Jerk Chicken

Like BBQ, jerk chicken is one of those dishes that has
a thousand different recipes, each one claiming to be
THE authentic way of doing it.

For our honeymoon, Miriam and I went to Jamaica, where we stayed at a resort and basically made no effort to experience Jamaica's culture. To be fair, "Jamaica's culture" didn't have swim-up bars and all the pina coladas you could drink, whereas the resort did. This was well before our paleo diet days, so we ate a lot of junk, but one thing we ate that actually fits very easily into the paleo diet was jerk chicken. I'm not saying it did anything to offset the three pina coladas I usually drank along with it, but in and of itself, it's pretty good for you.

Jerk chicken is just chicken marinated in a particular kind of marinade, and then grilled. While I was researching this recipe, I stumbled across a website run by a Jamaican cultural center that claimed that the most authentic way to cook jerk chicken was over a fire made with "pimento wood." Pimento is what Jamaicans call allspice, so the site was saying that If I had any wood from an allspice tree, I should use that. I don't have any allspice wood, so I used charcoal. I do recommend that you make this chicken with the smokiest cooking method you can manage. Charcoal grilling is probably the best option, followed closely by grilling with propane.

There are a lot of ingredients in this recipe, but the food processor does most of the work for you.

Ingredients

6 green onions
6 cloves garlic
2 small onions
3 habanero chiles
4 tsp salt
4 tsp thyme
4 tsp allspice
2 tsp black pepper
2 tsp nutmeg
2 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp ginger
4 tbsp apple cider vinegar
1/2 cup lime juice
1/4 cup tbsp olive oil
Approximately 3.5 lbs of chicken (Roughly one chicken cut into pieces)



Equipment

Food Processor (recommended)
Large Zip-top Bag (recommended)
Grill (recommended)



Remove the white bulb end of the green onions and discard them. Cut the green onions in half and place them in the food processor. Remove the paper from the garlic, and place the whole cloves in the food processor with the green onions. Remove the outer layer of the 2 small onions and cut off their root ends. Cut each onion into four pieces and put them in the food processor. Carefully remove the stems and seeds from the habanero peppers and discard them. Place the peppers in the food processor with the other vegetables.

Try not to handle the pepper seeds very much.
If you do handle them, don't touch your eyes for about a day.

Pulse the vegetables several times in the food processor until they are roughly chopped. Add the salt, thyme, allspice, black pepper, nutmeg, cinnamon, and ginger to the food processor.

The newer your spices are, the more flavor they have.
This might be a good time to replace that container of allspice that you bought back in college.

Pulse the vegetables and spices a few times to combine them.

You might need to scrape down the sides of the food processor if everything keeps trying to climb out.

Add the vinegar, lime juice, and olive oil to the food processor, and turn it on for about 15 seconds, until the marinade is a smooth, loose paste.

Not the kind of paste you used to eat in kindergarten.

Place the chicken and two-thirds of the marinade into a large zip-top bag. Close the bag and get as much air out of it as you can. Make sure that the chicken is evenly covered with the marinade, and place the bag in the refrigerator for several hours (overnight is even better). Save the remaining third of the marinade for use while grilling.

Plastic bags are the best container for marinating, because they hold the marinade right next to the food.

Grill the chicken using indirect high heat for about 30 minutes. Leave the lid of the grill closed as much as possible to promote smoking. Turn the pieces several times, and use the marinade that you set aside to baste them as they grill.

You should try to arrange the pieces so that the smaller ones are on the cooler parts of the grill.
Otherwise, they may dry out before the larger pieces finish cooking.

When the chicken has finished cooking, allow it to rest for about five minutes before serving.


Notes

• You may have noticed the three habanero chiles in this recipe. I won't deny that this chicken is spicy, but it's not as spicy as the three habaneros would make you think. Removing their seeds really removes a lot of the heat, and they're distributed across a whole chicken.
• If you're still worried that this will be too spicy, you can substitute jalapeno peppers for the habaneros. I wouldn't leave the peppers out entirely, though. I think the chicken wouldn't turn out very well with absolutely no spice.
• If you don't have a grill, you can bake the chicken in your oven. I would recommend doing it at 350 for about 25 minutes, and then increasing the heat to 450 for 5-10 minutes to sear the outside a little.
• If you don't have a food processor, you could make the marinade in a blender. To do that, you should put all of the liquids in the blender first, and chop the vegetables finely before putting them in. Set your blender to its highest setting, and it should work pretty well.
• The best way to create "indirect high heat" on a charcoal grill is to pile the charcoal in the middle and then place the chicken in a circle around the outside. On a propane grill, light all the burners but one, and place the chicken over the unlit burner.

