I have an admission to make – while it is generally accepted that I make one helluva good pie crust, I have freely admitted (when asked) to have been working from another’s recipe. The Silver Pallete cookbook has been a mainstay of our household, since before I was even part of this household. The binding is worn and 3/4 of the pages are falling out, and it is well used.
The Pâté Brissé recipe towards the back – it is not so much a recipe as one of a set of tips – explains the secret: cold, cold, COLD butter, and just enough water to let the dough form.
Making a grain-free version of this crust is a bit tricky, because what tends to make for a very good pie crust – flaky but not crumbly – is gluten. Gluten holds everything else together, and its binding power is hard to replace. We’ll use an egg here, but you can also try – if you’re brave enough – a mixture of tapioca starch, arrowroot powder and ground flax seed (about 1/8 cup each) to try to make things a bit gooey-er. But honestly, a single egg works fine. Scramble it first, before you mix it in with the other ingredients.
The trick here is to use a bit of teff flour. Teff is not a grain – it is the seed of a grass – and teff flour may even qualify as Paleo if it is properly fermented prior to cooking (I don’t do that here.)
As you’ll see in the steps below, the trick is to have ice-cold chopped up butter and to work it into the dry ingredients quickly but without heating it up. A strong set of wrists help, as well as a very solid fork.
Add Teff flour, almond flour, salt and baking powder to a bowl.
Chop the butter, which should already be frozen, into cubes, and add to the bowl of dry ingredients. Frozen butter is the secret to every decent pie crust you've ever had, and that's what we're shooting for here.
With a sturdy metal fork or wooden spoon, begin smearing the butter into the dry ingredients. You can do this in a cuisinart blender as well, but you will not get credit for the reps. You'll also need to move more quickly with a blender, because the heat from the blade will melt the butter, and you really don't want that.
Eventually you will have "sheets" of butter encrusted with the dry ingredients. You can stop mixing at this point - you don't want to completely incorporate the butter and the dry ingredients any further.
Scramble the egg throughly, and then add to the dough. Mix until incorporated. There's usually enough water in the egg to form a dough ball, but if not, add up to 1-2 TBSP of water. Stop when a ball forms.
Put the dough in the the freezer for 10-15 minutes. The goal is again to get the butter nice and cold. A good crust can only form if the butter melts as the crust hardens in the oven.
Remove the dough ball from the freezer. Place a sheet of wax paper down on the baking sheet, and put the dough ball on top.
Place another sheet of wax paper on top of the dough ball, and roll it out to approximately 1/4" thickness. Work quickly, you don't want that butter to melt!
Remove the top sheet of wax paper, flip the rolled out dough over into a 9" pie plate, and remove the other piece of wax paper. If the dough is sticking too much to the wax paper as you remove it, put the entire sheet back in the freezer for 10 minutes, and try again.
(Optional) Place a clean sheet of parchment paper onto the pie crust, and cover the pie tin with dried beans or rice. You want to use something that will keep the pie crust weighted down. Note that this tends to not make much of a difference with the Paleo version of this crust, but the gluten-y original will puff up unless weighted down in this way.
Alternatively, if you are making butter cookies, this is where you'll cut the crust into shapes and arrange on a cookie sheet.
Bake in the oven at 425 degrees for 15-20 minutes.
It is hardly fair that Fall should come and we should miss out on Chex Mix. Not the pre-made stuff you find on store shelves, with chocolate-y sauces and sugar coatings and who knows what else. No, home-made stuff is what I’m talking about. Half of the experience is the smell as it cooks, and the fact that you can eat it steaming hot right out of the oven.
And let’s be clear, this grainless, chex-less chex mix has a very functional purpose: to keep you from gorging yourself on the Chex-FULL chex mix that will be circulating during the colder months.
Until the good folks at General Mills start to offer Pork Cracklings Chex, this will be a fairly good approximation.
Add almonds, pecans, and pepitas to a large mixing bowl
Take the plantain chips and crush them a bit. You just want to break them up into smaller pieces so that they mix better with the nuts and seeds. Put them in the bowl with the nuts and seeds.
Sauce
Melt butter in the microwave; 30 seconds on high will do.
Into the mixing bowl with the plantain chips, nuts and seeds, drizzle the sauce all over. Gently mix throughly.
Mix until the sauce is spread evenly over the other ingredients. In standard Chex-mix, there's a lot more butter; we use a lot less here because the chips, nuts and seeds won't absorb it. But as a result, you need to spend a bit more time mixing things up here.
Bake at 425 degrees for 15 minutes. Check to see if things have begun to brown. If not, bake for another 5 minutes.
