Haddock & Puy Lentils with Cream Mustard Sauce

From an ancestral perspective, lentils represent the least offensive of the pulses which we're told to avoid at all cost. In actual fact, they're a pretty good source of protein and all manner of micronutrients, their negative effects rendered out of the equation by soaking and boiling.

Good to go, then? Well, yes ... and no. I am far from advocating pulses, even benign pulses, as a regular thing but every now and again, they make a welcome change and make a great tasting dish. In fact, isn't that what being alive is all about? Eat, sleep and be well? Keep a perspective on it, eh?

With apologies done, let's see what this dish is about ...

It's haddock fillets, simply pan-fried and laid over a bed of puy lentils, mushroom, courgette and spinach, cream and mustard sauce over.

Fish - Haddock & Butter
Lentils - Puy Lentils, Onion, Garlic, Parsley, Mushroom, Courgette, Tomato Puree, Worcestershire Sauce & Goose Fat, Parsley & Spinach
Sauce - Cream & Wholegrain Mustard

Puy Lentils

Puy lentils, a Protected Designation of Origin green lentil variety from the Le Puy region of France owes its distinct character to the terroir within which it grows.

Take a skillet and melt some of your favourite paleo fat, sauté off some chopped onion, drop in a few  mushrooms to soak up any remaining fat, add courgette, garlic, tomato puree, Worcestershire Sauce, sea salt and black pepper. Chopped parsley, too.

As a benchmark, 400g of lentils will feed two, one onion is needed.

Set aside on a low heat to reduce and concentrate the flavours, stirring in a generous handful of spinach as you start the fish.

Haddock

Pan fry the fillets in butter.

Sauce

Warm through some double cream and stir in a helping of wholegrain mustard.

How much? Your choice! Go by taste. Reduce gently, adding literally drops of water if the sauce becomes too thick.

Serve

Make a bed of lentils, fish over, sauce on top and garnish with something, or other. I had chives to hand which worked very nicely.

Mid-Week Bolognese

Just to prove you don't need four hours of simmering and all the other guff that Italianistas seem to advocate in order to elevate what is essentially ordinary to the level that it is ...

You'll need minced beef, onion, garlic, Worcestershire Sauce, chopped tomatoes, tomato purée, dried oregano, mushrooms, carrots, beef stock, sea salt and black pepper, and pasta.

Your pasta can be any veg spiralized or julienne grated, perhaps something gluten-free which is what I'm doing tonight with Mama brand Instant Rice Noodles.

Take a large skillet and brown off your minced beef - no fat needed, just enjoy the fat that is already minced into the meat. If you bought extra-lean, well, shame on you; drop in a good blob of dripping to get it moving. Give it a damn good splash of Worcestershire Sauce.

While the meat is browning, chop up an onion, peel and slice some garlic, quarter some mushrooms and dice up a carrot. Bolognese seems to enjoy a lot of garlic, so for a pound of meat (for two), give it four or five cloves.

One the meat is browned, soak up all the lovely juices with the mushrooms, add the chopped onion and sliced garlic, stir through, add the carrots and cook on for another couple of minutes. If the spirit takes you, add a generous glass of red wine.

Pour in a carton of chopped tomatoes, a good squirt of tomato purée, some sea salt, black pepper and pour in a good pint of beef stock. Sprinkle the dried herbs over - I don't measure, just sprinkle over.

On a medium to high heat, cook on, topping up with water as necessary. Cook it for at least half an hour, or until your minced beef is not chewy. A good hint here is to cook through well at the beginning.

Once the Bolognese is reduced, cook your noodles. Mine just need 60 seconds with boiling water poured over.

Serve out, noodles down, Bolognese over; none of that proper Italian stirring the pasta into the pan, this is the British method. We don't do it wrong, we just do it our way. Fresh herbs, if you like; parsley, in my case.

So, reasonably quick mid-week meal.

If you added wine to the Bolognese, enjoy a glass with your meal. If you're just opening a bottle to enjoy with the meal, shame on you for not opening it earlier and pouring a good slug into the dish.

However you do it, remember, it's simple, quick, rules are there to be broken, but do enjoy it afterwards, slurping it down hungrily, noisily and with a huge smile on your face!

Smoked Salmon & Poached Egg Crumpets

I thought we'd have a treat ...

