Month: August 2016

Back to School Lunches, Paleo Style

If you haven’t sent your little ones back to school yet, you will be soon, which brings up the all important question: what are you going to feed them for lunch?

I have been hearing lots about back to school lunches lately. I’ve read magazine articles, I’ve heard news reports on the radio, I’ve even seen stories on the national news, all focused on healthy school lunches.

“Healthy” is certainly a matter of opinion, these days more than ever. The vegan next door thinks she’s the healthiest, the low fat dieter believes that’s the only way, I think our paleo diet is the best, so that’s not what I’m here to debate. I’m simply here to give you some ideas about what to send in the kiddos’ lunch boxes that will keep their little brains and bodies functioning well through the school day.

If you’re reading here, I assume you are following at least a gluten free diet, and most likely need to send peanut free lunches. Everything I suggest will meet those criteria. And honestly, it’s really pretty simple. Once you train your brain to think outside the peanut butter and jelly sandwich box, putting together a healthy and totally paleo lunch is simpler than your standard lunch.

The so-called health experts who like to tell us what to do all the time have come up with some really great sounding recipes to send with your kids for lunch: ham and cheese muffins, cinnamon roll bites, pasta salad in a jar. All that sound just lovely, but I have all I can handle cooking dinner each night and making sure we have food for breakfast and lunch that the kids and husband can prepare themselves. I am not cooking lunches too. Period.

So here’s what I’d do if I were packing lunches each day. And lest you think I have no experience with this since we homeschool, these meal ideas are what my kids do eat each and every day. We just eat it at home. But we do pack our lunches a good bit as we go on field trips, meet friends at a park or sometimes just when we have lots of errands to run. It’s easier to have lunch on hand that find yourself with starving kids and need to run through a fast food drive thru. What you see below has been tested and tried and my kids will eat these foods every time without fuss.

A typical kid lunch plate in my house looks like this:

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  • lunch meat, usually ham (I buy a deli brand with no preservatives, nitrates, nitrites, soy, gluten, etc.), sometimes turkey, roast beef or even bologna. I mix it up.
  • cheese, sometimes string, sometimes slice (they don’t get cheese every day)
  • baby carrots
  • apple slices (or banana or berries or peach – whatever’s in season)
  • some green leaves, spinach is their favorite
  • chips – our favorite brand is Boulder, who makes avocado oil and coconut oil chips, both yummy and gluten free varieties are available
  • occasionally a sweet treat like a small piece of chocolate (Altar Eco brand is soy free and so delicious) or one of my cookies

Now, if you just have to get all fancy, then by all means, don’t cook just for lunch, but do plan ahead when you’re making dinner and make extras for lunches. Some of my recipes that are particularly well-suited to lunch time are:

Paleo Shake and Bake Chicken Nuggets (Paleo and AIP versions)

 

Paleo Fish Sticks (AIP option)

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New and Improved AIP tortillas (use these like bread for rollups or quesadillas)

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Bacon and Egg Salad from Practical Paleo: essentially chopped hard boiled eggs, chopped, cooked bacon, mixed with homemade mayo, salt and pepper.

Sure, you can spend a lot of time making fancy lunches for your kids, but in my experience, what they like best are separate foods. What I mean is, most kids would rather eat some chicken, some carrots, some spinach, maybe with a little dip or sauce than a fancy chicken veggie muffin you might whip up. Save yourself the trouble and heartache and just get a nice lunch container like this one:

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Then fill each little compartment with protein, fruit, veggies and something snacky like chips or nuts and a few chocolate chips. Bam! Lunch is done. It’s quick, easy and kids love it. They can even make it themselves!

I hope your school year gets off to a great start!

Paleo Camping Tips, Part 2

Quite a few folks have told me that they love these trip reports the most and I’m so glad because that means that I can quit cooking and developing recipes and just go on vacation. Thanks! Y’all are the best.

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We left off Paleo Camping Tips Part 1 after Saturday’s breakfast of gluten free donuts and bacon. Really, we could just stop there, couldn’t we?

