Nut-Free Schnitzel

As a child, one of my most favourite meals was chicken schnitzel. I had it just about every night. I had it so often that mum and dad gave up with the whole flour and egg thing, and skipped just to the breadcrumbing. So then my grandmother's lovingly made, non skimped chicken schnitzel was a million times better.

The other day, I had an epiphany for a paleo remake of schnitzel, and I wanted to see if I could remake it. I made up a big batch of chicken tenderloins and an eggplant round (to test it out) and lovingly made my non-skimped, paleo schnitzel.

Afterwards, I laid my big chickeny breast schnitzel and the lone breaded eggplant on a bed of shredded and boiled TO PERFECTION Brussels sprouts (they looked so good that even my brother asked if he could 'try the lettuce') and ladled on some of my LINK slow and perfect meat tomato sauce. And it was DIVINE. It looked like heaven too. It seems to be the best meals I don't take photos of.

So I tried to recreate it with the eggplant. I got an eggplant, sliced it up, salted it, let it sit out for a day and a half (the longer, the better!) and got around to making a big batch of eggplant schnitzel.

I laid out my bowls of arrowroot, egg and coconut and the dunking commenced.

The still-wet eggplant rounds were dusted in probably too much arrowroot...

Then covered in egg (sometimes it didn't want to stick)...

And they were given a coating of finely desiccated coconut to schnitzel them up.

There's my first one.

Once I'd made all of them, I glugged out some olive oil (honestly, I suggest using a much more stable oil like tallow or coconut oil, because they ended up tasting very PUFA-y) into two frying pans and plonked them in once the oil was hot.

Back to replicating my perfect tomatoy dish that I made last time, I got a ladle and ladled out some of my pumpkin soup and put it in a pot, and then got a ladle of the worst osso buco of my life (osso buco + water = my hopelessly failed attempt at broth, I had no bones available) and popped that in the same pot. Of course, it wouldn't be the same solanine taste (duh, there's no tomatoes in basic pumpkin soup) but I wanted the same sort of rich, thick, vegetable-creamy (you know what I mean?) ladle sauce to spoon over my schnitzel like a parma. I heated it up, tasted it - still tasted boring, but oh well - and poured it lavishly over the breaded eggplant.

The photos accurately depict the meal's tastiness.

Before Sauce:

After Sauce:

As you can see, the eggplant schnitzel was the ultimate STAR OF THE SHOW and the pumpkin-osso buco-bleugh sauce just ruined it.

You know what also ruined it?

The fact that mum ate the rest of them.

Chicken (or Eggplant) Schnitzel

Serves 4

4 chicken breasts (or 2 large eggplants)

2 cups tapioca starch, tapioca flour or arrowroot

3 eggs (you can go with 2 but it's better to have more)

3 - 4 cups finely desiccated coconut

Stable fat, for frying

If using chicken breasts, cut each breast into three or four equally sized sections (about the size of a tenderloin). If using eggplant, cut into rounds, lay on absorbent something and sprinkle with salt. Let the butter juices leach out for at least 30 mins. Pat down with some more, dry absorbent stuff.

Place the tapioca/arrowroot in a bowl, crack the eggs into a separate bowl, and pour the coconut into a third bowl. Whisk the eggs until combined.

Dip the chicken (or eggplant) pieces, one at a time, into the tapioca/arrowroot, covering the piece. Then dip into the egg, covering the piece, and then into the coconut, then place on a separate plate or dish. Continue with the remaining pieces of chicken/eggplant.

Heat up the fat in a deep frypan. Fry each piece in the fat until cooked on one side, then turn and cook on the other side. Take it out once it is golden brown. Repeat with the remaining pieces until all are cooked.

Serve with vegetables, homemade mayo, melted cheese or some delicious sauce (don't ruin it with a bland sauce!)

NB: Once it's cold, the chicken schnitzel goes a little gummy between the chicken and the arrowroot, so I'm yet to work out a substitution - probably coconut flour. In the mean time, just eat it while it's hot! Not that it's incredibly inedible being a little gummy, it just doesn't stick to the chicken as well.

Lonely Love Day

Happy Valentine's Day everyone! Hope you all had a lovely day (see what I did there?). I should've really prepared for today but it didn't work out so I had no valentine at all :( but one of my gorgeous friends was handing out valentine carrots (she'd bought a bag of carrots and wrote 'Happy Valentine's Day' on them) and I got one. I felt loved then.

I've been playing with food ideas for the day of romance, so for breakfast I wanted to curl my bacon strips into a heart but, in my house, when we freeze bacon, it's cut into little square bits for ease of use. So a curly heart was not going to happen. I got out my heart shaped cookie cutter to try that before and after the bacon pieces had cooked, and I eventually gave up when I ended up with globby shapes of nothingness (delicious globs at that).

