Sourcing meat (and cake)

On a nutrient-rich paleo diet like the Paleo Autoimmune Protocol every meal or snack should include healthy fats and proteins, and this boils down to eating a lot of meat. For the last month I’ve managed to eat meat at basically every meal, up from maybe once or twice a week. I can tell my body is loving it, though it’s been with some relief that, having hit a month on the AIP, I’ve started incorporating some basic seeds, nuts and eggs back into my diet to have some non-meat-oriented meals.

Of course on a healing diet like this it’s essential that the meat be good meat: grass-fed, pasture-raised, organic meat, or you can be getting a heavy load of toxic garbage through your meat (especially the fatty bits and organ meats). From researching the AIP I’ve learned that organs store toxins and eating organ meat from conventionally raised animals will therefore be counterproductive: organ meat should be one of the most healthy foods you can eat rather than one of the most toxin-laden.

So how to come by copious quantities of well-raised organic meats? Publix has some organic chicken and some grass-fed ground beef that tastes a bit like cardboard, but that’s not really enough on which base a protein-focused diet. And where do you even buy organ meat these days?! Enter Local Harvest, a fantastic website that puts you in touch with whatever independent or organic farmers, CSAs, and farmers markets are in your area.

I found Seabreeze Organic Farms on Local Harvest; they provide local, organic, pasture-raised meats. Every other Thursday we meet their truck and exchange an empty cooler for one brimming with interesting things!

Today we got our full cooler and it included (all grass-fed/pasture-raised and organic): raw-milk butter, a whole chicken, chicken meat, ground turkey, ground buffalo, beef roast, beef bones for bone broth, chicken livers and beef livers. I think I expected to live my whole life never even trying half the things in this cooler, let alone getting excited about it arriving.

For lunch I made buffalo burgers with guacamole, fried portobello mushrooms, crisped onions and sweet potato “buns”.

To make burger mix I food process a quantity of vegetables about equal to a pound of ground meat and then mix the veggies with the meat in the food processor with garlic and herbs. The veggies bulk up the meat and make it tastier, not to mention adding extra veggies each time I eat the patties. I use the same mix for breakfast sausage patties and also for little meatballs in soup.

For dessert I made some little “cakes” layered with white sweet potato (I swear white sweet potatoes taste like honey and have the texture of pound cake, I’d never tried them before this), strawberries, bananas, and coconut butter.

It’s incredible how sweet fruit has started to taste after a month of no refined sugar–it’s decadently sweet. It just keeps getting sweeter and sweeter. I can’t even imagine what sugar would be like at this point, though I certainly don’t feel like I need it. For one thing making something look like cake seems to make it taste like cake.