Maximized Grainless Rolls

Maximized food has become a no-brainer for us.  I hear all kinds of protests about the "cost" of organic, grain-free, sugar-free cooking.  I can only reply that my health is worth paying for.  In fact, I can not think of anything that is more worthy of my money.  I will admit, though, that the idea of a grilled organic turkey burger without a bun has often left a little to be desired.  That's why I needed to share with anyone who doesn't already have the recipe. . .these Maximized Grainless Rolls are the bomb!  The recipe is from Kimberly Pease-Roberto,  co-author of The Maximized Living Nutrition Plan, so rest-assured, your health need never suffer from eating a burger again!
By the way, they freeze beautifully. . . .if they last that long.

Kimberly's great recipe goes like this:

1 1/2 cups almond flour
5 tablespoons psyllium husk powder
2 teaspoons aluminum free baking powder
1 teaspoon sea salt
2 tablespoons apple cider vinegar
2 organic eggs or 3 organic egg whites
1 cup boiling water

Mix all of the dry ingredients together.  Add the eggs and apple cider vinegar and mix well.  You will have a very stiff mixture on your hands.  Add the boiling water and continue to mix until well combined.  The mixture will then turn from a "soup" into a very sticky dough.  Split the mixture into 5 rolls.  You will want to “form” them into nicely shaped rolls and place them on a parchment lined baking sheet. I do this using a very large serving spoon (for rolls) and (for "buns") I place a ring on the parchment to make them "round." Bake for 50 minutes at 350 degrees.

These can be used for sandwiches, grass fed burgers, or own their own.

Here is the link for this and a plethora of other great recipes:

http://smartmeals.wordpress.com/category/breads-and-baked-goods/

Enjoy.

Garlic Parmesan Flax Seed Crackers

Have you tried the Garlic Parmesan Flax Seed Cracker recipe in GOOD FOOD? I make it at least every two weeks, simply because it smells so great, tastes so good, and provides that "crunch" we tend to miss when we get the junk food out of our lives.
This recipe can be tricky to make. Over the past 6 months or so, I have developed a somewhat easy method for preparation, and I thought it might be good to share it with you. If you read ALL the tips below, I know it will help you.

For those who do not have the book, here is the recipe.

Ingredients:

1 cup flax seed meal
1/3 cup Italian Parmesan cheese, grated (To be on the safe side, I use a cheese that is a product of Italy ONLY)
1 teaspoon garlic powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup water

Preparation:
Preheat oven to 400 F.
1) Mix all ingredients together.
2) Spoon onto sheet pan which is covered with a silicone mat or greased parchment paper.
3) Cover the mixture with a piece of parchment or waxed paper. Even out the mixture to about 1/8 inch. I find a straight edge, like a ruler, works well. I also use a rolling pin and that does a good job of leveling the dough. The important thing is not to let it be too thin around the edges or that part will overcook before the center firms up. So after you spread it out, go around the edges with your finger and push the thin part inwards to even it up.
4) Bake until the center is no longer soft, about 15-18 minutes. If it starts to get more than a little brown around the edges, remove from oven. Let cool completely - it will continue to crisp up.
5) Break into pieces.

Note: Some cooks rolled the dough into balls and then flattened them with a cup measure.

TIPS:
I mix all the dry ingredients together, add the water and mix it all together. This forms a "ball of dough" which I form into a rectangular disc and place on a silicone baking pad in the middle of a cookie sheet. (If I didn't have the silicone pad, I would place the "disc" on a sheet of parchment paper big enough to cover the cookie sheet.) Then I cover the disc with another sheet of parchment, again big enough to cover the cookie sheet, and I roll out the "dough" between the two sheets with my rolling pin until it is approximately 1/8 of an inch thick. The rolled product covers nearly all of the cookie sheet. Rolling the dough between the two sheets allows the rolling pin to glide evenly without sticking, so getting it to 1/8 of an inch is much easier. Then I simply remove the top sheet of parchment, and bake at 400 degrees for 15 to 17 minutes. I set my cook timer for 15 minutes, and then WATCH the sheet of cracker VERY carefully, and AS SOON as the edges become dark, OUT of the oven it comes.

