One of the benefits of having your own blog is being able to see what people are searching for and what makes them end up on your site. A lot of searches that result in people arriving here are for paleo recipes. I know the scenario, since I’ve done it enough times myself. You get it into your head that you would like to cook X for dinner, so you go to your favourite search engine and type in “Paleo X”.
With the mighty internet and blogosphere as it now exists there are usually dozens, if not hundreds of recipes suddenly at your disposal for how to make your chosen meal in a paleo way. Sometimes you may end up confused at which recipe is best. Certainly some bloggers have come up with novel ways to recreate old favourites in a paleo-friendly way and a few of the recipes seem quite unlikely to result in the finished product you are after.
Searching for paleo everything
An easy trap to fall into is to abandon all your old cooking skills and recipes and start searching for paleo-everything on the internet. It’s important to remember that there are a whole host of meals that are inherently paleo. The best example of this is roast dinners. If there is plenty of veg selection then nobody will notice that you haven’t had the potatoes.
One of my most successful work lunches was at a Carvery. Usually I’m grubbing about trying to find the item on the menu with the most paleo food and the least potato and pastry products while this time I could pile my plate high with roast meat and veg!
But I liked the recipe I had already!
For some, starting to eat by a paleo diet has been the reason they have learnt to cook. But for many of us, the paleo way of living has come after our introduction to the kitchen and we already have recipes that are old favourites.
In many cases there will be simple substitutions you can make to these recipes and they will often come out as good as the original, or even better. Of course, there are the times when you make a substitution and then find yourself binning an inedible finished product, but you quickly learn what works and what doesn’t.
I tried using ground almonds instead of flour to thicken a casserole this weekend because I was trying to thicken it in a hurry when we had friends visiting. It didn’t really work and we ended up with bowls of meat, veg and flavoursome liquid. I didn’t get the finished product I was after until I had the leftovers that evening and I had the time to slowly reduce the sauce.
Converting traditional recipes into paleo recipes
Some of the resources you need to convert the recipes you know into unique paleo-gastronomic experiences are already available.
The best thing to do is to experiment with paleo recipes to learn what creates certain flavours or effects best. There are also a couple of useful websites that I turn to when I want to use an old recipe – it’s meant that I’ve got more use out of my recipe books recently than I ever had before.
Live Primal: A handy reminder table of ingredient substitutes, and I also recommend the recipe e-book (I’ve used several recipes from it already).
Mark’s Daily Apple: While not having actually done a post on how to convert your recipes, a quick hunt over this post by Mark Sisson can inspire some conversion techniques and provide possible alternatives. Some posts that I find particularly useful are the posts on:
My one recipe failure
Most of us have a single food item that means “comfort” to us and which we’ve failed to manage to convert since we became paleo.
I had plenty of comfort meals that I’ve managed to convert or substitute (or which I just don’t crave anymore, like macaroni cheese) but the one that endlessly fails me is Hot Chocolate. I’ve tried cocoa, cocoa and honey, or even cocoa and stevia for the chocolate flavour and for milk I’ve tried almond milk, coconut milk and even just plain water. Nothing has yet worked. Every time I am faced with a mug of too-sweet, too-bitter, gloopy or watery muck.
I’ve pretty much given up on my hunt for hot chocolate, but if you have a recipe that is paleo and which works (and tastes fairly close to the original) I’d be ever so grateful!
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