Paleo Crepes

Did you know that crepes are quick and easy to make? In fact, you can make them for an afternoon snack. Sure, having received the Analon Crepe Pan from last year's International Food Bloggers Conference made it easier and having an easy paleo crepe recipe kept it healthy, too!

Making crepes, even non-paleo crepes is pretty quick and doesn't require a lot of ingredients. Basically, crepe batter is a very thin batter which quickly cooks on a wide flat pan. You don't even have to have a crepe pan, a large skillet will work too!

Mise en place, a technique of preparing everything a head of time, helps make quick work of crepes. For Elana's crepes, it's simply eggs, coconut flour, coconut oil and water. That's great for a savory filling, maybe adding some coconut sugar would be nice for sweeter crepes.

Crepes cook quickly, maybe in 3 or 4 minutes and are delicate. I don't like to flip them because I lose so many to tearing, so I keep my batter on the thinner side.

 If I were making these as a treat or not worried about clean eating, this is where I'd dust them with powdered sugar!

My personal favorite filling is spinach, ham and mushrooms - I lean towards the savory over the sweet. I made crepes for breakfast this morning (yep, they're an all day snack) and realized that mushrooms need to be a staple item in my house!

What is your favorite filling?

Disclaimer: I received the pan at the IFBC conference and this post is one of three that I had to write as a blogger attending IFBC.

Trying to make a lamb lover out of me yet

At last year's International Food Blogger's Conference, I attended a breakout session sponsored by the American Lamb Board, Curriculamb 101. Historically, I've not really liked lamb - it's had a gamey taste, it's been tough. But surprise of surprises, I have 56 lamb recipes clipped in my Evernote Recipes notebook. My lovely wife likes lamb and I'll give it the old college try and make it for her on special occasions. So, I attended this breakout to learn more about lamb and see if it could get me across the threshold to be a fan of lamb.

Roast lamb with mashed carrots

I learned quite a bit about lamb, particularly that quite a deal of lamb is produced here in the Pacific Northwest and that the gaminess comes from the age of lamb. Domestic lamb is usually younger than imported Australian lamb - because we don't have a huge demand for wool in the US. In Australia, they'll keep their lamb a little longer to be able to shear their wool a few times.

One leg of lamb

And as an added bonus for attending the breakout, the American Lamb Board gave me a boneless leg of lamb to roast for my family! One more try to make me a lamb lover and an opportunity for me to make Heather a nice meal.

Herbs and spices ready to make a crust!

I decided to make the Serious Eat's Slow Roasted Boneless Leg of Lamb with Garlic, Rosemary and Lemon with Carrot, Leek and Parsley Mash from Chowhound. The lamb recipe called to me because of the crust of herbs that get rubbed on the leg before roasting it. This meal had a bit of fanciness to it, but kept it clean, not quite paleo, but primal.

Neither recipe was difficult, but it was one of those meals that took several hours as the leg of lamb needs to be in the oven for almost 4 hours and then rest. At least this way, you're only really cooking one thing at a time.

After several hours of roasting (and a fair bit of hoping on my part that it was fully cooked), I had some wonderful lamb ready for dinner.

Leg of lamb, all roasty!

It was good and it definitely opened me up to more lamb. I don't actively avoid lamb nowadays, but it still hasn't made itself a commonplace meal on my table yet!

Thanks to the American Lamb Board @fanoflamb for the meat and if you're a food blogger, think of heading to IFBC 2016 in Sacramento July 29 -31, 2016. This is one of my posts in return for a discounted blogger conference rate.

Lingering over breakfast with a french press

I enjoy drinking coffee. I'm not one of those people that needs coffee to function first thing in the morning; my first coffee will often be 5 to 6 hours after I wake up. I drink coffee for the flavors of the beans and for the art of making coffee.

I recently attended the 2015 International Food Bloggers Conference (disclaimer: this post is one of three posts I'll write in return for a discounted ticket) and a pre-event sponsored by Sur La Table and KitchenAid. I'm all about gadgets and cool kitchen cookery, so it was a great to visit the Sur La Table's test kitchens and see the new products coming out this fall. And I was quite pleased by the new Kitchen Aid Precision French Press that we were given.

If you've seen my Instagram photos, you know I love coffee and geeking out about it, maybe half of my pictures are of coffee in the making. Not only is the Precision French Press beautiful in it's stainless steel glory, it has a scale and timer built in so you can get your coffee just right every time. And because a French Press says lingering over breakfast or a baked good, the double wall construction keeps the coffee warm longer.

