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Grug’s Barbecued Stuffed Bananas—A Recipe Inspired by The Croods

February 27, 2013 in Decadent Desserts, Featured Recipes, Treats

Who is Grug? He is the overprotective yet loving dad (voiced by Nicolas Cage) in the new DreamWorks Animation film, The Croods. The Croods is about a family of cavemen forced to embrace change. This movie looks like a whole lot of fun and I can’t wait to take my girls to see it (you can watch the trailer here).

When I talk to my children about the way we eat, I like to phrase how we eat in a positive way (as you know, I like to approach every aspect of our diet and lifestyle in a positive manner). I like to explain that we only eat the most nutritious foods so we can be healthy and happy. But, my daughter is a language nerd (at the ripe old age of 6 years) and when she asks what the word “paleo” means, we do talk about cavemen living a long time ago, how they lived and how they ate. The idea of cavemen is fascinating to my daughter, so I think when you combine cavemen with a family-friendly animated movie (about the importance of family no less!), it feels a little like striking gold! So, of course when I was asked if I wanted to create a thematic recipe to support the movie, I couldn’t possibly say no! I knew instantly that I wanted to create a recipe that used fire (okay, the barbecue but you could make this recipe over a campfire too). I also knew I wanted to use an ingredient from the movie itself. Enter the banana.

In the movie, The Croods meet the Punch Monkeys (aptly named monkeys who punch). Grug discovers that the secret to not getting punched by the Punch Monkeys is to give them bananas.

And there is the inspiration for this recipe! Fire + Banana!

These barbecued stuffed bananas are so delicious and very easy to make. The secret is to use quite ripe bananas (they are sweeter but also their flavor works better once cooked). I’ve included alternate directions for baking them in the oven, but I really do think they are better on the barbecue (isn’t everything?). My husband and girls love these!

The stuffing is simply made from some chopped nuts and spices. I used dried, ground spices, but you could use whole fresh spices and grind yourself if you prefer.

To stuff the bananas, cut lengthwise but be careful not to cut through the peel on the bottom. You can get away with cutting about three quarters of the way through and the bananas will still open up easily.

Once sliced, open the banana to create a groove for the stuffing.

Sprinkle the nut and spice mixture in the banana (you can get quite a lot in there-about 3 Tbsp of filling for a medium banana and about 4 Tbsp for a large banana).

Repeat until all of your bananas are stuffed.

Now, place those bananas directly onto the barbecue after you’ve cooked the rest of your dinner and the coals aren’t super hot anymore. In about fifteen minutes, you’ll have a very delicious treat. The warm banana tastes very sweet and takes on a slightly lemony flavor from being cooked in the peel. The nut and spice mix is reminiscent of a crumble topping. It’s kindof like eating a warm and soft banana coffee cake. I know The Croods couldn’t make ice cream, but you can, so feel free to serve these with a scoop of The Best Ever Paleo Vanilla Ice “Cream” to make it an extra special dessert.

This recipe makes 2 large or 3 medium bananas—2-4 servings. This recipe doubles and triples well, so feel free to make a bunch! We all like them warm, but they are still very good as leftovers. Prep time: 5-10 minutes. Cook time: 12-18 minutes.

Ingredients:

2 large or 3 medium very ripe bananas

¼ cup chopped raw pecans

¼ cup chopped raw walnuts

½ tsp cinnamon

¼ tsp nutmeg

¼ tsp ginger

¼ tsp allspice

1/8 tsp cloves

1/8 tsp cardamom

Dash salt

1. Chop nuts fairly finely (it’s okay if they aren’t completely evenly chopped). Combine chopped nuts with spices and mix to evenly coat.

2. Slice bananas lengthwise about three quarters of the way through the banana (careful not to cut the peel underneath). Spread the banana open and fill the groove with the nut and spice mixture.

3. Barbecue on a medium to moderately hot grill for 14-18 minutes (time will vary based on the size of your bananas and how hot your grill is). The peel will darken (and maybe turn completely black) which is normal. You know they’re done when the peels are dark, the banana is bubbling away and they smell fantastic!

4. Alternatively, place stuffed bananas on a cookie sheet (line with parchment paper, tin foil or a silicone liner to make clean-up easier) and bake at 425F in the middle of the oven for 12-14 minutes.

5. Remove from the grill (or oven) and enjoy warm! Eat with a spoon scooping right out of the peel! A scoop of The Best Ever Paleo Vanilla Ice “Cream” is optional.

