Sunday 30 October 2011

Sometimes, you just need a piece of toast


When I started crossfit I didn't jump on the paleo bandwagon straight away. I started gradually reducing my wheat consumption in lunches and dinners, but I was still very much addicted to my morning bagel with peanut butter. I had been eating either toast or a bagel for breakfast every day of my life, it was hard to imagine anything different.

Last Christmas I did something drastic and decided to only have a bagel every other day. Breakfast has always seemed to me like the hardest meal to change; it's much easier to get moving in the morning if you just carry on with your regular routine on autopilot, so it takes some directed effort and perhaps planning to do something different.

Anyway, in order to give up morning toast EVERY DAY for the current 10 week paleo challenge I'm attempting now, I decided it was time to find an alternative. I tried making this bread first, because it was the only paleo bread recipe I could find that actually looked fluffy. Most of them look more like banana bread in density, which just won't do for toast. It one didn't work for me, in short. It didn't rise at all and so was hardly wide enough to spread nut butter on.

My next attempt was much more successful. The recipe is from Elana's Pantry, which has a slew of gluten free goodies that appear to be mostly paleo friendly. I didn't have the tiny pan she recommended (I got mine from Fortinos), so my slices are more the shape of malba toast. Mine also has brown flecks because Fortinos has only flax meal instead of golden flax meal.

I love this bread. It's light and fluffly like proper bread, and even tastes like it's buttered already! It's good with nut butter, or all by itself. It also doesn't take very long to make at all. I mixed the ingredients while my spaghetti squash was roasting, and baked it while I ate the spaghetti squash (with ground beef, simmered for a while in diced tomato with garlic, salt and pepper, tamari, and lots of paprika and chili powder...delicious!). I have also successfully eaten this bread toasted with an egg, tomato, and bacon, and it did not fall apart, although it's a bit incorrectly shaped...unless you have a rectangular egg pan...

EDIT: It looks much better with golden flax meal, as prescribed, and I think it tastes even better too.
Paleo Bread
Ingredients
1 ½ cups blanched almond flour
2 tablespoons coconut flour
¼ cup golden flaxseed meal
¼ teaspoon celtic sea salt
1 ½ teaspoons baking soda
5 eggs
¼ cup coconut oil
1 tablespoon honey
1 tablespoon apple cider vinegar

1. Place almond flour, coconut flour, flax, salt and baking soda in a food processor (or a bowl)
2. Pulse ingredients together (or stir with a fork)
3. Pulse in eggs, oil, honey and vinegar
4. Pour batter into a greased 7.5" x 3.5" Magic Line Loaf Pan
5. Bake at 350° for 30 minutes
6. Cool and serve

Tuesday 25 October 2011

Who are you, and what have you done with Jen Young.....

If you suggested a year ago that I would be baking bread, making pies, and eating bananas and broccoli, I would have suggested you have your head examined. I had all sorts of excuses for why I didn't have the time to make my own food from scratch and, more importantly, I was unaware of information about the food that I was eating that might have provided some motivation to make the time.

Then, several changes took place in my life (some small, some rather enormous) that set me on the hiking trail that I'm navigating today. When I was a student at McMaster I started going to the campus gym, where I went regularly to classes lead by a wonderful instructor named Ruth. She ran a spin class, a step class, and a strength class back to back every Thursday (the heaviest weights were 15lbs, but she did her best and made us hold two at once for something resembling strength training). By the time I graduated I felt my fitness had actually improved (I could make it through all three classes on a good day). But then came the real (non student) world of expensive gym fees and monotonous classes that left me peddling on the eliptical 3 times a week. Not so much with the progress anymore.... I started to suspect a change was in order, but I had no idea what that might be.

Then, my dad died of a heart attack, and my gym routine felt so futile that I could hardly scrape together the motivation to go once a week. After several months of hazy funk, I remembered Christine B mentioning this Crossfit thing at work, and decided that change was definitely in order, and that perhaps this was the change I was looking for. Over a year later, I can say with sincerity that Altitude and the people there have not only changed my life, but my outlook on life as well.

So my fitness was back on track again, and through this new brand of fitness I was introduced to a new way of thinking about food. This coincided nicely with the decision to order a weekly box of organic, local vegetables to share with my roomate (more on that later). Slowly, I began to look for replacements and substitutions in my diet to bring me closer to the Paleo diet, and at the same time the veggie box was forcing me to be more creative with my meals (there were veggies I'd never even heard of, google was required). I also have this compulsive need to immediately research anything and everything that someone claims to be true (I blame math and its tidy proofs, I need that QED), and I directed this compulsion toward all things to do with food and the body.

Put all of these things together, and you end up with a person who went from frozen pizzas and Zoodles, to "one of those people who bakes and stuff". Weird. I still don't bake for fun; it isn't something that I wake up in the morning feeling excited about. But I certainly enjoy consuming the end product, and it somehow tastes better when I know exactly what's in it and what sort of fuel it will provide. There's also the basic satisfaction that you get from making something "all by yourself", and from sharing your culinary successes with others. (And when they declare your creation to be delicious, it's the adult equivalent of when your mom used to stick your artwork on the fridge)

So, the point of that unintentionally long-winded ramble was to introduce the intention behind this space. I consider(ed?) myself to be rather inexpert in the kitchen; I started out profoundly uncreative with my meals, and I have actually managed to screw up cookies made from a mix in the past. This isn't meant to be a place to share my "expert opinion". Instead, I plan to record the things that I'm learning from those I consider to be more expert than myself. In addition, I will share my attempts to become actively engaged in my own fitness, happiness, and all around health, and hope that anyone who happens across this space will do the same.

~Jen