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Here’s our campsite. Car camping is a great way to start since you can take all the stuff you need. And the car is nearby if you need a quick getaway.

But no! There is more fun and more delicious food to be had. By Saturday morning our friends had arrived at camp and we spent a very leisurely morning hanging out with them, chatting and just goofing off. We ALL need more time in this life to goof off, adults included.

We did eventually get our rears in gear and headed out for a hike. Along the Blue Ridge Parkway there is a 13 mile trail called the Tanawha Trail. We’ve hiked most parts of it, but there are a few little stretches we had not tried until this trip. (There is one section of several miles that appears to us that it would not be very enjoyable so we will be skipping that part, until someday when we decide to do the whole thing at once.) For now, we’re sticking to the 2-3 mile sections that are fun for the kids. It just so happened that we had never hiked the very beginning of the trail which leads to the Linn Cove Viaduct. This was a pretty and fun hike.
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We collected oodles of wild blackberries along the way. So many in fact, that we stuffed our bellies and then stuffed our little pockets and hands full of them, stored them in a zippy bag once we got back to the car, then had them to add to our dessert later.

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Our tummies were grumbly by the time we got back to the car and we were thankful lunch had tagged along on our outing. We chowed down on the usual: lunch meat, chips (yes, Cheetos included), carrots, fruit, my cookies, some nuts, same old same old. It’s not exciting, but it fills us up and it’s super convenient.

After the hike, we headed back to the campground for more goofing off and relaxing. This is actually kind of unusual for us. We typically do two hikes per day (with a stop for ice cream in between – of course!). But the kids were begging for more friend time at the campground and honestly, the adults needed some down time as well so we gave in.

The temperature on this mountain was perfecto, so I chose to hold down the hammock some more. I don’t even know what my husband and kids were doing. I was content, relaxed and perfectly comfortable in my hammock. Who cares about anybody else?!! 🙂

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Eventually, my husband surfaced and asked what was for dinner. The nerve. Before we left home, I cut up some boneless, skinless chicken thighs, a bunch of vegetables and made a batch of stir fry sauce from this recipe.

The one thing you do have to pay a good bit of attention to when camping is how you pack your cooler. Be very intentional about what you put in first. Everything is frozen when we leave our house (we need less ice this way) and I layer the food in the cooler based on when we will need it. By the time we made it to Saturday night (our third night away), the meat was just thawed out, but still perfectly safe and cold.

The oops here was that I left the stir fry sauce in the freezer at home. I immediately started thinking about how I could improvise. The main flavors in the sauce are orange juice, garlic, ginger and coconut aminos. I had orange juice for our breakfasts, but nothing that even came close to the other flavors. I did have salt and pepper and a little extra gluten free flour.

As I sauteed the chicken, I sprinkled in the flour (about 3 Tablespoons), got the chicken nice and brown, then added the little carton of OJ, a couple packets of yellow mustard from our lunch box, lots of salt and pepper then mixed that in with the vegetables which I had sauteed separately. I served this over white rice. It was very tasty, hearty and satisfying, even if it wasn’t what I had planned.

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Dessert was blueberry, peach cobbler. At home, I cut up the fruit and made the cobbler topping and stashed it all in zippy bags. The cobbler simmered in our Lodge brand dutch oven over coals, out in the beautiful mountain air. If dinner had ended up really, really badly, it would not have mattered at all with this cobbler waiting for us. Oh yeah, remember those wild blackberries? We added them to the cobbler.

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Everywhere we hiked, my little scouts found fresh, wild blackberries and occasionally blueberries as well. We did not let them go to waste.

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There was so much chocolate left from s’mores the night before that I had to have a couple pieces of that later in the evening. Just to not be wasteful, you know.

I also burned my hand pretty darn good. I was boiling water to make a cup of tea and as I picked up the pot to pour the water I apparently lost all sense of coordination and poured the boiling water all over my hand rather than in the cup.

Here’s my burn remedy when at home (I do burn myself in the kitchen quite a lot): immediately rinse with cold tap water for a couple minutes, then soak the burned area with soy sauce. The sodium helps to alleviate the burn. It works really, really well. You know on Paleo we don’t eat soy, but I keep soy sauce around for this reason alone.

