Tasty Tuesday: Herbed Feta Scramble in Coconut Oil and Butter

So many wonderful fats to eat, it's hard to get 'em all in. I like to use a combination of virgin coconut oil and organic, grass-fed butter for my scrambles and omelets, about a tablespoon of the first and a teaspoon of the second. Sometimes I pour in some extra-virgin olive oil, too. They all taste so good and are so good for me, I can never figure out how to choose one over the other, so I just put 'em all in the pan.

Russian sage attracts monarch butterflies.

Need I mention that I don't use nonstick? With all that oil and butter, why would I need it? Besides, I'd much rather eat fat than plastic. See my Notes on Nonstick in my article on Best Pots and Pans on why cooking with Teflon and other nonstick coatings amounts to introducing plastic in your diet, and other reasons I just can't stand the stuff.

This morning I walked Ulysses to school and back, then dug up a hole in my newest flower bed and planted the big bundle of Russian sage that a real-foods-friendly parent had dug from her garden and sent to school with her husband for me. After all that walking and digging I was ravenous.

Breakfast: three eggs from Keene Organics, the best eggs you can buy in Madison, I believe. Dark yellow yolks, loaded with flavor, mmm. Plenty of chives, tarragon and thyme gathered from the yard, can't get any fresher. Tropical Traditions virgin coconut oil, which I recently got for the first time and am happy with. Organic Valley butter, which the website tells me comes from cows grass fed whenever possible, so that's good enough for me for now. Plenty of feta. A little salt. Cast-iron pan.

A more in-depth description of how to put all this together -- really, it's a blueprint for a perfect scramble made with whatever herbs, cheeses, or ingredients besides eggs you wish to use -- is in my Low-Carb & Paleo Breakfast Book, available in a Kindle edition (Today #8 in Breakfast in the Kindle Store!) as well as in PDF format.

Animal foods provide the kind of vitamin K we need.

I said usually I use about a teaspoon of butter. But this time, I thought about vitamin K2 and put in more like a tablespoon.

You see, I just listened to the Latest in Paleo podcast with guest Richard Nikoley, and he and host Angelo Coppolo talked about vitamin K2. Richard said taking it made his fingernails stronger almost overnight. My husband, Don, has been playing his banjo more, and the clawhammer style he uses is wearing down his fingernails, he told me.

The two of us were spurred to look further in K2. Nikoley has written extensively about it on his Free the Animal blog (I love that name). I read some of Stephan Guyanet's info on Whole Health Source, also. Seems the good Dr. Weston A. Price found that traditional diets were super-rich in it. It does more than fix fingernails. It is of central importance to human health. If I understand correctly, it helps calcium get to where it's supposed to be, like in bones and teeth, and not where it's not supposed to be, like in your arteries. Apparently it's important for cardiovascular health and can be preventative against leukemia. I'm a home cook, not a nutritionist, so if you're interested, please follow the links and read more!

Plant foods provide a version that apparently isn't well assimilated. The version we need is called menatetrenon, or MK-4. Guess what has PLENTY of it?

Butter! Especially grass-fed butter.

Coincidentally, I also just read about how Sarah over at the Healthy Home Economist  helped her child heal a gaping cavity in a short time with capsules of vitamin-K rich butter oil. (They had a dental visit scheduled to fill it, but it healed before the appointment.) Apparently, Dr. Price did something similar regularly in his dental practice in the 1920s and 1930s.

Guyanet says to take butter oil, which is made by spinning butter in a centrifuge and getting out just the fat of the butter. That's really expensive, like 60 bucks for a little bottle that you take a teaspoon of each day. Guyanet says it's more concentrated than just making ghee, which also removes the water and milk solids, but which I (in my lay opinion) think sounds more natural than the violent centrifuge thing. Nikoley says he takes supplements. So we decided to order supplements, eat more butter and make some ghee, while we're at it.

Eat more butter! Tough advice, but I think I'm up to it.

