Hunt It. Gather It. Work It.: Bacon-the ultimate vegetable improver

The Low Down

The human body is a metabolic marvel comprised of dozens of little systems connecting to create one complex system. Food is the fuel, the input, for the systems. Our metabolic machinery evolved over hundreds of thousands of years to function optimally on select fuels. These fuels were the original, Primal foods of the human organism. Over these hundreds of thousands of years our Big Game Hunting, small prey capturing, scavenging, foraging, gathering, opportunistic ancestors accumulated experience and wisdom about nourishing themselves. The learned to preserve and predigest foods to maximize the quality of their metabolic fuel. Eventually they learned to cook foods without destroying the important nourishing properties of the food, and then they learned to heal the human body with food. Only recently in the human evolutionary experience, have we abandoned all these hundreds of thousands of years of accumulated epicurean genius. Now we fuel our marvelous, complex metabolic machinery with crap invented to create profits for agribusiness. We have become dumb eaters. As we regain our eating intelligence it doesn't make sense to move back to the savannah and put out our fires or climb into our cave and pretend there is a glacier next door. It makes sense to fuel our bodies with all the primal human foodstuffs, prepared and preserved with accumulated ancestral wisdom and served up for the undeniable desires of the human taste buds. Primal, paleolithic food choices, handled according to ancient food ways resulting in outrageously good food.

PRIMAL. SMART. DELECTABLE.

Sunday, January 3, 2010

Bacon-the ultimate vegetable improver

I will make a daring statement: all vegetables are improved with bacon. More nutrients from plants are absorbed if we ingest a little fat with them because many important nutrients are fat soluble. More people will eat vegetables if the are cooked with bacon, therefore bacon increases the vegetable content of peoples' diets. Finally, bacon tastes magnificent. Even my son described the green beans I cooked with bacon as "These green beans are actually pretty good." Now, it is true that some people do not believe green beans are Paleo because they are a legume. Since a green bean is primarily the shell of the bean, and I am not looking to reduce anyone's vegetable intake by making rules about string beans I'm going to leave the quibbling to others. The biggest problem with using bacon as a vegetable-improver is that cooking bacon makes a mess. I don't like spending a lot of time cleaning up bacon pans. Here is how I do it: I take my sharpest knife and about 3 strips of real, smoked, non-chemical bacon. I stack the slices and cut them into tiny little pieces by making one cut lengthwise down the stack and then slicing all along. I throw the tiny bacon pieces into a heavy skillet and saute them until brown. This produces crispy little bacon pieces and a thin coating of drippings. The pan is just starting to look as if it will be unpleasant to wash. At this moment I toss in my green vegetables with a spoonful or two of water (careful of splattering) and use a metal spatula to scrape the bottom of the pan. Then cover the pan for 5-10 minutes (or longer depending on your vegetable). Once everything is done the moisture from the vegetables will have cleaned the bacon mess from the bottom of the pan! And your kid will pronounce the vegetables more edible than usual.