Prepared yellow mustard also works, but not as well as soy sauce. Naturally, I did not have soy sauce on the camping trip (I should have known I would burn myself at some point!), but I did have more mustard packets. I ran cold water over my hand for what seemed like ages. Thankfully, there was water at the campsite. Then I slathered mustard all over it, of course staining my clothes, but that’s beside the point. Meanwhile, my friends appeared and called the owners of the campground. Granny, who lives there in season, said she rubs a raw onion on burns. I had never heard of this remedy, but I was willing to try anything. Plus, Grannies are usually right about everything. By this point, it was completely dark, we were sitting around the fire with our friends, my hand covered in mustard and my onion was delivered. My husband sliced it up (I certainly couldn’t be trusted with a knife at this point) and I sat there rubbing it over my hand for well over an hour. By the time we went to bed, I still felt a little burning in a couple spots. This was a true miracle considering I had poured boiling water over my entire hand. We had some burn cream in our first aid kit so I rubbed that on as I drifted off to sleep. I woke up with no pain and just two small red spots on my hand, not even a little blister. I was very, very thankful. The only thing I couldn’t manage was washing the dishes because I simply could not put my hand in hot water yet. Oh, shucks.

The trauma of the night before behind us, we were ready for a hearty breakfast. Sunday morning’s breakfast was a joint effort with our friends. We cooked on the camp stove and ate in shifts, but it was totally fine. Remember, everything moves at a much slower pace when you’re camping. The kids were all too happy to eat first and then run off to do whatever 9-11 year olds do when left alone in nature.

Breakfast menu: We had half a package of bacon leftover, half the loaf of banana bread (which I toasted in the skillet). I also brought ingredients to make gluten free pancakes. These are not paleo, but are made with my gluten free flour blend. I brought the dry ingredients in a bag and the wet ingredients in a container kept in the cooler. Mix when ready to cook and voila! You have fresh, delicious pancakes. My friends brought eggs and more bacon, which we scrambled up and fried, respectively. Sliced a few apples, popped a couple cartons of OJ and milk and everyone was fed and happy.

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Sadly, Sunday morning was packing up day. It was supposed to rain all morning so we were very thankful to wake up to sunny skies. The tent had plenty of time to dry off so we could pack everything up completely dry. If you get home late, it’s 100 degrees, and you have to open up all the camping gear so it can dry out, it’s not so fun. We’ve done this plenty of times so we were extremely thankful we could pack it up for good this trip.

Oh yes, we did make time for crawdad catching…

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We headed off for a late morning hike and afterward were feeling a little tired and so decided on a lazy lunch. If you’re ever in the Boone, NC area, there is a great, little restaurant called Coyote Kitchen. I’d say their focus is Southwestern foods, but they also have salads, soups, burgers and sandwiches. The real special thing about this restaurant is how they handle allergy requests. All their fry batter is gluten free so the kids can indulge in real, honest-to-goodness chicken fingers or fried fish. Their friers are dedicated gluten free so french fries are an option here as well. They have these amazing concoctions called “boats” that are like a deconstructed burrito. I chose one with rosemary chicken, chorizo, roasted red bell peppers, rice and some other stuff I honestly can’t remember. My husband’s boat had chicken, beans, plantains, sweet potatoes, pineapple and more. Super delicious and we feel totally safe eating there. They even had a gluten free carrot cake for dessert. We could not resist!

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Then down the mountain we came. Sadly, all good things must come to an end. We are always so very sad to see our mountain vacations come to a close. There is a new park on the outskirts of Boone called Rocky Knob, which is mostly a mountain biking park with great looking trails (we didn’t have our bikes so didn’t try those) and even a little training area where you can practice the various mountain biking skills before tackling the trails. They also have an amazing play area for kids all made of ropes and logs. It is a small park, but really pretty and peaceful. Maybe on an upcoming adults only trip, we’ll tackle the trails. I haven’t mountain biked since before my son was born so it should be a good mix of thrilling, scary and humorous.