No one wanted to wait until I was done photographing the bananas to dig in–which made for some fun extra photos. Yes, these are that good!

And a big thank you to The Croods for the inspiration! The film hits theaters on March 22, check out the official website here and don’t forget to like The Croods on Facebook too.

Tags: allspice, bake, baked, Banana, barbecue, barbecued, bbq, cake, cardamom, cinnamon, coal, coals, coffee, cream, crumble, Dairy-free, delicious, dessert, filling, ginger, Gluten-Free, Grain-free, Grill, Grug, ice, monkey, nutmeg, nuts, oven, pecan, peel, pie, punch, Recipe, salt, season, spices, spring, stuffed, stuffing, summer, tasty, The Croods, treat, walnut, whole
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Guest Post by Faye Weickert: Healing the Skin from Within – Paleo, Gut Health, and Eczema

February 5, 2013 in Alternative Therapies, Topics for Paleo Families

Faye is a blogger at www.GreenOrganicMama.com, from the islands of the Florida Keys, where she writes about the challenges of raising an eco-conscious family and integrating a Paleo lifestyle. She is also an independent skin care/beauty consultant for Neal’s Yard Remedies/NYR Organic; a carbon-neutral, family-owned company, specializing in all-natural products that free of GMO’s, parabens, phthalates, petroleum, and artificial fragrances. You can read more by Faye at her blog, connect with her on Facebook, and shop her online store.

First of all, I have to extend a huge thank you to Sarah, for putting together this amazing resource here at www.ThePaleoMom.com and with The Paleo View Podcast; both of which have helped so many people, like me, with navigating our health issues, together with following a Paleo lifestyle. I will be forever grateful for Sarah’s friendship, her advice, and her insight!

Much like Sarah, I’ve suffered through various autoimmune issues throughout my childhood and adult life, from asthma, allergies, and eczema. Like most of us, I was seen by countless conventional doctors and specialists, put through various medical tests, and prescribed many, many medications. The problem was that none of these recommendations ever did any more than serve as a Band-Aid solution. Not one of them addressed the root cause. Nobody stopped once to ask the all important question: Why? Why was I having asthmatic symptoms? Why was I breaking out in rashes, when I never had before. I just kept using my inhalers, applying cortisone creams, and taking oral steroids, which just masked the symptoms. Not to mention that each of these prescriptions carried their own side effects, too, but that’s a story for another day. Fast forward to the birth of my own daughter, and I then took on the helplessness and frustration that my own mother felt, when my little girl broke out in a horrible diaper rash, and later, a mysterious, persistent bleeding rash on her scalp. We ended up in the same vicious cycle. After much trial and error, more doctors’ visits, more testing, and trying all sorts of prescription and non-prescription creams, lotions, oils, and balms, we were very blessed to finally come across Paleo.

“There is no magic cream that is going to fix eczema.”

Before getting into what we did to heal and manage our symptoms, it’s important to understand that there is no magic cream that is going to fix eczema. None. And that’s coming from me, a compulsive, label-dissecting, green mom blogger, and also as an independent skin care consultant for Neal’s Yard Remedies/NYR Organic. There are products that I’ll discuss later that can provide much-needed relief when the flare-up symptoms occur, and that can also help with the healing process, but eczema and other autoimmune rashes will continue to rear their ugly heads, if the root causes are not addressed. Sometimes it can be an allergy, and as discussed in Episode 10 of The Paleo View Podcast, there may be a chemical sensitivity involved. However, in the case of many autoimmune issues, the problem lies within the gut.

“All diseases begin in the gut.” – Hippocrates

I’m a firm believer in the message that Sarah sends with this blog and in her autoimmune protocol: that many diseases begin in the gut. For our family, we had already been living green and organic, since before my daughter was born. We thought we were already very healthy eaters. We had weeded out all the chemicals in the home, and made a conscious effort to use the most basic ingredients possible, both in the food we ate, and in the products we put on our bodies. Despite all this, my daughter still developed eczema, and I continued to battle with mine. It’s because of that reason that I’m thankful for finally stumbling upon Paleo. It was a revelation when we found out that the grain-laden Standard American Diet, the one advocated by our health care professionals to help us be healthy, was in fact what was making us sick. I still remember thinking what a crazy notion that was at the time (“What?! Give up bread?!”). It wasn’t until the second time that I heard about Paleo, before I realized that we had already tried everything else, nothing else was working, and we finally decided to take the plunge. A year and a half later, I look back, and wish we had done this sooner!

