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.

Monday, April 12, 2010

The Grown-Up Mushroom





Mushrooms are just one of those foods that a lot of kids don't like. I think that is perfectly fine. Mushrooms have plenty of adult energy considering all the powerful myth associated with them. They can, of course, be deadly, hallucinogenic and magically mysterious. If you have a chance to get out of this desert and harvest some wild mushrooms with a knowledgeable person I highly recommend it. Oyster mushrooms (on trees) are easy to recognize and not particularly similar to any of the more dangerous varieties. The boletes are tricky because there are some that are poisonous, but the bigger difficulty in my experience is that they become hosts to maggots and bugs as soon as they come into existence. It is disconcerting to get your mushroom basket home and leave it on the counter for an hour only to come back to it and see...yeah, gross. Anyway, here in Tucson you'll have to go to the grocery store. Stuffed mushrooms make any dinner feel kind of glamorous and they are easy to make Paleo.

STUFFED ROSEMARY MUSHROOMS

As usual, I make many extras for leftovers.

3 packages of small portabellas. I like the kind that are 1-3" size.
3 cloves garlic
Stem of fresh rosemary (leaves removed from stem) about 4"
1/4c pine nuts
1/4c macadamias or cashews
Salt and pepper
Butter and white wine


With a small sharp knife take out the stem of the mushroom. Trim off the end if it is very dry or woody. Mince up the mushroom stems very small-set aside. I throw all the other ingredients except the butter and wine into my Vita Mix (you can use a food processor) and process until they are coarse crumbs. Then I mix that with the mushroom stems. Pack the mushroom caps tightly with the filling and put a pea size piece of butter on top. Arrange the mushrooms in a buttered baking dish and pour in some white wine (or you can use chicken stock) so there is about 1/8"-1/4" in the dish. Bake at 375 for about 20-30min. They should be tender, but not dried out, with the top of the filling a little bit brown and crispy.
Posted by at
Labels: ,

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)