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.

Mayleo

...sometimes combining words doesn't look as good as it sounds. I was trying to come up with a cool title for this post and I ended up combining 'mayo' and 'paleo' in my head and came up with 'mayleo'...which doesn't look as good... Some things just don't mix well, like extra virgin olive oil and egg yolks.

My mayo actually worked, so that's not where I'm going. But one tip I'd love to throw out there: DON'T USE EXTRA VIRGIN OLIVE OIL. I used about 3/4 evoo, some macadamia oil and some sweet almond oil, because I read a thousand recipes saying 'don't use evoo' and I was like 'I can handle a bit of evoo'. But no. Even slightly diluted, just no.

And I didn't even use that much oil. But when I make it again, I'll make sure I have a bit more patience (and a lighter tasting oil) so that I can see what it's like when you use all of the oil. I only used a third of the amount.

I Did It Again

Well, let's just say it's been a looooong time since I even thought about blogging, but here I am again. I think I need a strategy for this. That works.

I'm thinking really ultra short entries. Things that take me two seconds to write. Because I can write a hell of a lot when I get going, so I think my entries should just be short and sweet.

I was hoping to rekindle the fire of my blogging by making them more like Facebook updates and short things that happen, such as:

"I went to dad's, and since he buys EVERYTHING when they're on special, he branched out of his usual jams and bought a St Dalfour's Fig Jam. Not only is the jar super pretty (can't wait to ferment some asparagus in there!) and it's from France (I've been a little obsessed with France since I read the beginning of 'French Kids Eat Everything'), but it's PALEO!! Oh yes, there is a god. All of their jams. All they have is the fruit, fruit juice concentrate (ok, so maybe Grok didn't have access to that), some citric acid - normally just lemon juicey type of stuff - and some have pectin (from fruit). Ahhh! So I had a spoonful of it with my persimmon. I know, I'm weird, ok?"

That would be the entire entry, maybe with an additional photo or two.

Or, if it's more lengthy, it'd only be like this:

"Today I took my time to volunteer at the Tough Mudder that I had signed up for. I wanted to do it myself but 20km? In mud? With all those horrific(ally awesome) obstacles? Not with this bendy boney body. So I turned up hopeful to make a possible friend or two, and see how difficult this challenge was.

I turned up and after looking anorexic and not eating much of the free lunch I was given (a veggie burger, a bag of chips, a cookie, and an apple - which I ate slowly), I was sent out to man the mohawk and mullet area, and I only shaved two guys' heads since everyone else shaved theirs before (I got there at midday). Then one of the head volunteer guys came over and dropped me at the finish line to put the glorified orange headbands on everyone.

I was there for a while. I, along with a girl called Dana who had volunteered over her hours, and an American couple of which the guy was the winner this morning, stretched the headbands around the wet and muddy heads. A few people asked us to 'crown' them, a couple of guys got down on one knee (the guy knighted him), and I even got a lovely sloppy muddy hug. A few dainty girls came out the other side of the electric shocky thing crying. But I think that if I was to do it, I'd give the poor volunteer a messy hug and make sure they got muddy. Hehehe.

And when it was over, I followed David, one of the main volunteer guys, around like a lost puppy and he got me to cut all the zip cords on the banners. That was not fun, I can tell you. But after doing it for a while, I came out of the portaloo with him an some other main volunteer guy telling me that they wanted me to sign up to do paid volunteer-style work. I could be paid for this sort of stuff! So we exchanged details and I took leftover bananas and solo cans home.

But getting a possible job wasn't the only amazing thing today. I learnt how to quickly lever zip cords out, I learnt that you don't have to be ripped (or even have any nice physique) to be a Tough Mudder, and I learnt that doing good gets you places."
And sometimes it might just be:

"I MADE MYSELF A BEANIE! It's hot pink and ribbed and the perfect size for my head and I'm actually going to wear it places. Yaaay!"

I'll see if I can keep entries up once a week (I'm thinking Thursdays), but let's just see what exciting happenings happen.

:)

Bio Excursion

I've come to realise that being a senior means that you have to be in more places more often, learn heaps more in these more places, and you need to have a responsibility about getting there, leaving there, and anything that may happen in between (eg your bus overheats two minutes down the road from your school and you have to wait 45 minutes for a new bus).

Today we had our biology excursion and, although I learnt so much from the park ranger woman who... collected fat in a pretty strange way... I also got to contemplate a lot. I was very contemplative today. I came up with a million and one interesting ideas for food experimentation, some of them including:
- Using that machine that normal people lay with bread and fill with baked beans, press together and cook (not gonna do THAT ever again), I thought you could either use thin chicken breast slabs, or parcooked (steamed and patted dry), massive spinach or kale leaves in a few layers, and fill the inside with pumpkin/starchy veggie mash with either meat or leaves, depending on what you didn't put on the outside, and lay more chicken/leaves on top, press and cook away. Little parcels of fun!
- bacon for paleos, or slices of cheese for primals, laid on the underside of a cupcake tin and baked/roasted (with another cupcake tin pressed on top if needed) until cooked, for little savoury yum cups. Sorta like those cookie cups you may have seen, but BETTER (obviously - I mean, it's bacon, guys).
- do the same thing with tomatoes, but take their insides out and make sure they're nice and squished.
No one steal my ideas please! These are now copyright because I've put a © here. Don't even think about being too lazy to think for ideas. They are mine.

Lazy Stuffed Zucchinis

Neither mum nor I wanted a big dinner tonight, and neither of us wanted to do anything fancy. Mum said that she'd be happy with toast for dinner. But on the weekend we picked up a couple of cute little (like 15cm long) fat, organic zucchinis and I didn't want them to go yuck. And I'd planned this meal at the beginning of the day so it was going to happen.

This recipe is a very, very laid back recipe - if you could call it a recipe at all. I was pretty demotivated to take good photos so what you see is the best my laziness could do with an iPhone. Which is very little.

I gathered a collection of paleo stuffed zucchinis and found that it's basically just minced meat, a few bits and bobs, herbs and spices if you're feeling snazzy, and your scooped zucchini. The recipe that really wowed me the most was this one from Eat Drink Daily with the addition of olives. Boy, were they a good addition! They really tied the whole thing up, and I think that without it, this recipe wouldn't even be that fantastic enough to write about.

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!