Where have I been?

Anyone who saw a blog post from me yesterday might have been a little surprised. Rightly so. It's been exactly a month since I last did a post. Where have I been all your life? I'm not entirely sure. Doing my thing, apparently. I've had some behind-the-scenes stuff going on - along with a cold and a stomach bug. But, by some miraculous confluence of circumstances, I've found myself with a little bit of time to blog recently. Hooray! I'll be sharing what I can, when I can.

Like right now - I recently cooked a new recipe. It went pretty well!

I made Paleo Sloppy Joes! In general, sloppy joe is basically a Paleo choice as long as you don't put it on a bun. I'm a little skittish about it, though, because I worry that the pre-prepared stuff has a lot of salt in it. Also, if you use a recipe that calls for ketchup, it's probably got some added sugar (in addition to some salt). Eek!

So, I slightly modified this recipe. I used probably half as much onion as called for, chopped just about as small as I could make it by hand. I'm normally reluctant to cook with onions - I had a terrible experience the first time I cut up an onion. I cried and cried, and then wiped my eyes, and then they started burning. It was awful. I recently read two different tips, which I employed quite successfully. One is to avoid cutting into the "root end" of the onion until the very end, because that's where most of the sulfur compounds are located. I didn't use the entire onion, so I didn't cut into the root end at all. Also, I read a tip that suggested that the compounds wouldn't affect your eyes if you had water in your mouth. Sounds weird, but worth a try. I took a drink of water and didn't swallow. I had to do this twice during my cutting adventure, but it was definitely worth it. I was tear free!

I also used Hickory flavored Liquid Smoke - apparently Mesquite would have been the other choice, but I selected almost randomly. My biggest modification was to delete the beef broth from the recipe. Some hardcore Paleo types have homemade beef stock lying around. Not yours truly. I could've bought the canned stuff, though that would have totally negated my lower-salt goal. I was intending to sub water, though I didn't find it needed much. I had my measuring pitcher at the ready filled precisely to the 1/2 cup mark, and used less than half that amount, added in dribs and drabs as the concoction looked too thick.

After letting it meld together for a good 5 minutes, I began preparing a sweet potato to serve it over. With 7 minutes in the microwave and another 10 in the toaster oven, while the sloppy joes simmered on the stovetop, we were in business. Yum!

I'll be back on Monday with the next installment in the story of the slump!