Healthy Oniony Rissoles (and they're easy!)

I haven't got too long and I haven't got any photos (yet) so this post will be a quick one.

Yesterday I made a big batch of rissoles to keep in the freezer because I get so annoyed when mum comes home with ugly, preservative-, additive-filled balls of 'meat' which she thinks are great. Nuh uh. She said that it all comes down to convenience so I decided to come up with a basic recipe for rissoles I can make to put in the freezer. I'd prefer to spend 15 minutes making these over spending a much longer time worrying about what is in those globs of intestinal destruction.

I didn't take any photos of the rissoles because, to be honest, squished raw meat is not pretty. Especially with my uber cool camera of an iphone. And also, when I finished shaping them they went straight in the freezer so it's not like I cooked them straight away.

But I did have a try of them today. And they need a little bit of a touch up, shall we say? I've added changes that I would personally add but feel free to make them however you want!

Healthy Oniony Rissoles

Makes 28 medium sized rissoles

1kg chicken mince

1/3 cup flaxseed meal

1 egg

2 stalks celery

2 cloves garlic, finely chopped

5 medium sized mushrooms

1 large Spanish onion

2 tbsp olive oil

salt and pepper

Chop up the celery and mushrooms up into tiny little bits. I put it all in a blender, which I think would be a lot easier than doing it by hand.

Slice the onion into little chunks, not as small as the celery and mushrooms but small enough to fit into a little rissole.

Put the oil in a medium pan and once the pan is hot, fry the onions and garlic.

When the onions are half cooked, add the mushroom mixture and stir it around until the mushies are all cooked through. Let cool (or not, if you're impatient.)

In a largeish bowl, mash together the chicken, flaxseed meal, egg and salt and pepper with your hands until combined.

Add the onion mix to the chicken and mush it all together with your hands.

Shape the meat into balls as big as the dent in your palm and place on a prelined baking tray.

Bake in a preheated oven at 180 degrees for 20 minutes or until it's cooked inside.

Thai Chilli Coconut Roast

What do you do when you want beachy, summery flavours and a comforting wintery meal? You combine them of course! Last night it was a little colder than usual but I felt like a bit of chilli and coconut so I came up with a bit of a concoction:

Coconut oil
Chilli flakes
Cayenne pepper
Desiccated coconut
Thai seasoning



And mixed my chicken breast into it. If I wasn't being so lazy, I would've made more and mixed the veggies in it, but the coconut oil was in the fridge so I had to scrape it out instead of scooping it out. I need a small jar of it to keep in the cupboard for easier use. If you don't have coconut oil, feel free to use a light oil or some olive oil (my veggies got a dash of EVOO - extra virgin olive oil). It shouldn't make too much of a difference.

Gnocchi with Fried Cauli-Broccoli Rice

Hey guys! More of a ranty post than a recipe post, but I wanted to put tonight's dinner up :)

So today I finally decided to change my subjects for year 11 and 12, so I strolled into the guy-who's-responsible-for-that-sort-of-stuff's office and asked for the form. But when he asked me what subject I wanted to change to, I told him I wanted to go from chemistry to pdhpe but he was like 'oh you can't do that they're not in the same line so you have to pick from this this or this' so I was like KJRBEIUH BUT I DON'T WANT TO DO MODERN HISTORY OR LEGAL OR THINKING SUBJECTS!! So I calmly accepted the fact that I wasn't going to get my perfect subjects as he wrote down my suggestions. And so I left the room and rushed to my exam I didn't know about... for pdhpe...

I was soo scared that I was going to get a 0 for missing the class I was hoping to swap into (how bad would that look??) but thankfully my pe teacher is a gem and let me do the exam. I wasn't even that late... like 2 minutes...

Anyway, all day I've been looking at my suggestions and asking all my friends what I should do. But there is no way I'm dropping either biology or food tech for pe so my final choice was...

DRAMA!

And yet I'm one of the shyest people on the planet. You know what? Who cares! I'm just going to stroll in there and pretend that I'm slightly more confident than I actually am and if people ask me what the hell my body is doing flinging itself across the front of the room, I'm gonna say that SCHOOL IS FOR LEARNING and I need to learn how to fling my body around the room so I don't look like the epitome of tragedy.

Plus I want to be a part time commercial model (yes, models don't all have to be tall and skinny! They can be short and... not skinny like me ;) ) so doing drama would help I guess.

Now time for the recipe, what you've been waiting for!