Chicken Cacciatore

The scientific name for the tomato is Lycopersicon esculentum,
which means "wolf peach."

"Cacciatore" is Italian for "hunter," so chicken cacciatore is "hunter's" chicken. I'm not really sure if the idea was that hunters would make the dish while they were out hunting, or if their wives were supposed to have the dish ready when they came home. Either way, it's a pretty solid meal to have if you've been tramping through the woods after an animal all day. One source I found suggested that chicken cacciatore comes originally from renaissance Italy, but I find that hard to believe, given that a lot of Europeans thought tomatoes were poisonous at the time. If the original really was a renaissance dish, I suspect that the ingredient list was drastically different.

Regardless, modern chicken cacciatore has many variations in both ingredients and technique. Chicken is a constant, and tomatoes are pretty standard, but the supporting vegetables and herbs are all over the place. I needed to make a dish for a potluck dinner, so I came up with a recipe that fit my needs. First, it's easy. It's made in a crock pot out of ingredients that need very little preparation. Second, it makes a lot at once. This recipe was easily 8-10 servings. You could cut it in half without too much trouble if you're not making it for a group.

Canned tomato products are a lifesaver for any dish that you're going to cook a long time.

Ingredients

1 medium onion
1 green bell pepper
4 cloves of garlic
12 boneless, skinless chicken thighs
1 8oz. package of sliced mushrooms
2 tbsp dried Italian herb blend
1 tsp salt
2 6oz. cans of tomato paste
1 14oz can of diced tomatoes



Equipment

Crock Pot
Medium Bowl

Start by chopping the onion into large pieces. Remove the stem and seeds from the bell pepper and chop it into large pieces as well. The pieces should be about the size of your fingertip.

Do not include any actual fingertips in the dish.

Finely mince the garlic cloves.

The finer you mince garlic, the more flavor it adds to a dish, so go nuts.

Cut each chicken thigh in half, and remove any large pieces of fat or skin that may still be on the meat.

You don't have to worry about removing smaller pieces of fat from the chicken.
Just try to get rid of any chunks of fat that have their own zip code.

Add the chicken, onion, pepper, garlic, and mushrooms to the crock pot. Also sprinkle 2 tbsp of dried Italian herbs and 1 tsp of salt on top of the meat and vegetables.


Before you add them, check your mushrooms just to make sure they don't have any dirt on them.

In a medium sized bowl, combine the diced tomatoes (with their liquid) and the tomato paste. Stir them together so that they form a thick sauce.

"Sauce" might be a little generous at this point, but this stuff will really improve while the dish cooks.

Add the tomato sauce to the crock pot. Try to evenly distribute the sauce across the top of the chicken and vegetables.

The juices from the other ingredients will mix with the sauce, thin it out, and make it delicious.

Cook everything in the crock pot on low for about 8 hours. When it's done cooking, gently stir everything to even out the sauce.

I put mine in a casserole dish for transport to the potluck.
Big mistake - it was too full and I got sauce everywhere.

Notes

• A lot of recipes for chicken cacciatore want you to brown the chicken in olive oil before braising it. I think that's a waste of time when making it in the crock pot, because any browning gets basically dissolved over the extremely long cooking.
• I used some cremini mushrooms for this dish, but regular white button mushrooms work just fine. You could also change things up with some more exotic types if you wanted.
• You can use other pieces of the chicken in this recipe, but I find that boneless, skinless chicken thighs are generally the best performers in the crock pot. White meat dries out too much, and I think drumsticks have too much connective tissue.
• I went with some packaged items in this recipe because I needed something I could throw together before work without a lot of hassle. You could certainly use fresh tomatoes instead of the canned diced tomatoes, and you don't have to buy your mushrooms pre-sliced. If you want to use fresh herbs, go for it. I'm pretty sure that Italian herb blends are mainly oregano and basil, with maybe a little thyme thrown in.
• If your sauce is really watery after you stir everything up, you can try adding about a tablespoon of arrowroot powder to thicken it up. Sprinkle it on top (to help avoid clumps) and then stir it in very gently. Let everything cook on low for another 15 minutes, and the sauce should get thicker.