Here's another hint. Sometimes, when the outer edges are beginning to brown, the middle is not quite done. What I like to do, once the giant cracker has cooled, is to take the "softer" middle of the cracker and put it back in the turned-off oven. This helps to dry that middle so it will be nice and crunchy.

One of these giant crackers is supposed to be broken into smaller pieces and served with hummus or some other dip. In my family, this almost never happens, because breaking off pieces of the giant cracker is so irresistable when it is cooling, half of it is gone before we know it.

Maybe I should prepare two recipes.

Chicken With Artichokes and Mushrooms

Generally speaking, I find it necessary to slightly alter recipes I find online.  I "maximize" them, test them in my own kitchen, take pictures, and then post my results.  The following recipe is a rare and beautiful exception.  Chicken With Artichokes and Mushrooms is my new favourite recipe, but it comes directly from another blogger - the link is below.

The ingredients are simple.  In fact they are simpler than they appear.  The first time I made this dish, I had most of the ingredients on hand, but not all of the dried spices. Since the original blogger mentioned her own swap-outs, I decided to make the essential version without all the spices, and we were all thrilled with the results.  Recipes are like that - they are best when altered to suit your own time, ingredients, and taste! Go for it.

By the way, I am also using the original blogger's photo.  Ours did not last long enough to get a picture.

Here's the link. Chicken With Artichokes and Mushrooms

Enjoy.

CINNAMON ICE CREAM

Here is a wonderful recipe that I found on a great website, "Tropical Traditions." I have mentioned this site before, because they feature coconut, a massively healthy ingredient. I only made tiny changes, but essentially the recipe below is directly from Tropical Traditions: 

• 27 oz full fat coconut milk (In Canada, that's just under two cans, but I used two full cans. . .you can never have too much coconut milk)
• 2 egg yolks
• 2 droppers full of liquid stevia.  You can use powdered stevia.  You are going for a sweetness factor equal to approximately 1/4 to 1/2 cup of sugar. 
• 2 tablespoons melted grass fed butter, (if you can not get grass-fed, organic is the next best option) 
• 2-3 teaspoons cinnamon
• 1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract - check the label to ensure there is no sugar in the ingredients
• 1/8 teaspoon kosher or sea salt

Add all ingredients to a blender and blend until smooth.  Pour the blended mixture into an ice cream maker and follow manufacturer's directions.  I have an older ice cream maker, so I turned it on and added the mixture about 5 to 10 minutes before we sat down for dinner.  By the time we were ready for dessert, dessert was ready!

Enjoy.

Sheep's hearts in plum sauce

This is a nice dish. I imagine the sauce would be quite good with other dark, gamy meats, like wild duck,  wild goose or possibly wild boar.

To serve 6:
6 lamb's or sheep's hearts
100 g flour
butter for frying
salt and pepper
6 well ripe plums (it doesn't say which kind, but the photo with the recipe shows red plums with yellow flesh - BTW, don't expect to see any such thing when the dish is cooked, since the luscious plum wedges shown in the image are a fiction of food photography)
1 large yellow onion, chopped
100 ml sweet white wine
meat broth (e.g. lamb, chicken or vegetable) or water
2 tbsp cornstarch (or potato starch, or Maizena sauce thickener)

First, here's how I had to compromise on the recipe: The week before I made it, I saw at least three varieties of plums in every food shop I entered and they always seemed to be so ripe as to be on the verge of becoming liquid inside their skins. The day I actually went to buy them all I could find were rock-hard purple plums, the kind which seem to go from hard to spoiled overnight and never really have a nice flavour. I used them anyway and near the end of the cooking time I could hardly taste them at all. I don't know what genius was watching over me but all of a sudden I had the idea of adding a dash of soy sauce. It was done purely to try to improve the rather bland flavour with a bit of salty soyness, but after about 10 minutes more cooking I thickened the sauce and tasted it and found it bursting with a plummy sweetness, well-balanced against a slightly salty note with gamy undertones. I think the MSG in the soy sauce must have brought out the umami flavour in the sauce and amplified the plum flavour. Anyway, you shouldn't have to worry about adding MSG if you use properly ripe plums.
Oh, and I used water and not broth, which may have had some effect as well.