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There you have it, a camping primer, ala Heinze. Now what I haven’t told you is that we have a reputation for bringing the rain. Just because that one time we camped it rained over 14 inches in three days. And yes, we stayed in our tent and toughed it out. There were little peaks of sun here and there, but they were few and far between. I distinctly remember all the details of that trip. Our last effort at enjoying our time was a hike along the Blue Ridge Parkway. It wasn’t raining when we started, but there was lots of water dripping from the trees. A little way in, however, the heavens opened once again and the rains came heavy and steady. We had toughed out this weather for three days. We. Were. Done. My lead Boy Scout kept charging ahead, but I made the executive decision that our trip was over. We plodded back to our car and climbed in. Here my children sat with a makeshift clothesline overhead and wet, soppy clothes drying in their faces. It was glamorous, let me tell you.

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Clothes drying overhead, but still a happy face. These are great kids.
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Notice the volume of water rushing through Linville Falls. This is not normal.
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Fake smiles

So, all because of that trip, we are dubbed the rainy day campers. When the Heinze family camps, most people stay away. We are thankful for our hearty friends who dare to join us on these trips now. But they have a camper.

Upcoming Events

Hey Paleo Friends (and those of you I haven’t converted yet), there are two super exciting events coming up soon that I want you to be aware of. I posted these on Facebook, but since some of you aren’t on Facebook, (I’m barely on there myself), I thought I’d send you a notice the old fashioned way – email. 🙂

  1. Wednesday, August 10th, 11 AM, Facebook.com/KidCasts, yours’ truly will be baking “No one will know it’s paleo” Chocolate cake with a dairy free frosting. I will have with me the cutest assistant on the planet. You don’t want to miss it!
  2. This coming Saturday, August 13th, 10 AM – 3 PM, Kerr Scott Building at the NC State Fairgrounds, the Gluten Free Allergy Free Wellness Event will be taking place. I’ll be a vendor this year with my awesome (can I say that?) cookies. There will be samples galore and lots of fun products for you to try out. If you’re going to be around and would like to go, comment below because I have a few free tickets to give out. If many people comment, I’ll draw names at random. But comment ASAP. Time is running out.

I hope to see you soon, either in person at the Gluten Free Event or via the world wide web tomorrow. Facebook seems to have some sort of vendetta against me, but I am trying to conquer it and will attempt to cook, wrangle children, talk somewhat coherently and read and respond to comments at the same time. If nothing else, it should be humorous.

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Paleo Camping Tips – Part 1

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Hold on there – don’t dismiss this article if you “aren’t a camper.” I wasn’t a camper either – until about five years ago. One weekend out in the beautiful fresh air of the North Carolina mountains, a leisurely pace for a few days, lots of family fun and hiking and I was sold. We’ve made at least one camping trip every year since. Although we have camped at different times of year, summer is our favorite. Any excuse to escape the oppressive heat and humidity of the city and I’m there!

As I began to write this trip report, I realized that there is way too much information for just one article, so here you have installment #1. I’ll cover the first half of the trip now and next week, I’ll send out installment #2 with the associated recipes.

The information found here is applicable to all sorts of travel, not just camping, so if you are a die-hard hotel traveler, never fear, there is something here for you too. And if you really couldn’t care less about how to eat healthy while traveling, then just sit back and enjoy the pretty pictures.

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My husband was relieved that I took to camping so well because it took a pretty hefty investment up front. In addition, all those hard earned Boy Scout skills were just itching to come back to the surface. Now, I’m raising my own little Boy Scout and he needs practice, of course.

Sure, you can borrow tents, sleeping bags, camp stove, etc. but we took the plunge and started buying each of these necessities during sales. Now we have all we need for a comfortable camping experience. I guess my husband was fairly confident camping would be successful for me. I’m glad he was right! I will say that our first ever family camping trip was at a beautiful mountain location, there were nice bathroom facilities, and the weather was amazing. If that trip had turned out like some of our subsequent trips, this whole camping thing might have gone right down the drain.

