veggies are going, cook the pasta, and everything should be done around the same time.

Plate and serve.

This was pretty tasty for being scrounged up out of the kitchen. And it burned through some of the pasta, which we're not allowed while we're paleo, but I'm too stingy to throw away a perfectly fine box of pasta. So it's just sitting in the cupboard, taunting me. Maybe I'll sneak it in in a few weeks. Have myself a cheat day. We'll see.

Chicken nugget spaghetti

I loved this recipe. Which really surprised me, I'm normally not a fan of cooking-out-of-a-can so to speak, but this was delicious. Not exactly very healthy, but a winner on the tasty and filling and easy fronts.

This is all the cooking you have to do. And turn the oven on. If you can't do that, you might be beyond my help.

I had a one pound bag of nuggets in the freezer and I used about half of them, but that depends on how big a pan you use.

So, step one is to cook the spaghetti and preheat the oven to 475. The recipe I posted last week said to heat to 400, but the nuggets I used needed to be cooked at 475. Nothing went catastrophically wrong by adding 75 degrees, so, just follow the cooking instructions on whatever nuggets you're using.

As in previous recipes, wine is an essential ingredient.

Once the pasta is cooked, add spaghetti sauce and pour into a baking tray.

Make a layer of nuggets on top and pop in the oven for about eight minutes.

Once the eight minutes are up, flip the nuggets over and put them in for another eight minutes.

That's it. You're done. This recipe was great because I only used two dishes and all I had to do was cook the spaghetti. So if you're starting out cooking, and you're looking for something to make for dinner that's nice and easy, pretty tasty and requires only the ability to boil water, you've got yourself a winner here.

Don't make this chicken salad

I didn't think salad would be a hard thing to make for dinner, but I think I was wrong.
I followed (kind of...not really) a recipe I found online, but the one I linked to yesterday was wrong. I took some parts of that recipe and other parts of a recipe that I either dreamt or lost into the abyss of my browser history and it came out...okay.

Looks pretty anyway.

Here's what I did.

Dressing:
2 tbsp lime juice
1 tbsp soy sauce
1 tbsp chili sauce
splash of peanut oil

1 chicken breast, sliced up
1 bag of  frozen "grilling veggies" from Wal-Mart (zucchini, squash, onions and red peppers)
5 mushrooms, sliced
mixed salad greens (spinach and spring mix)

I cut up the chicken into bits. I had originally intended to slice the breast in half longways, but the breasts we have left are a bit skinny for that, so I cubed-ish. I poured about 1/3 of the sauce into a pan and cooked the chicken in it, adding the frozen veggies as the chicken cooked.
In a separate pan I cooked the mushrooms with 1/2 tsp of butter until they were warm and then took them off the heat.
I put something like two handfuls of mixed salad into bowls and poured the rest of the dressing over it. There wasn't quite enough left so I made some more dressing to pour over the chicken and veggies.
Put the mushrooms on top, and then scooped the chicken/veggie mix on top of that and poured the rest of the dressing over the top.

It smelled pretty good as I was cooking, but it was VERY limey. Way too limey. I was trying to stretch out the chicken a little bit, but this wasn't a great success. Mr. Idiot seemed to like it well enough, he ate what was left in my bowl, but it was too limey and there wasn't enough difference of texture.
I don't want to give up on salad because it does help stretch the meat out, but this was no bueno. I'm thinking maybe if I get some peanut sauce and add some peanuts to the salad it'll have more crunch, and maybe less acidic lime taste. And I think the grilling veggies were a mistake. The flavor just...didn't go together. Maybe teriyaki chicken with peanuts and chili sauce.
Hrm.
Thankfully Mr. Idiot brought home chocolate cake (YAY!) with the lime juice I asked him to pick up, so neither of us went too hungry.
Hopefully tomorrow's dish goes down better.