Round and Round

Could this be the square peg that solves the round conundrum?

I keep seeing round at the market, but usually I just buy chuck or rib eye. Or once in a while brisket. Because I know what to do with those things. So I got a great big hunk of eye round, determined to Figure It Out.

I learned that round is the very leanest cut of meat there is. It comes from the nether end of the animal. I haven't yet figured out why it's called "round." Lots of connective tissue. The lean means it's easy to dry out with too much cooking. The connective tissue means it's going to be tough without lots and lots of slow cooking. So, how to prepare?

In the past, I made it into pot roast. As predicted by the caveats above, after lengthy cooking, even at low temperature, it was super dry, even though it was reasonably tender, and and even though it was braised in liquid.

This time, a friend suggested cutting it into 1/2-inch steaks, marinating it overnight and then grilling briefly, 4 minutes a side. I learned since that's called London broil, which is a method of cooking tough meat, and not a specific cut. London broil can be grilled, broiled, pan fried or roasted.

Donald and I sliced four steaks off the cylinder of round and marinated them. We used tamari (wheat-free, natural, traditionally brewed soy sauce) and various spices. The idea is that the enzymes in tamari break down the tough fibers.

The next morning, I applied my perfect steak method to two of the marinated round steaks to give the best chance at tenderness. After bringing them slowly to near 100, I seared them in hot cast iron on the stove. They were tasty. Not dry. Adding a pat of butter atop them on the individual plate helped, too. But they were tough. Not too tough to eat, but not ideal, either.  I wanted to find something that didn't work my jaw that hard.

Instead of grilling the other two marinated steaks, as we had planned, Donald ground them in the food processor, mixed in a generous amount of bacon fat (we always have plenty on hand), formed them into burgers and cooked them in cast iron. They were delicious, but still on the jaw-working side.

What to do with the rest of the round? We thought about how to roast or braise it, and we thought of cutting some into strips for stir-fry -- turns out round is a popular cut for that, but then we decided to splurge on a gadget we've been wanting forever: a blade meat tenderizer.

These things have lots of tiny blades that you push through a cut of meat, breaking down the fibers and therefore making it more tender. Long, slow cooking gelatinizes these tough connective-tissue fibers.

Remember that the purpose of the tamari was also breaking down fibers. Cutting into steaks -- that is, cutting across the grain -- also shortens fibers. As you can see, it's all about mitigating that fibrous connective tissue! Two cuts that have little connective tissue are rib eye and tenderloin -- that's why they're so tender even without long cooking.

We put the rest of the round roast in the freezer to keep it fresh while we're waiting for our 48-blade Jaccard Supertendermatic to arrive! I can't till it comes and I can find out how it affects the cooking of this tasty, but tough cut. Then I'll be able to report more about it.

Have you tried using a blade tenderizer? How do you like it?

The candy-coated elephant in the room

Remember when too much candy
would give a kid a tummy ache?

The title of the article looked promising: "Raising Food-Smart Kids: 10 ways to help your child develop a positive relationship with healthy food." So I clicked on the link and to read the article posted on WebMD and described as "selected and controlled by WebMD's editorial staff in collaboration with Sanford Health Systems" and written by Jennifer Warner.

I scanned the article for useful tips. I noticed the usual rote digs at dietary fat, especially vexing when aimed at children. The content-free recommendations for a "good," but undefined, breakfast. The usual stuff that gets my goat. But when I was done, I noticed a peculiar, empty sensation. What was it? I tried to identify it.

Something was missing. But what?

What had she said about sugar? I couldn't remember. So I punched Control-F and typed "sugar" to home in on whatever her take was.

No hit.

Nothing.

The word "sugar" did not appear in this article about dealing with children and healthy food. (Nor did "fructose" or any other sugar-related term I could think of.)

Probably the single biggest problem with children's health today is the amount of sugar in the diet. Yes, they're eating fake colors and preservatives, too much high-tech soy, GMOs. I didn't say it was the only problem. But probably, probably the single biggest problem. Yet, even in tips with headings like "Praise healthy choices" and "Don't nag about unhealthy choices," no advice was offered about how to reduce the amount of sugar the kid might be shoveling in.

