Search Results for: slow cooker

Fiber isn’t the one holy grail for digestive health - in fact, some people have digestive problems from eating too much fiber and feel better when they limit the amount and/or types of fiber in their diet. But for most people, getting a decent amount of fiber every day is good for gut health, easy digestion, and appetite regulation. And it’s generally congruent with our evolutionary history - yes, the Inuit eat very little to no plant food, but the vast majority of hunter-gatherer groups do eat plants, and those plants are largely pretty fibrous.

Paleo doesn’t mean giving up all plant food, and whole grains aren’t the only source of fiber around - in fact, they’re not even the best source of fiber around. To prove it, we’ll take an ordinary sandwich on whole-wheat bread (the healthy kind that “gives you fiber”) and compare it to some low-carb Paleo meals

The Sandwich

Our hypothetical sandwich is a paragon of low-fat, whole-grain tasteless nutrition and includes:

• 2 slices of whole-wheat bread* (30.8 grams total carbs, 4.3 grams of fiber)
• 1 slice of tomato (0.8 grams total carbs, 0.2 grams fiber)
• 2 slices of lettuce (0.4 grams total carbs, 0.3 grams fiber)
• 1 tbsp. mustard (0.9 grams total carbs, 0.6 grams fiber)
• 1 tbsp. lite mayonnaise (1.4 grams carbs, 0 grams fiber)
• 3 slices of deli-sliced turkey breast (0 grams carbs, 0 grams fiber)

*Different brands will be slightly different - this is the USDA average value for commercial whole-wheat bread in general.

The total creation contains 35.3 grams of total carbs and 5.4 grams of fiber (the majority of which comes from the bread), for a total of 29.9 grams net carbs. For the curious, it also contain 17.3 grams of protein and 7.5 grams of fat. By weight (grams), that’s 59% carbs, 29% protein, 12% fat. By calories, it’s 505 carbs, 25% protein, and 24% fat..

It’s worth noting that this isn’t really enough food to keep anyone full for long - it’s only about 300 calories. Most people would eat a bag of chips (a single-serving bag of Lays will run you an extra 21 grams net carbs) or maybe a cookie (one Starbucks chocolate chip cookie will add 72 grams net carbs) with that sandwich to make it into an actually filling meal. But nobody is claiming that chips and cookies add essential fiber to your diet! The claim is that whole grains - in that allegedly healthy bread - add the fiber. And that’s just not the case.

Now it’s time to see how Paleo and low-carb meals can do better! The choices below are full meals that actually have enough food for an adult, with fewer carbs and more fiber than the "healthy" whole-wheat sandwich.

1. Braised cabbage with extra bacon

Say “extra bacon” and everyone comes running! Start with this braised cabbage recipe but toss some extra bacon on a baking sheet as well to crisp up - or supplement the cabbage with any other protein of your choice.

Total carbs (including fiber): 20 grams per serving
Fiber: 8 grams per serving
Net carbs (total carbs - fiber): 12 grams per serving

2. Grilled chicken breast over zucchini noodles with tomato-basil sauce

For the chicken breast, just toss one (or three, or five, depending on the size of your family) on the grill and throw it on top of some zucchini noodles in an easy tomato sauce.

These zucchini noodles don’t require a lot of time and effort to prepare, and they make an excellent base for any 0-carb protein (pork chops, chicken breast, shrimp, or whatever else you like). Assuming your protein topper has no carbs:

Total carbs (including fiber): 23 grams per serving
Fiber: 6.2 grams per serving
Net carbs (total carbs - fiber): 16.8 grams per serving

3. Slow-cooker cabbage casserole

No time to cook after work? Cook while you’re at work - and come home to dinner already done, with this slow-cooker cabbage casserole. It's pretty low in carbs, high in fiber, and most importantly, delicious! It's also a complete meal because, on top of the cabbage, it has ground beef for protein and healthy fat.

Total carbs (including fiber): 19 grams per serving
Fiber: 8 grams per serving
Net carbs (total carbs - fiber): 11 grams per serving

4. Steak enchilada salad

This recipe combines super-easy protein with a super-easy salad bed full of vegetables and healthy fats. It’s packable, meal-preppable, and completely leftover-friendly. And it has significantly more fiber than the whole-wheat sandwich, on top of enough fat and energy to actually keep you full for a while.

Total carbs (including fiber): 21 grams per serving
Fiber: 6 grams per serving
Net carbs (total carbs - fiber): 15 grams per serving

5. Grilled Sea Bass with caramelized Brussels sprouts

Don’t be put off by “caramelized” in the title - this is a pretty simple recipe that works great as a weeknight dinner - and it has more than twice the fiber of the whole-wheat sandwich.

Total carbs (including fiber): 26 grams per serving
Fiber: 11 grams per serving (mostly from the Brussels sprouts)
Net carbs (total carbs - fiber): 15 grams per serving

6. Creamy chicken and bacon pasta

This Paleo “pasta” is made with spaghetti squash, with 6 grams of fiber (or more, if you really pile on the squash and broccoli). Spaghetti squash is super easy to cook and great for leftovers - add some cheese on top if you do dairy, or just leave it as-is for the lactose free.

Total carbs (including fiber): 26 grams per serving
Fiber: 6 grams per serving
Net carbs (total carbs - fiber): 20 grams per serving

Bonus recipe: Banana chocolate muffin bites

OK, this recipe for banana chocolate muffin bites isn’t a meal. It’s a dessert. But as a bonus, even the Paleo dessert has more fiber than the allegedly healthy whole-wheat sandwich.

Total carbs (including fiber): 24 grams per serving
Fiber: 6.55 grams per serving
Net carbs (total carbs - fiber): 17.45 grams per serving

In short: fiber is great but nobody needs whole grains (or any other kind of grains) to get it. Paleo and low-carb meals will do you just fine - and even the desserts aren't slouching when it comes to fiber count.

You already have the basics. You have a cast-iron frying pan, a good knife, a cutting board, a baking pan...but now you’re going keto and maybe you have a bit of room in the cupboard after bringing the cake pans and cookie cutters to the thrift store (don’t give away your cupcake tins, though - they’re great for egg muffins!).

This list isn’t the basic kitchen tools that every home cook should own; it’s about those specialty extras that can make keto cooking tastier and more fun. These make great holiday gifts for the keto-eater in your life - or for yourself, if you feel like having a treat!

(Paleo Leap doesn’t get any money from the makers of any kitchen products and nobody paid for inclusion in this post. This was written exclusively to give you information, not to sell or promote anything!)

Small-Ticket (up to $50)

1. Kitchen scale

Quick, how many carrots in 100 grams of carrots? Blanking on the mental image? That’s where a scale can help. Paleo isn’t generally huge on measuring everything you eat, but if you’re seriously trying for a ketogenic diet, then every carb counts, so weighing out vegetables and other carby foods can be excellent for peace of mind. Measuring exact quantities of higher-carb vegetables can also be a big eye-opener if you’re used to thinking of vegetables as basically “free” food.

Average price: $15-30, depending on how nice of a scale you want.

2. Larding needle

A larding needle is an old-fashioned little tool that lets you add fat to lean cuts of meat to make them tastier and more keto-friendly. It basically works like a regular needle, except instead of a hole for the thread, it has teeth that clamp onto a piece of bacon or other cured meat. This lets you “sew” some bacon right through the middle of your chicken breast and enjoy a tastier, fattier meal.

Average price: shouldn’t be more than $10.

3. Spiralizer

A spiralizer lets you create your own noodles out of zucchini, yellow squash, or other low-carb vegetables - enjoy a big plate of zoodles with your favorite cream sauce and a pile of sausage on top for a low-carb, high-fat comfort meal. Spiralizers range from mini handheld versions to full-service machines that also do other kinds of cutting-related magic (if you ever wanted to make your very own matchstick carrots perfect coleslaw cabbage, you have options!)

Average price: $10-20 for a cheaper handheld version; $20-30 for a slightly more powerful tool.

4. Potato ricer

No, you won’t be eating any potatoes on keto, but a potato ricer is also good for making cauliflower rice (or broccoli rice, if you don’t mind it being green). Potato ricers are a bit like giant garlic presses - you choose how coarse or fine you want your vegetable to come out the other end and just press it through. Use your riced cauliflower as a side dish or for keto pizza crust.

It’s true that you can buy riced cauliflower in the store, but it’s often really expensive. Even with the upfront cost of a ricer, if you eat a lot of cauli rice, you’ll end up ahead after a few months of meals.

Average price: $15-20

Big-Ticket ($50+)

5. Air Fryer

An air fryer basically does the same thing a real fryer does, only with mostly air and minimal oil. Why use air instead of oil, when this is keto and he whole point is to get a lot of fat? Mostly because the air fryer is so easy for home cooks to use, and you can always add fat afterwards by slathering your newly fried foods in mayonnaise, garlic-butter sauce, avocado dip, or any other high-fat dressing of your choice. Use an air fryer to make tasty snacks like chicken wings, crispy veggie chips, and pork rinds - all keto-friendly, no gross processed seed oils.

Average price: $75-150 for an average one; up to $300 for a really deluxe one.

6. Vacuum Sealer

One great way to save time on keto cooking is to make huge batches of food and freeze the extras. You can make a big pot of chili, but not get stuck eating that same chili every night for a week - just put the leftovers in the freezer and haul them out a necessary. A vacuum sealer takes the freezer game to the next level. You use it to suck all the extra air out of a plastic bag - this saves space and also prevents freezer burn. Vacuum seal bags are great for meat (big batches of pork shoulder, chicken thighs, chuck roast, meatballs…), soups, stews, or roasted vegetables.

Average price: $50-100+, plus bags.

7. Sous-Vide Cooker

A sous-vide cooker basically heats up food by circulating warm water around it, instead of heating up the air like an oven. You put your food in a plastic bag, pop it in the sous-vide, and set your desired temperature. Then just walk away and come back when it’s done! The huge advantage to this method is that it’s difficult-to-impossible to overcook meat. You can cook burgers or roasts to a perfect medium-rare temperature (or whatever else you like) without worrying about what rack of the oven they’re on or when to flip them.

The big disadvantage to sous-vide cooking is that there’s no nice crunchy exterior. If you want a tasty char on your burgers, you’ll have to finish them off on the grill, on the stovetop, or under the broiler.

Average price: About $75-100 for a wand that you put in your own pot; closer to $100-150 if you want a full-sized appliance that doesn’t require a separate pot.

8. Indoor grill or grill pan

Grilling is popular with keto eaters for good reason. It’s fast, it’s easy, and it’s delicious! But unfortunately, winter exists, and even in the summer, a lot of us are apartment-dwellers with nowhere to set up a big pile of coals safely.

Enter the indoor grill. It’s not the same as a real barbecue, and you don’t get that smoky grilled flavor of actual fire. But you do get the convenience (and the aesthetic, if you’re into that). Two options for frustrated indoor grill fans:

• Grill pan - this is something that goes over the elements on your stovetop and transforms part of the stove into a grill. Many of them also have a griddle on the opposite side, so you can flip them over to make eggs and bacon. If you’ve ever wanted to saute so many vegetables that you needed 2 square feet of space to do it, a double grill pan is the tool for you!
• Electric grill - a freestanding appliance that provides its own heat. A bit more expensive, but some of them have various tweaks to cut down on the smoke, which can be a plus.

Average price: $25-50 for a grill pan; $50-$150 for a full electric grill

What’s your must-have cooking tool for keto? What do you love that goes beyond the standard pots and pans? Let us know on Facebook or Twitter!

Sure, in principle kids should eat adult food just like adults do...

But have you ever tried switching a picky six-year-old from easy mac straight to liver and broccoli?

Everything tends to go much more easily if you can slide in slowly with some kid-friendly healthy alternatives. So in the spirit of tantrum-free dinners, here’s a week of kid-friendly dinner recipes, with lunchbox extras for five of the days (to make lunches for Monday through Friday).

All the meals include:

1. Animal protein
2. Sweeter or starchier "kid-friendly" side
3. Other vegetable

Depending on your kids and their tastes, you can get more or less insistent that they eat the other vegetable side.

The plan assumes that you’re feeding 2 adults and 2 kids.

Download the shopping list (PDF)

Sunday

For Dinner:

• BBQ Meatballs (tip: if your kids are picky about vegetables, puree some spinach and sneak it into the meatball mixture)
• Spicy sweet potato wedges
• Tomato soup

In Each Lunchbox for Tomorrow, Pack:

• A leftover serving of meatballs.
• Apple slices (sprinkle lemon juice on them so they don’t brown) with a sealed dip container or squeeze package of almond butter.
• Carrot sticks or baby carrots with your favorite dipping sauce.

Monday

For Dinner:

• Oven chicken fajita bake
• Butternut squash fries
• A quick tossed salad with greens, avocado, fresh tomatoes, and the spicy vinaigrette from this recipe.

In Each Lunchbox for Tomorrow, Pack:

• Leftover fajita chicken, shredded and mixed with a little mayonnaise and a splash of apple cider vinegar to make fajita chicken salad.
• Grapes or orange slices (or any other fruit)
• Kale chips

Tuesday

For Dinner:

• Pulled pork stuffed sweet potatoes (if you don’t have a slow-cooker, use this recipe to make the pork)
• Zucchini cakes

When you’re making the recipe, prepare half of it exactly as written. Half the pork and half the sweet potatoes are for lunch tomorrow – for these, do everything else but don’t stuff the potatoes. Instead, mash them with a little butter, cinnamon, and nutmeg.

In Each Lunchbox for Tomorrow, Pack:

• Leftover pulled pork.
• Cinnamon sweet potato mash (which you made with half the sweet
  potatoes from the dinner recipe)
• Bell pepper strips with your favorite dipping sauce.

Wednesday

For Dinner:

• Honey mustard drumsticks
• Roasted ambercup squash (or any squash)
• Roasted cauliflower with bacon

In Each Lunchbox for Tomorrow, Pack:

• Leftover drumsticks.
• A small cup of applesauce.
• Carrot sticks with your favorite dipping sauce.
• A few olives in a baggie.

Thursday

For Dinner:

• Portobello burgers
• Fruit salad
• Zucchini gremolata
• Also throw in a few beets to roast in the oven while you’re cooking (literally just poke some holes in them and throw them in, then take them out when they’re tender – no need for foil).

In Each Lunchbox for Tomorrow, Pack:

• 1 leftover burger patty with your favorite condiments (pickles, mayonnaise, ketchup, etc.) in sealed dipping containers.
• Leftover fruit salad.
• Roasted beets sliced and drizzled with olive oil and vinegar.

Friday

For Dinner:

• Sweet and sour chicken
• Baked Japanese sweet potatoes (these are the purple ones with white insides; you can substitute regular sweet potatoes if you can’t get them)
• Asian stir-fried Brussels sprouts

For Lunch Tomorrow:

• Pat yourself on the back – you’ve reached the weekend!

Saturday

For Dinner:

• Beanless chili
• Sweet potato bacon cakes
• Ratatouille stuffed zucchini

For Dessert:

• Banana ice cream!

“What should my macros look like on Paleo?” - it’s a common question and it’s sometimes frustrating to hear that there really is no one “right” answer. As far as anyone can tell, Paleolithic hunter-gatherer diets probably had a wide range of different macronutrient ratios, depending on the season and the geographic location of the tribe. That’s certainly how it works with modern hunter-gatherer groups - groups closer to the equator generally tend to eat more carbs, while groups closer to the poles generally tend to eat fewer carbs.

But Paleo isn’t even really about imitating hunter-gatherers, ancient or modern; it’s about how humans can eat to be healthy and strong. And the research here also backs up the “different strokes for different folks” theory of macros. Different people have hugely varying “optimal” macro ratios, and some lucky people who are relatively healthy can adjust to a huge range of equally acceptable options.

But with all that said, there are a few big macronutrient patterns that tend to emerge within the Paleo/keto/ancestral health community because they work well for a lot of people and offer some kind of structure for people just starting out. For example, a lot of people adapt Paleo food choices to a ketogenic (keto) macronutrient pattern. But there are a lot of Paleo-friendly macro choices that aren’t anywhere near keto. Paleo is a way of thinking about food that could theoretically be adapted to a wide range of macros, while keto is a specific set of macronutrient ranges - you can combine the two, but you can also do Paleo in a non-keto way.

Here’s a look at 5 keto and Paleo macronutrient ratio plans that might work for you - try them, modify them, or throw them out the window and do your own thing!

1. Extreme low-carb/carnivore

Protein: 20-40% (depends on whether you’re eating lean or fatty meat)
Carbs: ~1% (you will get trace amounts of carbs from eggs, dairy if you eat dairy, etc., but the total amount is extremely low)
Fat: 60+%

This is the most extreme approach to a nearly 0-carb diet you can get - basically the concept is to eat only meat, no plants, and particularly no plant foods that contain any amount of carbohydrate. Salt is allowed and encouraged. Some people modify it a bit with eggs, dairy, and/or or spices.

This is a very extreme approach and it’s worth noting that there’s almost no research on the long-term efficacy or safety of carnivore diets - and nothing on long-term consumption by overweight people in the 21st century looking to drop a few pants sizes. One of the best long-term accounts we have is the notes taken by Vilhjálmur Stefansson back in the early 1900s - his report on the Inuit diet is interesting and cool but not really a great scientific foundation by modern standards. There are a lot of unanswered questions here about nutritional deficiencies, especially if you're not eating a lot of organ meats.

The carnivore diet is probably best for people who want to try an interesting new diet experiment and really like meat but aren’t afraid to quit and try something else if it doesn’t work. If you want something low-carb but better-researched and less extreme, you could always try...

2. Basic keto

Protein: ~15%
Carbs: <5% (under 20 grams net carbs, not counting fiber)
Fat: 80+%

This is how most people do keto - enough wiggle room in the carb count that you can at least have a salad and some cauliflower pizza crust, but not enough wiggle room to actually go out of ketosis. Unlike the carnivore plan, the goal of garden-variety isn’t to eat only meat and avoid plant foods; the goal is to get a specific set of macros (high fat, very low carbs).

This plan has more fat and less protein than the pure carnivore plan, and likely less meat: even fatty meat isn't all that fatty by keto standards (for example, a nice juicy grilled T-bone is a whopping 38% protein, although you can lower that percentage rapidly by adding butter on top). With keto, you don’t necessarily eat a whole pile of T-bones; it’s more like half a T-bone with a lot of butter and some avocado and spinach salad.

Sample meals

• Chorizo and spinach omelette - 16% protein, 5% carbs (7 grams), 79% fat
• Baked salmon with avocado salsa - 29% protein, 3% carbs (6 grams), 68% fat
• Salt and pepper pork belly - 7% protein, 2% carbs (6 grams), 91% fat

If that's still a bit too much fat for you, or if you like really big salads with more roughage, what about...

3. Low-carb, not quite keto (aka keto with more vegetables)

Protein: 15-30%
Carbs: 10-15% (typically under 75-ish grams of carbs in total)
Fat: 55-75%

This type of macro scheme works well for people who want to avoid dense starchy sources of carbs (potatoes, rice, bananas) to keep their blood sugar under control, but who  still eat more fresh vegetables than they can fit into a traditional keto plan. If you’re not aiming for keto specifically, you also have way more flexibility with protein - ramping up the protein content can help prevent hunger, and maintain muscle mass during weight loss.

Sample recipes

• Tex-Mex Stuffed Peppers - 32% protein, 17% carbs (17 grams), 51% fat
• Slow-cooker Cuban-style beef - 34% protein, 11% carbs (19 grams), 55% fat

4. Moderate-carb Paleo

Protein: 20-30%
Carbs: 15-30% (up to 150-ish grams of carbs)
Fat: 40-65%

On this type of plan, you get to eat not just low-carb vegetables but also more carb-dense foods like potatoes (sweet or white), bananas, plantains, and dried fruit. A whole lot of people just feel better eating like this, particularly people who do a lot of sports, people with active jobs, pregnant women, and children and teenagers.

This is also a good starter plan for people new to Paleo who are worried about the “low-carb flu.” You almost certainly won’t have that problem on this type of plan.

Sample recipes

• Paleo sausage quiche - 22% protein, 24% carbs (19 grams), 54% fat. Serve with roasted delicata squash (adds 12 grams of carbs and a bit of extra fat) as a side.
• Creole jambalaya - 30% protein, 18% carbs (20 grams), 52% fat. Serve with garlic green beans (adds 13 grams of carbs and a bit of extra fat) or your other favorite greens.

5. Carb cycling

Protein: 20-30%
Carbs: Depends based on the day/time
Fat: Varies based on carb level

This is a little different from the other types of plans because it adds a timing dimension. The goal isn’t just to eat X amount of protein, fat, and carbs in a day; the goal is to eat those nutrients at certain times and not at others.

This plan is good for people who want the benefits of low-carb eating most of the time but struggle with lack of energy during workouts or recovery from hard workouts. Timing carbs just around your workout can get you over that hump but still give you the benefit of low-carb eating for most of the day.

This type of plan is also good for people who like periodic planned “cheat” meals for their own mental health. If a big carby dinner on Saturday night keeps you on the straight and narrow the rest of the time, then it can be a great psychological tool for long-term consistency.

Sample recipes (low-carb phase)

• Salmon with lemon-butter capers - 29% protein, 2% carbs (4 grams), 68% fat
• Balsamic chicken salad - 18% protein, 11% carbs (15 grams), 71% fat

Sample recipes (high-carb phase) - just add any of these to your other food whenever you need more carbs

• Grilled zesty sweet potatoes - 33 extra grams of carbs
• Hasselback potatoes with Paleo sour cream - 66 extra grams of carbs
• Curried purple sweet potatoes - 22 extra grams of carbs

Pick what works for you.

Paleo really isn’t about any single macronutrient ratio - a ketogenic Paleo diet is definitely one way to go, but you don’t have to do keto to be Paleo. The five macro schemes above are five common plans that work well for a lot of people: if you’re new and don’t know how to start, you could do a lot worse than picking one of those, giving it a college try, and tweaking it to make it perfect for you.

