This is one of my favorite Primal Recipes, one which is very simple to make. It is easy to assemble and cook, requiring nothing more difficult than chopping some vegetables and meat. It does require a pressure cooker for the method I recommend, but you can do the same thing with long, slow simmering, but plan on the recipe taking about four hours rather than the one hour required in a pressure cooker. Also please note that the heat factor of this recipe is pretty mild despite the presence of several kinds of chile peppers, but I offer some ways you can boost the heat at the end of the recipe if you so desire.

Primal Chili Pork Verde Recipe

Ingredients:

Pork (I often use a pork butt roast), about 3-4 pounds

3 Poblano Chile Peppers

3 Jalapeno Peppers

3 Serrano Peppers (or 3 more Jalapenos if you can’t find Serranos)

½ pound Tomatillos

1 Onion, minced or diced

5 or 6 cloves of garlic, minced or put through a garlic press

Salt & Pepper to taste

Lime juice from 2 fresh limes

Toppings:

Chopped Cilantro

Diced Avocado

Shredded Cheese (I use a pre-shredded Mexican Cheese blend)

 

To begin with, you need to chop or mince the onion. Since the later part of the recipe requires using the food processor, I just toss the onion in and give it several fast pulses until it is broken down into small pieces. Then transfer the onion to the pressure cooker vessel.

Next, clean and seed the peppers. Discard the seeds and add the flesh of the peppers to the food processor fitted with the blade attachment. Chop the tomatillos in half and add them to the food processor. Add one cup of water and turn the processor on. Process until the peppers are fully broken down and partially liquefied, about one or two minutes.  (You may add more peppers if you choose; the recipe as designed is actually not very spicy, but you can add more jalapenos either now or at the end if you prefer it spicier).

Transfer the pepper mixture to the pressure cooker.

Now you need to break down your pork meat into stew sized pieces. I often start with a whole pork butt roast, and then chop it into pieces about ¾ inch cubed, but you can make the pieces smaller or larger, depending on your preference. I am careful to discard any tough or fibrous or gristly pieces I come across. In Texas, we have a store called HEB that sells cryovac packages of pork meat labeled “Carnitas”, and I often use that meat (which comes in multiple large chunks) instead of the pork butt because it is cheaper and similar in quality. Feel free to use any cheap cut of pork, because the length of cooking in the pressure cooker will tenderize almost any cut of meat, but be careful not to pick a piece that is too lean, and make sure when you are picking out the tough parts that you don’t discard too much fat. This dish requires some fat to make it rich and flavorful.

Add your pork to the pressure cooker vessel. Then add your minced garlic. Add salt and pepper to taste (and don’t be shy with the salt—remember that it needs to flavor three or four pounds of meat)! Squeeze in the juice of one lime. Give everything a good stir and then place the vessel in the pressure cooker. Set the cooker on ‘High’ and cook for 55 minutes.

After the meat is done cooking, you will want to carefully release the pressure and then give everything a good stir (the meat tends to stick together in the center of the pot during cooking, but it breaks apart easily).  Let the meat cool for a few minutes as you assemble the toppings.

I choose to use diced avocado and chopped cilantro as the toppings for my primal chili pork verde, but you can use whatever you want. Many families will traditionally serve this green pork stew over rice or over tortilla chips (corn chips), so if I’m making this for a crowd, I will often offer that on the side (and simply skip it myself). I also put shredded cheese on top of mine. I know a few people who like to add a dollop of sour cream, and it sounds good as I write it, so I think I will try that next time! One thing to note: cilantro can taste kind of ‘off’ or soapy if it sits around for a long time after being chopped, so I usually chop it at the very last minute.

Just before serving, stir in the juice of one more lime to give the dish a bit of brightness. Feel free to add some finely minced peppers at this point, too, if you prefer it on the spicy side—the long cooking mellows out the heat of the cooked peppers, so adding some at the end is an easy way to boost the heat. You can even offer the minced peppers on the side so your guests can doctor their stew to their own desired heat level.