Paleo Chicken and Waffles

Straight out of Harlem.

For some reason, people think chicken and waffles is a southern thing. Being from the south, I thought maybe I just wasn't paying attention when I was a kid, because I had never once seen anyone eat chicken and waffles together. In fact, I don't think I'd even heard of the idea until I moved north from South Carolina to Virginia. It turns out that my powers of perception weren't completely turned off in this case. The idea of combining fried chicken and waffles actually comes from Harlem, and originated during the Jazz Age at a restaurant called Wells'. The confusion about it being southern food is understandable, given the metric tonnage of fried chicken that I've eaten in my lifetime, just never with waffles.

Paleo fried chicken isn't really that hard to figure out. You just replace the thick, grain-based breading with a very light dredging of arrowroot powder and fry the chicken in a decent kind of oil. I don't personally have any lard (yet), but if you have some, this is a good time to get it out. You can also use coconut oil or any other neutral oil. Just don't fry with something that's loaded with trans fats, and everything will be OK. (Protip: the secret word signalling trans fats is "hydrogenated." Look on the nutrition label.)

Waffles are a trickier proposition. They're a bread product, so you're going to have to get out some serious paleo substitution voodoo to make them happen without grains. Thankfully, the Internet knows everything, so I was able to find a good paleo waffle recipe at a site called My Primal Kitchen. They're primal over there, not paleo, but there's a lot of overlap. This recipe is both. Also, I used their ingredient list, but changed up the technique, because the original steps require you to dirty more bowls than strictly necessary, and I like to avoid that.

I start to worry that a recipe is over-complicated if the ingredients don't fit on my cutting board.
I guess this one just made it.

Ingredients

For the waffles
1/4 cup coconut flour
1/2 cup almond meal
1 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
large pinch of cinnamon
6 eggs
2 tsp honey
2 tbsp coconut oil (plus a little for the waffle iron)
2 tsp vanilla extract

For the chicken
4 chicken breasts
arrowroot powder (enough to lightly coat the chicken. 1/4 to 1/2 cup)
salt
pepper
smoked paprika (optional)
oil for frying


Equipment

Large Bowl
Whisk
Waffle Iron
Pan
Draining Rig

Start with the waffles. In a large bowl, combine the coconut flour, almond meal, baking soda, salt, and cinnamon. Whisk them together to combine the ingredients, and try to whisk out as many clumps as you can.

My coconut flour always has little clumps in it. You can see some of them in the picture.
Try to get most of those out, but you'll probably have a few small ones no matter what.
They'll get taken care of when you add the wet ingredients.

Add the eggs to the bowl and mix them into the dry ingredients.

Stupid broken yolk, ruining my picture...

Put the coconut oil and honey into a microwave safe dish and heat them for about 30 seconds, until the coconut oil is liquid.

This stuff mixes in much easier when it's liquid.

Add the coconut oil, honey, and vanilla extract to the bowl and mix everything well. Let the batter sit for a few minutes while you turn on your waffle iron and let it get hot. When the waffle iron is ready (mine has a little light that comes on) pour about about half of the batter (about 1 cup) onto the center of the waffle iron and close the lid.

The batter won't go all the way to the edges. That's good, because the lid squishes everything outward when you close it. If you load up the iron completely, you're probably just going to throw away your waffle iron and buy a new one rather than clean up the disgusting mess that results.

Cook the waffles until the waffle iron indicates that they're done (mine uses the little light). Remove the waffles from the iron and set them aside. Cook the second half of the batter just like the first.

The chicken only has a few steps. First, season the chicken on both sides with salt and pepper. If you've got it, also shake on some smoked paprika. You don't have to use the paprika, but it's really good.

I forgot to take a picture of the seasoned chicken until it was about to be breaded.
I think you still get the point.

