After a long, long wait in the holds line at the library, a copy of Against All Grain: Delectable Paleo Recipes to Eat Well & Feel Great
was finally available. I read it and made two dishes out of it and have thoughts. We tried “Slow Cooker Chicken Tacos”, which begins with chicken parts cooking all day in a diced tomato and spice sauce, then the chicken gets shredded and eaten on a butter crunch lettuce leaf with Pico de Gallo and avocado. I also made “Braised Chicken in Artichoke-Mushroom Sauce”.
Both of these dishes were tasty and neither was particularly difficult. Reading through the book, though, something was bothering me about it. I emailed back and forth with one of my sisters until she zoned in on it. I think the author, Danielle Walker, is just coming in under the wire with this cookbook. The first Paleo books were all about the theory with a few of the “my favorite recipe” sort of dishes thrown in. Then came the second wave of Paleo books, with some theory up front, but mostly cookbooks. I own and have spoken about some of these here, for example Make it Paleo
, Well Fed: Paleo
and Paleo Comfort Foods
These cookbooks were very useful in the beginning when sitting down to make up a weekly menu. Flip through and a person doesn’t have to think too hard about what is Paleo and what is not.Our first menus incorporating Paleo were made that way. I had three one-week menus from the above three books, a one-week menu made from recipes online, and as I became more comfortable with the principles, a one-week menu from my other cookbooks.
But the rub for Danielle Walker and everyone who comes after her is that too many of the recipes in these books are for dishes already intrinsically Paleo, like both of the chicken dishes listed above, or beef/pork/meat dishes, or vegetable recipes. Recipes for replacement-of-non-paleo-favorites, like say sweet potato fries, beanless chili, or coconut-flour-based baked goods, begin to get awfully repetitious after a few of these cookbooks. And quite honestly, there comes a point where I can get a better recipe for the same dish from “regular” cookbooks by amazing cooks. Rick Bayless is on my shelf for that taco dish and Aida Gabilondo is the matriarch of Pico de Gallo, thanks. Larousse Gastronomique has five different dishes by my count that feature chicken cooked with mushrooms and artichoke hearts.
I don’t mean to be grouchy about all of this. The recipes were not flops by any means. I just think that from here on out, Paleo cookbooks are going to be re-hash for the most part, just as so many gluten-free cookbooks have become. Late to the party.
My plan for the future, when someone is considering going Paleo, is to send them to Practical Paleo
for the unsurpassed collection of 30-day menus but recommend that they hold off on other cookbooks until cooking Paleo has become second nature and they can see the “holes” in their repertoire. And possibly throw in a mention that Well Fed: Paleo
has an interesting take on weekend cooking for a week of meals for busy folk.Loading a few Paleo blogs into Feedly or whatever blog feed one uses means fresh inspiration. And there will be some fresh takes once in awhile – my sister has home from the library just now Bill Staley’s Gather
which is a collection of Paleo menus for entertaining, and I still mean to check out Sarah Fragoso’s Italian
book .That’s my grumpy take on the whole issue! Hope to be proven wrong :-)
used on Amazon for a few cents plus shipping, but I have since seen copies at my local thrift stores. I really can’t urge you enough to pick up a copy used somewhere yourself. What a gem. I’ve mentioned before how this is a collection of 64 recipes, which really is 62 recipes since two of them are bird and beef divided into two separate recipes by weight (ie, “roasted birds over 4 1/ lbs” and “roasted birds under 4 1/2 lbs”). Each recipe begins with a very clear step-by-step description of the process, with an instructive picture or two when needed. There is a little sidebar with history and serving/side dish suggestions. But then comes the thing that makes this cookbook unique: the chart. I needed some dramatic music with that – use your imagination :-). The charts are what turn 64 recipes into the "over 500" of the title.
by Marian Burros. I bought this a million and six years ago, one of my first cookbooks, when I was a single nurse working in an NICU. I had a co-worker and dear friend who brought inspiring meals to work every evening, and I wanted to learn to make something, but my priorities did not include being in the kitchen. Hence the selection of this title. It was a random selection, so I was fortunate in selecting a good author. There are a few recipes that are good from that book, but the one that became a family staple is her recipe for 5 Spice Chicken. Who doesn’t need a 5 Spice Chicken recipe, right? Oh. Vegetarians. OK, but the rest of us need one! Those of us who are paleo throw it on a bed of greens, everyone else on rice. Perfect vehicle for soooo many vegetables lightly steamed and stirred in. Leftovers very lunchable. This is a good example of fast food, too, and making the spice blend oneself allows for slight tweaking over the years until it becomes a unique family blend.
. If you know us in real life, please don’t bring up this cookbook title in Clara’s hearing :-). She really hates how the instructions are written in this cookbook. He has set up the instructions to get the complete meal to the table simultaneously, with everything warm that should be warm. So he might have you chop the onions and garlic for one dish, and set it to a low temperature, then tell you to combine ingredients for another dish and put them in the refrigerator, then come back to your first pan, add chicken broth, then chop something else. What drives The Patriarch batty about the instructions is the lack of actual times or frequently measurements. “Add oil to the pan and cook while you chop the broccoli” is not my husband’s friend. We all do get it. Especially after watching episodes of the show that went with the book on youtube, this is all meant to be enabling and instructive on how to throw together fresh, whole ingredients to make a quick meal.
. I have discussed this book in the past. This one strikes me as a goalpost. He has a kitchen garden and his approach is the head-to-the-garden-and-the-market-and-cook-what-is-fresh approach that I think of as very European. It was much easier to cook this way when I lived in Germany – I could take a walk, not very long, through the village and pass the bakery, the butcher, and in summer the outdoor produce market, otherwise a small grocer. Here in suburbia, in our climate, this type of cooking is really only practical in, say, July through September. Still – very good recipes and we’ve never made a thing from it that we didn’t like.
is a mystery at this point. I’m sure hogging a library copy, eh? This one was very good, too. Although it is going to look pretty simple on this webpage, the flavor combination was new to all of us and very, very good. A dish that sort of slowed the world down and took us somewhere else while we ate.
and actually calls for turkey breast, which would be nummy too, but chicken breast was what I had. Nigel had been given a ginormous zucchini from someone at work, so I put my visiting sister to work slicing that, and we both began assembling the dish. Clara ended up finishing the whole thing, however, when sister and I put on the chauffer hat to do a series of errands.
, that I’d almost sent to the thrift store without trying out. It is dated and it had lived over a decade on the shelf without use. But when making up the menu this last week I decided to give a couple of recipes a try. This particular recipe came from "Duck Soup Inn" which still is in operation in Friday Harbor on San Juan Island.
, this was a basic comfort chicken dish. Well, trattoria food in general is homey Italian food, hearty and comforting, and this recipe embodied that, I think. A whole chicken was broken down into eight parts, pan browned, then cooked more slowly with canned plum peeled tomatoes put through the food mill, a twined herb bundle, and caramelized red peppers/onions.