This dish is great as leftovers, and it reheats beautifully, but the avocado and cilantro don’t hold so well, so I will usually chop some fresh toppings to go with the leftovers on the day I am serving them. This recipe is so good that it makes me glad that I follow the Primal Blueprint method rather than trying to figure out how to make a Paleo friendly pork stew recipe, because how could you possibly make this without using any chile peppers? I simply couldn’t give up healthy, flavorful, and nutritious peppers!

The British love cream in all its varieties, from clotted cream to double cream to Devonshire cream (or Devon cream), to Cornish clotted cream and many other varieties. It’s enough to make your head spin, and it’s particularly confusing if you’re an American trying to follow a British recipe. I recently ran into this problem when I was trying to make a delicious-looking and –sounding lemon tart that was featured on an episode of “How to Cook Like Heston” with Heston Blumenthal. It called for double cream, which sent me on a quest to figure out: can I just substitute heavy whipping cream for double cream? The answer is no. But I have found a solution…

A Cream Maker.

I actually started looking into this gadget several years ago, but never bought one because they were mostly offered on the UK version of eBay, and the shipping was prohibitively expensive. This is a simple, old-fashioned gadget that does its one job perfectly, and that job is to make double cream (or single cream or extra thick double cream or any of the other varieties of cream) out of plain old milk and unsalted butter. Basically, it re-homogenizes the fat into the milk. It came into popular use during World War II, when rationing led to cream becoming almost impossible to find. People could get their standard ration of milk and butter, but no cream. Since butter is nothing but milk fat that has been separated from the liquid portion of the milk, it stands to reason that putting the butter back into the milk would reconstitute the cream, but the process is tricky. You can’t just stir it together, because the melted butter floats. You can’t shake it together, because that is actually how the butter is created in the first place—shaking only forces the sticky butter to cling together. What you can do is force the liquid butter and milk through a fine nozzle a bit at a time under pressure, and this will recreate the original cream.

I finally found an old Bel Cream Maker on eBay in the US, and it looked completely unused. I was excited to give it a whirl when it arrived in the mail today. I washed and assembled the parts, and followed the directions in the accompanying original brochure, and I soon had extremely thick double cream! I document the recipe and procedure below.

If you want to buy one of these gadgets for your own use, here are some tips: they were most commonly made by a company called Bel. You can also find an attachment for a Kenwood mixer that does the same things, but that’s only helpful for people who have such a mixer. Anybody can use one of the Bel cream makers. When searching on eBay, you find a wide range of conditions and prices. These usually go for around $10 to $20 US, but I’ve seen sellers who think they can get $50 to $300 for them just because they are cute and vintage. I can assure you there is no need to pay that much! Several of these come up for sale each week, so just be patient and check back and you’re bound to be rewarded.

You will find many more “ice cream makers” than cream makers, so it’s best to find a way to filter those out. One of the Bel models was called the Jubilee, and many of the older models are made of Bakelite, so the best search I found was the following (leave all punctuation and spacing intact):

(bel,jubilee,Bakelite) “cream maker”

What this search is telling eBay, just in case you don’t know how eBay advanced search works, is: show me any items that have any of the words bel, jubilee, or Bakelite AND the words “cream maker” in exactly that order. In essence, this gets rid of the glut of whipped cream makers and ice cream makers so you don’t have to wade through them. Now on to the Recipe (*see note at the end regarding different measurements or percentages of butterfat–one of my helpful readers actually created a calculator that I will link to)!

