Superfood Chocolate Bars

After some amazing rosemary and garlic bacon wrapped chicken drumsticks (highly recommended!) I had a bit of a sweet tooth. The following recipe really hit the spot!

This delicious, low sugar, vegan, superfood-filled recipe is a slight variation of this recipe from Chocolate Covered Katie. It's is a great way to get your chocolate fix without dairy and (little to no) sugar.

Ingredients:

• 4 tbsp unrefined coconut oil, melted
• 1/2 cup cacao or cocoa powder
• 1-2 droppers full of liquid stevia
• 1-2 tbsp maples syrup or honey
• 1 serving greens powder (I used Greens+)
• 1 tbsp chia seeds
• 1 tbsp hemp hearts
• 1 tbsp shredded coconut
• 1 tbsp cacao nibs

Directions: Melt coconut oil in a pan over low heat. Stir in cocoa powder until dissolved. Add sweeteners above or to taste. Stir well until melted and smooth. Remove from heat and stir in greens powder. Stir in remaining ingredients (optional). Pour into a parchment-lined baking pan or glass container. Freeze for 20 minutes or so, remove and chop into pieces. Freeze to store. 

Liver Love.... and Hate

We all know how important it is to take care of our liver- and what can happen if we don't. But what about the importance of eating liver? Prior to the last month or so, the only experience I can remember of consuming liver was when I was quite young, at my great Aunt Vi's house. She had liver pate out to munch on (she always has some little snack out- I think it's a Southern hospitality thing) and I, being the ever brave and curious soul, decided to give it a try. Well, it was gross. It had a very strong and, to me, unpleasant flavor and weird, pasty texture.

I have never had a real urge to try liver in any form again, and besides, I thought, the liver is the organ that filters out all the crap and toxins in your body, so why would I want to consume the crap and toxins from another animal, especially if it doesn't even taste good?!

Turns out that assumption is a common one, and completely wrong. According to Chris Kresser, integrative medicine practitioner and author of Your Personal Paleo Code,

"While it is true that one of the liver’s role is to neutralize toxins (such as drugs, chemical agents and poisons), it does not store these toxins. Toxins the body cannot eliminate are likely to accumulate in the body’s fatty tissues and nervous systems. On the other hand, the liver is a is a storage organ for many important nutrients (vitamins A, D, E, K, B12 and folic acid, and minerals such as copper and iron). These nutrients provide the body with some of the tools it needs to get rid of toxins."

In the same article he states that "every nutrient—including vitamin C—in beef liver occurs in exceedingly higher levels in beef liver compared to apple and carrots. In general, organ meats are between 10 and 100 times higher in nutrients than corresponding muscle meats." He shows a side-by-side comparison of beef liver next to beef muscle meat and apples and carrots. Although beef liver appears to be the most potent nutritionally, chicken liver is not far behind, as shown by this nutrient comparison.

Ok, so I'm totally convinced now- I should be eating liver. And I have been. However, I don't entirely enjoy it. I've found that the texture and flavor is about how I remembered it, and my taste for it has not really changed. I've tried duck liver, just sauteed with onions- it was tough but edible. I've tried beef liver breaded and sauteed- not great, honestly, but I ate it and I DID feel awesome afterwards- so awesome, in fact, that I was too energized to go to sleep (whoops). Beef liver is quite large, so I made the leftovers into a pate which got mostly thrown out because I didn't consume it fast enough. More recently I made a chicken liver pate with copious amounts of bacon, mushrooms, and a little bone broth, which I've been eating with cucumber and carrots, on salads, and mixed into ground meat. So far so good. I'll share my recipe successes and failures with you in an upcoming post.

Have any of you had success with preparing and eating liver? Do you love it or hate it? If you haven't had it, have I convinced to at least give it a try?

Recipe: Spaghetti Squash & Meatballs

 Alright I'm no food photographer (nor was is an iPhone probably a camera of choice among the pros) but I think you can tell from the photo that this dish is de-lish! Super healthy, paleo-friendly, and very satisfying. I think it could even be made vegan with relative success if you subbed the meat for tempeh and omitted the cheese.

Ingredients:

1 spaghetti squash
1 lb. ground grass-fed beef or other meat (I used a combo of beef and buffalo)
1 onion, finely chopped
1 bunch kale, de-stemmed and torn into pieces
1 bunch scallions
1 tablespoon Italian seasoning
1 tsp salt
2 cloves garlic, pressed or finely chopped 
4 carrots
2 parsnips
4 small tomatoes
1 cup tomato sauce or tomato-based pasta sauce (not from canned)
3-4 tablespoons Parmesan cheese (optional)




1. Heat oven to 400 degrees Fahrenheit

2. Cut squash in half lengthwise, scoop out seeds and discard or toast separately. Place squash, cut side down, on oiled baking sheet. Bake one hour. Let cool for 10 minutes, then scrape gently with a fork, fluffing the squash to get the "spaghetti".