Photo by Parker Raines

Using the press is quite simple, especially given that it is self-contained.  I warm my press with boiling water, empty it and measure the coffee with the integrated scale. The manual comes with a table for a 1:16 coffee to water ratio, so no early morning math is needed! Tare the scale and fill with water to the target weight and then start the timer, all right there on the handle.  I like a 4 minute brew time and after a stir to break the crust, a gentle press of the plunger makes great tasting coffee.

Keep in mind that brewing with French Press does require a slightly coarser grind coffee, otherwise pressing the plunger will get pretty tough.  I've had glass presses break on me as I've been pressing and its quite a mess, but with the strength of stainless steel, I'm not sure how this one would fail - no matter what it would be a hot mess. So, just make sure you use an appropriate grind, which is nicely pictured in the manual, as well.

Personally, I'm quite happy that the art and science of making coffee is becoming more prevalent. It's no longer the brown stuff from the can that my grandparents would drink; like wine and chocolate, the subtle flavor nuances are now being appreciated.

How do you like to make and drink your coffee? Are you on board with the craft coffee movement or does coffee help you survive the morning?

September is going to be awesome

September is shaping up to be an awesome month.  For one, I'm writing on my blog again after an almost 3 month hiatus.

End of Summer Backpacking Trip

September started off (well, really August ended) with a 2 night backpacking trip with my son in the Alpine Lakes Wilderness Area. He said he wanted to go backpacking during the summer and this was the last weekend of summer. What started out being planned as an overnight, turned into a 21 mile, 2 night, multiple lake extravaganza in the woods.

We started out Friday afternoon at 4:25pm with 4.5 miles and about 2000' elevation gain to get to Melakwa lake before the 8pm sunset. We made it just in time to set up our tent in the twilight and enjoyed dinner in the dark.

During the nights (both of them), the wind and rain were both hard, but we stayed warm and dry. It sprinkled during the day were we weren't necessarily dry, but we weren't cold or wet either. Though there was some suck factor, we both had a great time.

I took my Aeropress on this trip, with the grand plan to take some of those camp stove, Aerpresss, coffee pictures against the beautiful lake backgrounds. Sunday morning, I had a great backdrop for it - we camped at Rainbow Lake and our tent door opened up to look out across the lake. If it hadn't been raining so much while I was making breakfast, well let's just say I didn't have any coffee that morning.

New Job, New Computer

I'm getting settled in my new job and learning the ins and outs of using OS X.  In my case, its not such a big deal, because I usually have 4 terminal sessions open anyways. I love the fact that underneath the polished GUI is some form of 'nix.  And I'll say it - "why didn't I do this sooner?"

Swim practice has started up and as I write this post, I made this tweet:

I am officially one of those people using a MacBook at @Starbucks

— Beau Raines (@beauraines) September 5, 2015

So, don't be surprised if you see more more geeky tweets in the coming months.

The Elysian Games

Next weekend, I am competing in the Elysian Games at Seattle Center. Taking advantage of my age, I'm competing in the Masters ( > 40) division. I didn't finish last last year, so I'm going to do it again. It's going to kick my butt, but I'm going to have fun at it.

International Food Bloggers Conference

The 7th annual International Food Bloggers Conference is the following weekend 18 - 20 September.  I'm looking forward to seeing old friends, making new friends and getting re-energized about my blog. Oh, yeah and tasting some really good food.

With the legalization of marijuana in Washington, there is even a breakout session on edibles. Truthfully, that breakout is not for me, but I know that lots of people are looking forward to that session. 

This will be my third year in attendance and its a fun filled, tummy filling experience.

MBA Reunion and Cal Football Game

It's been 5 years since I graduated from the Foster School of Business with an MBA and its reunion time. What's kind of cool about this reunion is that the football game that it is paired with is against Cal, our alma mater.  It'll be my families first UW football game, so it'll be pretty cool to see Cal too. 

September is going to be jam packed... It's funny how we had a quiet summer and then pack it all into the very end. Hopefully, I can keep writing during the month. 

Paleo Chicken and Waffles

Last weekend was the 2014 International Food Bloggers Conference, where brands and bloggers got together in Seattle to network, learn and enjoy good food.  With breakouts on Food, Writing and Technology, there was something for every food blogger. I had an enjoyable time and actually got to meet some bloggers in real life. Ironically, some of those I met live in my same neighborhood.

What was great about this year's conference was that there were many brands represented in the healthy space, and for me, that means acceptably paleo.  Dinner last night was brought to us by the swag from these brands.