If you’re a bit lost with the low-carb life and don’t know where to start, here’s a 101 guide to the produce section. It doesn’t cover every single low-carb vegetable (you’d be here all day and probably forget most of them by the end of the list) but it does hit 5 basic staples that every low-carber should at least try. Start out with these and you’ll always have something in the fridge that you can throw together as a side dish or a quick salad.

1. Cauliflower, the amazing rice replacer

Use cauliflower as an easy low-carb substitute for all kinds of white starchy foods (potatoes, rice, pizza crust…). You can even buy it pre-grated into rice-sized grains now, no elbow grease required! It’s also tasty just tossed in the oven to roast with some olive oil and black pepper.

Carb count: Per 1 cup chopped raw cauliflower: 3.2 grams net carbs (5.3 grams total - 2.1 grams of fiber = 3.2 grams net)

Nutritional highlights: cauliflower is high in vitamin C and some B vitamins. It’s also rich in antioxidants, especially if you steam it or stir-fry it instead of boiling it to death. On the other hand, cauliflower can be hard to digest for some people because it’s high in FODMAPs, so if you have a really sensitive stomach, it might not be for you.

Recipe inspiration:

• Cauliflower shepherd’s pie
• Keto cauliflower pizza
• Keto creamy mashed cauliflower

Substitutes: Broccoli or Brussels sprouts for something quick to roast; nut flours for Paleo/keto baking.

2. Spinach, the speed demon side

Spinach is incredibly easy and fast to cook, goes with almost everything, and makes a perfect delivery vehicle for butter. Or eat it raw as a more nutritious lettuce substitute in salads.

You can also buy bricks of frozen spinach and just throw them in a pot of soup or chili for some extra nutrition - it looks like a lot of spinach, but it really almost vanishes in the pot.

Carb count: Per 1 cup raw spinach: 0.39 grams of net carbs (1.09 grams total carbs - 0.7 grams of fiber = 0.39 grams net)

Nutritional highlights: Spinach is full of essential minerals, like magnesium and copper. It’s also high in folate and other B vitamins (notably B2 and B6) and even some iron (although the iron isn’t very easy to absorb, so you’re still better off eating meat). It’s pretty low in FODMAPs, so it should be fine for people with IBS or FODMAPs sensitivity.

Like other intensely green vegetables, spinach is also rich in chlorophyll. Chlorophyll is how the plant makes energy out of sunshine, but it’s also a powerful antioxidant. No need for an expensive greens supplement when you could just eat some leaves!

Recipe inspiration:

• Keto smoked salmon salad with spinach and mushrooms
• Creamy mushroom and spinach chicken
• Chorizo and spinach omelette
• Keto ham and spinach egg cups

Substitutes: lettuce for eating in salads; beet greens, kale, or chard for cooking.

3. Cabbage, the savior of grocery budgets

Cabbage is incredibly easy on the food budget. If you shop sales, you can get a big head for 40-50 cents/lb and sometimes even cheaper in the late fall when it’s in season. For budget-conscious shoppers, cabbage is definitely the vegetable to stock up on.

Carb count:Per 1 cup raw cabbage: 2.96 grams net carbs (5.16 grams total carbs - 2.2 grams of fiber = 2.96 grams net)

Nutritional highlights: Cabbage gives you all the benefits of other cruciferous vegetables - broccoli, cauliflower, kale, and the better-known members of the “superfood” crowd - at a budget price. It’s particularly full of vitamins K and C, plus anthocyanins, glucosinolates, and other antioxidants. Unfortunately, it’s also high in FODMAPs, so this would be another one to avoid if you’re sensitive to them.

Recipe inspiration:

• Keto slow-cooker cabbage casserole
• Simple keto coleslaw
• Cabbage-wrapped salmon (leave out the onions and peppers to reduce carbs if necessary).
• Keto egg roll in a bowl

Substitutes: Celery or cucumbers for something crunchy to eat cold. If you're looking for more budget-savers, frozen vegetables are typically just as nutritious as fresh (since they're picked at peak ripeness, so they lose nothing in travel/sitting in the store) and typically cheaper.

4. Zucchini, the noodlemaker

Zucchini is one of the best vegetable choices for making low-carb noodles (“zoodles”). Cauliflower might be great for other recipe replacements, but it’s pretty hard to make satisfactory noodles out of a cauliflower - zucchini is a little bendier and generally more suited to spiralizing. You can even buy it pre-noodled now, which is convenient for everyone on the run.

Carb count:Per 1 cup raw zucchini: 2.66 grams net carbs (3.86 total - 1.2 grams of fiber = 2.66 grams net)

For anyone wondering, zucchini is lower in carbs than spaghetti squash (the other vegetable typically used in Paleo noodles). 1 cup of raw spaghetti squash has about 5.5 grams of net carbs, compared to about 2.7 in raw zucchini. Or if you take them cooked, you’ll get just under 8 grams of net carbs in a cup of spaghetti squash, compared to about 3 in a cup of zucchini.

Nutritional highlights: One nutritional highlight of zucchini is everything it doesn’t have. Zucchini is OK for basically anyone to eat. Keto? Autoimmune protocol? FODMAPs sensitivity? No problem!

Recipe inspiration:

• Zucchini fries
• Keto zucchini noodles with tomato-basil sauce
• Lemon chicken kebabs with grilled zucchinis
• Zucchini gremolata
• Garlic shrimp with zucchini noodles

Substitutes: yellow squash (they’re basically the same thing) or spaghetti squash for a slightly higher-carb noodle substitute.

5. Avocado, the high-fat, low-carb fruit

Avocado is the only item on this list that’s technically a fruit and not a vegetable. In fact, it’s one of the few fruits with a low enough carb count that you can actually eat it on keto (read more about fruit on keto here).

Carb count: 3.65 grams net carbs (17.15 grams total carbs - 13.5 grams fiber = 3.65 grams net)

Nutritional highlights: The big selling point for avocados, other than the fact that they're delicious, is the fat. Avocados are packed with monounsaturated fat, the same kind found in olive oil, making it absolutely perfect for low-carb, high-fat diets. Particularly for people who don’t like eating a ton of butter or other animal fats, an avocado here and there is a great way to up the fat content in your diet.

Avocados are also a great source of vitamin E (especially important if you don’t eat a lot of nuts). Here's a more in-depth look at all their nutritional benefits.

Recipe inspiration:

• Grilled lamb burgers with avocado sauce
• Keto avocado egg salad
• Keto baked salmon with avocado salsa
• Avocado vegetable dip

What’s in your fridge?

What’s your favorite low-carb pick from the produce section? Let us know on Facebook or Twitter!

When you first start with keto, the cooking can be a challenge. What does a typical keto day look like? What do you make for breakfast without carbs? What about work lunches? What about kids? What if you have to cook for your non-keto family on top of it all?

Think of this as part meal plan, part guide to making your own meal plans, and part instruction manual for modifying keto recipes for your specific needs.

The plan is written for an imaginary keto beginner, Emma. Emma works Monday-Friday and needs to pack a lunch. She’s not a vegetarian and has no major food allergies. She eats some dairy and she’s trying to stay below 50 grams net carbs per day.

Below are three days of meals, modified for three different scenarios:

• Emma lives alone and is cooking only for herself - instructions for bulk meal prep, cooking ahead, and halving recipes to be manageable for one person.
• Emma lives with her husband and 2 kids, and they’re all eating keto - instructions for cooking keto for a crowd.
• Emma lives with her husband and 2 kids, and Emma is the only one eating keto - instructions for satisfying everyone without cooking two separate meals because nobody has time for that.

Weekday 1

 

 

Protein: 142g / 29%

 

Fat: 135g / 63%

 

Carbs: 40g / 8%

 

Net Carbs: 26.5g

Values are per portion. These are for information only & are not meant to be exact calculations.

Breakfast

Protein/Fat: Egg frittata muffins

Portion and prep instructions:

Lunch

Protein/Fat: Stuffed peppers (make the night before if you need them to go)

Portion and prep instructions:

Dinner

Protein/Fat: Baked salmon with avocado salsa

Keto Side: Big tossed salad with spinach, red onions, walnuts and lots of delicious olive oil.

Portion and prep instructions:

Weekday 2

 

 

Protein: 131g / 25%

 

Fat: 160g / 69%

 

Carbs: 30g / 6%

 

Net Carbs: 19g

Values are per portion. These are for information only & are not meant to be exact calculations.

Breakfast

Protein/Fat: Breakfast pork sausages

Keto side: Fried mushrooms and onions

Portion and prep instructions:

Lunch

Protein/Fat: Spicy bacon-wrapped meatballs (made with 75/25 ground beef, without the optional honey)

Keto side: roasted cauliflower.

Portion and prep instructions:

Dinner

Protein/Fat: Roasted bone-in chicken thighs - for more fat and extra-crispy skin, drizzle the thighs in schmaltz (chicken fat), duck fat, or butter before roasting.

Keto side: Roasted or pan-fried zucchini with lots of cooking fat (fat of your choice; ghee or butter would be delicious).

Portion and prep instructions:

Weekend Day

 

 

Protein: 122g / 20%

 

Fat: 193.5g / 71%

 

Carbs: 53g / 9%

 

Net Carbs: 31g

Values are per portion. These are for information only & are not meant to be exact calculations.

Breakfast

Protein/Fat: Eggs fried in butter or coconut oil with salt and pepper

Keto side: Wilted spinach and avocado slices

Portion and prep instructions:

Lunch

Protein/Fat: Coconut curry shrimp with cauliflower rice

Keto side: If you want even more vegetables besides the cauliflower rice, you could roast some tomatoes, broccoli, or anything else that sounds good: use a generous amount of fat and the same spices in the coconut curry shrimp recipe.

Tip: to save time, you can buy fresh or frozen bags of pre-riced cauliflower.

Portion and prep instructions:

Dinner

Protein/Fat: Slow-cooker fennel and rosemary pork shoulder

Keto side: Baked bacon and cabbage

Portion and prep instructions:

Dessert

Chocolate and almond butter fat bombs

What's your favorite way to modify keto recipes? Got a great easy bulk meal to prep for keto eaters living alone? Let us know on Facebook or Twitter!

One of the big claims of conventional nutrition advice is that whole grains are "superfoods" incredibly high in various nutrients - just look at all the fiber and B vitamins and antioxidants! But it’s easy to come up with Paleo meals that are even better than grain-based meals - without the antinutrients and other bad stuff found in grains.

To prove it, here's a look at 5 sample meals: an easy workday dinner, a hearty salad, an office lunch, a soup recipe, and a breakfast. For each meal, there’s a whole-grain-heavy alternative, plus a Paleo option with equal or better...

• Fiber
• Total B vitamins (B1/Thiamin, B2/Riboflavin, B3/Niacin, B5/Pantothenic Acid, B6/Pyridoxine, and B9/Folate.). B12 isn't included because this is about beating whole grain and B12 isn't found in whole grains, only in animal foods.
• Antioxidants

Technical notes, for the curious (skip this part if you just want the numbers):

• B vitamins are measured in RDA percentages because they make it easy to see roughly whether a food is high or low in a given nutrient, not because it’s essential to get exactly 100% of everything every day.
• There are so many different antioxidants in plants that a direct comparison of each specific one would take way too long, and that would be silly anyway since micromanaging specific antioxidants isn't a great use of your time. Instead, we just list antioxidant-rich foods in each meal.
• Only nutrients relevant to whole grains are considered. For example, nobody is touting whole-wheat pasta as a great source of calcium, so calcium isn’t measured in the nutritional comparisons (but if you’re worried about that, you can look up 5 dairy-free meals with more calcium than a yogurt).
• Nutrition information taken from the USDA nutrient database

1. Easy Workday Dinner

Need something quick for dinner? A big pile of brown rice with some protein and vegetables is a super healthy choice...until you put it next to a Paleo dinner! Take a look:

• Whole-grain meal: 1.5 cups of cooked brown rice, 1 pork chop, and 1 cup of cooked spinach
• Paleo meal: Salmon (5 oz) with fried spinach and onions (1 cup spinach + 1 medium onion) and and 1 baked potato (yes, white potatoes are OK on Paleo)

Antioxidant explanation: salmon is rich in the antioxidant mineral selenium; spinach and onions are rich in antioxidants like carotenoids and quercetin.

Unless you’re seriously deficient in thiamin, the Paleo meal is clearly the more nutritious choice.

2. Hearty Salad

If you ask most recipe sites, “grain salad” is apparently a legitimate category of recipe, even though some of them don’t even seem to include anything green. So how do they stack up to a salad made of actual vegetables?

For a comprehensive comparison, there are two whole-grain meals here. One is a traditional pasta salad that you might see at any potluck; the other is a healthified organic quinoa salad that wouldn't be out of place at a vegan health food convention:

• Whole-grain meal 1: Pasta salad (Pasta salad recipes obviously vary, but for calculating this nutritional info, 1 cup of salad = .5 cup of cooked whole-wheat pasta + .25 cup cherry tomatoes + .25 cup red pepper slices)
• Whole-grain meal 2: Quinoa salad (1 cup of salad = .5 cups cooked quinoa, .25 cups raw cucumber, and .25 cups tomato chunks)
• Paleo meal: Roasted Vegetable Salad (1 cup of salad = .2 cups beets + 0.2 cups butternut squash + 0.4 cups Brussels sprouts + 0.15 cups sweet potato + a sprinkling of pecans)

Here are the nutrition facts for 1 cup of each salad:

Antioxidant explanation: Beets, butternut squash, and sweet potatoes are all rich in antioxidants. For example, beets get their color from betalains, which are highly anti-inflammatory.

No matter whether you’re looking at the classic pasta option or the trendier quinoa take on “grain salad,” making a hearty Paleo salad out of root vegetables still nets you a more nutritious meal.

3. Office Lunch

Need to grab something fast for lunch? The classic office lunch by conventional standards is a sandwich, but Paleo leftovers blow that out of the water for nutrient content. Compare…

• Whole-grain meal: Sliced roast beef (2 deli slices) sandwich on whole-grain bread with pickles (3 dill slices), mustard (1 tbsp), mayo (1 tbsp), and cheese (2 slices provolone)
• Paleo meal: Leftover Rosemary and onion roast chicken (1 thigh with a few of the onions) and leftover broccoli and mushrooms (¼ of the recipe)

Antioxidant explanation: Broccoli is rich in all kinds of antioxidants, including flavonoids and vitamin C.

And when it comes to ease of packing, leftovers from dinner might also beat making a sandwich from scratch. Pretty much a win for the Paleo team here.

4. Hearty Comforting Soup

If you’ve ever tried to buy canned soup at a grocery store, you know how many soups put rice and barley and noodles in their recipes. Supposedly, all those “heart-healthy whole grains” make them more nutritious, but compare that to a Paleo choice:

• Whole-grain meal: Vegetable barley soup (1.5 cups, based on the USDA database entry for a generic/typical recipe)
• Paleo meal: Slow-Cooker Butternut Squash and Apple Soup (¼ recipe)

Antioxidant explanation: Among other antioxidants, the rich orange color of this soup comes from carotenoids in the squash and the sweet potato.

The fall vegetables in the Paleo soup pack a serious nutritional punch; nutritionally speaking, this soup is probably a better choice than the vegetable barley.

5. Breakfast

The first meal of the day comes last on the list, featuring a whole-grain English muffin vs. a tasty omelet:

• Whole-grain meal: whole-grain English muffin with honey (1 tbsp) and peanut butter (2 tbsp)
• Paleo meal: Omelet (3 eggs, ½ onion, ½ red pepper, ¼ cup of ham) with half an avocado

Antioxidant explanation: avocado is incredibly rich in antioxidants, but did you know that eggs also have significant antioxidant activity? It’s all in the yolk: antioxidants are the same chemicals that give the yolk its golden-yellow color.

Whole Grains Aren't Necessary for a Balanced Diet!

Whole grains do have some nutritional content - this isn’t Wonderbread we’re talking about here. But it’s very simple to put together Paleo meals that match or beat grain-based meals in fiber, B vitamin, and antioxidant content. So now you have proof with specific numbers and even some recipes to go with them: nobody needs grains to get all the nutrition they need.

"I'll start packing my lunches:" everyone says it with such great intentions, but so many people can't keep it up longer than a week or two. It takes too long. It makes too many dirty dishes. Pack lunches are boring and flavorless. Or an emergency happens and they end up getting fast food and it all goes downhill from there.

Don't let that be you! Here are 6 tips to make packing lunch less tedious, less time-consuming, and more delicious.

1. Minimize the Dishes

Between the lunch-cooking dishes and the lunch-transporting dishes, packing lunch can add up to a huge stack of pots and tupperware in the sink. And all that dish-washing time can be a huge deterrent to actually sticking with your plan to pack healthy lunches. It’s really annoying to feel like you’re spending your whole life washing out lunchboxes!

Some tips:

• If you usually use multiple containers per lunch, try a single container with different compartments.
• Leave oil and vinegar for salad dressings at the office. Packing a separate container of dressing with your salad leaves you with one extra container to wash out and deal with. If you have a fridge, you can also bring other long-lasting condiments or extras.
• Cut down on the lunch-cooking by cooking in bulk (more on this below). There’s no need to get whole set of pans dirty every day just for your lunch.
• Try packing more foods that don’t create any extra dishes. For example, canned fish (just recycle the can at work) or whole fruit (instead of cutting up apple slices or other fruit, just bring the apple).

2. Bulk Cooking is your Friend

There’s no way around this: home cooking takes longer than

Lean Cuisine. There’s no amazing magic trick to change that. (This is why people are willing to pay through the nose for pre-packaged food.) But bulk cooking can help cut way down that time commitment.

Three alternatives:

• Cook double at dinner and pack up the leftovers right away for lunch the next day.
• Use a slow-cooker to make a big pot of chili or stew over the weekend. Pack it all up for the week and you’re done.
• Roast a ton of vegetables (spaghetti squash, broccoli, beets, etc.) and a big chunk of animal protein (whole chicken, pork shoulder, beef roast). Add sauce(s)/seasoning(s) of your choice. Divide and pack.

A few more recipe ideas for bulk cooking:

• Slow-cooker beef and onion stew
• Chicken meatballs with marinara sauce
• Simple herb-seasoned carrots
• Slow-cooker herb and garlic roast beef
• Italian-style vegetable medley

3. Use Fat and Seasonings. Liberally!

Fat gives things flavor and different sauces can help spice up bulk recipes where you’re eating the same main protein/vegetable for a week.

For fat, use olive oil on your salads, butter on your vegetables, mayonnaise on cold chicken... This is doubly important if you’re reheating things in an office microwave. Microwaves do nothing for the texture or flavor of your food and they have some kind of secret black magic that lets them make some food dry and tough while also making other food soggy and mushy. Don't make it worse than it has to be! (Speaking of microwaves: they also don’t cause cancer/autism/obesity/alien mind control - they might not make the tastiest of food, but they're not dangerous).

You can also use seasonings to spice up bulk recipes if you get bored of eating the same recipe every day for a week. All it takes is a bulk recipe that can be easily changed with different dressings or additions. For example, cook chicken breasts for salad in bulk, but make one salad with cranberries and almonds over kale and another with raisins and walnuts over spinach. Some other sauce/seasoning ideas:

• Cranberry sauce
• Nut butters and nut butter-based salad dressings (like this one)
• Creamy coconut milk sauces (like this one)
• Pesto
• Mustard BBQ sauce
• Sriracha

4. Don’t get Fooled by "Free"

Another barrier to packing lunch is the psychological lure of free food that's already there. Office pizza. Catered lunch (if you’re lucky enough to get it). Random baked goods that people being in because it’s a day that ends in y. Candy bowls.

Free office food seems like a great combination of frugality and convenience, but in the long term, unhealthy food has a cost. Being sick is expensive. If something makes your health worse, then it isn’t free, even if you don’t exchange any money for it at the time you eat it.

It’s perfectly fine to cook your own lunch even if there’s pizza for the office. If you have a lunch meeting with absolutely no Paleo options, plan ahead and bring a snack for before and after. Obviously, there are workplaces where this is more difficult than others, but if you don’t make a big deal out of your dietary choices, it’s almost always possible to make it work. Unless you work as a professional Nutella taster, you shouldn’t have to choose between Paleo and your job.

5. Have a Back-Up

Even the most prepared and dedicated of Paleo eaters have emergencies sometimes. Be prepared for them so they don’t throw you off your game:

• Scope out the available restaurants near your office so you have a Paleo-friendly backup plan. Even 7-11 sells plain hard-boiled eggs; there’s almost always something that can do in a pinch.
• 
• Keep a couple of emergency snacks (jerky, Paleo-friendly bars, nuts, etc.) at your desk in case you get unexpectedly hungry. If you’re a boredom eater, pick something tasty enough that you don’t mind eating it when you’re actually hungry, but not so tasty that you’re sitting there thinking about it all day. Canned meat is usually good for this, and you can get cans of chicken breast if eating tuna in the office isn’t an option.

6. Consider an Alternate Eating Schedule

There’s no evolutionary reason why people need to eat in the morning, around noon, and in the early evening. That’s just a cultural habit. Especially if you work earlier or later than 9-5, it can make perfect sense to not eat "lunch" in the traditional sense.

You could have a big breakfast, a small snack in the afternoon (maybe a couple hard-boiled eggs, something that’s really easy to pack and transport), and a big dinner. That solves a lot of lunch-cooking and lunch-packing problems automatically.

Some people also like to just fast until dinner (intermittent fasting). It’s not for everyone, but it’s also not dangerous at all if it agrees with you. Your metabolism absolutely won’t come stuttering to a halt because you didn’t eat for a few hours: that’s a complete myth and you can learn about it here.

Alternate eating schedules don't work for everyone, but some people find them much easier to keep up with.

What do you do to make packing office lunches easier? Let us know on Facebook or Twitter!

