The Real Food Guide

Not too long ago, I finally caved in and bought myself a new kitchen toy – a vegetable spiralizer. I’d been toying with the idea of getting one for well over a year now and I put it off because I have a box grater and a julienne peeler which can essentially do the same thing: make vegetables into strands. The problem was that both of those tools made short, non-noodle like strands, and they can to be a little harder on the knuckles, especially if you’re trying to get free child labor your child to help in the kitchen. The bonus in finally owning a spiralizer is that there is a certain novelty to having your vegetables in noodle form, so that’s resulted in more vegetable-eating and, the gadget is so easy to use that my son will happily help with this part of the food prep!

This recipe is inspired by the turnip cakes or ‘lo bak go’ (蘿蔔糕, disclosure: I can’t read that, but that’s what Wikipedia tells me it is) that you can get at dim sum. Dim sum, for the uninitiated, is a Chinese lunch-ish meal where small plates are served literally à la carte). Unfortunately for me, the turnip cakes are usually made with either regular wheat flour or rice flour – neither of which I can tolerate. They also usually use lap cheong, a delicious, sweet-savory Chinese sausage. Again, because of my food intolerances, I haven’t been able to find a Chinese sausage that doesn’t include questionable ingredients like food coloring. I may risk it sometime just to see what happens because they’re that good, and would be a very tasty addition to this stir fry. In any case, I had a ‘lo bak’ (also known as a daikon radish), and decided to mix it with some shiitaki mushrooms, a package of frozen shrimp and scallops that I had on hand. The dim sum turnip cakes usually have dried shrimp or scallops with them, so seafood seemed to be the perfect accompaniment to this dish. This probably isn’t a dish my mother would make, but then again, most of the dishes I make are a bit too North American ‘fusion’ for her 😉 Hopefully though, you’ll enjoy this as an easy way to get the flavors of Chinese cooking without all the fuss of having to steam your own turnip cakes.

Choosing Shiitake Mushrooms
Shiitake mushrooms are a staple in many Asian dishes. Unlike white button mushrooms, shiitake mushrooms have a meatier, more savory (or ‘umami’) taste. Shiitake mushrooms are readily available in any Asian market, or in the international section of major grocery store chains. You’ll usually find them dehydrated, in a plastic bag or sometimes even in a fancy box that is ready for gifting. That’s because these mushrooms can be quite expensive and can make the perfect gift for your Asian host/hostess, or foodie. You’ll also generally get what you pay for. Look for whole mushrooms that aren’t pre-sliced (as it’s harder to tell the quality when they’re already cut up). The mushrooms tend to have a more intense flavor when you can see fissures on the caps.

To prepare dried shiitake mushrooms, you’ll need to rehydrate them first. You can either do the “oh crap, I just remembered I should start dinner” method in using boiling water to soak your mushrooms, which takes about 20-30 minutes of soaking. Or for a more full flavor, you can soak your dried mushrooms in filtered water overnight.

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Lo bak (daikon) noodle stir fry
INGREDIENTS

10-12 dried shiitake mushrooms
1-2 tbsp coconut oil or cooking fat of your choice
1 lb frozen shrimp and scallops
3 green onions chopped
1-1/2 tsp of white pepper (omit for AIP)
1-1/2 tsp of sea salt
1-1/2 tsp of grated ginger
1 medium-sized lo bak (aka daikon radish or Chinese white turnip), about 8-10 cups once spiralized
1-2 tbsp wheat-free soy sauce or coconut aminos
INSTRUCTIONS

In a small bowl, soak your mushrooms with enough boiled, filtered water so that the mushrooms are covered. It should take about 20-40 minutes to soften, depending on the thickness of your mushrooms. Squeeze out all of the water, cut off the stems and slice the mushrooms.
Heat coconut oil or your preferred cooking fat in a wok on medium-high heat. Add your sliced mushrooms, shrimp and scallops, green onion, white pepper, ginger, sea salt. Stir-fry until the shrimp are translucent, and slightly undercooked. Remove everything from the wok and set aside.
Add more coconut oil or cooking fat to your wok, and add your spiralized lo bak/daikon noodles. Season with soy sauce or coconut aminos and stir-fry the noodles until softened, about 10-15 minutes.
Drain any liquid from the wok and add your reserved shrimp and scallop mixture to the wok with the noodles. Stir-fry until the shrimp is sufficiently cooked.
Garnish with additional chopped green onion and serve.

It’s been one HOT summer, save for a week of (much welcomed) cooler weather… and I have NO complaints about any of it. 🙂 Being in Canada, we actually get our fair share of heat and humidity, because it isn’t always the Great White North. One way I’ve been cooling off lately is making different frozen treats – so many, in fact, that I recently partnered with Jennifer Robins of Predominantly Paleo to make a whole book of them. What sets our book, ‘We Can ALL Scream for Ice Cream’ apart from many others, however, is that our treats are all Paleo Autoimmune Protocol (AIP) friendly! For me, these recipes are purely selfish, since I’m among the growing number in the Paleo community who have found even further improvements to health by cutting out inflammatory foods like eggs, nuts, seeds and nightshades.