Double Cream Recipe:

Double Cream is 48% milkfat. The highest percentage milkfat available in the US is typically 36%, so it doesn’t substitute. Once you have your cream maker in hand and assembled and ready to go, follow these steps:

Weigh or measure out:

4 fluid ounces of milk (100 ml)

5 ounces of UNSALTED butter (you don’t want salty cream, do you?) (140g), cut in pieces

Put these two ingredients together in a small saucepan and heat gently over low to medium heat. You do not want to boil or scorch your milk because it will change the flavor. If you keep the temperature below 180 degrees F, that is best. You can remove it from the heat once the butter is about halfway melted and the residual heat will continue melting it. Once it has been completely melted, stir it and then quickly pour it into your cream maker. Next, hold the maker FIRMLY with one hand (you need to pump the handle of the thing up and down with some force, so you will need to keep a firm grip on the base of the thing to prevent any spills). Pump the handle. If nothing is coming through into the chamber below after a few pumps, stop pumping, carefully take off the lid from the base, and adjust the nozzle nut by loosening it slightly. Reassemble and start over. Once you see something coming through (you should probably see about ½ teaspoon of cream being created with each pump), continue pumping until all of the milk and cream have been forced through into the lower chamber of the cream maker. Congratulations! You just made Double Cream!

Here are some photos I took while I was making my first batch, along with some photos of the resulting THICK cream (it became much thicker after cooling):

The box my Bel Cream Maker came in (mine seems to be from around the 1970’s, which is around the time the company stopped making this item, it seems, judging from availability).

Melting the butter.  After heating it up and removing if from the heat, you can let it sit for a few minutes.  You can see some of the remaining small pieces of butter sitting in little yellow pools of melted butter. Once you stop seeing those little pools of melted butter appear, your butter is ready to go.

All melted, no more pools of yellow butter on top:

Poured into the Bel Cream Maker:

The first bit of cream:

All done. The final product. This cream is about twice as thick as American Heavy Cream. I can’t wait to try the Heston Blumenthal Lemon Tart recipe (it appeared on Episode 2 of “How to Cook Like Heston”, the “Eggs” episode). One commenter pointed out that the cream looks a little thin. Please remember that it was still warm in this photo, and it thickened considerably after being chilled.

Of course, the tart recipe is not one of my normal Primal Recipes.  It’s one of my “cheat day” recipes.  I plan to use the eggs from my amazing French Marans hens to make this incredibly rich looking custard tart.  Can’t wait to try it.  If it’s as good as I hope, I’ll share the recipe.

*Note on measurements and percentages of butterfat: I have had many questions from readers regarding different percentages of butterfat, or what they could subsitute to come up with the preferred 48% of double cream. One of my readers, Matt, actually made a calculator that will help you with any such questions! You can find it here. It will open up pre-populated with 80% butterfat (the percentage in plain butter) and 3.25% fat (for whole milk). If you are using this calculator, you will want to leave the 80% for butter, but you could change the milk fat percent to 12% for half-and-half, or 0% for skim milk, 1% for 1% milk, etc. You can even change the desired volume, depending on how much double cream you need. Very handy! Thanks, Matt, whoever you are!

It may strike you as funny or a bit odd that I would say this was my favorite recipe from the excellent The Primal Blueprint Cookbook by Mark Sisson and Jennifer Meier.  It would have struck me as pretty funny about nine months ago, too.  I grew up in a family that simply didn’t eat cabbage.  I knew people who did, and I remember jokes from my childhood about how boiled cabbage smells (it can smell sulphurous, a bit like a rotten egg), but nobody in my family ever cooked it, on either side, from my great grandparents on down.  It just wasn’t part of our diet.

I’d always assumed that my family avoided cabbage because it was simply no good.  I remember having it at a friend’s house when I was young, and it was terrible—her mother had boiled it to mush.

That’s why this recipe was such a revelation to me!  It is so simple that I thought it was kind of a throw-away, just something added because they were trying to meet a minimum recipe quota.  Still, the simplicity of the recipe (it only has four ingredients) appealed to me, so I gave it a try, and it’s now one of my regular recipes.  I’m so glad cool weather has finally come back to Austin so that I can turn my oven on and make cabbage and sausage again!