If you’re trying to save on the grocery bill, a great habit is to look through the receipt afterwards and circle everything that (a) cost over $5, or (b) cost way more than you think it should have. If you’re trying to cut back, these items will get you the most savings. Often, it’s just a few high-cost items driving up the grocery bill.

Sure, some of the expensive stuff is necessary. Most meat purchases will be over $5, and if you’re buying high-quality meat, it’s worth paying for. But sometimes there are easy ways to crack down on those high-cost groceries. Here’s a list of 6 pricey items that might be eating through your budget, and tips for cheaper substitutes.

1. Bacon: Try the Ends and Pieces

Bacon ends and pieces are exactly the same meat, but instead of being in regular strips, they’re in odd-shaped bits.

If you’re planning on making bacon-wrapped something, then that won’t do. But if you just want bacon flavor (say…in some Paleo pasta or a quiche), ends and pieces will do you just fine. You were going to cut it up anyway! It’s actually more convenient to get it pre-cut-up, and it saves a lot of money. The ends and pieces are often half the price of “ordinary” bacon.

You can usually find the ends and pieces off to the side of the regular bacon, or sometimes with the ham hocks and neckbones and other “odd bits.”

2. Red Meat: Try Heart Instead of Roasts.

They taste the same. Heart tastes exactly like a roast, and it mostly cooks up like a roast, but it’s often several dollars less per pound because people think it's "icky." Especially if you have a big family, you can save a lot of money by snapping it up!

Here’s some more about the nutritional benefits and cooking with heart, with some easy recipes that you can use if you don’t already have one.

Extra tip: you can also swap out chicken for chicken hearts. Chicken hearts are around meatball size, so they’re not an exact substitute for something like a breast. But they work just fine in soup or stir-fries.

3. Broth: Try DIY Instead of Store-Bought.

Chicken broth from the store can run up the bill fast, especially if it’s organic. But if you ever eat chicken, you might be throwing out a perfectly free source of chicken broth: the bones.

When you eat bone-in chicken, save the bones, wingtips, necks and backs…all the gristly bits (throw them in the freezer if you don’t have a lot at once). Then throw them in a slow-cooker, add water, and turn it on overnight. In the morning, you’ll have chicken broth from the bones you would have thrown out otherwise. Even if you need to buy a slow-cooker for this, it’ll pay for itself in just a few batches of broth.

If you’re worried about getting caught in a time crunch, keep one or two boxes of the store-bought stuff in the pantry for emergencies.

Bonus tip: if you never have bones because you always buy boneless, skinless chicken breasts, swap out those for thighs, wings, and whole chickens. Those cuts are cheaper per pound, and they actually have a flavor!

4. Bars and Jerky: Try Summer Sausage Instead.

Snacks and to-go food can really add to the grocery bill, and two of the worst offenders are bars and jerky.

Bars and jerky aren’t “bad.” There’s a time and a place for Paleo recreations of PowerBars, and we went over some of the best for Paleo Leap members here (sign up here if you haven’t already!). And jerky is a convenient, high-protein, low-sugar snack that doesn’t have any of the problems with eating nuts or dried fruit.

But there’s one big problem with bars and jerky: the price tag. For everyday eating, they’re really expensive.

A cheaper solution is summer sausage (that’s the hard, shelf-stable sausage you’ll see out at room temperature). Per pound, it’s ¼ or ⅓ the price of jerky, with the same nutritional bragging rights as a meat-based, low-carb snack full of healthy fats. If you leave it in its original package, it usually lasts several weeks at room temperature with no issues. Even if you take it out, it’ll last the better part of a day unrefrigerated or longer if it’s cool.

5. Berries: Try Frozen Instead of Fresh.

Even people who rarely eat fruit sometimes go for berries – they’re low in sugar and high in antioxidants, and definitely very tasty. But they can also bump up the grocery tab, especially in the off-season. Frozen berries are a more affordable alternative.

There’s usually no difference in nutritional quality between fresh and frozen. And when there is, it’s usually in favor of the frozen berries, since they were picked at the peak of their ripeness instead of being picked unripe and fridge-trucked across the continent.

Frozen berries are sturdier and easier to transport, so they cost less, and the cost savings get passed on to you. And they’re delicious with a drizzle of coconut milk on top.

Extra tip: if you often have the problem of buying vegetables that rot in your fridge, frozen vegetables might also be a money-saving option for you.

6. Nuts and Spices: Try Bulk Foods Instead of Packaged.

Bulk spices are so much cheaper that you can actually save money buying in bulk at Whole Foods compared to buying in a package at a regular store. Where else can you actually save money by going to Whole Foods? That shouldn’t even be possible! It disobeys the laws of the grocery-store universe! But it’s true.

Other foods where you can save a ton of money by buying in bulk include…

• Nuts
• Nut flours or coconut flour
• White rice (if you eat it)
• Dried fruit

“OK,” you say, “but who has time to go to a special bulk-food store on top of all the regular grocery shopping? I thought this Paleo thing wasn’t supposed to eat up my life.” Two solutions

• Buy in bulk…online. It’s even cheaper than a physical store, and you don’t have to leave the house.
• Make a big trip every 1-2 months. Most bulk items are nonperishable. Nuts and spices and rice will keep for ages. You don’t have to go every week; just keep a running list and head out for occasional bulk shopping trips.

Got a problem food we didn't cover? Or have you ever found a simple grocery-store swap that saved a lot of money? Let us know on Facebook or Twitter!

When it comes to flexible grocery staples, we all know ground beef and eggs and onions and coconut milk. All those foods really do live up to their reputation as versatile staples that go well with almost anything, and you can do dozens of things with every one of them. But here are 6 lesser-known foods you might want to consider for their power to become anything you like.

1. Unsweetened Coconut Flakes

Coconut flakes can be crunchy or chewy, and work in sweet or savory recipes. They’re good in everything from breaded chicken tenders to Paleo cookies, and they’re particularly noteworthy for adding some nut-free crunch to just about anything.

Recipe inspiration:

• Crispy Coconut Shrimp with Mango Sauce (use the shredded coconut to make a crispy crunch on these shrimp)
• Banana Raisin Cookies (coconut can be chewy as well as crunchy - here it gives you the traditional oatmeal texture with no grains required)
• Coconut Macaroons with Lemon Curd (a little involved, but so worth it)

2. Cauliflower

Cauliflower is white and reasonably mild-tasting, which makes it a Paleo stand-in for all kinds of other white and mild-tasting foods that might not be the very healthiest foods around (pizza crust? Bagels? Rice? You got it).

Recipe inspiration:

• 8 creative cauliflower substitutions for unhealthy foods (from bagels to pizza crust, cauliflower is a good sub for all your bland-white-carb needs)
• Beef and Winter Vegetable Soup (use the cauliflower to add a rice-like texture to the soup)
• Cauliflower Chowder (the cauliflower gives you that thick, creamy texture)

3. Ground Not-Beef

Ground beef is a Paleo staple because you can make it into anything, but what about all the other ground meat? Ground chicken or pork can add something new to your recipes. Sick of chili? What about white chili? Done with meatballs? What about an Asian-inspired version with pork instead of beef? Ground anything-but-beef is an easy way to dramatically increase your recipe possibilities and keep the old favorites interesting.

Recipe inspiration:

• Buffalo Chicken Meatballs (or try them with turkey)
• Beef-Stuffed Butternut Squash (would also be great with ground pork for a change)
• Greek-Style Meatballs (the recipe calls for lamb, but these would also be good with chicken or turkey)

4. Cocoa Powder

It’s not everyone’s first thought when it comes to versatility, but if you know how to use it, cocoa powder is actually good for all kinds of recipes, including the savory ones. Throw it into chili or a steak rub to add a deep, warm flavor (and no, your steak won’t taste like dessert). Or keep it on hand so you can always make an instant Paleo treat.

Recipe inspiration:

• Chocolate-Coconut Bites (completely dairy-free; it’s basically an easy way to make your own, high-fat/low-carb chocolate)
• Frozen Chocolate Smoothie (another quick and easy treat, or try coconut milk hot chocolate for the warm version)
• Grilled Chicken with Lime Butter (use chocolate to give this recipe an extra base of flavor)

5. Avocados

Avocados are another grocery staple that easily go from sweet to savory and back again. Cool avocado is great for temperature contrast on top of soups or chilis, and a few slices or cubes add some flavor (and nutrients!) to almost any salad. On the sweet side, try them in smoothies or even chocolate mousse.

Recipe inspiration:

• Cranberry Avocado Salad (the avocado here is a pleasant contrast to the tart cranberries).
• Chocolate Avocado Strawberry Smoothie (it’s not just for savory recipes: avocado is also mild enough to go in desserts)
• Chicken Enchilada Casserole (this recipe uses avocado as a garnish for temperature and texture contrast)
• Chicken Tenders with Avocado-Cilantro Dipping Sauce (the avocado and herbs in this sauce give it a smooth texture and a nice richness)

6. Eggplant

Stuff it! Slice it! Use it as a pasta substitute, or just cut it into cubes and roast it with curry powder and paprika. Eggplant is good for a lot more than just lasagna and grossing out children under 10. Because it’s both large and flexible, it gives you a lot of options for shapes and presentations, and it’s particularly good with anything Italian.

Recipe inspiration:

• Shrimp-Stuffed Eggplant (eggplant halves make a beautiful edible “bowl” for a shrimp curry)
• Eggplant Cannelloni (who needs pasta when you could have this?)
• Baba Ghanoush (a savory Middle Eastern dipping sauce, with eggplant standing in for the chickpeas)

What's your most versatile pantry staple? Let us know on Facebook or Google+!

Even if you were a great kitchen organizer before going Paleo, dramatically changing your diet can be an organizational challenge: say goodbye to easy-to-store staples like pasta and rice and hello to multi-pound hunks of meat that you have to worry about defrosting on time. If you weren’t terribly organized in your Pre-Paleo days, it can be even harder – what the heck is anyone supposed to do with all these vegetables?

Here are 7 simple organizational tips specifically for Paleo kitchens and the challenges that Paleo food can bring.

1. Use a Defrost Container

A defrost container can be any random bowl, or not even a bowl at all (that one piece of Tupperware that lost its lid years ago is perfectly fine). The point is just to have a designated receptacle for defrosting meat in your fridge.

The obvious benefit of this is that it keeps any leaks and drips out of the rest of your food. But an even bigger advantage is the way it gets you into a regular cycle of defrosting things to cook. If you get into a habit of refilling that bowl when you take something out of it, you won’t ever have to decide between waiting until 11pm for dinner and trying to cook a chicken while it’s still half-frozen.

Having a steady supply of freshly-defrosted meat = dinner is easier to make = less temptation to skip the protein or dive into the junk food.

2. Put Spices At or Below Eye Level

Where do you keep your spices? If they’re in a cupboard up above your head, chances are excellent that you have to spend too much time every time you cook fumbling around for the one you want, because it’s all just a jumble of bottles and bags that got shoved in there haphazardly.

Putting your spices at or below eye level makes it easier to see what you want, and also much less challenging to go through and organize them sometimes to avoid a jumbled mess. You’re not craning your neck and crawling up onto the countertop, and you can see what you’re doing.

Use a spice rack (spinning or otherwise), a drawer at waist height (with labels on the lids – it makes everything so easy to grab!), or any other organizational system you like. But put it where you can see everything.

The easier it is to use your spices, the more you’ll end up using them, the more delicious your food will be, and the less effort it will take to eat homemade meals instead of going out.

3. Pick Functional Storage Containers, Buy Tons of Them, and Pay for Quality

If you’re switching to Paleo from a diet of processed foods, cafeteria foods, or even standard “healthy” foods, you may be shocked at how many storage containers you end up using.

• Replacing a granola bar for breakfast with a week of pre-cooked egg dishes? You’re going to need an extra container or three.
• Packing lunch every day when you used to eat out? You’ll want at least an extra two – or five, if you pack your lunches all at once at the beginning of the week.
• Saving time by cooking in bulk? Say hello to your new fridge full of Tupperware!

Buy more than you think you’ll need, and pay for ones that really work. It’ll be worth it when your lunch doesn’t leak all over your laptop on your commute. And get containers that you find easy to use. If you find it inconvenient or bulky to store things in Mason jars, then forget about Mason jars and use unfashionable but functional containers that make your life easier.

To store them, get containers that stack nicely, and keep a separate part of your storage area just for the lids, so they aren’t clogging up the main stack of containers.

4. Get Rid of Stuff

Kitchens tend to accumulate stuff – a gadget here, a gadget there, and suddenly the drawers are overflowing. This makes it hard to find what you actually want, so cooking devolves into a hunt for things and ends up taking way longer than it should.

If you don’t own it, you don’t need to find space for it, clean it, wash it, disassemble it, reassemble it, or move it out of the way while looking for other things.

Paleo cooking doesn’t require much in the way of special equipment. Unless you’ve basically never cooked before, there’s almost certainly something you can throw out. Solid, well-made basics will get you much further than a whole drawer of avocado savers, citrus juicers, egg poachers, cherry pitters, and whatever else you got as stocking stuffers five years ago.

Go through your drawers with a big cardboard box and throw in everything you can’t remember using in the past month. Leave the box on an inconvenient shelf. If you need something from the box, take it out and put it back in the drawer when you’re done. After a year, donate whatever you haven’t taken out to Goodwill without even opening it again, because you clearly don’t use it.

5. Add a Writing Surface

Paleo cooking takes planning. It doesn’t always have to be a full-on meal plan, but unless you want to spend your whole life running back and forth to the grocery store, at least some planning is pretty much mandatory.

Even if you have your whole life on your computer and your phone, it’s helpful to have a non-electronic writing surface permanently attached to the kitchen for those times when you remember something while your hands are wet, or when the computer is in another room, or when you just don’t feel like pulling out your phone and dealing with the tiny little keyboard.

Put in some kind of indestructible writing surface that you can’t move, and permanently attach a writing utensil to it. You could do…

• A whiteboard or whiteboard paint
• A chalkboard or chalkboard paint
• A legal pad attached to the fridge, with a pencil tied to it

6. Front-Load your Fridge

One big challenge of Paleo cooking is dealing with all that fresh produce – with your fridge packed full of vegetables, fruits, and fresh herbs, it’s very easy to lose track of stuff and then discover it a week later, rotting away.

There are all kinds of ways to address this problem. You could just buy a few days’ worth of produce at a time, so you can always keep track of what you have. You could make a very strict meal plan, so you know you’ll use everything in time.

Or you could organize your fridge to solve the problem for you. When you unpack your groceries, put in the least perishable stuff first, so it gets pushed to the back. Then put the most perishable things towards the front and top of your refrigerator. Lettuce to the front; cabbage to the back. Cilantro to the front; rutabagas to the back.

That way, every time you open the fridge, you’ll see the things you need to use first. It’s hard to lose track of them when they’re right under your nose!

7. Store Small Electronics in your Extra Cupboard/Pantry Space

Think of all the cupboard- and pantry-cramming things you no longer have to deal with when you’re eating Paleo:

• Cereal boxes
• Loaves of bread
• Bags of flour
• Pasta and other noodles
• Beans and lentils
• 80% of canned soups, sauces, etc.

Your kitchen is probably designed on the assumption that you’ll need all of those things, with storage space to match. Some of them will get replaced by Paleo alternatives, but there’s still a lot of space freed up. Use it to store small electronics, like blenders, slow-cookers, spiralizers, pressure cookers, etc. This gets them all off the countertop so they don’t clutter your work area, but keeps them in easy reach for when you do want them.

Now it’s your turn! Take a picture of your favorite part of your kitchen (or all of it, if you’re really in love) and share it on Facebook or Twitter. What are your favorite organization tips? Any seasoned Paleo wisdom to share?

Paleo can be much cheaper than you think, and for many people who “can’t afford” to eat Paleo, it’s really a matter of priorities. If you “can’t afford” Paleo but you “can afford” every season’s latest trends in shoes, the problem isn’t your cash flow.

Before you assume that you can't make it work, check out a bunch of ways to make Paleo affordable here, here, here, and here.

But for other people, it’s not a choice between Paleo food and the newest cute statement pieces. It’s a choice between Paleo food and the electric bill. And the hard fact is that if you’re already cooking from scratch, eating cheap carbs is cheaper than eating Paleo.

You can get a 1-pound bag of rice or lentils or a box of store-brand pasta for less than $1, and it’ll feed a person for several meals. You can also get a pound of chicken for less than $1 in many places if you know how to shop the sales and use what you can find, but a pound of chicken doesn’t go nearly as far as a 1-pound bag of rice, especially if it’s a bone-in cut like legs or wings. And that's assuming you're willing to buy $1/lb chicken: you might be uncomfortable buying factory-farmed meat for ethical reasons, and refuse to buy meat at all unless you can get it from animals that lived a happy life. That’s a legitimate and admirable choice, but it does make budgeting harder.

So let’s assume that for whatever reason, you can’t afford to eat full-on Paleo right now. What’s the least-unhealthy way to compromise? Can you still get some of the benefits of Paleo nutrition without going whole hog?

Yes! In general, here are some reasonable targets:

• Aim for animal protein (meat, fish, or eggs) at least once a day.
• Aim to get as many vegetables as you reasonably can. Frozen vegetables are perfectly fine.
• Pick the cheap staple food that does you personally the least damage (more on this below).
• Pick the cheap cooking fat that does you personally the least damage (more on this below as well).
• Avoid sugar.
• Prioritize animal protein and vegetables over fruit, nuts, sweeteners, and other Paleo luxury foods.

You won’t get optimal Paleo results with that diet, but you can use Paleo principles to pick the best of your reasonably available options, and at least get something better than you had been eating before.

Picking a Cheap Staple Food

Cheap staples are the backbone of cheap meals; unfortunately, most of them tend not to be Paleo. The key here is picking which one will be least bad for you personally. From a Paleo standpoint, you’d want to minimize the potential for gut irritation and maximize the nutritional value of the food.

Many people will feel better if they avoid gluten grains; it’s at least worth a 30-day trial of staying away from pasta and bread. So what’s left?

Potatoes

White potatoes are fine to eat for most people. They’re just as nutritious as sweet potatoes, but cheaper; the idea that sweet potatoes are more nutritious is a complete myth. They may be less than ideal for people who already have an autoimmune disease, but that doesn’t mean they cause autoimmune disease in healthy people: they absolutely don’t.

Some people do better with fewer carbs and avoid potatoes for that reason. And even on a moderate-carb Paleo diet, potatoes aren’t meant to be a staple food that you base a lot of meals around: they’re more of a side dish that you eat sometimes depending on your carbohydrate needs. That’s a perfectly valid point, but if you’re working from the premise that you have to pick a carb-dense staple food and you’re just wondering which one to pick, it’s not relevant.

Rice: White vs. Brown

Rice is also a decent choice, and from a Paleo perspective, white rice may be better than brown rice (yes, this is the opposite of what you’ll hear almost everywhere else).

• White rice does have a higher glycemic index, but that only matters if you’re eating the rice all by itself with nothing else. If you eat it with fat or protein in a mixed meal, it’s much less relevant.
• White rice is much less likely to be a gut irritant than brown rice, because most of the gut irritants are in the outer layer.

Brown rice is commonly praised as more nutritious, but if you actually bother to look up the nutrition facts, it’s not such a huge difference. Here’s the comparison for 1 cup of cooked, medium-grain white rice vs. 1 cup of cooked, medium-grain brown rice:

• White rice wins on thiamin, riboflavin, niacin, folate, iron, and selenium
• Brown rice wins on vitamin B6, calcium, magnesium, phosphorus, potassium, zinc, copper, manganese, and fiber.
• They tie on pantothenic acid.

Overall, the biggest problem with white rice is how easy it is to overeat, but you can avoid this by cooking it with vegetables, or mixing it with vegetables after cooking, which reduces the calorie density and also adds nutritional value. Add some vinegar for the blood sugar benefits, and it’s not a bad staple.

Lentils and Beans

You might also consider legumes (lentils, black beans, kidney beans, etc.), especially if you soak them properly before eating them. The advantage of these foods is that they have at least some protein (although they’re still much higher in carbs than they are in protein) and that they have quite a reasonable nutritional value. The disadvantage is their potential for gut irritation; there’s no real equivalent of white rice for lentils and beans.

If you personally are fine with soaked (and preferably slow-cooked or pressure-cooked) legumes, they’re not the worst option you could consider.

Overall, beans and lentils are probably a little better for weight loss, while rice is probably a little better for gut healing. Potatoes are good for both, because they have a lower calorie density than rice and even a little protein, but few gut irritants. Pick your priority and eat accordingly.

Picking a Cheap Cooking Fat

Another major problem when you can’t afford Paleo is cooking fat. Paleo is all about fat quality: the good fats are really good for you, but the bad fats are really bad for you. Unfortunately, the bad fats (industrial seed oils like corn and canola oil) also tend to be the cheapest ones, and the good fats like extra virgin olive oil (and yes, the extra virgin part is important!) are much pricier.

How to do damage control:

• Email any animal farmers in your area and ask if they have raw animal fat You can often get it very cheap or even free. Render it into lard (pork fat), tallow (beef fat), or schmaltz (chicken fat) and enjoy!
• If you can afford butter and you’re not skipping factory-farmed animal products for ethical reasons, get it. Grass-fed butter is better, but even conventional butter beats soybean oil by a long shot.
• As a last resort, try to choose high-oleic seed oils. Oleic acid is a monounsaturated fat, so from a Paleo standpoint, it’s preferable to the polyunsaturated fats found in most industrial oils.

Summing it Up

Everyone should be able to afford to feed their families ethically-raised animal protein, plenty of vegetables, and high-quality fats at every meal. Unfortunately, the reality is that not everybody can do that, and that situation won’t change until we collectively get our act together and stop subsidizing junk food crops, stop letting food industry lobbyists pick our nutrition policies, start investing in sustainable agriculture, and generally make it a political priority.

