Strawberry-Banana Bread

Strawberry-Banana Bread

Ingredients:

3/4 pint strawberries

1 banana (can use a frozen banana)

1/4 cup coconut butter

1 cup almond flour

1/4 cup coconut flour/shredded flakes

2 eggs, whisked

1 Tbls coconut oil

Directions:

1. Preheat the oven to 350 F and grease the bottom and sides of a loaf pan with coconut oil.
2. Rinse the strawberries and cut off the tops. Dump into a food processor/blender and process until smooth (you can leave a few chunks if you like).
3. Remove 1/4 cup of the strawberries and set aside.
4. Chop up your banana and add to the food processor until fully combined with the strawberries.
5. Add in your coconut butter. Once combined, followed with the almond flour and coconut flour. (You'll probably need to grab a spatula and push the mixture down from the sides of the processor.)
6. Mix in one egg at a time.
7. Transfer to your greased loaf pan and bake in the oven for 25 minutes, or until the center is firm.
8. Let cool for 15 minutes before removing from pan.
9. While cooling, heat 1 Tbls coconut oil on the stove. Once hot, add the 1/4 cup of strawberry puree that you had set aside in step 3. Cook, stirring occasionally, for 10 minutes. The mixture will turn a deeper red and start to clump together.
10. Slice up a piece and top with the warm strawberry mixture.

Pork Roast and Sauerkraut

During my New Year's trip to Jamaica, I spent much of my time laying by the pool and reading. While my friends were reading what I assume were mystery and romance novels, I was learning about cholesterol, blood sugar, and omega-3s via It Starts With Food by Melissa and Dallas Hartwig. In the book, they mentioned that eating fermented foods is good for you because it introduces probiotics to the gut. Yay for healthy gut bacteria! One popular fermented food is sauerkraut, something that I have always STRONGLY disliked. My mom loves the stuff and I remember hating being in the kitchen when she heated up a batch of sauerkraut. I disliked the smell so much that I had a hard time convincing myself to even try it. Well, after reading It Starts With Food, I decided to give it a try. The result was...

Pork Roast with Sauerkraut
1 large jar of sauerkraut
2.5 lbs pork roast/loin
salt and pepper

1. Rinse and trim the pork roast as necessary.
2. Spread ~1/2 cup of sauerkraut over the bottom of a crock-pot.
3. Place the pork roast on top of the sauerkraut and dump the rest of the sauerkraut over and around the pork roast.
4. Set crock pot on low for 8 hours. Leave during the day or overnight.
5. Remove the pork from the crock-pot. Pull out a couple forks and start pulling pork so you get the nice shredded look.
6. Serve hot with your ideal amount of sauerkraut. It tastes good with Dijon mustard.

I recommend storing the sauerkraut and pork separately, especially if you're like me and still have questionable feelings toward sauerkraut. I admit that the pork with sauerkraut tasted good, but I think that sauerkraut will be an infrequent visitor to my dining room table, which is an improvement over my previous sauerkraut ban.

Alcohol and Meat Roll-ups

Last Thursday's workout took roughly 45 minutes. I drew from my one CrossFit experience of Fran:
Warm-up: 20 lunges, 20 pushups, 20 squats, 10 minutes elliptical

Thrusters (21-15-9@ 50 lb)

Assisted Pull-ups(21-15-9)
Reverse Curls (2x20 @ 10 lb)

Cycle - 30 minutes

Last Friday was Rabbie Burns Night, so my friends and I went to a Scottish pub to celebrate.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qMxIBqpryG0&playnext=1&list=PL76C25FB248957F10&feature=results_video

I drank cider (yes, I know it's not compliant with Whole 30, and I am a terrible person). I had fun though, so I don't feel too bad about it. I did feel bad the next morning when I realized that a few ciders over the course of four hours wasn't even to get me drunk but it apparently was enough to give me a hangover the following morning... or at least hangover symptoms - I woke up at 8 on Saturday with a screaming headache. As a result of the headache, I gave in to medicine and took a couple Advil before crawling back into bed to sleep away the headache. Two hours later, my headache was down to a dull ache and I had started considering how bad alcohol really is for my body.

If three drinks leaves me clutching my head the next morning, is it worth it? I don't have the answer to that. Sometimes I think that alcohol isn't worth it; other days, I wonder what to do when I meet up with friends during the week. Usually we meet up for drinks, but if you're not drinking and you go to a bar where you don't want to eat any of the food on their menu, what do you order? I don't often drink soda (though sometimes I'll let myself have soda water or gingerale), so I probably won't order a soda at the bar. What does that leave me with? "May I have a water, please?" I always feel weird going to a bar with friends who intend on drinking alcohol and then being that one person who isn't drinking because I choose not to for my health. Not to mention if you go to a bar and meet someone new... they'll eventually notice that you're not drinking and then you end up getting into the whole story of why you're not drinking alcohol, because apparently "I choose not to" isn't always a good enough reason for some people. This always leads to me feeling like I'm preaching Paleo.

Anyways, as I had posted previously (http://adventurepaleo.blogspot.com/2012/12/whole-30-peer-pressure-and-alcohol.html?m=0), maybe there are better types of alcohol to drink. Red wine always seems to be at the top of the list for the least-bad-for-you-alcohols. But again, it's one of those things where you personally have to decide if you're okay with consuming something that's still technically bad for you, but just happens to be the healthier option. That's like saying, I'm allergic to dogs AND cats, but I'm more allergic to cats than I am to dogs, so I'm going to get a dog, because I'll still kind of be able to breathe out of my nose instead of becoming my cat-induced mouth-breather alter-ego. Neither the dog nor the cat is a wise idea, but the cat would be MORE harmful to my health. Does that logic make sense to you? Hopefully not. But then again, maybe you REALLY want a pet. Maybe that pet is going to be good for your mental health because you'll have something to take care of and something to love you unconditionally (in the case of the dog at least).

So, to share some lunch love... I had this for lunch at work the other week. I bought some Prosciutto at Trader Joe's, along with some mini heirloom tomatoes and mixed greens. I sliced the tomatoes in half, placed 4-6 halves on one prosciutto slice with some of the mixed greens, and rolled in up. The result? Meat Roll-ups! You can also do this with other types of sliced meat... It was DELICIOUS. Prosciutto is yummy! And to round out my lunch with a little bit of sweet, I added a small handful of blackberries.