Now these popsicles aren’t in the book, but they are AIP friendly! (Thankfully, I can actually tolerate chocolate, but I know that many who follow AIP can’t successfully re-introduce chocolate, so these are actually made with carob powder. If you can tolerate cocoa, you can certainly use it instead).

This recipe came about because of a conversation I had with my husband about one of his favorite chocolates as a kid: ‘Cherry Blossoms’. It turns out that Cherry Blossoms are a Canadian thing apparently, because my discussion of these with my American co-author had her wondering what the heck I was talking about – not uncommon in our discussions though ;). A good Canadian Cherry Blossom is essentially a very non-paleo, cloyingly sweet, corn-syrup-filled, candied cherry, covered in chocolate, coconut, and pieces of nuts. These Cherry Blossom popsicles are AIP-friendly, and they aren’t cloyingly sweet, but they’re still very, very good. I’ve skipped the nuts for all of us on AIP, but if you can tolerate them, you can certainly sprinkle nuts on top of the chocolate coating for that extra crunch. The toasted coconut in the chocolatey coating is quite excellent with or without the added nuts. If you’ve never tasted a cherry blossom, these popsicles are a bit like a good black forest cake. YUM! If you’re vegan, you can omit the gelatin – but if you can, include it because not only does gelatin add plenty of gut-healing nutrition, it also adds to the creaminess of the popsicle.

Sarah Ballantyne (aka The Paleo Mom) does recommend that those of us following AIP should limit fructose intake to no more than 20g per day. So, while these popsicles are AIP-friendly, they do contain 11.6 g of fructose per popsicle (with 8.5g of that in the coating). If you’re very concerned about the fructose, you can skip the coating, or spoon it over your popsicles sparingly. The coating can be quite thick if you just dip it in, like I did in making them.

I have to confess that I approach Chinese-style cooking with much the same attitude as my parents – chop a bunch of ingredients, toss them in, taste, season and voilà! Dinner! So I was inspired when I saw A Girl Worth Saving’s Paleo Crispy Noodle recipe, I wanted to make my own real food, safe-for-me-to-eat, Cantonese Chow Mein. Basically, this recipe is me throwing together ingredients that are typical to Chinese stir-frying and tossing them together and declaring it delicious.

And here’s the thing – that’s the way I think more people should approach cooking. Buy real, whole food ingredients. Toss them together. Season them. See what happens! This is why, you’ll see that the recipe below includes an ingredient that’s probably never seen in real Chinese cooking – nutritional yeast. I added the nutritional yeast to the spiralized turnip noodles because it worked in giving the noodles a more savory, ‘umami’ flavour. So how authentic is this recipe? Well, my mama will probably say it’s not, especially because of this ‘special’ ingredient. After all, she did say my ‘char siu’ recipe was a little lacking in authenticity 😉 But for me, it works, so I write it down in hopes that I’ll be able to re-create it again when I want to.

I digress. This recipe isn’t going to be the same as your Chinese take-out version of Cantonese Chow Mein. While I love my spiralizer, and it’s a great way to make ‘noodles’ out of all sorts of vegetables, if you know what real, authentic Cantonese Chow Mein tastes like, this will merely be ‘good enough’ if you’ve got a craving. And that’s okay by me, if it means that I can satisfy a craving without breaking out in to a rash. If nothing else, I hope this recipe of sorts encourages you to get cooking and experimenting!

If your experiments work, great! Write it down! Make it again! If it doesn’t work, try and rescue it with different seasonings, or vow never to make it again and pretend like it didn’t happen 😉 That’s the amazing thing about cooking with real food though – it’s just food. You’ll have to eat again. Don’t get too caught up in the pomp and circumstance of it all, especially if you’re just cooking a day-to-day meal.

Ingredients

• 2 medium lo bak (daikon) radish or 8-10 white turnips
• 1/2 tsp sea salt
• 2 tbsp nutritional yeast
• 1/4 cup melted coconut oil or your cooking fat of choice, additional 1-2 tbsp oil or fat for stir-frying
• 1 lb frozen shrimp and scallops
• 2 large carrots, sliced
• 1 lb baby bok choy
• 1 can of sliced water chestnuts, drained
• 1-1/2 tsp of white pepper (omit for AIP)
• 1-1/2 tsp of sea salt
• 1-1/2 tsp of grated ginger
• 1-2 tbsp wheat-free soy sauce or coconut aminos
• 6 oz char siu, sliced

Instructions

1. Preheat oven to 375F
2. Wash, peel and spiralize the lo bak (daikon) or turnips. (The daikon has a milder taste, while the turnips have a more distinctive turnip flavor. Alternatively, you can do a mixture of both daikon and turnips.)
3. Coat your spiralized turnips or daikon with melted coconut oil, sea salt and nutritional yeast. Bake for 35 minutes, flipping your noodles about half-way through the baking time.
4. After you’ve flipped your noodles, about half-way through the baking time, heat coconut oil in a wok on medium-high heat. Add your shrimp and scallops and stir-fry until the shrimp are translucent and slightly undercooked. Remove them from the wok and set aside.
5. Add more coconut oil, and add your carrots, baby bok choy, water chestnuts and seasonings. Stir-fry until the baby bok choy are slightly wilted, but still bright green. Add the shrimp and scallops back in, and stir-fry them with the vegetables until the shrimp are cooked through.
6. Plate your stir-fry on top of your noodles to serve.