In the meanwhile, everyone still has to eat, and if you can’t stretch your budget to cover 100% Paleo, you can still use Paleo principles to choose from your available options. Pick a staple food that works best for your goals, do what you can with the fats available, eat as many vegetables as you can afford, and try to get animal protein at least once a day. It’s not perfect, but it sure beats a diet of peanut butter sandwiches and pasta.

From the vintage Pyrex hounds who spend their weekends scouring antique stores to the Le Creuset devotees whose Dutch ovens are family heirlooms to the recent cast-iron renaissance, cookware has a way of inspiring devotion in the people who use it. But there’s also a dark side: dire warnings about heavy metal contamination from metal pots, plastic leaching toxins into everything it touches foods, and nonstick coatings that give off potentially deadly fumes.

Is there really anything to those concerns?

Here’s a look at a few popular types of cookware materials, and the evidence for whether or not humans cooking with them have any reason for concern about potential dangers (bearing in mind that “humans cooking with them” are not the same as “mice being injected with concentrated substances that they may or may not produce”). It’s not an exhaustive list of every potential type of cookware ever, but it’s a reasonably good place to start.

Metal Cookware

Metal cookware includes aluminum, stainless steel, copper, and cast iron. It’s durable, easy to use, easy to clean, and available in almost any price range you want – so far, so good. But the big debate over metal cookware is the potential for leaching metal into your food, especially if you’re cooking something acidic like tomatoes or lemon juice.

The most infamous is aluminum, supposedly linked to Alzheimer’s Disease and other neurodegenerative disorders. There is some evidence that aluminum exposure can be toxic to the brain at extremely high doses, especially in animals. But human studies are constantly contradicting each other, and what’s more, any plausible amount of cookware-related contamination represents a tiny fraction of the average person’s aluminum exposure. So even if excessive aluminum exposure does cause Alzheimer’s, there’s no evidence to suggest that avoiding aluminum pots and pans would be protective.

For other types of metals, there’s even less evidence of any kind of danger. For example, stainless steel supposedly leaches nickel, but there are almost no actual studies quantifying that. And this study found that even cooking tomatoes (an acidic food, which tends to increase leaching) in a stainless steel pot didn’t produce levels of nickel that exceeded the Tolerable Upper Intake of nickel. What’s more, the amount of nickel leached was reduced drastically in just 6 uses of the pot.

For cast iron, there’s some evidence that the iron may get out into your food, but for most people this will probably be a health benefit, not a risk. And it’s not even clear whether it raises iron levels in the long term: for example, in this study, researchers tried to help women with iron deficiency by giving them chunks of iron to put in their cooking pots, but after 6 months, their iron levels weren’t notably different.

What About Enamel Coatings?

Enamel coatings over metal will theoretically protect you from any potential leaching – at least until the coating gets scratched or damaged. But since there’s not much evidence that leaching is such a big deal anyway, this is less of a concern.

The upshot: there’s not actually much evidence that metal cookware is dangerous, and it may even be beneficial.

Glazed Ceramics

Glazed ceramics include things like the inserts in most slow-cookers, or other ceramic dishes (e.g. casserole dishes) that have been glazed.

Here, the problem is leaching heavy metals again, in this case lead and cadmium. It’s not controversial that lead is a health hazard, and glazes from some countries have been found to have a high amount of lead that could realistically be dangerous to healthy adults (here’s a study from Tunisia, for example). But other glazes are lead-free and completely safe (e.g. most slow-cookers; here’s more on lead in slow-cookers).

A good practice is to only buy new glazed items made by a manufacturer who can verify that the glaze is lead-free (if you buy cookware made in the US and avoid imports from China or other countries with very loose environmental laws, that’s already a good start).

The upshot: be careful where you get your ceramic-glazed stuff, and you’ll be fine.

Nonstick Pans and Nonstick Coatings (e.g. Teflon)

Non-stick coatings are infamous for their potential to cause health problems. Teflon is the poster child for this – it’s a particular brand of nonstick coating made with a chemical called polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE). The problem with PTFE is that when it’s heated: it releases potentially toxic fumes containing another chemical called PFOA (also called C8).

PFOA is a serious concern for people who work with it in industrial environments or live near chemical plants where they’re exposed to it heavily. But is the amount from household use of Teflon pans actually enough to do the same kind of damage? A recent study found that “consumer products” like pans are actually a minor source of exposure to PFOA (contaminated foods and drinking water represent a much bigger area of concern). And to start causing problems, you’d have to heat up your Teflon pans really hot, much hotter than most people would turn up the stove most of the time.

On the other hand, the fumes from Teflon pans have been documented to kill birds, and they’re definitely bad for rats. There have been several reports of humans getting flulike symptoms from Teflon exposure. And more to the point, you shouldn’t really need Teflon pans if you’re eating Paleo. Their main advantage is that they reduce the need for cooking fat to grease the surface of the pan and keep your food from burning. But when you’re eating Paleo, there’s absolutely no reason to be afraid of cooking fat. It makes your food taste better and it’s perfectly healthy for you.

The upshot: there’s some evidence that they may be dangerous, and there’s no need for nonstick coatings when you’re not afraid of cooking fat. Skip them.

Clay, Glass/Pyrex, and Other Inert Materials

There’s also a whole list of different materials that are marketed as “more natural” to make cookware out of (and therefore presumably safer). The problem with all of these is that they’re not great for stovetop cooking. You can use them in the oven, but for a frying pan, you’ll need something else.

Clay

With clay, just like with ceramic glaze, it’s all in the quality. Clay can be contaminated with heavy metals, industrial runoff, and other unwanted garbage just like anything else that ultimately comes out of a hole in the ground. If the clay is high-quality, and the pot is made by a company that regularly tests for these things, it should be fine.

Clay pots can make very tender meat and stews, and they’re great for roasting chickens – you can’t brown things in the bottom like you can with a Dutch oven, but they’re a nice addition to a well-stocked kitchen.

Glass or Pyrex

Glass is an inert material; it won’t leach anything into food. Pyrex is basically a type of glass, and also hasn’t ever been called out for any potential health problems. It’s convenient for going from the oven to the fridge, but again, you can’t really do much on the stovetop with it.

Summing it Up

The safety concerns of most types of cookware are based on some pretty thin evidence. It’s not that we know these things are harmless, but it’s not clear that they’re harmful, either. The best evidence for avoiding any one particular thing is for non-stick coatings. Most worries about metal leaching are overstated: even if aluminum is connected to Alzheimer’s, aluminum pans represent such a tiny fraction of daily intake that they’re not worth worrying about. And there’s legitimate reason to be concerned about lead and other heavy metals in ceramic glaze, if the item wasn’t made to high manufacturing standards, but you can avoid that by being choosy about ceramics (possibly the one situation where “pick it up for $10 at Goodwill” isn’t a great kitchen-furnishing strategy).

Paleo isn't about spending hundreds of dollars on fancy new cooking utensils, and claiming that you "need" a whole new set of triple-certified absolutely perfect pots and pans to be healthy isn't just wrong; it's pointlessly elitist and impractical for most people. For everyday cooking, very little evidence actually suggests that metal or enameled pans are dangerous to health. And glass/Pyrex and clay cookware is almost certainly safe. Aside from avoiding nonstick coatings, pick whichever cookware material or brand works best for you, and focus on the important part: making sure the food inside it is nutritious.

If you pop out of bed bright-eyed and bushy tailed to the twittering of the early birds, count your blessings as you lovingly prepare a handcrafted breakfast, and then settle down to contemplatively sip some tea and possibly meditate before calmly getting ready for work, this post is not for you.

But if your mornings are more along the lines of “hit snooze a couple times, stagger out of bed, forget half your stuff on the way to the car, and finally wake up around 10:30 after three cups of coffee,” you might be wondering how on earth you’re supposed to manage getting in a home-cooked breakfast and packing a lunch in all of that. Who on earth has time to cook breakfast while they’re staggering around about to be late for the bus?

Here’s how.

Why do Mornings (Sometimes) Suck?

You can’t fix something if you don’t know what’s broken. So why do so many people hate mornings and revolt at the thought of adding even more to them in the form of cooking breakfast and packing lunch? Often it’s a combination of…

Feeling lousy.

The morning headache, the grogginess, the grumpiness, the aching need to just collapse right back into bed and pull the covers up over your head – all of them just plain stink. Nobody wants to manage cooking when they feel like that, which is probably a blessing in disguise since operating knives and an oven when you can’t see straight is generally a bad plan.

Not enough time.

On top of feeling lousy, mornings are often a frantic flurry of rushing around trying to do five things at once, which is exactly what you’re least prepared to handle when the coffee is still working its way through your system. If you're stretched to grab a granola bar on the way out the door, waiting 20 minutes for a frittata to bake sounds like an impossible feat.

Crafting a Better Morning

To start making mornings less-bad, start by tackling the root causes of the morning-crud/time-crunch combo that makes mornings so unbearable and a real breakfast so impossible.

For some people, feeling lousy in the morning is just biology. Some people are wired to sleep a later – one study found that roughly 50% of people have an ideal bedtime after midnight, and an ideal wake-up time after 8:00 am. This is called an evening chronotype. If this is you, and you have to get up at 6 for work, you’re probably not going to be at your best.

But for other people, the problem isn’t their chronotype. They’re not grumpy in the mornings because they’re wired to be; they’re grumpy because they only got 6 hours of sleep, and one of those was tossing and turning because they were up on the computer until they collapsed into bed. And all of those problems are a lot easier to change than your biology.

Sleep Better.

Good mornings start the night before. Count backwards 9 hours from your wake-up call: that’s the time to turn off all the electronic screens. The blue light from computer screens, cell phones, TV screens, and other electronics looks like daylight to your brain, and it’s a signal to stay awake – you want to turn that signal off to wind down for bed.

An hour after that (8 hours before waking up), your head should be on the pillow. This gives you three things:

• More time: when you plan for enough sleep, you aren’t stealing your morning prep time 10 minutes at a time via snooze button.
• More efficient use of your time: when you’re well-rested, you’re more efficient than when you’re stumbling around in a haze.
• Better mood: if your body is done sleeping by the time you need to wake up, then waking up won’t be such an awful prospect, and you’ll feel better once you’re up.

It’s also worth reconsidering your relationship with caffeine. Coffee and other caffeinated drinks can have a place on Paleo, but they can also easily turn into a vicious cycle where you’re tired, so you drink more coffee, so you don’t sleep well, so you’re tired, so you drink even more coffee, etc.

Automate your Food Prep

The next step to making mornings a little better is to cut down on the number of things you have to cram into them – this is where the later chronotypes will really start seeing benefits. Mornings might not be your favorite time of day, but they don’t have to be a frantic rush of things to do, even if you want a home-cooked breakfast and lunch.

On Paleo, you’ll be cooking almost all of your meals from scratch. But you don’t have to cook anything in the morning if you don’t want to. The key is to get into a routine of doing food prep ahead of time, so it doesn’t take any effort to remember and becomes totally mindless.

• For breakfast: One day a week, batch-cook something that you can grab and go. Here are 8 simple recipes to get you started.
• Lunch: if you need to pack a lunch for work or school, get in the habit of cooking double for dinner and packing the leftovers when you clean up after dinner. Stick it in the fridge; you can just grab it and go in the morning.

Make these into habitual parts of the week, so there’s no need to think about them. You’ll have healthy food easily available in the mornings without scrambling to cook. Even if you’re still not quite awake until closer to lunchtime, the pre-coffee haze won’t be compromising your health goals.

Mornings from Good to Great

With enough sleep and a solid food prep routine, getting real food into your mornings should at least be tolerable. Here’s how to take it up one more notch.

Make Mornings Enjoyable

• If you don’t work out in the morning, stretch for a few minutes. Not everyone is a morning-workout person, and that’s fine. But if you’re not, take a couple minutes and stretch out to get the blood flowing. It’s a great way to feel more awake without caffeine.
• Drink a big glass of water. Again, energy minus the caffeine, and it’s good for you!
• Build in some quiet time. It’s one thing to not-rush. But even better than that is some quiet time to yourself in the morning. Whether it’s reading the paper, meditating, or just having some coffee and looking out the window, give yourself a few minutes to start the day calmly.

Set Up Your Day

If you have time to do even a little bit of food prep, you can also take a few simple steps to make the rest of your day better:

• Put something in the slow-cooker. When you get home from work, dinner will be ready.
• Put something in to marinade. This is especially good if you’re planning to grill anything for dinner.
• If you have a spare few minutes, put some dishes away or clean something fast. It can make a big difference to come home to a clean kitchen.

Summing it Up

Even if mornings will never be your favorite part of the day, at least you can make sure they aren’t any worse than they have to be. As simple as it sounds, getting enough sleep and planning ahead for meals can save you from a crazy morning rush that ends up with you skipping breakfast and caving to the lure of the vending machine at 10.

Healthy food shouldn’t be a luxury. Meat that doesn’t come pre-loaded with drug-resistant bacteria, meat with its natural proportion of healthy fats, meat with its natural concentration of vitamins and minerals – that kind of meat shouldn’t be restricted to the relatively few people who can actually afford it. Unfortunately, that’s not how the American food system works. For a lot of people, truly grass-fed meat is simply out of financial reach.

Yes, it’s true that more people could afford grass-fed if they cut down on their new iGadget purchases or stopped eating out for lunch every day and cooked at home instead. For those people, it’s a problem of priorities, and the answer is to just bite the bullet and prioritize their health over always having the absolutely newest and trendiest everything all the time. For other people, it’s doable with just a little tweaking. They absolutely can’t afford grass-fed steak and bacon every day, but if they know how to find the affordable cuts, buy in bulk, and use other money-saving tips, they can fit grass-fed meat into the grocery budget without a strain.

But for other people, it’s not about skipping on the $30 lunches, and they’re already buying only the cheaper cuts of meat. Some people have already stretched their grocery budget as tight as it can possibly go. All those luxuries they’re supposed to cut out? They’ve long since cut them, if they ever spent money on them in the first place.

If that’s you…

You can still eat Paleo without grass-fed meat.

It won’t be absolutely optimal, but think of it this way: which is better for you, grain-fed sausage on top of a giant greasy pizza, or grain-fed sausage on top of a pile of broccoli? Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good; just because you can’t afford grass-fed meat doesn’t mean you should completely give up!

Here are some tips for making the healthiest possible choices when you’re working with grain-fed meat – no judgement, just some advice to help you eat as well as you can within your budget.

Choosing your Best Options

At the grocery store, focus on choosing the best options you can afford. In general, when you’re buying grain-fed meat, you want to buy lean cuts, because a lot of the potential toxins and bad stuff is stored in the fat of the animal. Factory-farmed meat also has a higher ratio of Omega-6 to Omega-3 fats, so if you’re concerned about inflammation, eating a lot of fatty conventional pork or chicken isn’t the best idea. Limit processed meats (which you should really be doing anyway) and very fatty meats like bacon, sausage, and pork shoulder.

On the other hand, lean cuts can also be expensive because with everyone still being stuck in the low-fat model, the demand for lean meat is high (think chicken breasts compared to chicken wings: the price per pound is much higher for the breasts).

So how do you balance it out? Here’s how to go cheap, but lean:

• Chicken: look for bulk bags of frozen chicken breasts (often cheaper than fresh). Tenderloins are sometimes cheaper than the breasts. Ground chicken is often pretty cheap, and quite lean.
• Turkey: turkey breast is often cheaper than chicken breast, if you can get it, and it’s just as lean.
• Beef: look for bone-in roasts, brisket, and chuck. Cook them low and slow for delicious, tender meals.
• Pork: look for bone-in chops (trim the fat off), but limit pork in general since it is fattier than other meats.

Anything you can find frozen and in bulk is likely to be a cheaper option than fresh: check the freezer for bulk poultry.

Then supplement your lean cuts with healthy fats. Coconut and olive oil are two great options, but another choice that might be more affordable than you think is grass-fed butter. Grass-fed butter will give you all the health benefits of fats from pasture-raised animal fat, like Vitamin K2, and it’s absolutely delicious. If you can squeeze an extra $3-4 into the grocery budget every week, grass-fed butter is probably the best way to supplement lean conventional meat, because it fills in a lot of the nutritional gaps.

An even better option for cheap fat if you can make it work is to get pasture-raised animal fat from a local butcher or farmer. It’s even cheaper than cooking oil or butter (sometimes it’s actually free), and it’s delicious.

Another consideration: eggs. Humanely-raised eggs are often cheaper than meat, and even the very cheapest of factory-farmed eggs are extremely nutrient-dense and have a great fatty acid profile.

Starting a Meat Fund

Another way to make grass-fed work in the long run even if you can’t afford it in the short term is to start a “meat fund” where you put…

• Any money that you have left over in your grocery budget because you weren’t buying expensive pre-packaged meals, processed foods, candy, soda, chips, or other junk. That stuff adds up fast! Compare your grocery receipts pre- and post-Paleo and save the difference.
• Any money that you have left over in your medical budget after going Paleo from medicines you no longer need, doctor’s visits you budgeted for but didn’t have to make, etc.
• Any money that you save from not eating fast food, or not ordering takeout. Add up your typical takeout bill for a month of pre-Paleo eating and stick that in the fund.

Let it pile up for a while (and it might take some patience; don’t get discouraged if it doesn’t happen in a month), and then look into ways to buy half or a quarter of a cow in your area – this is typically the cheapest way to buy grass-fed meat per pound. While you’re eating the quarter-cow, you can add all the money you otherwise would have spent on meat to your next meat fund.

Summing it Up

In a perfect world, everyone would saunter down to the farmers’ market on Saturday for a leisurely chat with the farmer who raised their bacon before they moved on to pick out picture-perfect heads of lettuce and bunches of carrots from the next stall over. In the world we actually have, not everyone can afford to do that, even if they know how to look for the cheap cuts, and even if they’re already making all the sacrifices they can reasonably make to fit good food into the budget.

If this is you, you can still eat Paleo. Don’t feel like you’re doing it wrong – you’re doing it as “right” as you can. Go for relatively cheap but lean cuts and supplement your diet with healthy fats – pastured butter, pastured animal fats, coconut milk, avocado, or healthy oils like olive and coconut oil. Consider starting a meat fund to save up for a bulk purchase. But most importantly, don’t beat yourself up over it. Imperfect Paleo is better than no Paleo at all; do what you can and let yourself off the hook for the rest.

Are you working on a Paleo challenge but struggling to fit in all that cooking and meal prep – and maybe looking longingly at the prepackaged “Paleo” bars and cookies at the checkout counter? Or maybe you’re craving snack food more than you thought you would, or you’re not sure what to even eat for snacks without dried fruit and nut butter.

Trying to fit Paleo into a modern lifestyle isn’t easy. If you’re already doing it, or even if you’re trying your best, pat yourself on the back, because you’re swimming upstream against a very strong current of takeout culture and convenience foods at every turn. To help you along the way, here’s a masterpost of tips, advice, simple recipes, and resources for making your challenge a success.

Finding Time to Cook Without Prepackaged “Paleo” Foods

A lot of people struggle with Paleo because they’re “too busy to cook.” So they end up eating a lot of convenience foods that they didn’t want to eat, just because they think they don’t have time to make something at home. Alternately, they end up way too reliant on processed “Paleo-labeled” treats like bars and trail mix – which is exactly what the Paleo Basics challenge asks you to eliminate.

Here’s how to squeeze Paleo into your daily schedule without relying on the prepackaged convenience foods, sugary smoothies, or a handful of trail mix masquerading as a “meal.” Pick your problem below to get solutions and resources for tackling it.

I don’t have time to make breakfast in the morning.

• Solution: go for a make-ahead breakfast, like egg muffins/mini frittatas or mini meatloaves.
• Resources: Here are 8 make-ahead breakfast recipes.

I don’t have time to pack and prep lunches.

• Solution: cook a double dinner at night. Put half on your plate and half on your lunchbox. You just packed your lunch in about a minute of extra time.
• Resources: Here are all our recipes tagged as “good for leftovers” for your browsing convenience.

I don’t have time to make dinner after work.

• Solutions: (pick one or more)
  • Invest in a slow-cooker or pressure-cooker.
  • Make one-pan skillet meals like skillet rosemary chicken to minimize prep time and cleanup.
• Resources: Here are all our recipes tagged as “fast cook” for inspiration.

What can I eat for quick snacks?

• Solutions: (pick one or more)
  • Eat enough at meals so you don’t need snacks at all. It’s OK to eat big meals. There’s no metabolic advantage to eating six times a day: the only reason to do it is if you like it.
  • Eat exactly what you’d eat at a meal, just less of it. Good food is nutritious whenever you eat it; there’s no reason why “snacks” demand special kinds of food.
• Resources: Check out this list of 10 nut-free, low-sugar Paleo snacks; mix and match until you get something with both protein and vegetables in it, and chow down!

Tip: if you batch-cook one or more of the following at the beginning of the week, you’ll have a much easier time finding snacks later:

• Hard-boiled eggs, egg muffins, or egg salad.
• Chicken drumsticks.
• Guacamole.
• Homemade mayonnaise.

Keeping the Basics Interesting

“Basics” is not a synonym for “boring!” You don’t have to give up flavor or pleasure just because you’re giving up stuff that’s designed to imitate junk food. In fact when you let go of the “Paleo treats,” you might be surprised to discover exactly how enjoyable your “regular food” can be.

Some tips and resources for keeping your interest going:

• Don’t skimp on fat or salt. Both are perfectly fine to eat (fat doesn't make you fat, and salt isn't a devil food), and they give your

food flavor. If you try to eat meals without fat or salt, your food will taste like cardboard and of course you’ll be bored of it – so don’t do that to yourself! Maybe as a special treat to carry you through the challenge, you could experiment with duck fat or something else really luxurious.