The reader learns that when his child asks for potato chips, for example, she should be offered baked tortilla chips with salsa, instead. Yum, every kid's favorite! Not to mention, this is no doubt the brainchild of someone who has not been conditioned to immediately recognize any liquidy, chunky, tomato-based condiment as belonging to the class of Things Children Spill Everywhere Unless You Watch Them Every Second, and therefore not suitable for low-maintenance impromptu kid snacks.

Never mind that. Every parent knows that discouraging a kid from eating potato chips is, well, child's play, compared to raising a kid not to live on candy.

Candy. Ice cream. Soda pop. Cookies. Snack cakes. Were any of these so much as mentioned in the article? No.

How about the prevalence of added sucrose and high-fructose corn syrup on processed and packaged foods of all types, not just sweets? Not mentioned.

Too much sugar isn't something that "simply fails to be good for you," in the words of a high-school friend many years ago. It's actively bad for you. See "Is Sugar Toxic?" by award-winning science journalist Gary Taubes writing in the New York Times Magazine in April 2011.

Getting and keeping kids off sugar is probably the single most important thing you can do for their health. You want to raise "food-smart" kids? You want to teach good nutritional choices? In our food culture, you can't do it without teaching the proper place of sugar in the diet. That is to say, minimal.

I see kids all around mine eating sugar all day -- literally for breakfast, lunch and dinner, plus snacks and beverages. Those kids don't see sugary snacks as special treats. They feel them as necessities. They live on sugar and authentically feel bad when they don't get it. I've witnessed this. It took a while for me to understand they're not being brats when, for example, neighbor kids playing at my house beg me, frequently and periodically, for candy and juice (they've learned there's no pop here, only ultra-watered-down juice that I guess they figure is better than nothing); they're responding to their metabolic states.

The advice in this article would do nothing to open the eyes of any of those kids' parents. Because the biggest single problem their kids have with food -- too much sugar -- isn't even mentioned!

(By the way, I searched for more articles by the same writer and guess what I found, this one on MedicineNet.com: "Can Food Really Affect Your Child's Behavior? Experts bust the sugar-hyperactivity myth and other misconceptions about food and children's behavior." Uh-huh.

So if you think tossing off comments about how great the lean protein in turkey is for playing sports better (heaven forbid WebMD in collaboration with Sanford Health would mention beef, or protein without the palliative "lean"), or keeping dried fruit on hand for those days you don't have time to melt chocolate to dip strawberries into when Junior wants a snack (I'm not making these up, and please know that dried fruit is an extremely concentrated source of sugar), go for it and please drop me some comments and let me know how it's working.

Meantime, the candy-coated, nougat-filled, chocolate-sprinkled covered elephant is pretty much stomping all over the room.

Tasty Tuesday: Yankee Pot Roast

A few seasons in, we finally started watching Mad Men. And loving Mad Men. One of my favorite things in it is the retro food.

We just watched episode 404, the fourth episode in season four, "The Rejected." Awesome episode. I don't want to put in any spoilers for anyone who hasn't gotten that far in watching, so I'll just say this. Trudy Campbell tells her husband, Pete, that she's having her dad over for dinner the following evening. She assures him that it will be the perfect opportunity for Pete to tell his in-law the Important Thing that I won't mention (because of the spoiler factor).

"Tomorrow night," she says, reassuringly. "Yankee pot roast."

Yankee pot roast! What is that? Donald and I both wanted to know! And we both wanted to have some, like right away! It sounded so soothing, so down-to-earth, so reliable.

It turned out that Yankee pot roast is pot roast the way we make it all the time already. Regular pot roast is when you take a tough cut of beef and roast it in a covered pot until it's tender. Yankee pot roast is when you add vegetables. Like we do already.

