Coconut Yoghurt

Short story: I made some yoghurt.

Long story:

My brother got an ice cream maker for his birthday, and the person who was more excited about it was me. One of the only seemingly pointless kitchen appliances I've been to scared to ask for! Sure, it's tiny, but I'll keep it churning!

My issue, however, was that we were out of any form of canned coconut, and I couldn't make the ice cream.

So on the weekend, I got dad to take me to the supermarket and I bought $20 worth of Aroy-D (I don't care about the unlabelled potassium stuff). Walking through the dairy aisle for dad's food, I saw a little expensive container, and I said Coconut Yoghurt. Last time I'd bought a coconut yoghurt it mysteriously disappeared. I decided to buy the orange lidded pot and keep it in my sights at all times.

And then it hit me. I had all this coconut cream and all these little bacteria. Why don't I combine the two?! It made sense to me. So I hogged the oven for 24 hours and followed the recipe that's posted on Michelle Tam's site but isn't hers.

You may as well go to her site for the guest post, I haven't changed a thing.

http://nomnompaleo.com/post/45263391503/paleo-plans-simple-coconut-milk-yogurt

It was pretty runny. However, if you put it in the fridge (as you should once it's ALIVE...) you'll get more creamy Greek style yoghurt on top, and a thickish probiotic coconut water underneath that you could have in smoothies or whatnot. Or toughen up and mix it together and pour it like (thin) heavy cream on your passionfruit and blueberries.

A note of... warning, however (it's not that bad). If you pour it on something cold like mango sorbet and let it sit for a bit, the delicious fat will solidify and you'll get an awesome cracked effect.

I'll definitely have to hog the oven some more.

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.

Otai - Nature's Energy Drink

Mālō e lelei! (that's Tongan for 'hello' :) )

Today's recipe comes from the wonderful world of Facebook. I was scrolling the other day and I came across a picture that had someone completely obliterating a watermelon, a muscly guy carving out coconut, and a glass with all this glorious stuff in it. I thought it looked pretty delish. It looked it up to see if it was as amazing as it seemed.

The wonderful world wide web told me that this lovely drink was called otai, and is a traditional Tongan and other-Polynesian-island drink. You 'grate' watermelon and/or other tropical fruits like mango or pineapple, add fresh coconut, coconut water, coconut milk or coconut cream, some more water, then pour it into a whole coconut shell - that has a hole in the top - and leave it in cold water or behind a waterfall to let it cool for a few hours (my favourite bit!)

Doesn't that sound like the absolute most annoying drink to make? You have to grate the watermelon, which isn't too hard, but it would take a while, crush up some other fruit, get the meat out of the coconut, pour it into another coconut with a whole in the top and let it cool for a few hours?? Are you kidding? Obviously that stuff has gotta have a load of calories in it for that kind of work! I think that if you made this drink like they do in Tonga, you'd definitely deserve that sugar from the fruit and fat from the coconut more than anything else.

Wikipedia also told me that it's traditionally, traditionally made with ambarella and fresh coconut, and that watermelon, mango and pineapple was introduced, so the Samoans only call ambarella otai 'otai' and every other fruit has its own drink name.

So, once again, my 'traditional' recipe isn't so authentic as it should be.

And then I go one step further.

Mistakes I've Made - Whipped Avocado Cream

Have you ever seen those paleo (or vegan) cream recipes that use 'whipped coconut cream' instead of dairy cream?

I wanted to try it out, so I got my last can of (what I thought was) coconut cream, put it in the fridge and got the beaters out ready to whip me up some fatty cream.

When I planned for all this, I had a wacky idea that I thought I should try, just because I already had the beaters out and dirty. I grabbed the half avocado I had and had a go at making that into whipped cream as well.

It's Coco Snow, Yo

Let's just face the fact that I'm never going to be bothered enough to make a proper, smooth, nut or anything butter. Butters that don't come from a cow (and really, aren't real butters) all seem far too laborious to make. I think the title of 'Butter' should only really go to raw dairy milk that gets shaken up, but for now I'll continue calling it 'peanut butter' and 'almond butter' for the sake of ease.

Like, why has it taken me over an hour to get to some sort of stage where both me and my blending ingredient - coconut - can agree with? Yeah, ok, so maybe I've done other things between blend and shake my blender around and have tantrums at it but let's forget about that... Everyone else's takes twenty minutes! Why does my blender not accept the fact that I'm trying to make it a Vitamix?

Remember that coconut I cracked a few days ago? This is the result from that, high expectations and not wanting to spend $9 on an Artisana more-like-just-a-taste Coconut Butter jar. Stupid curiousity makes me want to shove fresh coconut into a blender and perform some sort of HIIT arm workout to make it spreadable. Would a normal person do that? I'm not even sure. Is there much point to making blended coconut? I'm really not sure. Apparently it's nice, when it gets to butter. But, of course, my blender does not contain the engine of a fighter jet so a velvety, creamy jar of spreadable stuff is not what's going to happen.

So we had to negotiate a middle ground.

I've Got a Lovely Bunch of Coconuts

Coconuts seem to be a staple of paleo cooking, whether it be coconut flour or coconut oil or coconut butter or desiccated coconut or coconut milk or coconut cream... See? Sometimes I think paleo people are a little too dependent on these amazing fruits.

I find it kinda funny how someone can say 'I eat what a caveman would eat' when in reality, unless you lived in the tropics and actually liked exerting large amounts of energy into preparing a single food item, you wouldn't eat coconut as much as we do today. But then again, cavemen didn't know what cakes and cookies were, and he wouldn't need to make coconut flour to make them.

We've gotten coconuts twice, once before Christmas and the other one we got this week. But as much as I love coconuts, the process of getting it from a heavy, hard ball to edibility is pretty darn hard. Let's go through those steps, shall we?

Step One: Drain the Coconut Water. I'm not quite sure how a caveman would do this neatly, but find the three dark dots on the coconut and stick a thick pin type thing in there. I used a meat thermometer, but that's because that's what I found. You may have to get creative with that one. Once you reach the hollowness, tip it upside down and let all that sweet deliciousness trickle out.

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.

First Post

Hey everyone, and welcome to my first post! I think I'm going to jump straight into it and give you a nice simple recipe for my first post.

Summer's here!
I can feel it; the days are getting longer, and the layers are getting fewer. Aaaand it's the holidays at the moment, so I've been enjoying the sunny weather. I've been longing for this season since it ended in February. And now it's actually come! It felt like it never would!

Yesterday I made myself a nice icy treat to celebrate for the inevitable return of the Australian hot weather. We had loads of fruit in the fridge, and what better way to prepare it lazily than to freeze it up and blend it with some coconut water?