If you're going to treat yourself to something a little out of the ordinary, you can still do that with the same high standards that you apply normally. Quality wine, good chocolate, and the same applies for substitutions of bread and pasta - rice flour and potato starch are perfectly good, if not actually better than wheat.

We had some crumpets.

I spotted them in the Free From section at the supermarket and thought why not?

Grilled, good slab of butter, a piece of smoked salmon, poached egg and a sprinkle of Icelandic ash salt and some black pepper. Gorgeous!

Salmon Tagliatelle

Tagliatelle? Yes, that IS pasta!

There's nothing like a break from the old routine. I have been re-reading the Jaminet's 'Perfect Health Diet', a book I find absolutely inspiring, and was reminded of rice noodles.

Shopping, I found a pack of really good noodles, quite wide and the ingredients simple listed as: rice flour, tapioca flour and water. PHD-friendly, then. Living in the Ice Age-friendly.

If "safe starches" are not within your ancestral template then this is not for you ...

Ingredients

Let's just take a moment to spin round the food we're going to cook: salmon, rice noodles, double cream, watercress, pecorino cheese and broccoli. Sea salt and black pepper, too.

Salmon and broccoli is a no-brainer. Perfect partners. Salmon and watercress is a no-brainer. Perfect partners. This is looking good!

Cream sauces do need a little salt lest they leave the dish tasting a little flat. I pepped up my cream sauce with cheese - pecorino, an Italian sheep cheese which has a lovely salty tang and less of the pungency of parmesan which I find overpowering.

So, to work ...

Salmon

First, poach your salmon. Place the salmon is a pan and cover with boiling water. Add some sea salt. Leave it there for around 10 minutes, perhaps with a gentle flame underneath.

Watercress Sauce

Meanwhile, the cream sauce. Somewhere around 100ml per person is good. I use double cream which, I believe, is akin to heavy cream that folks in the US will be used to. British double cream is slightly creamier (around 48% fat compared to around 40% fat for heavy cream), but it doesn't matter - we're going to reduce it anyway.

Blend the cream with watercress. How much? However much you like. Use a lot if you want a really vibrant green sauce (like I did), or a little if you just want a hint. Blend a lot or blend a little - your choice.

Pour into another pan and gently reduce by a third. Just a gentle flame is good. If the cream becomes too thick, add a dash of the poaching liquor to let it our again - you really won't need much as a teaspoon will make a thickening cream sauce quite wet again.

Once the fish is poached, retrieve it, set it aside and steam or boil the veggies. You can use more than broccoli if you like, but I kept it quite simple.

After a couple of minutes of steaming, set aside. I like broccoli to retain its firmness and after even only a couple of minutes, the florets will be soft.

Tagliatelle

Drop the noodles into the water and follow the instructions. Mine suggested three minutes.

Meanwhile, grate some cheese into the sauce and add a little black pepper. The heat will melt the cheese, but do assist with with some stirring.

Serve

Noodles ready? Drain and pour them out into a wide-brimmed bowl.

Pour the sauce over, salmon on top and veggies alongside.

I'm sure you've noticed that if an egg was dropped in, this might make an interesting carbonara, of sorts. I still have some noodles, so that will no doubt be my next adventure.

Aubergine Buttered Egg and Prawn Crispbread

Crispbread? Bread? I know ... I know ... it's not "paleo" but it is absolutely gluten-free, made simply from rice flour and a little bit of fun for a starter now that the summer is just about starting to warm up.

Once you've done the strict '30 Days of Paleo' (capitalised) and then achieved those initial goals, paleo (miniscule) becomes your lifestyle and much of the strictness relaxes. That does not mean you let standards slip; more that you are happy to eat a little off trail every now and again, but when you do, you still make sure it is good, wholesome food.

This is one such dish ...

Begin by skinning and slicing some aubergine (that's eggplant, if you're wondering what an aubergine is) and soften it in some butter in a skillet on low. You don't want to colour the aubergine, just soften it and get it to soak up some butter. How much butter? Enough. If the pan is dry, add a little more butter. If it's swimming, skim some butter off.

Boil an egg for each person eating and get some prawns defrosting.

Once the aubergine is soft, mash it with a little sea salt and some white pepper until it is a soft pulp. Set aside to cool. Peel the eggs and set aside to cool.

Build the plate ...