Paleo is all about keeping inflammation at bay, and repairing a leaky gut. Sarah does a much better job explaining these concepts, and I highly recommend reading her very well-researched posts on these topics (start here), and pre-ordering her upcoming book on this very subject, The Paleo Approach:Reverse Autoimmune Disease and Heal Your Body. In a nutshell, once our family got away from processed foods (especially gut-irritating grain products), we introduced probiotics to restore our gut flora, and focused on food as medicine, we miraculously began to heal. My daughter’s head rash went away, and years later, it has never returned. I also finally lost those stubborn twenty pounds of baby weight, and I’m also rash-free, as long as I’m diligent with Paleo, manage my stress, and take care of my body. (After a year into Paleo, I learned the hard way what happens when a series of events caused me to stray for too long).

Caring for the Skin

As I mentioned above, despite all the claims, there are no magic creams to make eczema go away, but there are things you can do to help relieve the symptoms and help the skin heal, in conjunction with proper eating, to reduce inflammation, and simultaneously heal the gut and the body from within.

Anytime we’re dealing with damaged skin, it’s important to treat it gently. As a green mom blogger, I’ve kept my family away from products containing parabens, synthetic fragrances, phthalates, artificial colors, and petroleum. As mentioned in Episode 10 of The Paleo View, coconut oil is also one of my favorites for simple and thorough cleansing of the skin. I’m a huge fan of Tropical Traditions, and the same five-gallon drum of coconut oil that we buy for cooking is the same stuff we use for cleansing our skin, too.

While coconut oil is a really effective and gentle cleanser, I’ve personally found I need something more emollient afterwards, to help protect and heal the damaged skin. After trying so many other brands of creams, my favorite products are Neal’s Yard Remedies Frankincense Hydrating Cream and on my really rough, red spots, a small dab of the more highly-concentrated Rejuvenating Frankincense Facial Serum. Highly prized since ancient times, frankincense is an intensely-healing tree resin from the wild-growing Boswellia carterii trees found in Africa. Neal’s Yard Remedies has stores around the globe, and is available online in Canada and the US. If you live outside these areas, you still can find frankincense readily available as an essential oil from Amazon.

Another great healing plant-based remedy is rosehip oil, which is used in many parts of the world to treat burn victims.^[1] As with the frankincense, you can find recipes on the web to make your own rosehip oil home remedies. Personally, I carry around little pots of Neal’s Yard Remedies Wild Rose Beauty Balm, which is a very soothing and nourishing blend of organic rosehip, jojoba, beeswax, shea butter, hemp, borage, and frankincense, too. My daughter and I will often catch ourselves unconsciously scratching away at an irritated spot. I’m always amazed at how quickly one little swipe of this balm calms the itch and the redness, and keeps them from coming back. These natural remedies pair well with all of our healing efforts; inside and out.

The important takeaways here are these points:

Your skin truly serves as a picture of your own internal health. An imbalance in the body will manifest itself in the skin.
Eczema does not manifest itself because the body is short on corticosteroid creams or oral steroids.
Traditional medicine typically does not address the root cause of eczema and other autoimmune issues; functional medicine practitioners, like chiropractors, do.
Healing from eczema and minimizing flare-ups requires identifying irritants and taking care of the gut first.
You did not get sick overnight, and it’s going to take longer than overnight to heal. There are no shortcuts.
Our skin absorbs around 60% of what’s put on it.^[2] Choose your skin care and household products wisely.
Our bodies are complex, and we are all different. What works for one person, may not work for you, and vice versa. Learn to listen to your body.

With a little diligence and know-how, it’s possible to keep eczema at bay, the natural way.

^[1] http://www.healingcancernaturally.com/chelating-ionizing-radiation.html

^[2] http://blog.naturalhealthyconcepts.com/2012/07/16/what-toxic-chemicals-is-your-body-absorbing-infographic/

Tags: alternative, autoimmune, balm, cream, dermatitis, disease, eczema, help, natural, ointment, rash, salve, skin, steroid, topical, treatment
3 Comments »

Paleo Chocolate Éclairs

December 22, 2012 in Decadent Desserts, Holiday Treats, Nut-Free Baking

Yes, you read that right. Paleo Chocolate Éclairs. Éclairs were one of my childhood favorite treats. If you aren’t familiar with the éclairs, they are pastry cream-filled puff pastries topped with chocolate. Drool! The recipe is at the bottom of this post, but don’t scroll too fast! Because first are some other great recipes to try too!