Remove from oven and let cool. Serve as soon as you can get them into your mouth without burning yourself. Devour, preferably in groups, but it's also ok if you want to split this up into several bowls and devour separately.
Recipe Notes
For several reasons, this isn't totally paleo. Most Worcester sauce will have some soy sauce and/or sugar in it, and the seasoned salt we used (Lowry's, of course), has some corn starch in it. Also, it's likely that your store-bought plantain chips were fried, and probably in sunflower or canola oil.
If you want to make this more (if not perfectly) paleo, you can roast your own plantain chips in the oven; use 1 tsp himalayan pink salt, 1/4 tsp paprika, and 1/4 tsp pepper in place of the seasoned salt; and use coconut aminos or anchovy paste instead of the Worcester sauce.
Frozen Butter Coffee pops with fatCoffee ready for the freezer
Claudia with her fatCoffee Tea Pop
Bela enjoys a fatCoffee-infused Hibiscus pop
With the summer swelter settling in here in Philadelphia, we’ve been busy looking for ways to keep cool. Movie theaters present a compelling option, as does cranking slot online yang sering kasih jackpot up the air conditioner at home to your preferred setting. In our house, we set it to “Apple Store Cold.”
Thankfully, there’s a tastier, more economical, and much more Paleo option: fatCoffee Summer Ice Pops. Delicious and smooth, and they take about 5 minutes to prep (plus an hour or so in the freezer.) We made these in the evening, so that we can leave the judi slot onlinehouse with our fatCoffee on a stick, a frozen frappé to go.
Frozen Butter Coffee Pops with fatCoffee
Print Recipe
Mixed with coffee or tea, fatCoffee is delicious and satisfying. Frozen on a stick, it's even more refreshing and convenient.
A note about mixing fatCoffee pops: use HOT brewed coffee or tea, because that will mix more thorough with the fatCoffee.
Even still, as the pops cool in the freezer, the foamy part will float to the top before the pops freeze completely. This means that your popsicles will have a richer, smoother part at the bottom of the stick, and a icier part at the top. We rather like it that way, but you should judge for yourself.
One possible way to make a more evenly-mixed Butter Coffee Pop with fatCoffee is to use these Ice Pop Molds instead. About a 1/2 hour after putting them in the freezer, take them out and mash them like you would a sealed fatCoffee packet to mix the material around. Even better, lay them flat in the freezer so that the icey and smooth parts are distributed evenly along the length of the pop. We'll be trying that this weekend!
“I found Bacchus in the garden” was one of the first things I heard when we moved into our new home, a little over 10 years ago. There was an old, discarded iron window grate, of the kind used here in Philadelphia to cover the small, 1/4-height windows that many homes have peeking up from their basements onto the sidewalk.
A friend of mine recently mentioned this recipe to me (well, more of an approach), and described lining the muffin tins with bacon.
“Is the extra bacon grease a problem?” I asked.
“Why would extra bacon grease be a problem?” He replied.
Welcome to the world of the low-carb, high fat carnivore 🙂
Line a 12-muffin tin (or two 6-muffin tins) with a strip of bacon in each tin. Start by placing the fattiest end of the bacon slice in the bottom of the cup, and spiraling the bacon around the inside of the tin.
In a separate bowl, add 6 eggs, diced onion, diced mushroom and diced spinach. Or, really, whatever veggies you want to add (kale is great, too.) The idea is to add enough vegetable matter so that the egg is basically just there to hold everything together.
Beat together furiously for 56 seconds exactly (Or until mixed.)
Pour about 2 tablespoons of the egg mixture into each bacon cup. Really, just divide the contents of the egg mixture evenly between the bacon cups.
Pause for a moment, and think about that: Bacon. Cups.
The possibilities here are actually kind of endless.
[Optional] - Top each cup with some diced chives or leeks.
Bake for about 35 minutes, until you can see that the edges of the bacon sticking up are crispy.
Remove, allow to cool for a few minutes and remove from muffin tins and place on a paper towel or cooling rack to let the drain.
Enjoy responsibly. Which means sharing... 12 muffins serves at least two people.
Recipe Notes
This recipe works best when you're using leftovers to mix with the eggs. We had a bunch of leftover grilled veggies from the night before. If you're using fresh veggies, add more eggs to compensate for the extra water. Otherwise, aim for a ratio of 1:1 between veggies and eggs.
You can line the muffin tins with cupcake liners first, if you like, but there's usually enough grease from the bacon to make that unnecessary (at least in terms of keeping things from sticking.)