Here’s what I find necessary for a successful camping experience. No, we don’t re-create our home out in the wild, but there are a few items that make the whole adventure more enjoyable:

  1. a good quality tent that will not leak (yes, it rains outside)
  2. a comfortable bed – be it air mattress, camping pad, cot or plain old sleeping bag – get what’s comfortable for you
  3. a reliable camp stove – yes, you can cook over a fire, but if it’s raining and all you’ve planned are campfire meals, you will be hungry
  4. hot water showers and flush toilets

You might need more and you might need less, but if you’ve never camped, I encourage you to arrange for these “necessities” and if at all possible, go with some friends who have some camping experience. Even though it’s technically a lot of work to go camping, something about it is super therapeutic and relaxing.

On average, three hours lazily pass from the time we get up in the morning until breakfast is eaten and the dishes are cleaned up. Three hours! You read that right. When was the last time you indulged in three hours to get ready in the morning? It just naturally takes longer to cook and clean up when you’re living out of boxes, a tent and the back of your car. But here’s the thing – it is not a chore. I love it actually. We trip over tent stakes, I burn my hand, we get smoke in our eyes, but somehow it’s all ok when it’s 102 degrees at home, but 68 at your campsite, the sky is blue, there’s a gentle breeze and best of all – your kids are safely running free through the campground with all the other camp kids. It’s truly what I picture heaven to be like.

So how do we camp paleo? I ran into a friend at the campground this past weekend and she was saying that she thought it would be hard to stay paleo while camping. In fact, it’s super easy. You still have to plan, plan and plan, but the food is generally very simple, which fits in perfectly with the paleo lifestyle.

And speaking of the paleo lifestyle, not just diet, camping is about as paleo as it gets. You have to walk to do everything (this includes trips to the bathroom in the middle of the night – while all the woodland creatures are out – this part is not fun), our activities consist of hiking, preparing meals and then relaxing. It’s all about fun and time together and no stress.

Onto the food! Hopefully, these pictures and recipes will make you hungry for your own adventure.

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Relaxing with ice on my sore feet and reading a paleo cookbook – what else?

Thursday night: We head out of Raleigh and pick up Wendy’s on the road. If you’re a regular reader, you know Wendy’s is our travel go-to. The kids eat burgers without buns or the grilled chicken wrap without the wrap, I eat either salad or a bunless burger. No, it isn’t paleo, but pretty close and even though there is surely contamination, this food never leaves me with any negative symptoms.

Friday Morning: I got myself a fancy, new camping coffee pot for this trip. This brought back such great memories as I folded the filter over the center thingy. I used to “help” Grandma with this part of making the morning coffee using their old electric percolator pot. I have this French press coffee cup from REI and it works great, but 1. it’s a pain to clean and 2. it doesn’t make quite as much coffee as I want. I got the 6 cup version of the percolator pot and it was perfect. Not only does it do the job, but it’s easy to clean, small enough to be packable and that handle does not get hot on the fire.PastedGraphic-1

Oh yes, we did have more than coffee for breakfast. Before we left Raleigh, I made sausage patties. I also had a loaf of banana bread in the freezer. As I accumulate over-ripe bananas, I make a loaf of this yummy bread and stash it in the freezer for just this kind of event. We scrambled a few eggs in a bit of the sausage grease, added some fresh fruit and breakfast was done.

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As for beverages, aside from my coffee, the kids and my husband had hot chocolate (totally not paleo), milk and OJ.

Friday Lunch: Here’s what works best for us when we’re camping: we keep the cooler in the car so we can have lunch where ever we happen to be when hunger strikes. Where we typically camp in the NC mountains, if you’re near some beautiful hikes, you are not near restaurants. So in order to not let food get in the way of our fun, we just keep our food with us. I keep a separate little box inside my big cooler with our lunch staples so they are easy to find:

  • deli meat
  • string cheese
  • gluten free bread
  • fruit
  • carrots

I also keep a labeled bag of lunch add-ins that don’t need to be kept in the cooler: condiment packets that we lifted from fast food restaurants, paper plates, napkins, chips, and nuts. And we have a big jug of water as well to fill up our individual bottles.