The choux pastry is made the traditional French way of creating an egg-rich batter on the stovetop, piping onto a cookie sheet and baking immediately. I’ll be honest up front: this is a bit of an arm workout. Once the puff pastry cools, you end up with hollow pockets of joy. To make éclairs, cut them in half and fill with vanilla pastry cream (I’ve included variations for chocolate and coffee pastry cream as well) then top with melted chocolate.

When I was a kid, a French friend of my mom’s used to make homemade éclairs and filled them with whipped cream instead of pastry cream (she actually used to make the most decadent version of strawberry short cake using choux pastry too). A delightful alternative to pastry cream is whipped heavy cream or coconut cream (sweeten or not, it’s up to you). I’ve also included some variations for flavored pastry creams.

Another possible variation of this recipe is to pipe silver dollar sized circles of choux pastry instead and then use an injector tip on your piping bag to fill them with pastry cream or whipped heavy cream. Voila! Puffballs! Stack them and drizzle with chocolate for a croquembouche to wow your friends.

Yields 16-20 4”-long éclairs. Store in an airtight container at room temperature for up to a day. For longer storage, store in the fridge.

Ingredients (Pastry Cream):

3 cups coconut cream (either use Aroy-D or use the top thick part of about 4 cans of full fat coconut milk that has been sitting in your fridge overnight)
8 egg yolks
1 cup arrowroot powder
3/4 cup honey
1½ Tbsp vanilla
Beans scraped out of 2 Madagascar vanilla bean pods

Combine all ingredients in a large saucepan and whisk together.
Then put the saucepan on the stovetop and heat over medium-low heat, whisking constantly. You want to heat until just shy of boiling point. The pastry cream will start to steam slightly and then start to thicken. Once it becomes thick and gooey, remove from heat (takes 7-8 minutes if you put it on a preheated element).
Pour into a bowl or measuring cup and cover the surface with wax paper to prevent a custard skin from forming. Let cool to room temperature before piping into éclairs.

Pastry cream variations:

For lighter pastry cream: fold in 1 cup softly whipped heavy cream or coconut cream to cooled pastry cream

For chocolate pastry cream: add 4oz of finely grated bittersweet or unsweetened chocolate to the hot pastry cream. Stir until melted.

For coffee pastry cream: add 1-2 Tbsp coffee powder (super fine grind) to the saucepan with the rest of the ingredients.

Ingredients (Choux Pastry):

½ cup palm shortening (you could substitute unsalted butter)
1 cup full fat coconut milk
1/3 cup coconut flour, sifted (measure after sifting)
1/3 cup tapioca starch
1/3 cup arrowroot powder
4 eggs + 1 egg yolk
Pinch of salt

This is going to be intense, so I recommend measuring out all of your ingredients before you start. Combine your flours and salt. Crack your eggs and place them in separate bowls (okay you can combine your extra yolk and one egg in a bowl). Have either a pastry bag with a wide tip ready or a large heavy duty plastic bag (like a ziplock freezer bag) and a pair of scissors handy. Preheat oven to 425F. Line a baking sheet with a silicone liner or parchment paper. Actually, line two baking sheets because you’ll probably need two.
Heat coconut milk and palm shortening over medium heat until it just starts to simmer. Remove from heat and pour in all of the flour all at once. Stir like mad until it’s thick and fully combined.
Add the eggs ONE AT A TIME and stir like crazy with each addition (you are doing this off the heat). Each time you add an egg, the dough will seem to separate and then as you stir, it will come together. Wait until it comes together before adding the next egg.
At the end, you have a fairly warm, quite thick and sticky cream-colored dough. Immediately scoop it into your pastry bag or plastic bag. If using a plastic bag, cut off one corner so you have a hole about 1” in diameter.
Pipe 4”x1” long rectangles of dough onto your prepared baking sheet (if you’re using a pastry bag tip that isn’t 1” wide, you can pipe a really narrow U shape to get your éclair rectangle). Don’t worry if they aren’t perfect, they will smooth out considerably as they cook.
Immediately place into the oven and bake for 18-20 minutes. They will puff up to be about 1” high (depending on the size of your eggs) and will be light golden in color.
Remove from the oven and gently turn each one upside down. Let them cool upside down on the baking sheet for 20 minutes (then you can move them to a cooling rack until you’re ready to deal with them).
Cut pastries in half using a sharp knife (the pastry is quite thin, so you can just trace around the circumference without cutting all the way through the whole pastry). Pipe cooled pastry cream into the middle.
Make sure to cut and fill them relatively promptly after they have cooled. They have a habit of getting softer if they sit too long and are then much harder to cut open cleanly (still taste great though!).