Put your arrowroot powder on a plate. Put the chicken on top of the arrowroot powder, and turn it over to cover both sides of the meat. Shake off any excess, so that you have a very light coating. Do this for all of the chicken breasts.

You only want a light dusting to stick to the chicken. Otherwise the breading will mix with the oil and make disgusting oil-and-arrowroot dumplings all over your chicken.

Add enough oil to a pan to come about halfway up the side of a chicken breast. Heat your oil up over medium-high heat. Add the chicken to the oil and let it cook for about 3 minutes. Then, flip the chicken over and let it cook for another 3 minutes on the second side.

That's the color you want to see.

Remove the chicken from the pan and place it on your draining rig.

Paper towels also work.

Plate each piece of chicken with two of the waffles.

Feel free to serve this with the side item of your choice, but it was a hearty meal all by itself.

Notes

• My waffle iron makes four normal waffles at a time. If you've got a waffle iron that makes huge Belgian waffles, you're going to have to adjust how much batter you put into it, and you're going to get a different number of waffles. I trust you to remain calm and make the necessary adjustments.
• Depending on the size of your pan, you may be able to cook more than one chicken breast at a time. Just make sure that they aren't touching each other in the pan, or the crust won't form correctly. The pan I used can only handle one at a time.
• If your pieces of chicken are very large or very thick, they may take longer to cook. Each of mine were about 8oz, and 3 minutes per side was just right.
• Nutritionally, this dish is high protein and medium fat. The carbs per serving are negligible - maybe 5g for each serving.
• Traditionally, you'd put maple syrup on the waffles, and a little hot sauce on the chicken. A bunch of maple syrup would defeat the purpose of the dish, but you can make an excellent sauce for this that's only a mild indulgence. For each serving, combine 1 tbsp of hot sauce with 1/2 tsp of honey. Heat them in the microwave for a few seconds to thin-out the honey, and mix them together. Drizzle the sauce over the chicken. You're only adding about 3g of carbs if you do this.
• In case it's not clear, these are just like normal waffles. You could eat them for breakfast next to some bacon and eggs and they'd be great. Also, since they're so low carb, you can top them with a little fruit without even sending them into indulgence land.

Pineapple Chicken

Way better than that "Chinese" place that delivers to your house.

When I was little, we always got the sweet and sour chicken when we ordered Chinese food. I loved it, even though it was essentially fried bread dipped in sugar. (Come to think of it, that's probably pretty much WHY I liked it.) These days, I normally don't like sweet and sour chicken, but I do like its equally inauthentic cousins - orange chicken, pineapple chicken, lemon chicken, etc.

Of course, the heavy breading and super-sugary sauces are about as far from paleo as it's possible to be. So, I decided to make a paleo version that bypassed those problems by using pineapple juice in the sauce and arrowroot powder to very lightly coat the chicken so it could be fried in a little coconut oil. The result is a version of pineapple chicken that you can have without worrying that you'll feel like crap in a few hours.

The soy sauce is wheat-free. You could also substitute coconut aminos.

Ingredients

3 boneless, skinless chicken breasts (about 2 lbs)
2 cloves of garlic
1 teaspoon ginger
1 red bell pepper
1 20oz. can of pineapple slices in pineapple juice
2 tbsp soy sauce (or coconut aminos)
2 tbsp arrowroot powder
salt to taste
About 1/4 cup arrowroot powder (to coat the chicken)
About 1/4 cup coconut oil (for frying)

Equipment

Pan
Draining Rig (I use a rack over a plate. You could also use paper towels)
Small Pot

Start by cutting everything up. You should mince the garlic and the ginger very fine. I use fresh ginger, which doesn't come in convenient teaspoon measurements. I just cut a piece off of the hand that looks about the right size and mince that.

These are going in the sauce, so the finer you can mince them, the better.

Remove the stem and seeds from the bell pepper, and cut it into strips.

These have such a nice color. Without them, the dish would be pretty much brown.

Cut the chicken into approximately 1.5 inch cubes.

Don't get out a ruler or anything. Instead, just go for "nugget-sized."

Drain the juice from the pineapple and save it for the sauce. Cut the slices into large chunks.