This could be called a two ingredient recipe, since the only two required ingredients are cabbage and sausage.  The other ingredients are optional.  They are butter and salt.  If you want a more Paleo friendly recipe, you could leave out the butter and go with a lowfat sausage, but I prefer mine primal—I add dabs of butter all over the top!  I do go for an excellent sausage, though.  I’ve tried making it with pork Andouille, and I liked it a lot, but my favorite sausage for this recipe is one that I get at Whole Foods.  It’s called Pederson’s Sweet German Sausage, and it tastes great!  It’s lightly smoked, and, despite being called “sweet”, it has less than one gram of carbohydrates per serving, so it’s a low carb sausage as well (I should point out here that my boyfriend Michael prefers the Pederson’s Smoked Jalapeno sausage, so we usually go back and forth between that one and the Sweet German for the sake of variety).

It turns out that I love cabbage, which is great, because cabbage is full of nutrition.  And when cooked this way (roasted in the oven), it doesn’t give off that stinky sulfur smell.  The recipe takes me between 45 minutes and an hour to finish, but the actual work time is truly only about five minutes, so most of the time is simply spent waiting for the oven to do its job.  Here’s my version of the recipe, which might vary slightly from the book version.

Primal Cabbage and Sausage Recipe

• 1 Head of Cabbage (I prefer a cabbage that is on the “looser” side—not quite so densely packed—so if it feels like a bowling ball, choose a different one)
• 1 sausage, approximately 12 ounces to 1 pound in weight—I go for fully cooked sausages only for this recipe
• Salt to taste (varies depending on the sausage you choose)
• Butter—about 4 tablespoons, cut into pats

Preheat your oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit.

To assemble the dish, cut the cabbage in half by bisecting it through the core, so that it comes apart into two halves.  This will allow you to see how deeply the hard core runs.  Take a paring knife and cut away the core and discard (I save this and give it to my backyard hens).  Next, take a large chef’s knife and cut each cabbage half into strips about ½ inch to ¾ inch wide.  Chop the other half in the same way.

Take a large baking dish such as a 9 x 13 inch Pyrex dish and butter the bottom and sides.  Add the chopped cabbage to the dish.  Sprinkle it with salt.

Next, chop your sausage into rounds about ½ inch thick.  You can do this on the bias or straight through the length, depending on your preference.  Sprinkle the sausage over the top of the cabbage.  Sprinkle the butter (if using) evenly over the top of everything else.  Cover tightly with aluminum foil and place the dish in the oven and cook for 40 minutes.

After 40 minutes, remove the foil carefully by lifting it away from you, so the escaping steam doesn’t burn you.  Discard the foil.  Toss the cabbage and sausage with some tongs.  Put it back in the oven, uncovered, for 10 more minutes.

This next step requires you to use your judgment.  When the 10 minutes has passed, take a look at the dish and see if it looks done.  Some cabbages are more watery, so if it’s too watery you can put it back in the oven for another 10 minutes.  If it looks done to you, it’s good to go.  Whether you want to cook it more at this point is truly a matter of preference.  If you want the cabbage to be very soft, you can continue cooking it.  If you prefer it with a bit of crunch, you can stop cooking as soon as it looks done.  I have tried it all different ways, and I prefer it somewhere in the middle—I like it cooked all the way through so it is soft, but not to the point where it starts to become browned.

Once it’s done to your satisfaction, toss it again and serve!

I hope you enjoy this recipe as much as I do.  If you are starting out on the Primal Method, then I think The Primal Blueprint Cookbook is a must-have.  It is filled with simple and delicious recipes like this one.