Ingredients (Chocolate Coating):

1.75 oz dark chocolate (I used 85%)
1 Tbsp palm shortening or butter

Melt chocolate and shortening together on your stovetop or in your microwave. Spread over the top of the éclairs with a spatula or the back of a spoon.
Enjoy right away or let the chocolate cool first, up to you!

Tags: ancestral, ball, choux, cream, creme, croquembouche, Dairy-free, dessert, eclair, french, glute-free, Grain-free, Healthy, paleo, Paleolithic, pastry, primal, puff, puffball, Recipe, refined sugar free, treat
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The Science and Art of Paleofying—Part 3 Leavening and Fats

November 29, 2012 in Baking Ingredients, Cooking Tips

Creating paleo adaptations of our favorite recipes (a.k.a. paleofying) helps us stay on board with paleo through the holidays (and many other times of the year), help us feel like we can still celebrate and partake in all of the fun and food luxury of the season. I know that many of you are pulling out your old favorite recipes and wondering what to do with them (I’ve had many questions lately about rules of thumb for flour substitutions, and alternatives for those with nut or egg allergies). I am too. I have several family favorite recipes that I am tackling this year.

Paleofying is as much an art as it is a science. I vaguely remember a time when I did not have extremely well-honed cooking instincts (I think that was back in middle school). But even starting out as a fairly good cook, there was still a learning curve to all of these new ingredients and to baking without gluten. After a year of paleo baking (and blogging!), I have a much better understanding of how to adapt conventional recipes now and thought it was high time I share some of this knowledge and experience with you, in addition to my perfected recipes.

This is the third in a 6-part post series to help you start the process of adapting your recipes (did I call this a 4-part series before? Yes, I just realized I needed two extra parts and I reserve the right to expand this to a 7-part series if needed!). In the first post, I discussed paleo flours and other ingredients that add bulk to a recipe. In the second post, I discussed binders (ingredients that hold baking together). In this post, I will discuss leavening agents and fats. In part 4, I will discuss sweeteners. Part 5 will discuss liquid ingredients and wet-to-dry ratios. Part 6 will discuss some strategies for doing iterations and troubleshooting your recipes. You may also be interested in some of my posts that reference paleo baking ingredients: Important Pantry Items for The Paleo Baker, Paleo Flour Substitutes, Sugar vs. Sweeteners, and Is Sugar Paleo?).

Leavening Agents

Let’s start with leavening agents. Leavening means anything that puts little bubbles of air into your baking making it lighter, often “rising” while baking. Classic leavening agents are baking soda, baking powder, yeast, butter (or more specifically the butter sugar combination), and eggs.

Baking soda is sodium bicarbonate. It comes from a natural mineral that was originally mined, but is now made industrially using the miracles of chemistry. Sodium bicarbonate is an alkali, so when it mixes with acid, it undergoes a chemical reaction and CO₂ bubbles are released (woohoo for acid-base chemistry!). Depending on how much acid it is mixed with, it either reacts slowly or very quickly (think homemade volcano science projects). If your recipe calls for baking soda, then no substitution is necessary.

Baking powder is not paleo. It contains corn starch (corn-free versions typically contain potato starch). It’s actually one of my biggest pet peeves to see baking powder in paleo recipes because that little bit of corn starch can be a big problem for many people. However, the active ingredients in baking powder, baking soda and potassium hydrogen tartrate (a.k.a. tartaric acid, a.k.a. cream of tartar), are paleo.

Tartaric acid is an acid naturally found in grapes and is a byproduct of wine making. You can buy cream of tartar in the spice or baking section of just about any grocery store. Cream of tartar is an acidifying agent. It provides the necessary acid for baking soda to react with to make its little CO₂ bubbles. Baking powder contains both baking soda and cream of tartar (and the aforementioned corn starch as a drying agent), so if you recipe calls for baking powder, here are some simple substitutions:

1 tsp baking powder=1/4 tsp baking soda + ½ tsp cream of tartar
or
1 tsp bakin powder=1/4 tsp baking soda + 1½ tsp vinegar or lemon juice
or
1 tsp baking powder=1/4 tsp baking soda + ¼ cup molasses
or
1 tsp baking powder=1/4 tsp baking soda + some other acidic ingredients like applesauce

I will only briefly mention here that baker’s yeast is a perfectly acceptable ingredient to use in paleo baking (see my post Is Yeast Paleo?). However, you will have to pay close attention to binders in your recipe to hold in the air bubbles that yeast makes. I have two yeast-based paleo bread recipes (almond flour and nut-free) and both took many, many iterations to get right.