Now that everything is cut up, you should add some coconut oil to a pan and start heating it up over medium-high heat. While that's getting hot, dredge the chicken in the arrowroot powder.

You want a very light coating. You might need to shake the pieces a little to remove any excess.

Fry the chicken in the coconut oil. You may have to do it in multiple batches. Make sure to leave space between the pieces, or they'll stew instead of frying. Give them about a minute on the first side, and if the first side has browned, turn the pieces to a second side. Repeat the turns a few more times until the pieces are browned all over.

This is about the color you want to see.

Remove the chicken from the pan, and allow the pieces to drain. Remove the pan from the heat, and drain off any excess coconut oil.

I like using a rack over a plate. Paper towels also work.

Now is when you should start making the sauce. It's really pretty simple. Pour the pineapple juice from the can, the ginger, the garlic, the soy sauce, and 2 tablespoons of arrowroot powder to a small pot. Use a whisk to combine everything.

It will pretty much look like a weird gravy. Thankfully, it tastes nothing like that.

Heat the sauce over medium low heat, stirring constantly with the whisk. After a few minutes, the sauce will thicken a lot, and it will turn more translucent. When that happens, turn the heat off. If the sauce gets too hot, the arrowroot powder will disintegrate completely, and the sauce will "break." That's bad.

This is what the sauce looks like when it's ready.

Once the sauce is ready, turn the heat back on to medium-high under the pan. Add the pepper strips to the pan, and let them cook for about a minute.

Don't cook the peppers too much.

Add the chicken and pineapple chunks to the pan and top everything with the sauce. Mix everything in together so that the sauce coats everything evenly. Keep everything over medium-low heat for a minute or two to warm the pineapple chunks. You should also add a few pinches of salt.

Don't leave this over the heat for too long. You just want to make sure that everything is warmed up.

Notes

• My can of pineapple had almost exactly 3/4 cup of juice in it. If your can has less juice for some reason, you may need to reduce the arrowroot powder in the sauce a little bit to compensate.
• The sauce will be really thick. It's OK. It needs to be thick to properly coat the chicken. It also thins out a little bit as the pineapple chunks release some of their juice when everything is mixed together.
• I liked the way this tasted, but both Miriam and I thought it would probably be even better with a shot of lemon juice added right at the end.
• This paired really well with some of the fried cauliflower rice.
• I wouldn't call this an indulgence, but between the pineapple and the pineapple juice, it isn't super low-carb. I'd avoid serving it with a higher-carb side item.

Spicy Chicken and Bacon Poppers

The chicken and peppers make it so you're not
just shamefully eating a plate of bacon.

The first recipe I'm going to recommend comes from Mark's Daily Apple. It's his Spicy Chicken and Bacon Poppers

His recipe is good, and clearly laid out. You should be able to follow it without much help from me. Just reposting Mark's recipe seems silly to me, so I'm linking to it and adding a couple of things I wanted to say about it.

First, he uses pickled pepperoncini peppers. Those are fine, and I say give them a try to see if you like them. Personally, though, I prefer to make this recipe with pickled hot cherry peppers (like these ). I just like them a little better than the pepperoncinis.

Second, Mark seems to cut his chicken breast into larger pieces than I do. It might be because I use the cherry peppers, but a chicken breast cut into 8 pieces usually yields pieces that are hard to fit in a pepper. I get more like 10 pieces out of each chicken breast, and those pieces seem to fit the peppers better. I suggest that you look at the size of your peppers, and then basically cut pieces to fit. Go ahead; I trust you to freestyle it a little.

You can season the chicken pretty much however you want, but I don't think it needs much. There's vinegar in the peppers (which are spicy), and bacon is pretty salty in general, so I usually make this without doing anything to the chicken at all. I just let the pepper and the bacon provide the flavor, but if you've got a favorite spice, try it out.

A note on grilling these: I don't recommend the "8-10 minutes per side" that Mark suggests. I think you'll end up much happier if you do quarter turns every 2 minutes and cycle through two complete turns. The bacon is less prone to burning that way.

As far as I'm concerned, you can eat these every day and be not only within the letter of the paleo law, but also within the spirit. Some people quibble about the bacon, but if you get good quality bacon (especially the uncured kind) then I say you're fine.