If you are like me and you share meals with somebody who isn’t totally following the Primal method or Paleo diet, this Primal pesto recipe is great, because it is so easy to divide the sauce, and the recipe is also low carb diet friendly, as well as wheat free and gluten free, and it can easily be made dairy free by simply omitting the parmesan—there is so much flavor from the cilantro and jalapeno that you probably won’t even miss it. You can have your portion over spaghetti squash, while the other people in the house can have theirs over pasta, if they wish. It is also a great way to use up any leftover chicken. And there is nothing sacrificed in this dish—it’s pretty much exactly the same recipe I used before I decided to go primal. I came up with this recipe after trying the Jalapeno Pecan Pesto with Cilantro that is sold in the olive bar at my local Whole Foods. It was delicious! With just a few trials, I managed to come up with a recipe that I think is even better! It’s also better than any recipe I’ve found in any cookbook.

One of the reasons I actually prefer this dish to “normal” pesto (made with pine nuts and basil) is that it is so much cheaper. Even the Italians don’t always use pine nuts (or pignoli) because they are so expensive. It is common to substitute almonds or walnuts, and both will work wonderfully with this dish. I choose to use walnuts because I can buy a huge bag of high quality walnuts at Costco, and because walnuts are high in omega-3 fatty acids and ellagic acid (and they taste great). Walnuts are actually the only nuts that contain omega 3s in any substantial amount, although there are trace amounts in nuts like cashews and brazil nuts. You can give your meal an even bigger boost of omega 3s by opting to mix the pesto with walnut oil instead of olive oil. The fact that this oil is consumed raw only adds to its health benefits.

One note before we begin: the leftovers from this recipe do not keep as well as most. The raw freshness of the cilantro and peppers is changed when the dish is reheated, unless it is heated very slowly and carefully (heating it too hot will cook the pesto, and will make it taste completely different, and not as fresh). This will make enough for 4 people. If you are making the dish for one, it would probably be best to halve the recipe so that you don’t have a lot of leftovers; it is so simple to throw together another batch of the pesto that I’d just wrap the second half of the spaghetti squash in plastic and keep it in the refrigerator, and whip up another batch of jalapeno pesto a few days later. The following directions do not include cooking the pasta, so, if you intend to do so, just be sure you time it so that the pasta will be done by the time your spaghetti squash is done

Primal Recipe for Jalapeno Cilantro Pesto with Spaghetti Squash and Chicken

1 medium spaghetti squash

2 large chicken breasts or 4 boneless, skinless chicken thighs

2 bunches of cilantro

2 or 3 jalapenos (to taste); other peppers like serranos can be substituted for a change of pace

5 or 6 garlic cloves

1 tablespoon table salt

¼ cup of olive oil or walnut oil

¾ cup of raw walnuts

Lime juice to taste (1/2 to 1 lime)

½ cup ground parmesan cheese (optional, will taste fine without, but may need additional salt)

Directions:

To begin, cut the spaghetti squash in half lengthwise (from the stem through to the opposite end). Be very careful when doing this, because this is a very hard type of squash, and it requires a lot of force to cut through. If you aren’t careful, it is very easy to slip and injure yourself. I find it easiest to cut this type of squash by using a large chef’s knife such as the Forschner Fibrox 8 Inch Chef’s Knife (the most useful knife in my kitchen—if you don’t have a large chef’s knife, you owe it to yourself to get one; they’re only about $25 at Amazon). Start by securing the squash by laying it on a folded towel on your countertop or cutting board. Then, pierce the side of the squash by driving the tip of the knife straight down into the flesh until it is embedded. Carefully but firmly force the knife to cut slowly through the squash, turning the squash as necessary to make sure that you are always cutting downward toward the cutting board. Once it is cut in half, scoop out the seeds and membranes and discard.

Add about ½ cup of water to a microwave-proof pie plate such as a Pyrex plate (if you don’t have one, a bowl will also work). Place one half of the squash cut side down into the plate. The cut edge should be in the water or just above it. Cover the plate and squash with plastic wrap and place in the microwave and cook on HIGH for 12 or 13 minutes.