On this particular trip, we happened to run into some friends from Raleigh. They had just finished a hike we were about to start and we were sitting in our car eating lunch because it was raining at the time. My son had a plate full of Cheetos in his lap and my friend jokingly said, “Are Cheetos paleo?” Why, yes, of course they are. Just kidding. No, Cheetos are not paleo, but the kids get these kinds of treats when we travel.

Confession time: When my husband and I had just started dating, he came to my apartment for dinner and a movie one night. During the movie, I asked him if he wanted a snack, he said yes, and I reached under my sofa for a bag of Cheetos. He still teases me about that to this day. Yes, I ate Cheetos. At that time in my life, a still-in-debt just out of graduate school girl, I followed a terrible diet. I was a vegetarian who ate lots of processed carbs. And apparently I was too lazy to walk from my living room to my kitchen and store my snacks appropriately. In my defense, my apartment was a gargantuan 750 square feet.

Back to the business at hand: Because we are expending a great deal of energy when we are on camping trips, I tend to eat more gluten free carbs than normal. Lunch is typically a turkey sandwich on gluten free bread (usually just one slice of bread), baby carrots, apple or grapes, nuts, a few chips and some dessert if I’m still hungry. I brought along a bunch of my cookies for this trip which came in really handy (just wait till you get to Friday’s dessert).

Dinner Friday: It was a lovely night so we chose to cook over the campfire – grass-fed hotdogs and foil packets full of vegetables.

IMG_8278Dessert was s’mores. How can you not have s’mores when you’re camping? To keep this mostly paleo for me, I used one of my sugar cookies and had a piece of good, dark chocolate on the side. The rest of the family used my chocolate chip cookies as their graham cracker substitute (totally paleo) and then added the chocolate and toasted marshmallow. They said it was delicious, but I decided that would be too much sugar for me. Yes, we had a wide variety of chocolate to choose from. Paleo Rule #1: You can never have too much chocolate. 🙂 

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Breakfast Saturday: remember those gluten free donuts I mentioned in this post? That recipe made a ton of donut dough so I froze enough for one breakfast and took those along on this trip. While my coffee perked and the hot chocolate cooled off, I let the donuts rest (they need a little time to rise). I brought along a little jar of palm shortening which I heated over the camp stove and fried those puppies up. The kids had a great time fetching the donuts from the pan and shaking them in their bags of sugar (one bag of powdered sugar and another coconut sugar + maple sugar + cinnamon). Although I think it is fairly well accepted that you don’t need anything else when donuts are on the menu, we are all about balance in this family, so we added bacon and fruit.

After this breakfast clean-up, we were off for our hiking adventures. Stay tuned for part 2 of this camping tips post.

If you take nothing else from this post, let it be this: donuts, Cheetos and camping are three of the best things in life. Amen.

I leave you with is lovely picture of some awesome hikers.

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Facebook Live Tonight, 7:30 PM EST

Hey, hey! Tonight, I’ll be live on Facebook.com/kidcasts at 7:30 PM. If you can’t catch the show live, you can go back and watch after the fact. This will be my 4th show and all of them are still up on the KidCasts page.




Do me a favor, will you? Head over to Facebook.com/ourpaleofamily and like my page. I thought I launched that page back in the fall when I started the blog, but I guess I never hit “publish.” My crack technical support team (thanks, honey) noticed it for me and published the page a couple weeks ago. I’d love to start accumulating some “likes” over there – whatever that means!

Tonight’s show is focused on autoimmune paleo or AIP. I’ll be making my AIP tortillas and tempura fried shrimp for some delicious shrimp tacos. No, you cannot come over and eat because I will be going to sleep as soon as the show is over. Sorry.




I chose these recipes because 1. they are really, really tasty and 2. they’re a little tricky to make so I thought seeing me make them might be so helpful you would rush right out and make them yourself! Trust me, you would not regret it.

I hope to see you online tonight!

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