Cookie recipes will often use the combination of butter creamed with granulated sugar to achieve some lightness. You can still do this with paleo baking as long as you use a granulated sugar (there are unrefined options which I will talk about more in the next post of this series). If you replace sugars with liquid sweeteners like honey or with fruit, then you might need to add a little extra baking soda to replace the leavening effects of the butter and sugar. You won’t need much though, maybe as little as an extra 1/8-1/4 tsp.

Eggs provide leavening in addition to binding in many recipes, especially if the recipe calls for beating the eggs very well before adding in other ingredients or separating the eggs and beating the whites. If you are struggling with dense baking (especially cakes and breads), then before changing anything, try beating your eggs for 3-5 minutes (this works best if the eggs are room temperature). You can also try beating the egg whites and folding them in (see my recipes for Holiday Trifle, Paleo Styleand Cinnamon “French Toast” Flat-bread (Nut-Free)).

Fats

If your recipe calls for vegetable oil, then the typical paleo oil replacement is melted extra virgin coconut oil. If you don’t want to coconut flavor that this brings to your baking, you can use a naturally refined coconut oil instead. Olive oil or avocado oil are also acceptable substitutes for vegetable oil in baking. While these oils have a higher mono- and polyunsaturated fat content, as long as you are baking at 350F or less, you really don’t need to worry about the fats oxidizing.

If your recipe calls for peanut butter, then Almond Butter or any other nut butter will work well. Sometimes mixing a couple of different nut butters (like Almond Butter, Walnut Butter, and Pecan Butter) will provide a more neutral taste. You can also substitute some of all of the fat in a recipe with nut butters (or even coconut cream concentrate), which works well for cookies but can also be used in breads and cakes. Because of the fiber in nut butters, these can also help act as binders.

If your recipe calls for butter and you cannot tolerate any dairy, then palm shortening is the most similar ingredient in terms of chemistry. Lard also works. Often people get stuck on just using coconut oil for baking, but coconut oil can make baking heavy and chewy, which isn’t always desired. I find palm shortening especially useful in cake recipes where butter contributes to the lightness of the cake. It will also be helpful in cookie recipes to achieve a crispier, less chewy, cookie. If you do want chewy cookies, then coconut oil is a great choice.

If your recipe calls for shortening or margarine, palm shortening is your go to substitute. You could also use butter or lard.

When my paleo recipes call from palm shortening versus coconut oil, it is always extremely intentional. They have very different properties in baking. Palm shortening will help thicken a batter, keep baking lighter, provide a completely neutral flavor. Coconut oil is healthier and can help hold a recipe that is short on binders together. I love coconut oil for cookies because I tend to love chewy cookies. It’s also great for use in brownie type recipe, anything where that chew is a good thing.

I will talk more about fatty liquids like heavy cream and buttermilk in the 5th post of this series, but I will mention here that if whipped heavy cream is an ingredient in your baking and you can not tolerate any dairy (many paleo enthusiasts still consume heavy cream, especially if grass-fed), then whipped coconut “cream” is a good substitute. Chill a can of coconut milk in the fridge for 24 hours. Carefully scoop out the solid half at the top of the can, whip and go. You can also use Anoy-D brand coconut cream and then you don’t have to worry about what to do with your half can of coconut water when you’re done. If your coconut cream isn’t holding together (sometimes happens if you get too much liquid from the bottom of the can mixed in), then try adding a little arrowroot powder to help it hold together.

One more quick note on fats. Many recipes that we might want to adapt are “low fat” recipes from the last 30 years of fat-phobia. I often find myself increasing the amount of fat in a recipe, either by straight up using more fat or by using nut flours that are higher in fat or replacing dry ingredients with fat (like using full fat coconut milk). Increasing the fat too much in a recipe can cause baking to be quite heavy, but sometimes increasing it a little can work magic. More fat often means it holds together better, and depending on what fat you use, you can have better control over the texture. And the best part? High fat baking tends to taste great even with less sugar.

I hope this will get you started on your paleofying adventures. As you play more and more with these ingredients and get to understand their properties better, it will be easier to intuit what will work in any particular recipe. But, I still have recipes that take me many iterations to get right. And of course, if you adapt a recipe that is absolutely awesome, you are welcome to e-mail it to me to share on the blog: thepaleomommy@gmail.com