Paleo Kitchen Tools

If you are anything like me, you have/had a kitchen stocked with hard anodized cookware or some kind of teflon pans and cheerfully cooked with no-calorie PAM sprays. Would it surprise you to learn that in addition to all the chemicals you are exposed to from your carpet to your beauty products, the cookware you use can produce some of the worst? I'm not going to do a post on how bad crap like Teflon is to use, since Chris Kresser already did a great one here. What I am going to do is show you how much it costs to replace this garbage. Here's a little quote about Teflon from the article if you need a little convincing:

Teflon, made of the chemical known as PFOA, is the most persistent synthetic chemical known to man, and is found in the blood of nearly every person tested. (1) Animal studies have shown that PFOA causes cancer, liver damage, growth defects, immune system damage, and death in lab rats and monkeys. An EPA advisory panel reported that PFOA is a “likely carcinogen” in humans. (2)

Besides just leaching chemicals into the food, Teflon cookware has also been shown to release dangerous chemicals into the air during use. Toxic fumes released from heated non-stick cookware has been shown to be deadly to birds, with many hundreds of birds dying every year from “Teflon toxicosis.” (3) Even more scary is that DuPont’s own scientists have admitted that polymer fume fever in humans is possible at 662°F, a temperature easily exceeded when a pan is preheated on a burner or placed beneath a broiler. (4)

Avoid:
Aluminum
Teflon
Copper

Go For:
Enameled Cast Iron, Ceramic, Steel
Cast Iron - Everyday use
Stainless Steel - Good for quick cooking and browning meat


Things to remember:
Never clean cast iron with soap - wipe with a cloth, rinse with water and dry immediately. DO NOT SOAK.

You must use fat to cook with cast iron and keep food from sticking, however once you've used the pan several times, cooking gets easier and more tasty. Follow Chris Kresser's tips for cast iron.

Cast Iron can be a problem for people with toxically high levels of iron in their blood, but many of us (especially women) are iron deficient and cooking with cast iron can be beneficial.

Cook acidic dishes (i.e. tomato sauce) in an enameled dish or stainless steel. The acid can damage cast iron cookware.


PALEO KITCHEN ESSENTIALS:

1. Stainless Steel Utensils - $14.72 here
I recommend visiting a restaurant supply store or a Wal-Mart to check out prices if you can, otherwise you can find on Amazon.

2. Cast Iron Frying Pan - 16.99 for the one I have.

3. Enameled Cast Iron Dutch Oven - $70.99 for the one I have. Or splurge on Le Creuset for several hundred dollars.

4. Stainless Steel Frying Pan - 33.95 for the one I'd pick

5. Baking Dish - $59.95 for the enameled cast iron, or you could go less expensive and grab some glass pyrex for about half the price at Wal-Mart.

Anything else you probably already have and this is really all I would say you'd need other than a nice set of knives I hope you already got as a wedding present or something ;) Don't forget, it's ok to ask for gift cards for Christmas this year and GET RID OF THAT TEFLON!

Total Cost to redo the kitchen cookware: $196.60 + tax.

Optional:

Food Processor
Crockpot (HIGHLY RECOMMENDED, especially if you are making bone broth)
    There has been some debate as to whether or not chemicals are leached from crockpots into the food  
     that is being cooked inside.. I'm not convinced there is anything to this, but I avoid brightly colored  
     anything that comes from China. I just ordered this one to replace my one that got all scratched up.
Pressure Cooker .. I personally don't cook much with this.

My new go-to "Paleo" cake recipe

Let me start this post by saying that if you are adding sweetener to anything, I really don't consider it "paleo." As I've read more and more about nutrition and spent time cooking paleo food, I've begun to think that things like coconut flour and almond meal aren't really paleo. In fact, I consider a bowl of fresh strawberries topped with freshly whipped heavy cream way more "paleo" than a grain/legume/dairy free cake, cookie or muffin.

That being said, I think there is a place for these  kinds of baked treats for families that just don't want to forgo baked goods at things like birthday parties.

So, for my son's fourth birthday party I decided to finally try baking a grain-free cake. My previous attempts at paleo treats were just ok. The best ones I've found come from Primal Palate's cookbook Make it Paleo. You can find a lot of the recipes that are in their book on their blog.. The pumpkin pie was great.

Anything I tried with coconut flour was extremely dense and required a nice cup of coffee or water to get it down. I had a ton of it in the pantry though, so I decided to give it one more try. I scoured the internet and finally found: THE BEST DAMN COCONUT FLOUR CAKE RECIPE EVER.

I made 12 cupcakes and made up a batch of frosting with whipped heavy cream (I was not impressed with my frosting and will do cream cheese instead next time). Rather than use regular food coloring, I went out the my local Whole Foods and spent way to much money on "all natural" dyes that were made from vegetable juice. I used India Tree food coloring.. if it was not super last-minute, I would probably not have purchased these since, I kid you not, they cost about $16.


I will probably never use a different coconut flour cake recipe I was so pleased with this one. Here's the cake (it's a dump truck, not a bus..):