3. Combine ground meat, 1/2 of chopped onion, Italian seasoning, 1/2 tsp salt, 1/2 chopped green onions, and 3 tablespoons Parmesan. Form into approx. 16 - 2-in. balls. Place on oiled baking sheet and bake at 400 degrees for 30 min.

4. Heat 1 tablespoon oil in a pan on medium heat. Add remaining 1/2 chopped onion. Once onion starts to become translucent, add chopped carrots and parsnips. Cook for 10-15 minutes, stirring frequently, or until root veggies begin to soften. 

5. Add kale, garlic, and remaining scallions. Once kale has wilted slightly, stir in tomato sauce. Let simmer for a minute or two before removing from heat. 

6. Serve- layering the squash, sauce, and meatballs in bowls. 


Makes 2-4 servings, depending on the size of your squash. We had a small squash so it made only two servings but we had enough sauce and meatballs left over to serve with fried eggs the next morning which was ah-mazing!

 

 If you do make this recipe I would love to hear how it turned out!

Everything We Know About Nutrition Is Wrong...?

Hi, thanks for visiting my blog! I'd like to start off with a few facts and ideas to dip our feet into the nutrition world, and will expand from here. Please feel free to share your thoughts and responses in the comment section below.

I recently came across the website of Zoe Harcombe, a British nutritionist and researcher, who points out some nutritional fallacies that have permeated our collective conventional wisdom. Included is the "calorie myth"- the idea that 3,500 = one pound of fat so no matter what foods you are eating you just need to create that deficit to lose weight. As she points out in her myths & facts page, "If the calorie theory were correct, every human would lose 104 lbs every year, with a 1,000 calorie a day deficit (no matter their gender, starting weight etc)".

I really enjoyed the quote below that was found on her website home page, which puts it into perspective why it's so important to eat like our ancestors as opposed to how we have been eating in the last 40ish years.

“If we have been eating food in the form that nature intended for 24 hours, agriculture (large scale access to carbohydrates) developed four minutes ago and sugar consumption has increased twenty fold in the last five seconds. I wonder which food is more likely to be responsible for obesity, diabetes, or indeed any modern disease…”

Robb Wolf makes a similar analogy in his book The Paleo Solution, where he compared human evolution to a 100-yard American football field. If we walked from one end to the other, 99.5 yards of those would represent all of human history except the last 5,000 years or so. The last 1/2 yard represents the transition from hunter/gatherer existence to agriculture, and "the last few inches represent television, the Internet, refined vegetable oils, and most of what we take to be 'normal' modern living."

I think it's pretty unbelievable that we have evolved in that last 1/2 yard to be able to effectively process the high amount of grains and starchy carbohydrates we currently consume, and I find it extremely unbelievable that we have evolved to consume any of the overly-processed Franken-foods that permeate our modern diet.

What do you think? Do these human evolution analogies blow your mind as it did mine? Does these ideas offend, shock or excite you? Please share your thoughts below!

Holistic Wellness & Blog Manifesto

Hello!

Thanks for visiting my first blog post! I've decided to create a blog designed to share all of the wonderful things I'll be learning along my journey to becoming a certified health coach, and ultimately my transition into a profession that thus far has no title because I'm sort of inventing it, but I am going to call a Holistic Wellness Counselor for now. If you'd like know more about this endeavor and to support me on this journey, please consider funding or sharing my IndieGoGo campaign and follow my blog here.

I think that for now this blog will be much about sharing a lot of the information I'm learning and connecting you to other resources because I have been seriously geeking out on diet and nutrition stuff, and I have a lot of really interesting things to share. I've recently converted from a vegetarian-plus-fish diet to a Paleo diet and have just finished about 30 days of Paleo. I feel great and I think this is going to be close to how I will eat long-term, but this is NOT going to be a Paleo blog. My belief is that diet is not a one-size-fits-all thing and that there are many different perspectives on diet that all have really valid arguments and important things to learn. There are some things about a vegetarian/vegan diet that I can get behind, and some things about Paleo that I can agree with, too.

Although right now I'm really delving into diet and nutrition, I'm also a workout junkie, and if you read my IndieGoGo campaign bio, you'll see that becoming a personal trainer is "Phase 3" of my plan to becoming a Holistic Wellness Counselor (btw, if anyone has suggestions for a better title of a therapist, nutrition coach, and personal trainer hybrid, I'm all ears!) so eventually I will incorporate a lot of fitness stuff into the blog as well.

Lastly, I am a Marriage and Family Therapist (so close to my LPC license- just a few months away!) and I plan on doing a lot of work on the mind-body-brain connection, or incorporating mental health with physical wellness. So that's sort of my blog manifesto. If that sounds at all interesting to you, please join me on this journey and follow my blog!

Thank you for reading!!
Lorraine