• Explore all your vegetable options. Challenge yourself to try one or two new vegetables per week – most people have at least one thing in the produce section that they’ve always kind of looked sideways at but never really explored.
• Switch up your leftovers to avoid getting sick of recipes you batch-cook. Here’s how to use leftovers without getting bored.
• Look up recipes and techniques to make basic staple foods interesting: here are some ideas for eggs, roast chicken, salad, and ground beef.
• Keep your mind stimulated in other ways. If you’re relying on food for all the interest or stimulation you get in your day, then it’s going to be awfully hard to give up hyper-stimulating junk food: humans crave pleasure, and we need to get it from somewhere. If you’re trying to cut the junk, try introducing a non-food pleasure as well to shift your focus.

But Why Can’t I Have Paleo Treats on the Paleo Basics Challenge?

You “can” have anything you like: you’re an adult and you get to decide what goes into your mouth. If you want to, you “can” have Paleo treats – in fact, if you want to, you “can” have regular, non-Paleo treats full of high-fructose corn syrup and refined flour; it’s not like they’re illegal. Nobody will stop you at the door and set a dog to sniffing your bags for hidden sugar.

But for the Paleo Basics challenge, you’re choosing to abstain (and yes, the way you say it matters!) from those treats even though you technically “can” have them. Treats aren’t part of the Paleo Basics challenge because it’s about your emotional relationship with food as much as your physical diet. It’s fine to enjoy occasional treats; it’s not healthy to be dependent on food for comfort or entertainment. If you really are eating those treats occasionally, within the spirit of Paleo, then abstaining for one week shouldn’t be a big deal at all.

If you’re finding it impossibly difficult to even think about not eating Paleo treats for a week, it might be a sign that you’re depending on them for emotional reasons – to feel good after a long day, to handle work boredom or stress, to reward yourself for a job well done. In that case, it might be worthwhile to take a hard look at your relationship with food, and maybe some ways to reward yourself without food.

Are you doing the Paleo Basics Challenge How’s it going? Let us know on Facebook!

A pressure cooker isn’t exactly at the top of the list of necessary kitchen tools – it’s a nice-to-have, not an essential. But there's a place in everyone's kitchen for a few well-chosen nice-to-haves, and pressure cookers in particular can be really useful if you’re pressed for time with cooking or if you like to make a lot of certain dishes. So here’s a run-down of what pressure-cookers do, how to use them, and what your options are.

What Is a Pressure Cooker?

A pressure-cooker is not the same thing as a slow-cooker. Slow-cookers provide a very low heat for a long amount of time. A pressure cooker, on the other hand, shortens the cooking time – instead of taking hours, your braises and roasts are done in 45 minutes.

So how does that work? With a regular pot, even if you put a lid on it, some steam will escape out the top. This reduces the pressure inside the pot by literally letting off some steam. With a pressure cooker, the seal is completely tight, so all that steam stays inside the cooking chamber. This increases the cooking temperature, but by the magic of physics and chemistry, it does this while minimizing the chance of drying out the food inside.

Pressure Cookers for Paleo Cooking

The big advantage of pressure cooking is the time savings. This makes it great for Paleo staples that need low and slow cooking times – the prime example here is bone broth. Pressure-cooker broth is a surefire way of extracting a lot of collagen and making a very rich, velvety broth that gels beautifully in the fridge, all in just a few minutes. And it’s as easy as making broth any other way: just throw in the bones and the water and go.

Another great use of pressure cookers is tougher cuts of meat like brisket that would otherwise call for long braises. Slow-cooking is a powerful tenderizer, and it speeds up the process so you can break down all the fibers and get the same fall-apart tender texture, but in just a few minutes.

Hardier vegetables are also good candidates (think beets, parsnips, sweet potatoes – ones that would normally take a while to cook in the oven). These can often be cooked in just a few minutes.

On a more nutritional note, pressure cooking also requires less water than stovetop cooking, so more of the nutrients in the food are preserved.

The disadvantage of pressure-cooking is that you can’t really get things crispy – if you want crispy-skinned chicken or vegetables, you’ll have to finish them off in a frying pan, in the oven, or under the broiler. But it’s great for soups and stews, and other things that didn’t need to be crispy in the first place.

Choosing a Pressure Cooker

Not all pressure cookers are the same, so it’s important to pick one that actually fits your needs.

To start off with the obvious concern: no, it won’t explode. Some of the older models were very cheaply made and did pose an explosion risk, but that isn’t a concern these days. Modern slow-cookers have automatic safety locks that prevent them from exploding. Unless you’re doing your pressure-cooker shopping in a landfill from the post-World War II era, you’re safe.

One big distinction is between stovetop and electric pressure cookers. As the names imply, stovetop cookers use the heat from your stove, while electric cookers make their own heat. Here’s a run-down of some key differences:

• Cooking time: Electric pressure cookers have a longer cooking time (both time to pressure and time needed to release pressure) than stovetop cookers. It’s still shorter than regular cooking.
• Energy efficiency: Electric cookers are more energy-efficient.
• Maximum pressure: Stovetop cookers have a basically standard max pressure; electric cookers are more variable so just make sure to read the box so you know what you’re getting.
• Fiddliness and convenience: In general, electric cookers are more convenient to cook with. Stovetop cookers need more manual adjustment of the heat settings, and they rarely have convenience features like timers and sensors. Electric cookers you can just turn on and go, and they often have sophisticated controls.

Which one is right for you really depends on what combination of features you need.

Other than that, you’ll want to get one that fits into your available storage space (electric cookers are stored on the counter like slow-cookers; stovetop cookers can go with your other pots) and has the right food capacity. Pressure cookers come in all sizes from tiny little 2-quart cookers to giant 20+ quart models. For one or two people, 4 quarts is fine; for families, 6-8 quarts is enough.

Paleo Pressure-Cooker Recipes

If you can make it on a stovetop or in the oven, you can probably make it in the pressure cooker, but it’s not always easy to figure out exactly how to adjust the cook times. So here’s a variety of different recipes using all kinds of meat from the very lean (boneless skinless chicken breast) to the very fatty (lamb shanks) and everything in between.

• Here’s a pressure-cooker bone broth recipe from Serious Eats.
• Food blog Nom Nom Paleo has a lot of great pressure-cooker recipes; try some potatoes or maybe some lamb shanks as a change from the beef/pork/chicken rotation. And of course, she also has a recipe for bone broth.
• Here’s one for chicken cacciatore.
• Here’s how to cook a whole chicken in the pressure cooker, with bonus broth at the same time.
• Venison is a perfect candidate for pressure cooking because it’s so lean – here’s a pressure-cooker venison chili.
• Here’s a simple lamb stew.

Summing it Up

Nobody needs a pressure cooker. Whole generations of humans lived their whole lives without them. But if you like to make a lot of broths and braises, or if you just find yourself constantly crunched for cooking time, it might be a worthwhile investment. It’s hard to argue with 1-hour bone broth!

Prepping a big batch of something (chili, soup, pulled pork…) and then eating off it all week is a great way to save time, save money, and plan ahead for all the little emergencies that inevitably pop up during the week. You can make a week of breakfasts on the run and then just grab something from the fridge instead of worrying about cooking in the morning. Even if you don’t need to bring breakfast or lunch to work, it’s nice to have pre-cooked meat to quickly throw in a soup or stir-fry for an easy dinner.

But bulk food prep isn’t something everyone can just do intuitively. So here’s a guide to mastering the art of once-a-week batch cooking.

• What kinds of things can/should I make in batches? What about fragile things like salads?
• How can I avoid getting bored of eating the same thing all week?
• What kinds of tools and equipment do I need to do this?

What to Prep in Batches and How to Do It

If you think of a Paleo meal, it really has four parts:

• Required: meat or other animal protein (e.g. eggs)
• Required: fat (this might be provided by your protein source, e.g. bacon, but if you’re cooking lean protein you need to add some).
• Required: non-starchy vegetables.
• Optional: starchy vegetables, fruit, and/or nuts.

Typically, when you batch cook, you’ll be cooking one of these three parts. Many people only batch-cook protein – this doesn’t completely eliminate meal prep, but it makes everything a lot faster. Protein is typically the longest part of the meal to cook, so you’ll get the biggest time savings here.

You can eat the batch-cooked protein on its own, or throw it into soups, stir-fries, salads, and all kinds of other meals.

Other people batch prep vegetables as well. This can get tricky because you do have to make sure to use up all the vegetables before they go bad, but it’s definitely possible, especially if you choose wisely.

For a good batch-cooking recipe, you want something that’s easy to make in large quantities, keeps well for several days, and ideally tasty with a variety of different sides so you can mix it up.

Protein

If you only prep one thing ahead, make it your protein. Cooking a big batch of meat or eggs at the beginning of the week can save you incredible amounts of meal prep time. Here are some ideas:

• Eggs: hard-boiled eggs or mini frittatas.
• Meat: chili (pork or beef), shredded pork or beef, chicken breast, steak, any kind of roast, meatballs, or meatloaf.

Non-Starchy Vegetables

Non-starchy vegetables can get a little tricky to prep ahead because they can easily get slimy or gross – especially salads.

One great trick with salads is to keep the dressing separate. Wash your greens, chop them up, and mix all you like; just leave the dressing in a separate container until you’re ready to eat it. It also helps to layer your salads – put wetter things at the bottom so the juices don’t get all over the greens. Another tip is to prep salads for the beginning of the week and prep hardier vegetables for the end – or just have a second mini-prep day in the middle of the week where you make another batch of salads.

• Vegetables that keep for 1-3 days: fresh vegetable salad, fruity coleslaw, most steamed or roasted vegetables (e.g. broccoli, cauliflower, squash, etc.), most leafy salads if you keep the dressing separate.
• Vegetables that keep until the end of the week: roasted squash, cooked beets, chopped carrots or bell peppers. You may also have luck with coleslaw or other uncooked vegetables, depending on how fresh they were when you bought them.

Starchy Vegetables

If you’re batch-cooking breakfast, there’s a good chance that it’s because you need something to eat between the gym and the office – and in that case, you’ll want some starch with that. Here are some ideas for batch-cooking starchier foods:

• Mashed or roasted white or sweet potatoes (yes, white potatoes are Paleo).
• Sweet potato salads: one, two.

Or just add some starch to your protein, like these twice-baked sweet potatoes.

How to Keep it Interesting

You’ve cooked up enough pulled pork to feed the army with leftovers to spare. If the apocalypse happened tomorrow, you could subsist on pulled pork until you died of natural causes. But halfway through your week of pulled pork bounty, you realize that you’re so incredibly bored of it you don’t want to take another bite.

Oops.

Here are some strategies for preventing that in the first place or fixing it if you’re stuck there:

• Batch cook two main proteins and freeze half of each. Basically this puts you on a two-week batch cooking schedule instead of 1 week. So for example, instead of cooking just pulled pork, cook pulled pork and beef chili. Freeze half of each dish for next week. That way you’ll be able to rotate between them and you won’t feel like you’re eating the same thing every day.
• Use the protein as a base, not the final product. Put your batch-cooked protein in salads, stews, curries, or stuffed potatoes. Dress it up with different spices and seasonings. Chop it up and stir-fry it. Put an interesting sauce on it to add a new flavor. Here are 17 ideas to keep it interesting, and here are three soups that put a different twist on leftover meat: coconut lime chicken soup, ham and pumpkin soup, and winter vegetable soup.
• Rotate different proteins and side dishes together so you can get some variety on your plate even if you’re eating the same meat.

Useful Tools and Equipment

You don’t need a lot of special tools to get started with batch cooking. But it does help to have…

• Containers and a label system for storing the food once you make it. If you’re prepping grab-and-go meals, just put everything into meal-sized containers as soon as it’s done cooking for maximum convenience.
• A slow-cooker for cooking big cuts of meat painlessly while you do other things.

You can absolutely do batch cooking without a slow-cooker, though; you’ll just have to find a time when the oven is free.

Summing it Up

Batch cooking is an easy way to save yourself some time and make Paleo cooking possible for busy families. Some people cook all their breakfasts or lunches in advance for the whole week and just grab them out of the fridge as they go. Other people just cook their proteins and then use the cooked meat to make quick weeknight dinners like stir-fries and salads.

Either way, batch prep is a very useful shield against the lure of takeout and vending machines: find a recipe that looks tasty and give it a try!

For yourself, you might be perfectly happy to dump a can of tuna on top of some lettuce and call it lunch (or dinner, or breakfast…). Even if you’re cooking for a family, the pressure is low and you’re probably familiar with everyone’s tastes. But what if you’re in charge of feeding a group?

With the holiday season coming up, parties and family dinners can quickly turn into a headache – but they don't have to be! Here’s a guide to making it all work.

Party Hosting Tips

Planning your Menu

If you’re following traditional menu (e.g. turkey and cranberry sauce on Thanksgiving), then it’s almost easier, because you don’t have to plan what to serve, only how to make it tasty. But even if you don’t have a traditional menu to rely on, the principle is the same: focus on what you are eating, not what you aren’t, and serve dishes that highlight what Paleo food does incredibly well:

• Fearlessly delicious meat. The low-fat shackles are off: you can cook delicious, succulent cuts of whatever you like. Whether it’s steak for a gourmet dinner or chili on Game Day, almost every occasion has some kind of classic dish that’s made to show off the meat.
• Surprisingly good vegetables. Fatphobia is just as bad for vegetables as it is for meat. Show off your chops at making vegetables so delicious they’ll disappear first!
• Totally-worth-it starches. When Paleo eaters eat starch, we eat it in style - no huge vats of gluey and flavorless pasta or soggy bread!

The foundation of a gourmet menu is meat and vegetables, cooked in ways that bring out their natural flavors instead of hiding them, and seasoned with rich spices and plenty of fat. If it’s impressive enough for high-end restaurants it’s impressive enough for your guests!

A few other general tips for meal planning:

• If you’re feeding vegetarians or vegans, don’t make them starve on salad and broccoli all night. Serve at least one filling course that meets their diet restrictions (here’s one, just for example), and do them an extra favor by not giving them grief about it.
• If you’re feeding other people’s kids, bear in mind what kinds of foods they’ll expect to find. For the sake of everyone having a pleasant time, you may want to stock up on hot dogs and easy mac – not because “kid food” is nutritionally adequate or in any way appropriate for any human being to eat, but because you can’t force other people to make their kids eat Paleo if they don’t want to, and as the host your job is to give your guests a pleasant evening that isn’t summarily interrupted by a temper tantrum over broccoli.
• You don’t want to spend the whole evening in the kitchen without ever seeing your guests: look for recipes that you can make at least partly ahead, and recipes that aren’t terribly fiddly. For complicated menus, it helps to make a kind of “timetable” of what you’re going to cook and when, and pin it up in the kitchen (assume that everything will take 10 minutes longer than it says on the recipe). Alternately, if it’s that kind of party, you could ask the guests to help you cook.
• 
• Unless you're hosting for a tribe of foodies or fellow Paleo eaters, serve dishes familiar enough that people won’t be intimidated. Don’t go for something “weird” like liver – yes, it’s real food, and yes, it’s extremely nutritious, but most people are not adventurous eaters; they want options that are familiar to them.
• Consider a seasonal menu. Plan your meal around something seasonal, and you’ll be getting fresh ingredients at their finest.

Managing Non-Paleo Food and Expectations

Even if you serve the most delicious, gourmet-restaurant steak and salad, most people will expect bread with it because that’s what they’re used to seeing. You’re going to have to decide what you want to do with this. Here are some potential ways you could manage it:

• Play Paleo ambassador and explain to your guests that you don’t serve bread (or whatever else they might be expecting) in your house.
• Sneak an “accidentally” Paleo meal under the radar by making everything so delicious they don’t miss the junk. It’s not a “Paleo meal” it’s just the best food they’ve ever tasted…that just so happens not to involve any grains or legumes! If you go this route, bear in mind that most people expect to find a starchy side dish with their meal. A plate of roasted potatoes or sweet potatoes can send them there instead of leaving them wondering where the bread is.
• Make a Paleo-ified version of whatever you’re expected to serve (Paleo bread, Paleo cookies, Paleo cake for birthdays, etc.). Fair warning: you probably will not be able to pass this off as the “normal” version.
• Serve non-Paleo food because that’s what people expect. You can either serve it yourself or ask them to bring whatever they prefer. You can eat it yourself or simply let others enjoy it if they choose.

There’s no right answer; it’s all about what works for you and your guests.

Menu Inspiration

And now the fun part: what to eat! It’s impossible to cover every occasion, but here are some menu suggestions for a few potential needs.

Appetizers and Finger Food

Potlucks (and Similar Events):

With potlucks, you want something that’s relatively inexpensive to make for a big crowd, easy to store and transport, and a classic crowd-pleaser. Here are some ideas:

Casual Dinner with Friends

Dinner Party for Adventurous Foodies

• Starter/appetizer: basil cinnamon cranberry chicken and heart pâté.
• Main course: spiced duck breast.
• Side dish 1: roasted bone marrow served on a bed of arugula.
• Side dish 2: warm winter salad.

Game Day Party

For something like the Superbowl, here’s a menu of many smaller dishes for easy snacking: think of it as more like a tapas-style meal than a traditional three-course dinner.

• BBQ Chicken Wings
• BLT Dressed Eggs
• Slow-cooker buffalo chicken meatballs
• Sweet potato fries
• Miniature Portobello pizzas (vegetables!)
• These three Superbowl recipes: buffalo drumsticks, Paleo fries with herbs, and spiced nuts.

Etcetera

Looking for Thanksgiving recipes and menu ideas? Here you go! And keep watching the site: more will be coming up in a later post!

Bone broth is a Paleo staple. It fills in the nutritional gaps of muscle meat with nutrients from all the “odd bits” that we don’t eat nearly enough of (you can learn more about the nutritional benefits here, and here's the recipe if you need it.) But for a lot of Paleo beginners, cooking bone broth can be pretty frustrating, especially if it doesn’t “gel” properly.

"Gelling" refers to the way the broth congeals when you cool it to fridge temperature. Bone broth is famous for this: you put in a liquid, and take out something like “chicken Jell-O" - and that's a sign of quality! The very best broth is jiggly and gelatinous, not perfectly thin and liquid (don't worry; it liquefies again when you heat it up).

It’s important to remember that bone broth is still nutritious even if it doesn’t gel. But gelling is a sign that there’s even more of at least one important nutrient, and it gives the broth an irresistibly smooth texture that enhances everything you cook with it. So here’s how to troubleshoot broth that won’t gel.

Bone Broth and Gelatin

Bone broth gels because of the gelatin it contains. Gelatin is the cooked form of collagen; it’s the same stuff that gives Jell-O dessert its trademark texture. Originally, collagen is a type of protein found mainly in bones, tendons, ligaments, and other connective tissue; cooking broth extracts it from the bones and cooks it into gelatin, which is how you can end up with “meat Jell-O” when you make broth. Broth that doesn’t gel might contain some gelatin, but the gelatin is too diluted to really make it gel – think of the watery mess you get if you try to use just half a packet of Jell-O mix in the same amount of water.

Gelatin is one of the major health benefits of drinking broth in the first place: it’s very healthy for your joints and your gut. So if that’s what you’re going for with bone broth, then broth that gels nicely is the most efficient way to get it.

Here are two ways to increase the gelatin content of your broth, so it gels nicely:

Add More Gristle

Gelatin is the cooked form of collagen. To get enough gelatin in the broth, you have to have enough collagen in the raw materials. Bones do contain collagen. But you know what has even more? All the gristle-y connective tissue in between the bones. For the most collagen-rich bone broth, add as much of that as you can cram in. Here are some great ways to get it:

• Feet. Chicken feet are incredibly cheap (sometimes down to 99 cents/pound) and make fantastic broth. Pork, lamb, goat, or beef feet are a little pricier than chicken feet, but just as packed with the good stuff.
• Knuckle bones (from any animal).
• Tendons. It’s harder to find plain tendons, but if you can, snap them up.
• Entire chicken carcasses. Toss them in complete with any extra scraps of meat. You’ll get all the tendons between the ribs, along the spine, and around the shoulders, not to mention the cartilage and the bones. This is a great way to get even more use out of a whole chicken.
• Heads. Fish heads are famous for making fish stock, but chicken, duck, or goose heads will work just as well.
• Wingtips (chicken, duck, or goose).
• Skin. This is a tough one, since chicken skin is so delicious on its own. But if you have any pork or beef skin – maybe leftover from a skin-on pork shoulder? – then trim the layer of fat from it, render the fat, and toss the skin on into the broth pot.

All of these animal parts are typically cheap, and most markets will carry at least one or two of them. If you can go straight to a farmer, you’ll certainly be able to put in a request. Make sure you’ve got enough of them: one chicken foot is not going to make perfect bone broth in a gallon of water! A good rule of thumb is to fill your pot at least half full of animal parts and then pour water up to an inch or so from the top.

But what if you’ve already got a pot full of chicken feet and heads, and it still isn’t gelling? Maybe your problem is more about extracting the collagen from the bones…

Remove More Collagen From Your Animal Parts

Once you’ve got enough collagen in the pot, the next step is to get it out of the bones and gristle and into the broth. After all, it can’t help your broth gel if it’s locked up in the knuckles or feet or whatever you put in the pot! You have to extract it from the animal parts so it leaches out into the broth.

Collagen extraction can be done in all kinds of ways, but assuming you don’t have access to a full chemistry lab, here’s how to make it work at home:

• Heat. For most of its cook time, bone broth can be simmering gently (on the stovetop or in the slow-cooker). But if you’re having trouble getting the collagen out of your bones, often it really helps to bring the broth to a boil first. Even if you’re making it in the slow-cooker, just put the bones and water in a pot, then bring to a boil and just dump the boiling water and the bones directly into the slow-cooker. This is a very common and simple fix for slow-cooker broth that won’t gel.
• Acid. Treatment with an acid is one of the ways that commercial manufacturers extract collagen from animal skin to use in products like Jell-O. And one of the best acids for the job is acetic acid, the same acid found in vinegar. Try adding a little vinegar to your bones before you pour in the water (this will also help you extract minerals, so it’s a win-win).
• Time. Unless you’re using a pressure cooker, your broth is not going to be done in an hour! Leave it bubble away as long as you can.

