Caveman Cupcakes

Some friends in Austin, where I live, are having a Primal Holiday Party -- a party where everyone brings a Caveman-style potluck dish and we go play around outside.  I've been working on my Caveman Cupcake recipe, and I made some to bring to the party.

I don't have it perfected yet, but I thought I'd let you know what the recipe is so far. Just so you know, you can make variations of the recipe and they always seem to turn out well.

CUPCAKES

Ingredients
1 ripe plantain
1 ripe banana
1/2 cup raw, peeled Japanese sweet potato
2 large eggs
1 Tbsp olive oil
1/2 tsp vanilla
1/8 tsp nutmeg
2 tsp baking powder

Preheat oven to 375 degrees.

Peel the plantain and banana and break them into large pieces. Put everything in a food processor. Pulse a few times and then process for 20 seconds or so until smooth.

Line a muffin tin with 12 paper muffin cups. Spoon batter into the muffin cups until they're almost full.

Bake 20-25 minutes or until the tops are dry-looking.


FROSTING

This makes more frosting than you'll need, but it's yummy eaten on its own.


Ingredients
1 small to medium-sized avocado
1 small soft persimmon
1-3 Stevia packets
1-2 Tbsp carob powder
2-3 Tbsp unsweetened cocoa powder
1/2 tsp vanilla
1/8 - 1/4 tsp cinnamon

Put the flesh of the avocado and persimmon in a food processor. Don't include any skin from either. Be careful not to include the pit or stem from the avocado.

Add 1 Tbsp, carob powder, 2 Tbps cocoa powder, 1/8 tsp cinnamon, and 1/2 tsp vanilla. Process until smooth.

Taste the frosting and add more carob powder, cocoa powder, cinnamon and Stevia to taste. I recommend adding chocolate and carob powder until the frosting is a rich, dark color like the picture.

After-Note

My friend Mo tried making these with mixed results. After said event, I revised the avocado/persimmon ratio, so your frosting should be a bit thicker than his.

Also, note that if you don't follow the recipe and instead decide to throw random ingredients in a food processor, you might end up with something slightly different, like Mo's choco-almond cups.

Okinawan Purple Sweet Potatoes

The time has come to pay homage to one of my favorite foods (of many) -- Okinawan purple sweet potatoes!

As you can see, their skin is tan, but inside their flesh is an eye-popping violet laced with white. And when they're cooked, they turn from violet to purple...

The Caveman Diet includes sweet potatoes, although some Paleo-type diets don't. For a starchy vegetable, these particular sweet potatoes don't tend to stimulate blood sugar as much as other carbs might. They're very sweet, but it may be that they don't raise insulin as much as some other carbs.

They are extremely high in antioxidants, some say higher than blueberries. This makes sense because in nature, colors -- whether green, yellow, orange, red, blue or purple -- typically mean high antioxidant  levels.

There are a number of studies underway testing health benefits of purple sweet potatoes. I'm guessing that purple sweet potato extract will become a big product in the future. It's already used medicinally in Japan. You heard it here first!

Poaching Fish

I'm at my mom's house right now in L.A. The weather's beautiful, but I wanted to write a quick blog post about an easy, fool-proof way to cook fish. It's called poaching. Poaching means that you cover food with liquid and simmer it. I like poaching because the fish cooks up quickly and stays moist.

To poach fish, simply put it in a pan and cover it totally or mostly with water. If you want, you can add good things to the water, like onions or other veggies, as shown above. Simmering means gently boiling so that small bubbles appear in the water but not big bubbles. Leave the pan uncovered. If there's a portion of fish that's above the water, like you see above, turn the fish over partway through the cooking.

To test if the fish is done, just see if it flakes, using a fork. The cooking time varies, but the good thing about poaching is that the fish generally won't overcook.

Also, you can simmer fish that's frozen and it will turn out good. The water moderates the temperature of the fish so that it cooks evenly.

I just usually use water without any vegetables. I may be missing out by not putting things in the water, but I like plain fish, so I don't mind just tasting the fish and nothing else.

Once the fish is cooked, you can always top it with a sauce, salsa, herbs, or pureed vegetables.

Carob Powder

Carob powder is interesting stuff. My grandparents used to give me "carob milk," milk with carob powder mixed in. The carob powder would form little brown clumps, but otherwise this was a pretty good drink, kind of chocolate milk-like. On the Caveman Diet, carob is fine to eat. It sweet, but it's not quite like eating sugar. The fact that it's sweet and chocolate-like makes it a good stand-in for chocolate.

Now, the way I follow the Caveman Diet, I do eat chocolate. But only chocolate with no added sugar. What I do to get a chocolate fix is make something with cocoa powder. I've tried several frosting/pudding recipes that contained a combination of cocoa powder and carob powder. My favorite is a mixture of avocado, persimmon, cocoa powder, carob powder, a few dates, cinnamon and Stevia.

Did cavemen have all these complex ingredients? Even more importantly, did they have the food processor I constantly borrow from my roommate to mix the stuff up with? Well, no, everything they ate would have been fairly simple.

But this brings me to my philosophy on Caveman Eating. The important thing is to stick to it, even if it takes eating things that a Caveman wouldn't have had access to. Eating Paleo or Primal, or Caveman-style -- whatever you want to call it -- is really just a gimmick. It's a way to get people excited about eating healthy and help them continue doing that. You can really pursue it however you want. The key is just to find a way that works for you, which is also to say, a way that you buy into.

Case in point: A lot of people who eat this way currently include chocolate in their diet. And when I say chocolate, I don't mean the 100% cocoa that I mess around with -- I mean chocolate that contains sugar. Well, all followers of this type of eating know that sugar is not Paleo-approved. But dark chocolate fits in with how they do the diet, with the way of eating they buy into, so they eat chocolate.

 I tried eating some dark chocolate that had sugar in it and found that there's something about processed sweeteners that just doesn't work for me. Sugar is addictive in a way that something like a pureed fruit is not. An additional problem with eating dark chocolate (the kind containing sugar) for me is that you can get dark chocolate anywhere. I mean, it's at all the convenience stores. It's just too easy to get my hands on.

If I'm going to have a treat, I'd rather that it be something I have to consciously seek out. Carob seems like a good bet in that sense. Also things I have to make myself, like my Caveman chocolate frosting experiments.

Today I heated up some unsweetened almond milk and added a big spoonful of carob powder to it. Just like when my grandma gave it to me when I was a kid -- it tasted great.