While the squash is cooking, you can get started on the chicken. If you have leftover chicken, simply cut or tear it into bite-size pieces. If you are starting with fresh chicken, you have a choice to make. You can cook it however you prefer. I used to use a George Foreman grill, and then let it rest for a few minutes and chop it up, but I no longer have that type of grill, so now I cut the raw chicken into bite size pieces and give it a quick sauté. I will leave this step up to you…cook your chicken however you prefer, but make sure that it is thoroughly cooked. Set it aside to rest while you assemble the pesto.

To put together the actual pesto, simply put the rest of your ingredients in your food processor with the blade attachment. Add the two bunches of cilantro, stems and all (you may wish to pick off any dead leaves and cut a short length from the bottom of the stems, but the stems are full of flavor, so retain as much as possible). Press the garlic through a garlic press and into the bowl with the cilantro (or simply toss in the cloves if you prefer a chunkier texture). Stem and seed the peppers (discarding the seeds and membranes) and add the peppers. Add all of the remaining ingredients to the bowl. Place the lid on the food processor and turn it on. You can choose to run it for only twenty seconds or so if you prefer a chunkier texture, but I prefer to run it for at least a full minute to make a very smooth pesto. If the cilantro is not mixing properly, you can stop and scrape down the bowl and go again. You can also add a bit more oil if it seems to need more liquid in order to blend properly.

When the spaghetti squash is done, (it should be easy to pierce the top side with a fork or knife; the skin is a bit leathery, but the flesh inside should be easy to pierce), slide that side out of the pie plate onto a dinner plate and set aside to cool for a bit. Add more water to the dish and cook the second half of the spaghetti squash as before (wrapped in plastic, microwaved on high for 12 or 13 minutes). After the first half has cooled for about 5 minutes, you can begin assembling the final dish. Turn the squash so the inside is facing up (using a hot pad if necessary) and use a fork to “shred” the squash apart into “noodles”. If you‘ve never done this before, it’s quite simple…just stick the tines of the fork a short depth into the flesh of the squash and pull toward the bottom of the squash. The strands will start to come apart quite easily and you will quickly have a mass of spaghetti strands in the shell of the squash. Dump these strands into a medium bowl that you will use to serve your Primal Pesto. Continue to shred the squash until all of the flesh has been shredded. In the end, you should have a very thin, tough shell, with only a few pieces of squash still stuck to the inside. You can discard the shell at this point.

If you are going to separate the pesto into two batches so that some of it can be used for a non-paleo or non-primal eater, set aside an appropriate portion of the pesto. Add the rest of the pesto to the spaghetti squash in the bowl. Divide the chicken similarly (setting aside some to go with the other portion of the pesto), and add the remaining chicken to the bowl. When the other half of the spaghetti squash has finished, shred it as before and add it to the bowl (you may let it cool for a few minutes if you wish in order to make it easier to handle). Stir, taste, adjust the seasoning, and serve!

Just a few notes about the development of this paleo pesto sauce recipe: I wanted to see if I could boost the omega 3 essential fatty acids even more, so I decided to try substituting flax seed for the walnuts. Let me tell you, it was a mess! Flax seed can be ground into a meal, but if you try to grind them with a food processor, they suddenly release their oil–which is quite thick–and the whole thing turns into a giant ball of gum! I ended up with chunks of gummy pesto instead of a pesto sauce!  One tablespoon of salt may sound like a lot, but you have to keep in mind that this is a sauce, and the salt has to season the chicken and the “spaghetti” as well, so it really isn’t that much.  If you choose to leave out the parmesan, you may want to add even more salt.  During the time while you are waiting for the second half of the squash to cook, you don’t need to do anything special to the spaghetti squash (such as oiling it) to keep it from sticking together, as you would need to do with pasta; pasta is starchy and therefore tends to clump together, while this vegetable is low in starch (low starch=low carbs).

I have plans for more primal chicken and paleo chicken recipes, so stay tuned! I worked on my Primal Jambalaya Recipe last week and this week, and it needs only a few more tweaks before it’s ready.