Earlier in the week, the ProFUSSor talked about his disdain for poor food photography and why he doesn’t post pictures to his blog. I think his position is totally legit. I thought about it when I took the above picture of the home made “Larabar” that Scott made before heading down to camp MMW and have been laughing about it ever since. I mean, that’s just bad. I guess I don’t have the time or patience to a) cook, b) figure out how to take attractive photos of things that look unattractive and c) actually execute a quality picture.
But I promise I’ll try. That’s all you’re going to get. dealwithit.gif
Anyway, Scott did indeed make the above home made Larabar knockoff. If you don’t know what a Larabar is, it’s a paleo-friendly granolaesque bar replacement made out of dates, nuts, and fruit. This one in particular was a complete sugar bomb, made with bananas and dark chocolate chips. A delicious sugar bomb. 
I don’t know where he got this particular recipe, but there are hundreds around the internet. I do remember he spent the better part of 4 hours trying to dehydrate banana chips. They dried out somewhat, but mostly goopified and sweat out some kind of goo after he left them on the counter to cool. Not sure what was up with that. Anyway, they were delicious.
I planned a vegetarian meal for Monday night – Michael Pollan’s egg hash, which can be found in his How to Cook Everything Vegetarian book. I forget why I didn’t go to the gym on Monday, but I decided to get in some kettlebell work while the potatoes were frying. Scott and I prefer our potatoes near-burnt, so this took a while.
I totally forgot to take a picture of last night’s meal. I meant to do it before I ate the leftovers for lunch today, but I forgot. It was yet another “use up all the veggies, because more are coming!” meal. The recipe initially started out as stuffed mushrooms, but we’ve completely modified it to end up like a goulash or something.Here’s what we put in it:
- 1 sweet potato, peeled and diced
- 1 green bell pepper, diced
- 1 pound sausage, nothing too heavily seasoned
- 1 shallot, diced
- 2 ears corn, removed from cobs
- 2 portobello mushroom caps, cleaned and diced,
- 1 can coconut milk
- handful of fresh basil and parsley, chopped
- sriracha, chili oil
- butter or coconut oil
I started by browning the sausage in a cast iron pan. When it was cooked, I put it on a dutch oven on the stove. Then I browned the vegetables in turn, moving them over to the dutch oven when they were browned: sweet potatoes, mushrooms, peppers with shallot, corn covered in 2 tablespoons or so of hot chili oil, and portobello mushrooms (give them room to sweat!). I put the coconut milk and herbs in the dutch oven about half way through browning the veggies so it could absorb the flavors. When the veggies were done, I squirted a generous amount of sriracha in it, reduced the heat, covered it, and let it simmer for about 10 minutes.
We didn’t know what was going to happen when we made this. The sausage we had was mild Italian, and I was worried the typical strong fennel flavor would clash. But it came out great. I’m a sucker for coconut milk and sweet potato anything, honestly.
In other news, I deadlifted 220×5 on Wednesday! I’m pretty excited. I want to break 300# for my one rep max. My back is paying for it today – I could feel my back rounding toward the end – but with stretching and mobility I’m doing much better than I was before I started PT. Today’s WOD at the gym is the Torture Jar! It’s pouring, so at least running is out, which is good. Happy Friday!
Finally, the Ancestral Health Symposium is happening this weekend at Harvard. You can follow along on twitter by following #AHS12. I heard that many of the lectures will be posted on Sunday night online. Looking forward to watching them. Interesting stuff!