So today I made some Yankee pot roast. And so can you. It's easy. And so delicious. You'll know why they call it comfort food.

2 to 2 1/2 pounds chuck roast
2 teaspoons salt
several grindings black pepper
4 carrots, sliced
2 celery stalks, plus the inside green leafy section, chopped
1 large or two medium onions, sliced

Optional ingredients Trudy wouldn't have used:
1 to 4 cloves garlic, sliced
sliced fresh hot red pepper, or several shakes red pepper flakes 
Use a cast-iron skillet with a fitting lid for best results. You can also use a Dutch oven or any oven-safe skillet with a fitting lid. If your skillet doesn't have a matching lid, put a roasting pan and a brick on top of it while it's in the oven, or otherwise weight and cover. Then get a Lodge cast-iron skillet with a matching lid tomorrow.

Heat the skillet over very high heat. Put the roast in it and sear 4 minutes. Turn over and sear 4 minutes. Add seasonings. Cover and place in 250 F oven 2 to 3 hours. Add vegetables and cook an additional hour. Check occasionally and, only if it seems necessary, add water to prevent scorching. Cook longer, if needed, until tender.

Serve just as is for a low-carb or Paleo supper. Serve with broad noodles for Pete's father-in-law. Sour cream or yogurt are a lovely topping for this.

Tasty Tuesday: Miso Soup

Welcome to a new feature on How To Cook With Vesna: the first in the series of Tasty Tuesday blog posts. Tune in Tuesdays to read suggestions for toothsome treats, tidbits for thought, or nutritional nuggets.

This is a stock image of miso -- I'll replace it with
my own yummier-looking one, K?

I was enjoying some homemade Thai food with my friend, Gigi, who remarked -- in the context of my speech about how bad unfermented soyfoods are, especially industrially processed ones, and how they are put to shame by traditional, fermented soy products like tamari and especially miso -- that she didn't like miso soup.

"You don't like miso?" I said, incredulous, wondering how that was possible. Then I remembered -- probably the same reason lots of people think they don't like lots of things: they've only ever had processed or poorly prepared simulacra of the real thing. So I asked about the miso she'd tried.

"Instant, you know," she said. "What else?"

I sprang across the room and grabbed a tub of Miso Master red miso from the fridge. I put a saucepan of water on the stove. I began babbling about what a beautiful, artisanal, ancient food is miso. How tamari -- soy sauce -- orginated as a byproduct of miso making, just the liquid pressed off as the mass of koji-cultured miso matures. How there's red miso, brown, white, yellow, each with its complex flavor, heavenly aroma, distinct body.

"There's a section about it in my Breakfast Book," I continued, a little breathless with excitement, because of course I'm obsessed with and excited about everything in my new cookbooks, as I suppose (and hope) a new author should be. "It's so great for breakfast. I say that it's wonderful if you don't want coffee in the morning, but you want a mug of something warm and nutritious and invigorating to wake up to. And so easy!"

When the water was piping hot, but not yet boiling, I tipped about 2 tablespoons of it into a mug. I spooned in about 2 teaspoons of the thick miso paste. I stirred it and mashed the fragrant paste against the side of the mug until it had dissolved into the water completely.

"You can't just put it straight into the full serving of water, or you'll never get it all dissolved," I explained. "You need to have it in just a little water so you can get hold of it with the spoon enough to mix it totally in."

Then I poured in enough water, boiling by now, to fill the mug. Finally, decided to divide this single portion between us. I divided it between two mugs, for us to share.

I hope you can see how close to instant real miso already is -- why the notion of "instant" miso is such an industrial insult to the real thing. I mean, all you need to do is just mash the paste in a little water and then add the rest of the water. If you're making soup, mash paste in a little water and add the whole thing to the pot at the end of the cooking. You never want to boil miso, because you'll kill all the enzymes that make it such a wonderful living food. And it just doesn't taste right after boiling. Some spark of bright, vital flavor is extinguished.

