Food, cooking, eating, and me

Years ago I used to belong to a Yahoo coconut oil group, where people would discuss the miraculous health benefits of coconut oil and ways of consuming more of it.

Coconut oil has been much maligned. It has since then been shown that research blaming heart disease on coconut oil was faulty. In fact, in countries where coconut oil is a major part of the diet, there is no more heart disease than in countries where it is hardly ever consumed.

The group is still there, though I had to check to see, it’s been so long. It is also pretty busy.

But getting back to the subject at hand, it was on that list that I first saw mention that you could whip coconut milk. I bought a can, chilled it, and whipped, but nothing happened.

There’s a need for a non-dairy whipped topping that isn’t all crap. There’s also a need for a vegan whipped topping, um, that isn’t all crap. Really, the only home recipe I saw for something like this was made by beating silken tofu with sweetening and pouring it over the dessert. The recipe poster admitted it was not as good as whipped cream. The only person who made the recipe gave it 1 star and called it the worst recipe she had ever made and a waste of tofu.

So imitation whipped cream can be bad.

If you’ve ever opened a can of coconut milk in cool weather, you’ve probably noticed that it looks like a big lump of fat with some liquid. I always assumed that it was mostly fat. But finally this week I was opening a can of coconut milk and noticed the nutrition facts. I asked myself how that compared to dairy cream.

Was I surprised! Canned coconut milk has only half the fat of dairy cream, about the same as coffee cream. No wonder it doesn’t whip. But the question is, could it whip if it was more concentrated?

So I took a can of coconut milk, warmed it up to make sure all the fat was melted, added 1/2 cup of dried coconut milk powder and 1/2 cup of sugar. After stirring for a while and leaving at room temperature to cool, I put it in the refrigerator, stirring every half hour until it was cold. I whipped it for a long time to get soft peaks, but it definitely was whipped. And grainy, in a cold coconut oil graininess kind of way. So it wasn’t great, but it was at least as good as a lot of non-dairy fakes. And it was natural.

Flash forward. The next time I added an entire cup of coconut milk powder.

I poured it in bowl of my electric mixer to chill, put that in the refrigerator, and put the beaters in the freezer. As the mixture cooled, it thickened like heavy cream, and was white like cream, rather than translucent like skim milk. I continued to whip it a few strokes every 15 minutes or so, until it was chilled. Then I put it onto the mixer, and WOW! In about 45 seconds I had perfectly stiff peaks of yummy coconutty whipped creamy goodnes. The texture and mouth feel are exactly like whipped heavy cream. Okay, it’s pretty coconutty, so it will probably go better with tropical fruit than temperate types. In fact, I would server this with pineapple, mangos, etc. to my friends who aren’t dairy-challenged. It is really that good.

I finally did it, figured out how to redo the site in php so I can more easily put new recipes in the recipe index. My goal was to change the appearance as little as possible, and I think I’ve succeeded in that. This blog has not been changed. The biggest difference that you should see (aside from a few ads I’m hoping will defray the cost of the site) is that each of the old pages has a new name. The old page will be redirecting for a while so that people who have bookmarked specific pages can change their bookmarks. Eventually you will not see those redirects anymore.

With the new format, I should be able to put new recipes in the index much more easily. Eventually all the recipes that are mixed into blog entries should end up there, even as I keep making new ones.

Happy gluten-free eating!

I have had more than an idle interest in what they call Paleo diet, particularly as I’m of an evolutionary bent, and I believe that many more things can be explained through evolution than commonly are considered. In theory, the Paleo diet attempt to recreate the diet that our species evolved on, given that we were small game hunters and scavengers on the African savanna for a couple of million years. All the evidence shows that humans scavenged parts of large game—long bones and skulls—and broke them open to remove the high-fat/high-calorie marrow and brains.

At this time, fruits and nuts were seasonal, and early humans had no storage capability. Vegetables and leaves were small and/or fibrous, not suited for a digestive system evolved through millions of years of meat consumption.

As humans migrated to other parts of the world, they continued to consume as much meat as they could get, and always consumed the fattiest parts. It was during the Neolithic period that the shift began to plant materials, as plant hybridization and agricultural techniques developed to feed populations that had increased beyond what could be fed by hunting and gathering.

It was during this period that people began to consume in quantity many foods which had previously either not been eaten or had been eaten only locally or rarely. The FDA list of the eight most common food allergies—wheat, milk, soybeans, peanuts, fish, shellfish, tree nuts, and eggs—contains just such foods.

People of the Paleo philosophy want to give up all foods that were not consumed by our ancestors a million years ago. One problem is determining exactly what should and should not be eaten. Most books on the topic appear to have made concessions to the establishment in order not to have their book condemned by the pundits of conventional wisdom, which states that a low or no-fat diet is the human ideal.

But anyway, there’s your introduction. The reason I’ve written it is to give you a hint of issues before you read some of this interesting blog on diet and philosophy, Askesis, Philosophy, and Carnivorism.

Whew, I’m all written out. Just read the blog.

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Sorry it’s been so long. How time flies when you’re working two jobs while trying to maintain multiple websites and write multiple blogs… Sometimes it seems like there’s hardly time to cook anything at all.

I haven’t been baking as much, but I know that my baked good recipes are the most popular ones that I do post. So basically I need to get better at posting the ones I do make, even if maybe they are still a little rough around the edges.

Today I’ve got a killer recipe – if you’re into biscuits and gravy. It’s got neither milk nor flour in it, but you’d never know it. The gravy is thickened with blanched almonds, which give it milkiness and a bit of sweet rice flour and potato starch, which give it silkiness. This is a base I’ll be working on to create more dairy-free gluten-free sauces, which I miss. Heck, I was even trying to make a sausage gravy with water. Talk about desperation!

Keep in mind that the best black pepper is freshly ground, which will make a huge difference in the recipe.

For those of you who are unaware of the concept of ‘biscuits and gravy’ – either because you are foreign or unfamiliar with US regional cooking, biscuits (similar to scones in some places) are puffy and white, rich with butter or shortening, usually made with milk, and baked in the oven until golden brown. They are often split and buttered, but in the case of biscuits and gravy, the split biscuits have poured over them a creamy sauce made with breakfast sausage drippings.

There’s another definition for you who are not Americans. Breakfast sausage is a fresh pork sausage seasoned with black pepper and sage. It is often sold loose, rather than in casings, and may be fried up in patties. In this recipe I crumble loose sausage meat before cooking it, then include it in the gravy. If you fried patties or sausages, you could remove them from the pan and serve them on the same plate as the biscuits and gravy.

I’ll be making this again for breakfast tomorrow. It’s been way too long.

What can I say? There I was, thinking about back when I used to mix rum with maple syrup and heavy cream to make what I called the “Sea Captain’s Return”, back in the days when I was still enjoying dairy products. Foraging through my refrigerator, I pulled out a carton of store brand rice milk (no gluten ingredients). I filled a glass with ice, added a shot of rum, an ounce of maple syrup, filled it to the top with rice milk and stirred. Not bad at all. I could get used to that.