If you’re up for it, another solution is to invest in a pressure-cooker (also great for cooking long braises, stews, and soups quickly!). From anecdotal reports, pressure cookers seem to be better at breaking down the bones and extracting the collagen, maybe because they apply heat more intensely. And it certainly is convenient to have your broth ready in less than an hour! If you’re curious about pressure-cooker broth, you can learn more here.

Summing it Up

Remember: bone broth that doesn’t gel is still good for you! It probably even has some gelatin in it, just not enough to give it that jiggly texture. But if you want broth you can cool and then cut with a knife, try:

• Adding more collagen-rich animal parts, like skin, feet, and joints.
• Turning up the collagen extraction with heat, acid, and time (and maybe a pressure cooker).

It might take a couple tries to get the exactly right formula, but luckily the collagen-rich animal parts are usually also the cheapest ones, and even your failed experimental batches will still be delicious in all kinds of soups and sauces.

Roasted chicken is a classic family recipe: it’s quick, it’s easy, and it even makes leftovers! And roasting a whole chicken is much, much more economical than buying just the breasts. But it’s also easy to get bored of chicken with nothing but garlic, salt, and pepper, maybe with a little basil thrown in. So in the spirit of trying something new, here are 20 recipes that do something different with a whole chicken.

International Seasonings

Who said chicken has to be served with gravy and green beans? Try these delicious recipes inspired by cuisines from around the world:

1. Paleo Indian spiced roasted chicken (Plaid and Paleo)

2. Whole roasted masala chicken (Things My Belly Likes)

3. Thai-flavored roast chicken (Lemon Squeezy)

4. Five spice maple chicken (The Primalist)

5. Spanish chicken with sherry and garlic (Spanish Food Blog)

6. African chicken (The Spice House)

7. Irish roast chicken (Erin Brighton) – note that the page also includes a carrot recipe which isn’t Paleo, but the chicken is.

Chicken With Friends…

Spice rubs are all very good, but another way to make chicken a little snazzier is to cook it with some friends. Either as stuffing or as a same-pan side dish, all of these recipes feature chicken with something else.

(Note that some of the recipes call for potatoes. You can leave them out if you like, but there’s nothing wrong with potatoes.)

8. Roasted apricot chicken with herbes de provence (Organic Kitchen)

9. Balsamic roast chicken with tomatoes and new potatoes (Naked Cuisine)

10. Pesto and avocado-stuffed chicken (Virginia is for Hunter-Gatherers)

11. Roast chicken with sausage stuffing (The Not-So Desperate Housewife)

12. The bacon chicken (Paleo Parents)

13. Roast chicken with persimmons and sage (Adventures in Cooking)

New Techniques

Ready to get a little experimental? Why not try these new and different techniques for making your bird shine?

14. Rock Salt Roasted Chicken (Primally Inspired) – Equipment needed: rock salt (ice cream salt), which you can find at any grocery store.

15. Brick Chicken (Serious Eats) – Equipment needed: either a brick and one cast-iron skillet or two cast-iron skillets and something very heavy and heat-proof to use as a weight.

16. “Beer can” Chicken (Paleo Parents) – Equipment needed: a vertical roaster

17. Slow-cooker roast chicken and gravy (Nom Nom Paleo) – Equipment needed: a slow-cooker.

Other Ideas

Sometimes, new and different cooking techniques don’t fit neatly into one category or another. So here’s a round-up of some excellent “miscellaneous” ideas: browse through and see what interests you!

18. Everything Chicken (Worth Cooking) – yes, like an everything bagel; it’s tastier than it sounds!

19. Country Captain (Saveur) – replace the canola oil with a Paleo-friendly fat, and leave off the rice and peanuts.

20. Porcini-rubbed roasted chicken (Food52) – the chicken itself is Paleo, but note that the pan sauce isn’t Paleo as written, although you could replace the flour with almond flour if you wanted.

So...what's next on your chicken-to-cook list? Let us know on Facebook or Google+!

You’re old enough to take charge of your own health…but not quite old enough to have your own kitchen yet. Old enough to care…but not quite old enough to settle down with half a pastured cow and your very own fermentation crock. So how to stay Paleo as a college student?

In this article, you’ll get a look at some of the challenges that college students have to face when they’re trying to go Paleo, and how you can work around them.

Dining Halls

Believe it or not, it is possible to eat a more or less Paleo diet in a college dining hall. It just takes a lot of ingenuity. At the core, Paleo is about meat, fresh fruits and vegetables, healthy fats, and safe starches. So let’s see how you could hunt and gather all that from a typical dining hall…

• Meat: with luck, you’ll have a grill station where you can ask for just a burger without the bun (or even better, a lettuce bun). If there’s a self-serve deli counter, also try that; you might be able to snag some slices of turkey breast, ham, or chicken. Hot entrees are hit-or-miss: grilled barbecue ribs are perfect, but often your only options are breaded or deep-fried in junk oil.
• Eggs: many dining halls have omelets, or even a build-your-own omelet station. This can be an ideal source of quick protein without a lot of junk in it.
• Fresh fruit and vegetables: the salad bar will be your very best friend here. Load up a huge bowl of salad with everything you can find. Hot vegetable dishes might also be available, but watch out for breading, mystery oils, and giant globs of cheese on everything.
• Safe starches: baked or roasted potatoes are not hard to find, probably because they’re very cheap and easy to cook. If you can get your hands on some plain white rice, that’s also fine.
• Healthy fats: if you can get guacamole or olive oil on your salad, you’re home free. You could even consider bringing your own oils if you’re really worried about it.

Also, don’t neglect the soup options! Many dining halls will set out vegetable soup as a sad kind of concession to the vegan crowd, but typically it’s also relatively free of junk. Sometimes you’ll even get lucky and find “chicken vegetable” or something else with protein. Just make sure you’re not getting a bunch of noodles or soy sauce, and you should be fine.

It also helps to keep a stash of food in your room. If you can get a mini-fridge, so much the better. Otherwise, you can still stockpile canned fish, avocados, fresh fruit and vegetables, jerky, summer sausages, and raw nuts to grab for snacks.

Cooking For Yourself

OK, OK, but what if you’re living at home while you go to school? Or what if you have your own apartment? Suddenly, the dining hall stops being the problem; now it’s the need for super-quick (and preferably cheap) meals to keep you going through a long day of classes. Some tips on cooking for yourself as a busy, broke student:

• If you have a microwave on campus, you can cook up one big batch of soup or stew on the weekend, freeze it in individual servings, and pull out one serving per day. Lunch every day, for an hour of total prep time. And it’s hard to beat the price! Just make sure to add some kind of fat and protein (for example, coconut milk and chicken breast). If you throw it in your bag still frozen, the soup serves as its own ice pack, so you don’t even need a cooler.
• Hoard leftovers from dinner to throw in a lunchbox and bring to class. It doesn’t have to be fancy or special-looking, as long as it’s nutritious.
• Keep a snack around at all times. Student schedules are notoriously unpredictable; you never know when you’ll have to run to the library over lunch or stay late for a project. A bag of trail mix or a Larabar can make the difference between staying Paleo and giving in to the bagel counter.
• Hard-boiled eggs are fine to carry around at room temperature all day, and they make perfect quick lunches because you don’t even need utensils. Pack them up with some vegetables or a piece of fruit and you’re set.
• Invest in a slow-cooker, so you can leave your food to cook while you run off and do other things.

Managing Alcohol

Sometimes, the biggest challenge to your Paleo commitments isn’t eating. It’s drinking. And not the kind that you lead the horse to.

It’s easy to say “just don’t drink.” But a night on the porch with some good friends and a few beers can be an important part of college life, and who wants to be the healthiest hermit on campus?

There are as many solutions to this dilemma as people who have to solve it. You can go to parties and hang out with your friends, but just abstain from the drinking part. Or you can test it out to see if moderate drinking fits into your version of Paleo – social drinking actually fits very well into an overall healthy lifestyle as long as you know how to manage it.

It also helps to proactively suggest social activities that don’t revolve around alcohol (or food, for that matter). Try joining an intramural sports team, music group, book club, or some kind of activist organization that you care about. Invite your friends to walk around and explore places on campus with you. Drinking doesn’t have to be the default way of spending time together!

You might also find that as you keep making an effort to take care of yourself, you’re naturally drawn to other people who have the same priorities – people who won’t make you feel weird or out-of-the-loop because you choose to eat or drink a certain way. Then the problem is pretty much solved, and everyone’s happy.

Let go of Perfection

Let’s face it: trying to eat Paleo in college is never going to work out perfectly. No matter what kind of choices you make in the dining hall, you probably won’t be able to get grass-fed meat or organic produce. Cooking for yourself is a different animal, but it’s unrealistic to think that in four years of school, you won’t get stuck without a Paleo option at least a few times!

On top of all that, there’s the social aspect. A lot of your classmates simply won’t care about health, because they’re not seeing the consequences (yet). Making the most of your college years sometimes means choosing to eat something non-Paleo, and that’s OK.

The good news is that in college, while you’re young, you can typically “get away with” a whole lot more. Taking care of yourself most of the time will pay off down the line, but realistically, you do have more wiggle room at this age than you ever will again.

So if your friends invite you out for barbecue ribs…don’t say no because you’re afraid of sugar in the sauce. After all, it’s not just food that makes us healthy. Stressing over food can do just as much harm as the food itself. Strong social connections make us healthier in pretty much every possible way. Sometimes, splitting an Oreo sundae is the healthy choice, and as long as you’re Paleo most of the time, those occasional detours won’t do you much damage.

Summing it Up

If you’re a college student choosing to eat Paleo…congratulations! You’re miles ahead of the curve when it comes to taking care of your health. The benefits might not be obvious now, but you’ll start seeing them at 35 when everyone else is slowing down and you still feel great.

Whether you’re stuck with a meal plan or cooking for yourself, there are plenty of cheap and fast ways to get some food in your stomach and get back to the rest of your life. And just remember: you don’t have to be 100% perfect, 100% of the time. It is possible to find a level of strictness that keeps you feeling good without wrecking your social life; it just takes a little experimentation.

We’ve already published two lists of tips for saving money on Paleo food (here and here in case you missed them), but for some people the real challenge is not money but time. Maybe you have a job that pays you enough for all the grass-fed meat you want, but you don’t get home until 7 or 8 pm every evening and struggle to get dinner on the table at a reasonable hour before you collapse. Or maybe your evenings are a blur of piano lessons, soccer practice, and chess club, with precious little time left over for fiddling with new recipes.

It’s a familiar situation – in fact, the perpetual time crunch of the modern lifestyle is one reason why so many people turn to fast food in the first place. But busy people don’t have to give up on their healthy eating goals! Keep reading to see how even the most overloaded schedules can still squeeze in home-cooked meals.

Kitchen Efficiency

Inefficient kitchen habits eat up your time and make everything take so much longer than it should. Here are some tips to cut down on time-wasters in your shopping and cooking routines.

Let go of perfection.

“You don't have to cook fancy or complicated masterpieces - just good food from fresh ingredients.” – Julia Child

Your meals do not have to be 3-course fine dining experiences. It’s OK to eat something that looks less than photogenic; it’s OK to eat leftovers; it’s OK to eat your sardines out of the can. It’s OK to rely on frozen vegetables (they’re just as nutritious as fresh). If you’re making a salad, it’s perfectly fine to just toss spinach in a bowl with olive oil and balsamic, and then chop up some peppers and carrots on top. You don’t have to spend half an hour hunting down a new recipe and making dressing by hand.

Search out simple recipes (like coleslaw or lemon and thyme chicken). Or forget about recipes completely and learn very basic techniques, like tossing some vegetables on a pan, drizzling them with coconut oil, and roasting them until they’re nicely browned. It’s OK to make food that’s “just” nutritious and tasty; it doesn’t have to be something you’d serve the Queen.

Plan Ahead

Poor planning is the enemy of efficiency. Keep a grocery list on the fridge and write down what you need as you think of it – it’ll save you time running back and forth to the store for the little things you forgot. Meal planning (here's a guide to getting started) will also save you time in the long run, since you won’t be running back and forth in the store trying to decide what you want.

Stock up and minimize shopping.

You’ll save a lot of cooking time if you always have a few basic ingredients in your kitchen:

• Keep your spice collection well-stocked so you can try out new recipes without an extra trip to the store.
• Your cupboards should always have plenty of canned foods like tomato paste, olives, and coconut milk.
• Keep a can or two of fish in the cupboard at all times, for emergency protein in a pinch.
• Always have a bag of onions and a head of garlic on your countertop.

Basically, if it’s non-perishable, just buy it in advance; you’ll thank yourself later when you want to use it and don't have to dedicate 45 minutes to a grocery trip for one ingredient.

Also, even for perishable items you shouldn't have to go to the grocery store more than once a week! Here's a guide to maximizing your grocery efficiency with strategic use of shopping lists.

Prep ahead.

Some people like to chop all their vegetables for the week at once, so they only have one set of dishes to do afterwards. It doesn’t work for everyone – some people find that the vegetables go bad too quickly and they end up throwing them out. But you can chop at least one day ahead without fear of spoilage, and it’ll save you a lot of time the next day.

Another way to prep ahead is to deliberately make more food than you’ll eat at one meal, and freeze the rest (or just save it for the next day). This way, you can cook once and eat twice. It’s all about maximizing the amount of food you get for a given amount of prep.

Appliances to the rescue.

Don’t feel bad about relying on a slow-cooker (which cooks your dinner while you’re away at work) or a pressure cooker (which goes the opposite direction and gets everything cooked faster without sacrificing tenderness). No, cavemen didn’t have slow-cookers. They didn’t have time-sucking office emergencies, either.

Stick with it.

As frustrating as it might be for the first few weeks, cooking gets easier the longer you do it. Sometimes you just have to give yourself a few weeks to get used to this entirely new skill set that you’re trying to learn. After all, you wouldn’t expect to be a champion basketball player or skateboarder after just a few days of practice! The same goes for cooking, so give yourself some time to get into a good routine.

Master One Recipe

Pick one recipe, and make it every week until you can make it in your sleep. You should be able to cook this recipe in a blizzard of hungry piranhas while playing first violin in the London Symphony Orchestra with your other hand. By practicing so much, you’ll get really good at it, and you’ll always have a super-fast meal ready to throw on the table when minutes are precious.

Enlist Help

Who says one person has to do all the cooking? If you’re cooking for anyone besides yourself, get them to give you a hand! Even younger kids can wash produce, scrub dishes or load the dishwasher, wipe the table, or run across the store to get that one last thing you forgot. And if your teenagers are eating everything but the fridge door, surely they can help cook some of it, too!

Stop “Finding Time.”

The tips above can help you cut down your kitchen time. But you still do have to commit to something – what if finding even half an hour every day is just too much?

Here’s the secret, though: as long as you’re thinking about “finding time,” you’ll never find it. There is no secret 25^th hour in the day waiting under a rock somewhere for you to discover. You have to make time.

Making time means prioritizing healthy food over things that are less important to you. Some familiar – and unfamiliar – time sucks that you might consider cutting down on:

• TV. The average American spends 4 hours every day watching TV. It’s one thing to watch a show because you love it and care about the characters, but if you’re just turning on the TV in the evening because you can’t think of what else to do, then it’s not the best use of your time.
• Mindless browsing. It’s amazing how much time you can waste in a kind of Facebook-induced trance. It’s one thing to use social media because you really enjoy it, but ruthlessly get rid of the dazed tab-switching that just sucks up your life. Even little corners of time can add up: instead of checking Twitter while you're waiting for the bus, why not make your shopping list or look up recipes?
• Driving to the store. Most people in urban areas can now get groceries delivered, often for a very small fee (and sometimes that evens out considering the price of gas and impulse purchases at the register). Try a grocery delivery service and save an hour or two every week to cook and prep your food for the next few days.

Nobody’s asking you to cut out the things that really matter, like spending time with your family. But you can cut out things that don’t improve your life (whatever they may be) for the sake of things that do (like eating real food).

Summing it Up

Unless you have a personal chef, eating Paleo is going to take some investment of time to make it work. But it doesn't have to suck up your whole life. By maximizing efficiency in the kitchen and cutting back on time-wasters that aren't actually even enjoyable, most people can make (not find!) plenty of time to cook healthy, Paleo food.

Want to try Paleo but not quite sure what to cook first? We’ve got you covered! Here are 10 super-easy Paleo recipe ideas to help get you off the ground.

1. Frittatas

Eggs are one of the easiest Paleo foods to prepare, and frittatas take “simple but delicious” up to 11. The basic concept is simple: just beat some eggs and pour them into a pan with your favorite vegetables; then bake in the oven until it smells too good to resist!

Here’s a quick and easy recipe for an Italian-themed frittata to get you started. And if that’s not quite your style, try this zucchini and sweet potato frittata instead.

2. Crock-Pot Roasts

Roasts make it easy to stretch a tight budget (especially if you’re feeding a crowd). And slow-cookers make it easy to cram home cooking into even the busiest of schedules. Together, they’re a match made in heaven!

Here’s a quick recipe for balsamic roast beef, and if you’re not feeling the beef today, here’s one just as simple for a pork roast.

3. Roast Chicken

It’s a classic for a reason – affordable, low-effort, and delicious! Many people are intimidated at the thought of cooking a whole bird instead of just the breasts or drumsticks, but it's really not complicated or difficult. Once you do it for the first time, you'll be amazed that you were ever worried about it.

Here’s a very simple recipe for a whole roast chicken to get you started.

4. Baked Chicken

Don’t have a whole chicken handy? No problem: just grab whatever chicken parts you have and make a quick baked chicken recipe.

A few ideas: spice rubbed chicken is great for the heat-lovers, and lemon and thyme chicken has a slightly more delicate flavor, perfect for salads.

5. Chili

A big bowl of chili is just the thing to warm up a cold afternoon. It travels well; it freezes well; it reheats beautifully – is there anything it can’t do? You can adjust the spice level up or down, depending on your tastes, and you can throw in just about any kind of meat you can think of!

Here’s a classic chili with beef and tomatoes, here’s a spicy version with pork, and here’s a recipe for turkey chili (using leftover meat).

6. Coleslaw

Paleo isn’t just about huge hunks of meat all the time: your plate should be at least half-full of vegetables! Per serving, cabbage is one of the cheapest vegetables you can buy, and it’s also very easy to prepare. You can fry it, roast it, throw it in a soup…or make coleslaw out of it!

Here’s a recipe for fruity coleslaw, and here’s one for a buffalo ranch version.

7. Chicken soup

Chicken soup is “soul food” after a long day. It’s a time-honored home remedy for a sniffle or a flu, and it’s an ideal way to use up any vegetables loitering in your fridge about to go bad. Plus, it’s a perfect vehicle for bone broth.

Here’s a very basic chicken soup recipe that you can modify almost infinitely to suit your particular tastes.

8. Roasted Vegetables

The easiest way of dealing with almost any vegetable is to just toss it on a tray with some Paleo cooking fat and roast it until it’s soft and delicious. Roasting more assertive vegetables like broccoli or Brussels sprouts brings out their inner sweetness and makes them much more palatable for kids.

Here’s a basic recipe for oven-roasted cabbage to get you started, but remember: you can apply the same technique to almost anything!

9. Guacamole

Guacamole is a perfect vehicle for healthy fats and all the other good stuff that you’ll find in an avocado. It’s delicious scooped over a salad, used as a dip for raw vegetable slices, or simply eaten straight off the spoon.

Here’s a recipe for quick and easy guacamole.

10. Hamburgers

Burgers don’t have to come on a bun! They’re incredibly versatile and a guaranteed dinner favorite, so it’s well worth your time to find a Paleo recipe.

Here’s a basic recipe for Portobello burgers – with a mushroom stepping in as the bun. And just for fun, here are some fries to go with them.

Did we miss anything? What's your favorite super-simple beginner recipe? Let us know on Facebook or Twitter!

You’ve heard of spinach. And at this point we’re all aware that kale is going to make us immortal. But there’s a whole world of leafy greens out there beyond the usual suspects, and if you’re looking to switch up your salads, one of the less-popular choices might be the perfect option for you!

Adding different greens to your vegetable rotation ensures that you constantly have a good supply of calcium and other important nutrients: variety is one of the best ways to make sure your diet is nutritionally sound. So here are 10 tasty (and extremely nutritious) leafy greens you might be walking past every time you go grocery shopping, without even realizing what you’re missing.

1. Turnip Greens

How to find them: Turnip greens are large (a bunch is typically around the size of a bunch of kale) and bright green. They'll be either attached to the turnips, or sold in big bunches with the collards and other cooking greens.

Taste: like a very, very mild version of turnips; it’s really just a hint of turnip flavor. They’re great if you think the turnips themselves are a little too strong. Turnip greens bought at a farmers’ market tend to have a sharper flavor than greens bought at the grocery store, which are more watery.

Cooking tips: turnip greens are best cooked; stir-fry or sauté them in fat. Cook them just until they turn a brighter green; this removes any bitterness without making them bland and mushy.

Recipe inspiration: Stir-fried turnip greens.

2. Mustard Greens

How to find them: Mustard greens are bright and bushy (a bunch is about as tall as your forearm from elbow to hand). They should be with the collards and other cooking greens.

Taste: a little spicier and more assertive than lettuce.

Cooking tips: quickly pan-fry them with your favorite fat. Like turnip greens, mustard greens should be cooked just until they brighten up.

Recipe inspiration: Sarson ka Saag.

3. Dandelion Greens

How to find them: walk out into your backyard and pick some, or check in the leafy greens section of the supermarket.

Taste: they’re pretty bitter raw (although perfectly safe to eat, and great in a salad mix where you can balance out the bitterness with a milder leaf). If you’re not a fan of the sharp taste, cooking them tones it down a lot.