We sipped our miso. Gigi had the hoped-for reaction: so this is miso. She liked it!

The flavor of red miso is warm, soothing, with that kind of soul-satisfying impact that only real food can have, that palpable feeling of nourishment. I couldn't remember the last time I'd had a plain cup of miso, even though I'd included it in the Breakfast Book, knowing from past experience how to prepare it and how good it was for a warm morning cuppa. It had been just long enough, I guess, that although I knew it was good, I'd forgotten the actual feeling. I must have had it thousands of times during my macrobiotic years. I reflected that it was probably because I have so many conflicted feelings about that time that I had resisted eating miso regularly since then.

Now that good miso feeling was back, and it washed over me with unexpected vigor.

Since that evening, guess what I've been waking up to? That's right: a breakfast mug of miso.

Breakfast Mug of Miso

2 teaspoons real cultured miso paste, such as Miso Master brand, any variety*
boiling water

* Lighter colors are more delicate and almost sweet in flavor. Darker colors are darker, more robust and coarser in texture.

Place miso paste in a mug. Add about two tablespoons of hot water. Mash and stir until miso paste is completely dissolved. Fill mug the rest of the way with hot water.

When cool enough, sip and enjoy. Also enjoy looking at the cloud-like formations made by the fine particles of soybeans when the miso sits still for a while. I like gazing into the cup at them, and then stirring them away. Very pretty in a direct sunbeam.

Environmental Working Group: "The Dangers of Teflon"

In both my cookbooks and on my website I caution against the use of nonstick cookware.

This article from Environmental Working Group (EWG) describes the dangers of "Teflon flu," which develops from inhalation of the polymers released into the air when nonstick surfaces become overheated.

The Dangers of Teflon, use non-toxic cookware instead - Health Tips from EWG | Environmental Working Group

The article doesn't mention ingestion of nonstick materials, but that's something I've mentioned. Anyone who's used nonstick cookware has observed that the coating wears away as you cook, no matter how careful you are with it. Perhaps some wears off into the dishwater -- I almost said "harmlessly," but then I thought about the fact that this pollutes our water with plastic molecules. The rest must be wearing into the food you're preparing in the pan. Yummy. If anyone can point me to studies showing how much of the stuff winds up in food and what consequences have been shown, I would greatly appreciate it. Meantime, my common-sense reaction to this line of thinking leads me to stay away from nonstick cookware.

The EWG recommends cast-iron and stainless-steel cookware, as do I.

The EWG also gives tips for minimizing dangers if you can't get rid of your nonstick cookware. I go them one better: I say, just get rid of it.

Hat tip to Alice DiGioia on the Amazon Cooking discussion group, who pointed out this article in a thread about stainless steel versus nonstick cookware.

Kombucha, homemade coconut milk, oxtail stew, podcast appearance and more firsts

Wow! What a lot of firsts for me this weekend.

1. I appeared on my first podcast interview, Episode 4 of Low-Carb Conversations With Jimmy Moore and Friends, where we start out with a grand April Fool's gag. Tune in to hear me reveal the secrets of the long-lost writings of Weston A. Price, in which he recounted his travels among the Vegit Eskimo, and the little-known etymology of the name of the Kitaben islanders -- they assembled all their food from kits.

2. I sold my first copy of my brand-new e-cookbook, The Low-Carb and Paleo Breakfast Book, whose released was timed to coordinate with my appearance on the low-carb podcast. My cooking, and my site, is not exclusively low-carb, but I believe there's much to be gained by restricting carbohydrate intake, especially at breakfast, the meal that sets your pace for how you'll eat in the coming day.

3. I cooked with oxtail for the first time. I made a version of Auntie Mae-Mae’s Jamaican Oxtail (Stew), from  jamaican-recipes.com and came up with some variations. It was quite delicious, and I believe much of its deeply satisfying flavor comes from the fact that the oxtail comes with plenty of marrow-rich bone, and the minerals and marrow and gelatin all enrich the stew during the long cooking. Once I have my own version all ironed out, I'll share what I've come up with on my site.