I love a good stir fry, don’t you? So simple, easy, and delicious. Here are my top 5 tips for a healthy homemade stir fry!

1. Use coconut oil.

Not vegetable oil, canola oil, sunflower oil, or even olive oil. Coconut oil! Using the right fat is foundational for healthy cooking. Because coconut oil is mostly saturated, it’s heat stable. This makes it the safest option for frying. The same is true for other saturated fats from animals – butter, ghee, lard, etc – these are the ones you want to use for frying, grilling, and sautéeing.

Vegetable and seed oils are usually rancid (oxidized) when you purchase them, due to the high heat that’s involved in processing. These unsaturated fats are highly unstable when heated, and cause free radical damage in our bodies. Plus, they’re high in omega 6, which can lead to a deficiency in omega 3 and consequently, systemic inflammation.

My advice? Throw out your vegetable oils entirely, save your olive oil for salad dressings, and use healthy saturates like coconut oil or animal fats for your stir fry.

2. Skip the soy.

What? No soy sauce? You heard me correctly. I’m sure you’ve read debates on the issues surrounding soy: it’s a highly genetically modified crop, it can increase estrogen levels, it can inhibit thyroid function, it’s a legume and therefore difficult to digest…all of this information can be overwhelming.

So let me keep it simple for a moment. Above all else, avoid the regular ol’ soy sauce on your grocery store shelf. These commercial, non-traditional varieties are filled with additives like wheat, caramel colour, sodium benzoate, and other gross chemicals. So if you’ve got any bottles in your cupboard, toss ’em.

For me, while the downsides of soy generally outweigh any potential benefit, I don’t see an issue with a little soy consumption once in a while, provided it’s organic, non-GMO, and preferably fermented. You need to find what works for your body and what you can tolerate. Best options for your stir fry? Try organic wheat-free tamari, or use coconut aminos as a delicious soy-free substitute.

3. Steam fry.

Here’s a technique that will not only healthify your stir fry but probably improve the taste and texture. I’m no chef, but I believe this method is what you would call ‘braising’, wherein you use both dry and moist heat. After sautéeing in oil for a few minutes, throw in some liquid(s) of your choice (tamari, coconut aminos, bone broth, or my homemade almond sauce), then cover and let the steam finish the cooking. You don’t need too much liquid to do the job.

Think about it: if you were making a big stir fry using only oil, you’d need quite a bit in order to cook all of the ingredients at once. Let’s face it, we don’t want to drown our stir fry in excessive amounts of oil, even healthy coconut oil. Deep frying isn’t a great choice (duh), and I’ve found the results can be inconsistent and frustrating. Plus, steam frying is a great way to flavour your stir fry with delicious coconut aminos, or add some sweet nutrition with a little bone broth.

What I personally like to do is cook my harder textured veggies (carrots, celery, etc) first, and add the softer veggies (sliced mushrooms, zucchini, etc) with the liquid. I don’t bother trying to saute everything in oil because that has led to some soggy stir frys (boo). It all takes practice, but I’ve found this method works the best for me.

4. Don’t forget meat.

For a full and balanced meal, be sure to include chicken, beef, pork, shrimp, etc. Protein is essential at every meal because it’s what satiates us – veggies alone will leave you hungry and reaching for snacks a couple hours later.

What about tofu and tempeh? See my thoughts above about soy. Decide what works for you. In general though, animal proteins are more bioavailable, nutrient-dense, and don’t contain any worrisome phytates, lectins, or phytoestrogens, so that’s what I recommend. Choose grass fed, pasture raised, and chemical-free animal products when you can.

5. Make rice/noodle alternatives.

There’s a few reasons I encourage reducing consumption of grains. To sum up: they contain certain proteins (gluten is the most well known/studied) and other components (lectins, phytates, etc) which are incredibly hard for us to break down and can actually damage the gut lining. This leads to systemic inflammation and a whole slew of health problems and disorders.

The cool thing about reducing grain consumption is that it helps us increase our vegetable intake! Veggies are more nutrient-dense than grains, and don’t come with all the potential downsides. Try serving your stir fry over cauli-rice, zucchini noodles (aka zoodles), or spaghetti squash.

Now it’s time to hear from you lovely readers: what are your tips for making a healthy and delicious stir fry?