• The local sausage company, Isernio's, which makes clean chicken and pork (didn't know this before the conference) sausage.
• Nutiva, which makes coconut products, like coconut oil and flour
• NestFresh, a cage free, organic egg producer

Almost mis en place!

I had a hole in my tummy that was looking to be filled with waffles, so that's what I decided to make.  After going through my paleo waffle recipes (thank you PaleOMG), I found that they all required coconut milk, of which we had none.

It was almost 8pm and we were getting hungry. I knew that its only an 8 minute trip, one way, to the grocery store. So, yes, I did make a grocery store run for coconut milk and a few add-ons as I dashed out the door.

Paleo chicken and waffles.

 I made PaleOMG's Savory Waffles and topped them with browned Isernio's Chicken Breakfast sausage and some of Heather's spicy (homegrown) ketchup. While the savory herbs in the waffles complimented the sausage, the waffles were dry. Her recipe actually tops them with a gravy and they needed the moisture from a gravy, for sure.

What was neat about IFBC was that these were all products I already enjoyed in my clean eating and I got to meet brand representatives and see some new products (more on that later).

Disclaimer: The chicken and eggs used in this post were some swag from the conference.  I ate this stuff already, so I already thought it was great before I got some free coupons! While I wasn't compensated for this post, I did receive a blogger's discount for attending the conference and this post is meeting a part of what I had to do in return for the discount.

How to Poach Eggs [Video]

I've always enjoyed Poached Eggs. They've always had a special cachet to them - most restaurants don't have them on the menu, unless you get Eggs Benedict, another favorite of mine. And it takes a certain caliber of restaurant to have Eggs Benedict. I used to only make poached eggs when I was making a special brunch, New Years, Easter, Mother's Day, Father's Day or having friends over for brunch. I have several gadgets and even a special pan with inserts to make poached eggs, which I would leverage quite frequently.

My go to breakfast: poached eggs, mashed sweet potato and bacon. Photo by Heather.

But after some research, I learned how easy it is to make Poached Eggs in just a pot of water. And now, sadly, Poached Eggs have lost a bit of their cachet, because I eat them just about everyday (which makes me happy - a net increase in happiness).  Heather had posted several photos of the breakfasts I make for her with poached eggs, and one of her friends asked how to make poached eggs.  I decided to make a video of the method.

Without further ado, here is my first ever cooking video! Enjoy.

If you give it a try, let me know how it works out for you in the comments, either here or on YouTube. As a teaser for a future post, you can also make poached eggs in the microwave! Think how awesome your breakfast in the office could be!

The rest of this post is about making the video, so if you just wanted to learn about poaching eggs, that's all I've got for you today. If you want to see what I learned about making a YouTube video, read on.

It's not the greatest video around, but it was my first go. In making this video, I learned how easy it is to make videos for YouTube. The YouTube editor is pretty nice for working with multiple clips and provides some reasonable editing capabilities. I shot all this video with my phone, and in fact, the last half was inverted because I held my phone with my left hand, upside down so I could reach the buttons. Little did I know that the display would be right side up, but the video wouldn't be. However, YouTube came to my rescue and I was able to invert part of the clip!

Almost a year ago, I attended the International Food Blogger's Conference and a blogging chef recommended I try out food videos. IFBC 2014 is less than two weeks away, and I've finally done it. Here are a few things I learned while making this video - its probably the quality of what would be turned in for a high school project, but the lessons are still a good foundation.

1. Shoot in multiple clips. The editor can help you put them in sequence, even if you need to re-shoot a portion, and trim the starting and ending points. You'll notice that the video hadn't started when I was talking about bringing the water to a full boil.
2. I recorded my audio at the same time as my video. I didn't script it or prepare too much for it. You'll notice I was repetitive at times and stumbled over the words and simultaneous actions. With the editor I can turn off the volume on the video clip and lay an audio track down. That audio track could even be a new video, but it will only play the audio portion. This way you can go sequence everything and even talk through the transitions. I'd plan on redoing this video with a better audio track, with some introduction speech and some voice over the "what you need" picture.
3. Its easier if you have a helper to actually hold the camera. When it comes to food preparation, there is only so much you can do with one hand. Talk through the shot with them before hand. I didn't tell my son that I'd want to show the eggs right after plopping them in the water, hence the finger pointing.

I thought that this was a fun medium to work with and I plan on making more of these in the future. if there are any things you'd like me show you how to make, just leave a comment!