To make the dish:
Trim the fat from the hearts and slice each lengthwise into 6-7 wedges. Wash and then soak under running cold water for 2 hours.
While the hearts soak, chop the onions and remove the stones from the plums and cut each into 6 wedges.
Remove the hearts from the water, pat them dry and dredge the pieces in flour. Brown in hot butter and season with salt and pepper. 
Add the plums and the onion and then the wine. Simmer until the liquid is reduced by about 1/3.
Add the broth or water to cover and cook for 1-2 hours (depending on the thickness of the heart pieces and whether they were from an adult sheep or a lamb, or you could just compromise and cook them for 1 1/2 hours).
Make a paste from the cornstarch/potato starch and cold water and stir into the sauce until it is thickened to your liking (Maizena can be poured directly into the liquid to be thickened).

Serve with parsley and fresh vegetables.

20 MINUTE ORGANIC BLACK BEAN AND CHIPOTLE CHICKEN CHILI

This recipe takes NO MORE than 20 minutes to prepare.  It hardly needs to be written!  I have included easy to follow pictures with a few suggestions for amounts included, but honestly, the prep is insanely quick and easy. 

Enjoy. 

Add this (1 to 1 1/2 cups each) organic celery, carrot, and onion, to one pound of cooked organic ground chicken, turkey, or grass fed organic ground beef.  I often use 4 organic chicken burgers, and break them up in the bottom of the pot as they cook. See photos below.
Add organic beans and organic pasta sauce. (Pasta sauce should be from a glass jar.)The only spice I add is chipotle powder.  (If you  want to add other seasonings, feel free!  Just know that this chili has been called "EPIC CHILI" by some very discriminating eaters.)
Add water as desired to thin out the recipe.  I usually find this is not necessary.

I use organic chicken (or beef) "burgers" that I get in the frozen section at the organic market. You can put them in the bottom of the pot right from the freezer, and break them up, or get about 1 pound of ground organic chicken (or grass fed beef).  Either way, it will take you about 3 minutes to get your meat broken up as you see in the picture below.

 You're done!  Bring the chili to a boil, and then let the chili simmer until the vegetables are tender - this usually means about 10 to 15 minutes.

Sheep's hearts cooked in red wine

This is a nice recipe for lamb's or sheep's hearts. Hearts from an adult sheep will need slightly longer cooking than lamb hearts.

To serve 4.

4 lamb or sheep hearts

Marinade:
100 ml table vinegar
2 sprigs fresh thyme (or 1 tsp dried)
4 garlic cloves, finely chopped
3 laurel leaves
salt and pepper

For cooking:
100 g butter
100 g smoked bacon, finely chopped
10-15 shallots, sliced
1-2 tbsp flour
400-500 ml red wine
100-200 ml water
salt and pepper

200 g whole small mushrooms, sautéed

Cut the fat off the hearts, flush them well under running cold water and cut lengthwise into four parts each. Make the marinade and marinade the heart pieces for 4-6 hours. (I found 4 hours sufficient, but 6 will give a more intense flavour).

Melt the butter in a Dutch oven or deep frying pan. Remove the hearts from the marinade and brown in the butter. Add bacon and onions. Sprinkle the sifted flour into the pan and let it soak up the butter. Add red wine and water, stir to mix well and season with salt and pepper.

Simmer until the hearts are cooked, about 1 to 1 1/2 hours. Add the sautéed mushrooms and season to taste if necessary. Serve hot.

There are no suggestions as to what to serve with this, but I suggest poached potatoes and a fresh salad and a nice red wine.

I am cooking another heart dish as I type this and will post it if it turns out good.