Cooking tips: Dandelion greens are definitely candidates for boiling or another more demanding cooking method, depending on how much bitterness you like in your leaves.

Recipe inspiration: Eggs in a nest.

4. Mesclun

How to find it: check the bagged or boxed salad mixes.

Taste: Mesclun varies in taste from one batch to the next, because it’s not a specific plant. Instead, it’s the name for a mix of young salad greens, typically including some new and exciting candidates like radicchio, oak leaf, and mizuma. As a rule, the taste will be more assertive than a pile of romaine or iceberg, but it might be slightly bitter, peppery, sharp, or bright – or all of the above!

Cooking tips: Don’t cook mesclun; it’s best used as a salad mix.

Recipe inspiration: Duck confit with fried potatoes, mushrooms, and mesclun.

5. Arugula

How to find it: arugula will be with the lettuce and the other salad greens. It looks a little like dandelion leaves.

Taste: arugula is typically described as “peppery:” this is definitely a green that knows its own mind! It’s sharp, and even a little stingy.

Cooking tips: arugula goes really well in omelets or paired with something else that’s rich and creamy, to balance out the sharpness. In a salad, it’s best as one leaf in a mix, not as the only green involved.

Recipe inspiration: Arugula salad with beets.

6. Beet greens

How to find them: either attached to a bunch of beets, or on their own with the cooking greens. Beet greens have dark red-purple stems and deep green leaves.

Taste: beet greens taste a lot like Swiss chard, if you can imagine Swiss chard with a slightly beety twist. They have a rich, full, and almost  sweet flavor.

Cooking tips: use them any time you would otherwise use chard: they’re particularly good pan-fried with a pinch of salt and some onions for crunch. Be aware that beet greens will turn everything else in the pan pink, just like beetroots would.

Recipe inspiration: Roasted beets and carrots with grapefruit glaze.

7. Kohlrabi

How to find it: this one’s easy: kohlrabi looks like Sputnik, if Sputnik decided to go organic. The bottom is a big globe, with leafy offshoots sprouting up from it. Look for it with the other green vegetables.

Taste: kohlrabi tastes very similar to broccoli; it has the same hardy, rooty taste when it’s raw, and the same mild sweetness when it’s cooked (especially if you roast it).

Cooking tips: Roast or bake kohlrabi to bring out its milder side.

Recipe inspiration: Beet and kohlrabi greens chips.

8. Curly Endive/Frisee

(sometimes incorrectly called chicory)

How to find it: Curly endive, also called frisee, should be with the salad greens. It’s white at the roots and medium-green at the tips, and looks distinctly frizzy.

Taste: sharp, with a crunchy, feathery texture.

Cooking tips: frisee is a love-it-or-hate-it green; it goes well as a counterpoint for sweeter toppings (like apples and raisins) or rich and savory choices like bacon.

Recipe inspiration: Orange endive salad.

9. Belgian endive

How to find it: this is the lumpy, white plant you’ll see stocked with the radishes and turnips. Despite the similar name, it’s actually a different species from endive.

Taste: Slightly bitter, and often described as “tangy.” The versions with the red-purple tips and green-yellow tips both taste about the same.

Cooking tips: Belgian endive is great raw as a “scoop” for dips or appetizers, but it’s also good braised low and slow to reduce any bitterness and mellow out the taste.

Recipe inspiration: Caraway chicken with Belgian endive.

10. Watercress

How to find it: watercress has small, round leaves: a bunch of watercress looks like a bunch of very tiny water lilies. Look with the baby salad greens or fresh herbs.

Taste: Watercress, like arugula, is sharp and assertive; it mellows out a lot when it’s cooked.

Cooking tips: Watercress is great for adding a bit more punch to soups and other milder foods that could otherwise be boring.

Recipe inspiration: Warm watercress and pine nut salad.

What's your favorite less-common leafy green? Let us know on Facebook or Google+!

How often do you hear those five little words: "I know I should, but..."?

It’s a different issue for everyone, but most of us have at least one thing we should be doing, but for whatever reason, we just can't make it happen.

For example, say there’s an imaginary Paleo dieter called Kurt, and Kurt’s problem is sleep: he gets maybe 6 hours of sleep a night. He can feel that it’s affecting his health, and he knows how bad sleep deprivation is, but he’s getting really tired of preachy blog posts sanctimoniously repeating the dire consequences of sleep deprivation, because darn it, he’s busy. He knows he should sleep more, but...he has a full-time job and he’s taking MBA classes in the evening, and he has to get up early to hit the gym 4 days a week, and now on top of buying and cooking all his own food, he’s supposed to magically find 8 hours a night to lie there unconscious? Maybe in Paleo Fantasyland!

For you, it might not be sleep. Maybe it’s chronic stress: how many times have you felt a flash of irritation at someone self-righteously warning you about the dangers of stress and thought “that’s fine for them, but would they be so perfectly Zen if they had to put up with my life?” Maybe it’s exercise. Maybe it’s cooking at home. It could be anything. But you can tell it’s an “I know I should, but…” problem if

• You scroll past blog posts and articles about it because you just don’t want to hear anyone else preaching at you.
• You get defensive when it’s brought up.
• The topic makes you feel victimized, threatened, or angry for reasons you don’t understand.
• You can come up with perfectly understandable reasons for your behavior, but you still feel guilty.
• You’re looking for information about a health concern, and you keep finding that it’s related to this particular thing that you’re doing or not doing, but you don’t want to hear it so you go looking for other causes instead.
• In most other aspects of your life, you can do what needs to be done: this is one of a very few exceptions, or even the only one.

If any of that sounds uncomfortably familiar, you’re probably facing an “I know I should, but…” issue.

These problems are energy vampires: they’re not really alive, but they never really die, either. They don’t get serious enough that you’re forced to confront them, but they also don’t go away. They just fester in the back of your mind, sucking up your mental energy and preying on the edges of your mood. There’s always that niggling dissatisfaction of something you should be doing, the annoying guilt, the knowledge in the back of your mind that this is a real problem, no matter how many justifications you have for it.

Well, it’s time to haul out a head of garlic and your favorite hunting stake, because those vampires are about to die forever.

But It’s Not My Fault!

If you really believed that, you wouldn’t feel guilty about it. If you’re still hung up on the issue, one of two things might be happening:

• It really is beyond your control, and you’re having trouble accepting that and letting it go. To get back to Sleepless Kurt, maybe it really is objectively impossible for him to get a solid 8 hours.
• It actually isn’t beyond your control, and deep down, you know it. In Kurt’s case, maybe he’s just struggling with time management, or he’s in denial about his choice to prioritize World of Warcraft over sleep. All the justifications about how busy he is are just excuses.

In the first case, the solution is to make your peace with the things you can’t change. You’re an imperfect human living under imperfect circumstances, and you’re doing the best with what you’ve got. You’ll know you’ve reached this point when you’re no longer bitter, angry, guilty, or defensive about the issue, and when it’s no longer nagging at the back of your mind.

But if acceptance just isn’t cutting it, maybe the problem is that it isn’t actually beyond your control. Maybe that’s just an excuse: deep down, you know you could do something about it, but for some reason, it’s incredibly hard even to admit, much less to start working on.

Addressing the “Shoulds”

These questions of “I know I should, but…” are so uncomfortable to address because they make you confront the gap between your values and your behavior. It’s easier and more comforting just to let ourselves believe our own excuses. But stick with it, and you’ll feel so much better in the long run. Here's how:

Identify the Problem

Step 1 is to identify the problem – because often the issue really isn’t what you think it is.

Sit down with a pen and paper, in a place where you have no distractions. This is going to be pretty tough, so you’ll need all your focus. Think of your “I know I should, but…” problem, and then write it down. If anything else comes to mind on the topic, write that down too. Then just list all the reasons why you’re behaving this way even though you know you should be doing something else. From the totally ridiculous to the emotionally profound, just write it all down. If something doesn’t quite ring true, write it down anyway, and then try to come up with something that sounds more right. Keep listing things until you get the one that knocks you over the head with "Wow! That's the problem!" (you'll know it when you find it).

Brainstorm Solutions

Step 2 is to brainstorm some solutions. For each reason you came up with (even the ones that aren't the "Wow!" reason), ask yourself some questions:

• For outside reasons (e.g. “my work schedule”): what 3 specific things could I reasonably do to make this situation less of a problem? For example, if your work schedule is preventing you from cooking meals at home, you could: look up bulk recipes, buy a slow-cooker, and experiment with meal planning.
• For internal reasons (e.g. “I’m afraid of looking dumb”): what 3 specific things could I do to work around this in a way I can live with? For example, if your fear of looking stupid is preventing you from going to the gym, you could: buy a DVD and work out at home, go running at night when nobody can see you, or hire a personal trainer to teach you how to use the gym equipment.

Pick One and Plan

At this point, you should have a list of several possible things you might do to help yourself bridge that gap between “I should…” and “I do…”

Now comes the hard part: don’t do them all at once! Pick one and focus on that first. Then make a concrete, quantifiable plan to do that thing, and give yourself a specific time to do it. For example, “I will go to Target on Saturday and buy a slow-cooker.” If that helps you cook even one healthy meal that you otherwise wouldn’t, then you’re on the right track.

When you’ve accomplished one thing on your list, then move on to the next. This gets a lot easier as you build up momentum and start feeling good about finally addressing the problem. Err on the side of slow and steady; the worst thing you could possibly do here is make it too overwhelming.

It’s Not Easy

If it were easy, you wouldn’t need to read this, because you wouldn’t be having a problem in the first place. Cut yourself some slack, especially if you’re struggling with some heavy emotional issues behind the problem. Take it one step at a time, and remember that it’s fine to go slowly, as long as you don’t give up and quit. Keep reminding yourself how good it's going to feel when you can live without that nagging guilt and defensiveness in the back of your mind, and stick with it!

There’s a time and place to figure out what you’re having for dinner, and it’s not five minutes before dinner is scheduled to begin, while staring at an empty fridge, wondering how on earth you’re going to feed four people with half a leftover chicken breast, three zucchini, and a bottle of mustard.

Enter meal planning. This doesn’t have to mean spreadsheets and calendars and alphabetized collections of index cards: after all, the whole point is to save you time, not to turn your kitchen into some kind of culinary Library of Congress. Meal planning doesn’t have to be complicated, and you don’t have to be some kind of uber-organized kitchen prodigy to make it work.

Here’s how to start meal planning, in 3 steps.

Step 1: Assess

Before you can fix the problem, you have to know what the problem is. And you need to get a little more specific than “I don’t have time to cook.”

To make the most effective meal plan, the first step is to figure out your pain points. A “pain point” is the thing that always trips you up, the problem that destroys all your good intentions. Some examples:

• You don’t have a fridge at work, so you never know what to pack for lunch. You end up just getting fast food.
• You get home from work late and don’t know any recipes you can cook quickly, so dinner always takes forever and you end up just ordering takeout.
• You always forget things at the grocery store, so you spend way too much time running back and forth for just one or two things. Eventually you get sick of it and just go out to eat.

Think back on any times when you just couldn’t face the thought of cooking again so you gave up and ordered pizza. Why did you end up in that situation? Was it that you had no food in the fridge? Or the only recipe you had was too long and hard? Or that you didn’t feel confident about making it?

Try to focus on situations you can control, not reasons like “I was tired.” All of us get tired, and yet some people manage to stick to the plan while others stumble. The problem is not being tired; it’s that you didn’t plan for being tired. Takeout restaurants plan for that possibility very, very well: it’s their entire business model. So to beat the takeout demons, you’ll just have to plan better than they do.

Before you move on to Step 2, quickly jot down your top one or two (or more) pain points so you’ll have them for reference.

Step 2: Find your Style

Found your pain points? The next step is to find a style of planning that addresses those particular points. If your pain point is “I don’t know any recipes simple enough to cook in a rush,” then a meal plan full of complicated four-course dinners is not going to help! You need a style of meal planning that addresses your particular problem. Some suggestions…

The casual planner

Good for: “I’m fine with cooking; I just run out of food halfway through the week because I forget things at the grocery store,” “I’m single and I don’t want to spend too much time on this,” “I don’t mind cooking on the fly sometimes.”

You will need: paper and a pen.

How it works: Write down however many pounds of meat, servings of vegetables, servings of fruit, and servings of starch you eat in a week, plus any miscellaneous items (e.g. cooking fat, vinegar, spices/herbs, etc.). That’s your shopping list. It doesn’t matter what kind of meat you get; get whatever looks good or is on special. As long as you buy everything on the list, you’ll have enough food to tide you through the week.

When you eat what is up to you: that’s why this one is the casual planner! It’s great if you live alone and eat a lot of very simple meals, or if you have a knack for making a meal out of any random collection of ingredients, so long as there’s something in the fridge.

The money-saver

Good for: “I have time to cook but can’t afford to eat this way.”

You will need: the weekly flyer from your grocery store, a calendar or planner, a separate paper for your shopping list, and your computer, to look up recipes.

How it works: Every week, get your grocery store’s sales flyer. Pick out the Paleo foods on sale, and look up recipes based on those. Grab a calendar or weekly planner and write down what you’re having for breakfast, lunch, and dinner each day. As you write down each meal in your planner, put the ingredients on your shopping list. Head to the store before the sales end, stock up, and get cooking!

The time-saver

Good for: “I’m struggling to find time for shopping and cooking between everything else in my schedule”

You will need: your weekly planner or day organizer, a separate paper for your shopping list, and your computer, to look up recipes.

How it works: Every week, grab a calendar and write down any events that might interfere with cooking. Working around those events, pencil in the time that you’ll spend on meal prep, whether that’s all at once on the weekends or spread throughout the week. Then do some searching for quick and easy recipes, slow-cooker recipes, or recipes that make a lot of leftovers. Plan those into the schedule, and put the ingredients on your shopping list as you add meals to your calendar.

The low-effort plan

Good for: “I don’t know any Paleo recipes that I can cook in a hurry,” “I don’t feel confident cooking Paleo food,” “I’m always tired when I get home and don’t have energy to cook all this fancy food.”

You will need: a calendar or planner, a separate paper for your shopping list, and your computer, to look up recipes.

How it works: Every week, start by hunting through your favorite sources for Paleo recipes to find simple breakfasts, lunches, and dinners. It helps to find recipes that make multiple servings, so you can have some leftovers and not cook something new for every single meal. Write them down on your calendar, and as you write down each meal, add the ingredients for it to your shopping list. You’ll only have to shop once during the week, and you’ll always have something quick and easy to make.

The custom blend

None of the above sound quite right? Or are you struggling with a different problem? That’s OK; just experiment with methods until you find something that works. You can mix and match methods, or come up with something completely unique by starting with the “best match” and modifying it until it fits your life perfectly.

Step 3: Just do it!

Reading a list of tips on meal planning will not help you plan your meals. Only planning your meals will help you plan your meals. Instead of clicking back over to the next tab, grab your day planner right now and pencil in a time to sit down and work out a meal planning system. Or write an email to yourself, write it on your hand, put up a sticky note - whatever you like; just do it now before you can forget.

It doesn’t matter if it’s not perfect the first time. Paleo is a lifestyle change, not a “diet” that you go off in two weeks, so you’ll have plenty of time to fine-tune your system. If you're still nervous about jumping with both feet, here's a sample 14-day meal plan for you to start with; copy it exactly or modify it to fit your needs. Or come up with something entirely original. Even if it's not perfect, it'll still probably be better than what you had before. Just go for it: you've got nothing to lose!

Cooking Paleo for a family is a challenge in itself, but cooking for one person raises a different set of issues. Sometimes it just doesn’t seem worth it to get out all the pots and pans just for one meal; it seems like cleaning everything up afterwards takes even longer than cooking. And a lot of the money-saving techniques like buying in bulk just don’t seem workable.

But cooking for one also has its bright sides. You don’t have to worry about making anything look particularly impressive unless you personally enjoy fiddling with the presentation. You can cook whatever you want, whenever you want it, and there’s no pressure to make something that other people will like.

To help you maximize the up sides and cut down on the problems, here’s a simple guide to Paleo cooking for just one person.

Rethink Bulk Meals

Some people don’t mind eating the same thing every day, but most of us don’t want to make a huge pot of chili and then eat the exact same chili for the rest of the week. That’s way too boring. But you can still use bulk meals to cut down on cooking time and food prices. Here’s how:

• Make a huge batch of something. A slow-cooker is the perfect tool for this.
• Divide it into individual containers, and label them clearly with the date and the contents.
• Freeze all the containers.

That way, instead of having chili every day for a week, you can put most of your batch in the freezer, and pull out one or two servings a week as you want them. It’s all the convenience of cooking in bulk, without the monotony of eating the exact same food over and over again.

If you really want to get fancy with this, you could make multiple different freezer meals (remember to label them all!), so you’ll always have a choice of microwaveable Paleo dinners ready to go.

Cut Down on Pans

When you’re cooking single servings of anything, the ratio of dirty dishes to food cooked is very high. For example, if you use a frying pan to cook something, you have to spend just as much time cleaning the pan whether you make one serving or five. This can dramatically add to your total kitchen time – you’re basically doing family-size dishes, without the family-size meals. Here’s how to cut it down:

• Buy versatile cookware. Glass and Pyrex can go from the oven to the fridge without a hitch, so you can store leftovers in the very same dish you used to cook in the first place. This saves you a lot of annoying, bulky pans and Tupperware to wash.
• Make one-pan meals. Stir-fries, scrambles, and other simple recipes make a complete meal without a lot of dishes.

Freeze Wisely

Freezing isn’t just limited to bulk meals. Your freezer is your best friend for anything that you go through slowly – and if you live alone and you’re cooking for one, that’s a lot of stuff. Try freezing…

• Homemade sauces and dressings. Freeze them in ice cube trays, and then pop them out of the tray into plastic bags once they’re frozen. They won’t go bad, and you’ll always have some when you need them.
• Bulk spices. They’re cheaper, but they can go stale if you keep them out at room temperature.
• Nut flours and meals. These go rancid easily left out on the shelf, but they’ll keep almost indefinitely in the freezer.
• Coconut milk or other half-used cans. Making a recipe for one and don’t need the whole huge can of coconut milk? Just freeze the other half.
• Herbs. Sick of buying a huge bunch of herbs and having most of it rot away into a slimy mess? Use this recipe for freezing them in olive oil.

Plan your Vegetables

It’s absolutely possible to shop once a week for one person; you just have to plan out your vegetables a little. Spinach, sprouts, and other fragile vegetables won’t last the whole 7 days, so aim to eat those first (or cook them into something that stores better, like a spinach quiche). Hardier specimens like squash and beets can wait until the end of the week; they’ll still be good.

Another strategy is to use frozen vegetables – they’re just as nutritious as fresh, and of course, there’s no danger that they’ll go bad.

Mix and Match

Who says you can’t have one egg, one sausage, the last half-bowl of vegetable soup, and some quick roasted cauliflower for dinner? The Japanese have mastered this for the midday meal – bento boxes are lunchboxes that serve small portions of many different foods, often with cute or creative presentations. It doesn’t have to feel like you’re just eating a random plate of leftovers all smushed together; with a few meals of practice, you’ll get the knack of putting together a single meal out of many smaller servings of food.

Let Go of Recipes

Not everything you cook has to come from a recipe book. If you’re finding that all the recipes you like make huge amounts of food, try looking at them as inspiration, rather than a set of one-size-fits-all directions. Then think of how you could adapt the recipe to a single serving. For example…

• If you see a great frittata recipe with a dozen eggs, why not reduce the ingredients and make it as mini-frittatas instead, so you can cook only as many as you want.
• Instead of roasting a whole chicken, why not use the same spices and other seasonings to roast just a single breast, or just a leg?

Even if you can’t just divide all the quantities in the recipe by 4 and expect it to work, there’s usually a way to adapt the same idea to a smaller execution.

Some Paleo Meals for One

And now to whet your appetite, a few examples of Paleo meals that already come in single servings or are easy to convert:

• Lemon thyme chicken: just use one chicken breast instead of 4.
• Egg and pesto stuffed tomatoes: just cut down the eggs to however many you’re hungry for.
• Roasted delicata squash. Delicata squashes come in all different sizes; just find one small enough that you can eat it all in one serving.

…And Yours!

What are your best tips for single-serving Paleo cooking? Do you have a favorite bulk recipe? Share with us on Facebook or Google+!

We all know the standard tips for saving money on Paleo (if you’re new, check out the quick and easy list here), but every new meal is a fresh chance to learn another useful strategy. So in honor of the 3-year anniversary of the original money saving tips list (published December of 2010), here’s a brand-new list of 25 more helpful tips and tricks for keeping the grocery budget down.

1. Buy spices online. McCormick or other grocery-store brands are amazingly overpriced. Sometimes you’ll pay upwards of $6 for a tiny little jar! You can make your food taste awesome without all that: most online retailers are far cheaper per ounce. You can save even more if you find an online source that ships the spices in ordinary plastic bags, since that way you don’t have to pay for the bottle.

2. Consider wild greens. Living in a rural area gives you the opportunity to hunt and fish, but even city-dwellers can forage for a surprising amount of food. For example, did you know that you can make a delicious salad out of dandelion leaves? Mint is also quite easy to find. There’s a whole wealth of edible wild plants out there – many of which are more nutritious than their domesticated versions – and many excellent guidebooks to help you identify them. Just make sure to be confident in your identification before you eat something!

3. Keep a price book. A price book is just your record of how much you paid for something and when. Write down your groceries in a price book, and after a few weeks you’ll have a good working knowledge of how much something usually costs. Then you’ll be able to spot which sales are truly awesome deals (meaning: stock up!) and which ones you can skip.

4. Frozen vegetables. Frozen vegetables are just as nutritious as fresh (sometimes more, since they’re picked at the peak of their season). They’re often cheaper, but make sure to check because sometimes the fresh version is more of a bargain. A tip though: skip the canned vegetables. They’re less tasty and less nutritious.