4. For the first time, I heard of something called Jamaican browning, which is mentioned but not described in the recipe. It's also called Jamaican browning sauce. You add it a bit of it to the braise to add a depth of flavor and color. It's essentially caramel -- a sauce made from browning sugar and adding enough water (in some recipes) to make a syrup. Note that a lot of processed foods' labels list "caramel color." I think this is the real stuff that's based on.

5. And, for the first time, I made my own Jamaican browning. I used raw sugar instead of the white sugar or brown sugar (which is just white sugar sprayed with molasses -- essentially, artificial brown sugar) that I saw in the recipes I could find online. The difference in method, though, turned out to be much bigger than I expected, so I had to really work it until I could make it right.

6. Another first: I made my own coconut milk! I used the method from the Tropical Traditions, where I'd ordered my dried coconut. They have a video showing the method. It is delicious and really does taste more coconutty and fresh than the various cans I've been buying for years. It was much more thin, but Tropical Traditions says that canned product has various gums, and even some ingredients that aren't required to be listed on the label. So I guess thin is just fine -- the flavor was rich, so who cares.

7. And the last first I want to tell you about: kombucha! The mother of a classmate of my son (first grade) is deep into real foods. Lucky me, I found a neighbor who gets it! Weeks ago, she brought me a kombucha scoby, the gelatinous disc that you use to ferment kombucha. FINALLY, with my book out of the way, and the coconut curry soup (that's what I made the coconut milk for) stewing in the Le Creuset, and the laundry done, and the ferret groomed and bathed -- what a routine, eh? -- I had space to focus on the kombucha. I'd kept it in the fridge all this time. Actually, I was a little afraid it would be icky, so that was hlep me keep putting it off. Well, I couldn't believe how easy the procedure was, and how delicious was the kombucha that the scoby was floating in! It was like apple juice that was starting to go hard. Fruity and zingy. Very clean-tasting. In a week or two, I'll have a jug of kombucha, and then I can start again. When I get that down pat, I'll share the method.

The Low-Carb & Paleo Breakfast Book Is Here

The second book in the How To Cook With Vesna series is here!

The Low-Carb & Paleo Breakfast Book is all about starting the day right with satiating foods made from scratch for whole-foods, low-starch, low-sugar living in a Neolithic world. It's available right now on my website. If you've ever wondered what to have for breakfast when you're keeping your carbs down, you'll find plenty of ideas here. Recipes, suggestions, even tips on kitchen tools like the best pans and knives for whole-foods, natural cooking.

The Low-Carb & Paleo Breakfast Book arrives just in time to go with my appearance on episode four of Jimmy Moore's new podcast, Low-Carb Conversations With Jimmy Moore. Please give it a listen!

Cooking With Vesna: the eCookbook

Here it is: 48 recipes in 77 pages at the incredible introductory price of just 99 cents.

Cooking With Vesna is the first book in the "How To Cook With Vesna" series. Follow the link to choose the PDF or Kindle format. Either one is available with an easy, secure purchase through all major credit cards or PayPal. Instant download means you can be reading and cooking in minutes!

From Cheesy Stuffed Shells to Homemade Salad Dressing. from Pineapple Salsa to Easy Polenta, you'll find all sorts of recipes for whole-foods cooking from scratch.

Cooking With Vesna draws from a range of whole-foods perspectives, so whether you want to make the Freshest Tofu you ever experienced, straight from the soybean, Perfect Brown Rice or mineral-rich Chicken or Beef Bone Broth, this book covers it.

In fact, the very first time you cook something from this book, instead of buying it processed at the store, it will have paid for itself! Find out about more of the great features in Cooking With Vesna now.

My cookbook is available in the UK!

I'm waiting and waiting and waiting for the Amazon store to make my book available. Guess what. It's live and kickin' on the UK site. So if you live there, go get it -- for 71 pence!

Update: The book is live on Amazon US!