Place the cracker in the middle. Feel free to use pretty much anything you can pick up - this is finger food. It need not be a gluten-free cracker or crispbread, it could be a slice of marrow, swede, nut-based biscuit, whatever - it's your dish.

I considered the aubergine to be too wet to put straight onto the cracker, but actually it would have been fine. Next time, I'll do just that.

In this case, I laid some sliced egg onto the cracker, smothered it in the aubergine butter and placed some prawns on the top. Garnish with herbs, chives in this instance, and a pickle alongside to offset the buttery flavour of the aubergine.

Buckwheat & Rice Porridge

I've had a real hankering for porridge recently ...

First, buckwheat is not a grain - it is a seed; a pseudo-cereral.

While buckwheat is so very low in gluten that people with Coeliac Disease can happily ingest it without issue, it does have lectins.

Furthermore, it does have phytase, which is useful in breaking down phytic acid especially in other cereals that are higher in phytic acid - oats, for example.

Stephan Guyanet's article on how to eat grain gives us some insight into how to use sprouting, fermentation and cooking to reduce, if not remove, anti-nutrients in grains, legumes and cereals.

The main thrust of paleo eating is to eat widely available foods which do not present any digestive or health issues. Paleo sees no need to make other foods more ingestible, so why bother? Well, if I'm going to eat off the table, it might as well be the best it can be.

For this porridge, I used buckwheat flakes and rice flakes. Both types of flakes are made by steaming and rolling - the husks are removed and the starchy insides then dried off to make flakes. Both are high in carbohydrate with a reasonable protein profile: 85% carbohydrate, 10% protein and 5% fat. Buckwheat has zinc, iron and selenium.

Soaked overnight in buttermilk, which is a fermented dairy liquid from the leftovers of cream made into butter, to ensure that the cereal has the best chance reducing or removing remaining anti-nutrients, the liquid was poured off and then warmed through in a pan with water, and cream added towards the end of the cooking period.

Stirring with a spurtle for maybe five minutes while gently warming through turned the mixture from a loose texture to a much thicker texture which is how I think of porridge, porridge in the Scotch tradition.

Served out into a wide-brim bowl with a little sea salt sprinkled over ... just the ticket! Maybe a little coarser than a traditional Scotch oat porridge, but very much the warm, soft, sticky porridge I like.

For a particularly induldgent porridge, a nip of Whisky really lifts it!

But why not just use oats? Well, oats are high in phytic acid which binds to micronutrients (especially, zinc, iron, magnesium and calcium), blocking bioaccessibility. Otherwise, produced in the same manner: steamed and rolled, oats have a good profile.

Fermented overnight with a proportion of the cereal mix being buckwheat, providing a useful portion of phytase, the phytic acid can actually be reduced to insignificant levels and dramatically increasing the bioavailability of micronutrients therein.

I might just try that next time ... it'll probably be another year.

Poached Egg over Shredded Spring Greens and Rice Noodles

Quick and easy carb-up!

Rice noodles are a simple source of carbohydrate which, according to Wikipedia, "their principal ingredients are rice flour and water. However, sometimes other ingredients such as tapioca or corn starch are also added in order to improve the transparency or increase the gelatinous and chewy texture of the noodles." so, essentially starch; all the phytates are in the husk which has been removed in the process.

Spring greens are very close to wild cabbage, genetically, and grown primarily in northern Europe where its tolerance of cold winters is valued for an early spring supply of edible leaves, very rich in vitamin C, folic acid and dietary fibre.

To prepare the dish, simply roll up a few spring green leaves, shred and steam for a couple of minutes, transferring to a frying pan where the residual steam will cook the noodle through.

Add in some flavours, like ginger and chilli.

For the poached egg, crack an egg into a ramekin taking care not to break the yolk.

Eggs should be free range at the very least, woodland reared are best since the chickens are left to roam, peck and scratch for grubs natural to their diet, and the taste difference is evident.

Add a generous splash of white distilled vinegar to the water you used to steam the greens, get it up to a rolling boil and then drop the heat. Gently swirl the water and carefully pour the egg into the vortex to poach.

Poach the egg, retrieve and dry off by resting it on a folded kitchen paper towel.

Serve out into a shallow bowl with the spring greens and noodles as the bed for the poached egg. Slit the egg to allow the yolk to run out through the bed, sprinkle some sea salt over and enjoy.