5. Bulk is not always better. Yes, you pay less per unit for bulk goods. But if you buy an enormous bunch of cilantro and then use only a tiny bit before it goes bad, it might actually be cheaper to just buy the smaller size.

6. Shop ethnic stores. These are astonishing and underappreciated sources for all kinds of cheaper things. Indian or Middle Eastern stores will have spices at a fraction of the cost of a standard grocery. Halal and kosher markets have humanely raised meat, often also much more cheaply than Whole Foods. Asian markets are full of fish you’ve never even seen before! Not only is it cheaper; it also helps mix things up and keep it interesting.

7. Cut back on nuts. High-quality nuts are very expensive and not all that good for you anyway. For example, 1 pound of bulk almonds typically costs around $7-10, depending on where you live. For that money, you could get a pound of grass-fed beef instead, with a whole lot more nutrition attached. If you have to buy nuts, at least try to buy whole nuts – you can make your own almond flour, almond butter, and almond milk from raw almonds at a considerable discount, so don’t pay someone else to process it for you. The same goes for coconut products like coconut milk and coconut flour.

8. Skip the cleaners. Laundry detergent, shampoo, toothpaste, window shiner, furniture polish, and other household cleaners are often extremely expensive. Make your own all-natural versions with cheap ingredients like baking soda, coconut oil, and lemon juice, and you’ll free up more money for food. Plus, it’s better for avoiding environmental toxins.

9. Ignore best-by dates. This really isn’t a health risk. There’s even been a study describing how completely random, non-standardized, and ultimately meaningless those dates are. They really just exist to make money for the grocery store (you think you need to throw something out, and then you have to buy more). Trust your nose, your tongue, and your gut – if it smells fine and tastes fine, it probably is.

10. Cut back on fruit. Fruit costs a lot more than vegetables (in most parts of the world), and you get less nutrition for your dollar. For example, a pint of blueberries can easily reach $5, and that will serve maybe 3 people. You could also buy three bunches of collard greens (or more) for that $5, and serve 6+ people.

11. Slow-cook, slow-cook, slow-cook. Here’s a fairy tale made in health-food heaven: once upon a time, there was a Paleo Fairy who wanted to help everyone in the world eat delicious and nutritious food. The Paleo Fairy cried tears of pure coconut oil every time someone had to serve a cheap cut of meat that was tough, stringy, chewy, or as dry as old shoe leather. So, in a fit of generosity and inspiration, the Paleo Fairy invented the slow-cooker, allowing time-crunched, budget-conscious Paleo dieters everywhere to actually enjoy tender and mouthwatering pot roasts and brisket. And you too can enjoy this amazing fairy gift, simply by picking up a slow-cooker of your very own. Fancy models can get pricey, but you can get one that works just fine for $20, or even less if you get it secondhand.

12. Buy as basic as possible. You don’t need jerky, pre-packaged freezer meals, or other foods that someone has already cooked for you. These things add up incredibly fast. Prioritize single-ingredient foods, and skip the kale chips, “gluten-free ________,” and snack bars. For example, say you went to the store and bought 2 Larabars for snacks. Each bar is around $1.50 so two would be approximately $3. For that same $3, you could buy 2 cans of olives (also around $1.50 each, if you get the store brand), which will give you get approximately 8 snacks for the same money. And they’re healthier snacks to boot: more fat, less sugar.

13. Critique your supplements. With an increasing number of news stories lately about unlabeled or fraudulent ingredients in supplements, these expensive bottles are looking like a worse and worse investment every day. Pick them very carefully, go for quality when you absolutely need a supplement, and cut out the rest. You shouldn’t need a lot of supplements if you’re eating a nutrient-dense diet.

14. Label. Not every bunch of celery needs a label, of course. But for example, if you’re stocking up on freezer dinners, take the extra 2 seconds to slap a sticker on the Tupperware and jot down what it is and when you put it in there. That way you’ll never be stuck reheating the wrong thing, or wondering what exactly that is in the back of the freezer and whether you shouldn’t just throw it out.

15. Become an Amazon Wizard. Did you know that Amazon has a program called Subscribe and Save, where you get a discount plus free shipping on products if you order a regular delivery? You can get time periods ranging from 1 month to 6 months. This is perfect for nonperishable items like coconut oil, canned fish, coffee, and other pantry staples.

16. Cure your own. Bacon from pastured pigs will run you approximately $10 (at least) per pound. Pork belly is typically closer to $2-3 per pound. Use this recipe to make your own bacon, so you can have a treat at a fraction of the cost. The same goes for making your own fermented foods (compare the price of a bag of real, probiotic sauerkraut to the price of a head of cabbage).

17. Reduce disposables. Paper towels, paper napkins, paper cups and plates, plastic forks and knives…they’re convenient, but you pay for it. Buying a package of cheap dishrags will save you a lot of money down the line when you don’t have to buy paper towels every week. The same goes for cloth napkins and proper cutlery. If you want to get really thrifty about it, you can even cut up old shirts to make dishrags: after all, they still absorb just fine!

18. Tea leaves beat tea bags. Tea bags are convenient, no doubt about it. But you also pay more per serving than you would for tea leaves – and the leaves are also better for you, with more of their antioxidant content intact. You can get a very simple tea ball for $1-2 at a grocery store online, and it’ll pay for itself quickly.

19. Easy on the protein. Of the three macronutrients (protein, carbs, and fat), protein is by far the most expensive. For optimal health, you don’t need more than 15-20% of your diet as protein at most: eating 30, 35, or even 40% protein is just throwing money down the drain without improving your health in anyway. Focus on cheap and healthy fats (like butter, coconut oil, and animal fat) and carbs (like potatoes, sweet potatoes, and other safe starches) and reduce protein where you can.

20. Stock up slowly. It can be tempting to rush out and buy all your pantry staples at once when you’re first getting started. But on your first grocery trip, you don’t even know if you’ll need or like half of these new and unfamiliar foods! What if you buy a huge jar of coconut oil only to discover that you can’t stand it? That’s an incredible waste of money. So just buy enough to get you started for one week, and then slowly start accumulating more pantry staples, starting with the smallest sized amount you can buy, and springing for the bulk version only after you’re sure you’ll actually like it.

21. Write down what you waste. Whatever is moldering away in your fridge at the end of the week, grab a pad of paper or a sticky note and jot it down before you chuck it. Attach the paper to your grocery list, so you won’t make the same mistake twice.

22. Modify recipes. Think of recipes as suggestions, not strict sets of rules that you have to follow at risk of burning down the house. Many of them will hold up to a lot of modification, depending on what you have available or what you can get for cheap. For example, you can often swap out different kinds of white fish for each other: if cod is $10/lb and swai is $5/lb, go with the swai. You can also substitute a lot of vegetables, especially in soups or stews.

23. Use the whole vegetable. We make a big deal out of using the whole animal – including bones for stock, skin, organs, and other “odd bits.” But the same applies to vegetables. Broccoli stalks are perfectly edible, delicious roasted, and taste just like the rest of the broccoli. Throwing them out is just throwing money in the trash. The same goes for cauliflower stems, apple cores, and many other parts that most people chuck without thinking about it. In fact, even the cauliflower leaves are edible, and quite tasty.

24. Don’t buy bottled drinks. Of course, Paleo cuts out the biggest money suck of all (soda and soft drinks), but you might still be tempted by stevia-sweetened sodas, kombucha, unsweetened tea, or other pre-bottled drinks. Buying these products is expensive for what you get, because you're paying the transportation costs for a bottle that's mostly water. Save money by buying your own tea bags or coffee grounds, and adding the water yourself at home. Or if you need it to go, buy a thermos: it’ll pay for itself in a week.

25. Ask for useful gifts. As we’re heading into Christmas season, why not ask your friends and family to get you useful presents – a gift certificate to a local farmers market, a big tub of coconut oil, or a starter kit of spices? It might get them thinking about their own diet a little more, in a low-pressure kind of way, and you can be sure you’ll get something you want!

25 more ways to keep your wallet happy – but the list certainly doesn’t end there! What’s your best money-saving tip that we missed? Let us know on Facebook or Google+!

When we think about eliminating “processed foods,” most people’s minds go straight to grain-based confections wrapped in crinkly cellophane liners or boxed up in the cereal aisle. But what about less obvious forms of processing? Isn’t fermentation a “process”? What about cooking; isn’t it “processing” a food to chop it up, heat it, and combine it with other foods and spices?

Yes, technically it is. You might not think of a home-cooked meal as “processed food,” but cooked food actually is processed in the sense of being removed from its original state. Obviously, a home-cooked meal doesn’t include the usual suspects found in store-bought “processed food” (excess salt, MSG, and other additives), but it does chemically change the food you’re about to eat. So does even home processing compromise the nutrition of your food? Would a true Paleo diet mean eating your steak raw?

Not necessarily. Cooking is basically a series of trade-offs: you get some disadvantages, but you also get some fairly significant advantages along for the ride. Provided you take reasonable precautions, raw and cooked meat are both perfectly safe and healthy to eat: pick either one or a combination of both depending on your tastes and preference.

Raw vs. Cooked: Nutrients

One potential disadvantage of cooking is nutrient loss. Minerals are basically heat-stable, and fat-soluble vitamins (A, D, E, and K) are basically stable, but water-soluble vitamins (B vitamins and C) are more fragile and cooking can result in serious losses.

To start with, cooking meat thoroughly destroys the Vitamin C in it. Although Vitamin C is normally associated with vegetables, it’s also present in raw meat, as the explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson convincingly demonstrated when he lived for a year on raw and lightly-cooked meat without ever getting scurvy. Vitamin C is heat-sensitive, though, so by the time your bacon is nicely crispy around the edges, it’s gone. But this really isn’t an issue if you eat even minimal amounts of vegetables: meat makes a very tiny contribution to the Vitamin C content of most normal diets, because fruits and vegetables provide more than enough.

Cooking also reduces the levels of Vitamin B6, another heat-sensitive nutrient that just can’t hold up to a frying pan or even a slow-cooker. On the other hand, many common sources of B6 are foods that we usually eat raw. One cup of spinach, for example, has 22% of the RDA, and an avocado has 19%. If you were eating a purely carnivorous cooked diet, it’s easy to see how B6 deficiency would be a concern, but if your daily food intake includes some fruits and vegetables as well, this is not such a huge deal.

Overall, if your diet consists exclusively of meat, raw meat is better than cooked. But if you eat a reasonable amount of non-meat food, the vitamin losses from cooking your meat aren’t terribly significant.

Raw vs. Cooked: Potential Carcinogens

Another point against cooking meat is that the cooking process can form several types of carcinogenic (or potentially carcinogenic) compounds.

Advanced Glycation End-Products

First of all, the heat of cooking leads to the formation of Advanced Gylcation End-products (AGEs). These are by-products that form when protein and sugar meet a heat source; they’re responsible for the brown color that you get from a nicely seared steak. AGEs are a major source of oxidative stress, which drives overall inflammation and accelerates the inevitable process of physical degeneration (especially the physical decline associated with aging).

So far, so bad, but there’s one caveat to this: the AGEs you get in food are actually a very small proportion of the AGEs your body actually has to deal with. Even meat that’s burnt to a crisp barely contributes anything relative to the AGEs your body produces all on its own. So yes, AGEs are dangerous, but the best way to reduce them is to reduce your own body’s production (by avoiding excess fructose consumption), not to stress out about grill marks on your burger.

Heterocyclic Amines and Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons

Depending on how the meat was cooked, AGEs are not the only potential carcinogens involved. If it’s been cooked very “violently” at a high heat (e.g. grilled or smoked meat), using a technique that allows the juices from the meat to drip off onto the hot surface, there are other dangers as well.

When the meat is cooked at high temperatures, proteins, sugars, and creatine in the meat react to form chemical compounds known as heterocyclic amines (HCAs). Over a grill, when the juices and fat drip out and hit the hot surface below, they form another type of carcinogen called PAHs. Smoke rising back up from the flames coats the meat with these PAHs, giving it a delicious barbecue flavor, but bringing some potentially dangerous chemicals along for the ride.

So how dangerous really are these chemicals? Both are known animal carcinogens, but those studies used extremely high doses. Just to give you an idea, look at some of the data from this review:

To put it another way, even if you ate the meat highest in HCAs (broiled steak), you’d have to eat 642 pounds of steak in one day to get the dose of PhlP used in the mouse studies. It’s possible that these chemicals could build up over time, and it’s very likely that they become more dangerous via interaction with other carcinogens in the environment, but it’s important not to overstate the danger here.

Epidemiologic studies suggest a link between consuming barbecued or deep-fried meat and various types of cancer in humans, but as we all know, epidemiologic studies rarely tell the whole story. So on the whole, the evidence about HCAs and PAHs is suggestive, but far from conclusive.

There are also quite a few ways to reduce HCAs even in cooked meat. For starters, low-temperature cooking barely forms any at all. So simmering, steaming, or crock-pot cooking doesn’t even raise these concerns. PAHs can be completely eliminated by using some kind of barrier between the meat juices and the heat source. But if you really want to get your barbecue on, there’s good news: the other ingredients in the recipe can actually help.

Specifically, various marinades can reduce the HCA content of grilled steak by as much as 88%, mostly because they contain antioxidant-rich herbs and spices. Onion powder added to beef patties reduced two major types of HCAs by 81%. Olive oil (thanks to its antioxidants) helps reduce HCA formation when it’s used as a frying oil. One study found that grape seed and rosemary extract also helped.

On top of that, a diet rich in overall antioxidants is also beneficial, even if those antioxidants aren’t cooked with the meat. One study to test this gave subjects either low-temperature meat (cooked at 100 F) or high-temperature meat (cooked at 250 F), to see whether it would affect various markers for colon cancer risk. The high-temperature meat did indeed have higher concentrations of HCAs, and subjects eating it showed potentially precancerous changes. But eating one of three “inhibitors” (cruciferous vegetables, yogurt, or chlorophyll tablets) along with the high-temperature meat drastically reduced damage to the colon cells.

On the whole, HCAs and PAHs are a very small risk to start with, and almost completely avoidable by using gentle cooking methods or antioxidant-rich spices (which most of us do anyway, because they’re delicious) when we do fire up the barbecue.

Raw vs. Cooked: Oxidized Fats

Even the leanest chicken breast contains at least a little bit of fat, and the fat in meat is not magically immune to the dangers of oxidation. Oxidation – the reaction of the fat with oxygen – occurs at room temperature anyway, but it’s much faster at high temperatures. Oxidized fats are very inflammatory, and likely to be the real villains behind cardiovascular disease.

Polyunsaturated fats (PUFA) are especially prone to oxidation, which is one reason why chicken and pork (which have relatively high levels of PUFA) are less ideal meat choices from a Paleo perspective than ruminant meat.

Here again, common spices and herbs – for example, garlic – act as antioxidants and prevent the fat in the meat from degrading. Since using spices and herbs is a pervasive culinary practice, this seems like a simple, elegant, and tasty way to make your meat even better for you. Perhaps there’s a reason why we love the taste of spices on our meat so much so much!

Raw vs. Cooked: Food Safety

The most obvious advantage of cooking is safety. Cooking meat kills bacteria, parasites, and viruses that can make you very, very sick if you ingest them.

Raw-food advocates like to downplay this, but it’s actually quite a serious problem. According to 2011 CDC estimates, meat and poultry products accounted for 22% of foodborne illnesses, and 29% of deaths, making them the second most dangerous category of food (leafy vegetables were first). And this is just accidental contamination from people who presumably knew that raw meat can be dangerous and were making at least some kind of effort to avoid contact with it. If they were deliberately eating it raw, the numbers would probably be a lot worse.

Of course, these were all numbers for people eating factory-farmed meat. This only shows that cooking is a necessary precaution for suboptimal animal products (from animals that weren’t grass-fed or pastured). It doesn’t prove anything about raw meat from healthy, happy animals. So if you’re stuck with grocery-store meat, don’t risk your health on the gamble that there won’t be pathogens in there. The only meat you should ever eat raw is meat you can completely trust.

If you’re still a little leery even with well-treated animals, freezing the meat for 2 weeks before you eat it can also kill most potential pathogens (just also be careful about defrosting it afterwards: defrost in the fridge, not on the counter, or you’ll just get your newly-sanitized meat contaminated again).

Raw vs. Cooked: Energy Availability

One very common evolutionary theory is that human beings and cooking evolved side-by-side, because if we couldn’t cook, we literally couldn’t be humans. Cooked meat and fat allowed us to take in enough calories to fuel our enormous, energy-greedy brains. If we had to constantly graze on fruit like gorillas, we’d need all that energy for our digestive systems instead; cooking meat allows us to have smaller, less energy-intensive guts, and frees up calories to fuel our brains. In the days before freezers and refrigerators, it also allowed us to get all that nutrition from animal foods without such a high risk of foodborne disease.

This theory holds that cooking makes meat a more efficient delivery mechanism for calories, especially protein. It’s true that applying heat does help to denature the proteins, or “pre-digest” them a little bit before they get to your mouth. It seems logical that this would help you absorb and use these “pre-digested” proteins more efficiently. But the actual evidence isn’t so clear, and there’s a sharp debate going on about what’s actually happening.

One study, for example, found that between 51 and 65% of the protein in raw eggs was digestible, while for cooked eggs, that number rose to 91-94%. But other studies have shown the exact opposite effect! And just to make it all even more complicated, one recent study found that it actually varies with cooking temperature: a moderate temperature helps, but a high temperature hurts.

The upshot is that the evidence from the protein-digestion front is fairly mixed. In plant proteins (soy and legumes), cooking definitely improves nutritional value, but that’s not particularly relevant to a Paleo diet, and there’s just not a lot of evidence for meat one way or the other. But there are a few other points worth considering on the “energy availability” front.

First of all, there’s the fact that cooked meat has less moisture, so you can eat an equivalent amount of calories in a smaller volume of food (namely, less work for your teeth, jaw, and gut). Cooked food is also tastier to most of us than raw food, so we’ll want to eat more of it. In times of food shortage, this could very well be an advantage even if the protein is equally or a little less bioavailable.

Then there’s the evidence from the raw-food crowd. A raw-food diet is great for losing weight – in fact, it’s a little too good. Both men and women on a raw-food diet are at risk of becoming underweight; one survey found that roughly 30% of premenopausal women on a raw-food diet had lost so much weight that their fertility was impaired. This suggests that humans do best with at least some cooked foods in our diet, to provide us with enough energy: loss of fertility is a very dangerous sign that your body is trying to survive in famine conditions.

You can go back and forth on this issue, citing different evidence. But a more relevant question is really whether it matters at all. For 21^st century humans, protein scarcity isn’t a problem and we have more calories than we could ever use. We don’t really need a technology to make protein and calories more available. For our Paleolithic ancestors, this might have been a survival advantage, but for us, it’s not terribly relevant.

Raw vs. Cooked: Enzymes

Then there’s the mass of information (and misinformation) about enzymes. The raw-food camp claims that cooking meat destroys naturally-occurring enzymes that help you digest it. Without these enzymes, your body has to work harder to break down the food, making it more difficult to digest and use.

There’s just one problem with this theory: all those enzymes get destroyed in your stomach anyway. So even if your body could use a cow’s enzymes (debatable, since you are not a cow), it wouldn’t matter. Given equal quantities of raw and cooked meat, the raw meat might sit a little lighter in your stomach because more of it is water, but that’s not due to any magical enzymes pre-digesting it for you.

The Meat Spectrum

After a quick review of the potential issues of health, nutrition, and safety surrounding the raw meat debate, it’s time to get even more complicated: there are actually several shades of gray between “raw” and “cooked.” Just like milk, meat has many different stages on the way from "totally raw" to "totally cooked:"

• Completely raw: Untouched by heat or any other process; this is the meat you get when you hunt down an animal and dig in while it’s still warm.
• Dehydrated meat: jerky or pemmican are dehydrated at very low temperatures; this helps prevent the growth of dangerous pathogens without technically applying heat (thus eliminating the concern over potentially carcinogenic by-products of high-heat cooking)
• Non-cooked cured meats: sausage and salami are technically “processed” but curing salt, dehydration, and the fermentation process take care of potential pathogens without the need for heat. In fact, some raw-food diets prize fermented meat even more highly than strictly raw meat, because of the probiotic health benefits.
• Acid-marinated meat. Ceviche or other animal products marinated in an acidic liquid like lemon juice or vinegar are very lightly “cooked” by the chemical action of the marinade. This doesn’t protect against pathogens as well as fermentation or dehydration, but it does help.
• Partially-cooked meat: rare steak isn’t exactly raw, but it’s not totally cooked, either. A quick sear to the outside of a piece of meat will add flavor and kill any viruses or bacteria present (although it does nothing for parasites inside the meat). This method can also be used for scallops, tuna, or other cuts that are one continuous piece.
• Gently cooked meat: slow-cooking, steaming, or other gentle cooking methods create far fewer potential carcinogens than frying or grilling, and preserve more nutrients. For example, slow-cooking results in almost no formation of HCAs.
• Roughly-cooked meat: on the extreme “cooked” end of the spectrum, “rough” cooking includes pan-frying, deep-frying, and grilling. Rough cooking methods are very tasty, but they are also more likely to have negative consequences.

Conclusions: The Cooking Tradeoff

Like many other issues in health and nutrition, cooking is really a tradeoff rather than a black-and-white issue. The major issue seems to be the potentially carcinogenic by-products of cooking (HCAs, PAHs, and AGEs), but are these an acceptable price to pay for better food safety and possibly a higher energy availability?

If you were a caveman living without a guaranteed supply of food every day, your choice would be very clear: cooked food allows you to get more calories at every meal and reduces the chance of dying from a parasite infection, so it’s highly beneficial. The potential for a slightly increased cancer risk at age 70 doesn’t really measure up to the danger of starving to death right now.

For modern humans, who have access to clean raw meat and don’t need to worry about whether our next meal is a week away, it’s a little less clear-cut. There are ways to minimize the drawbacks of both choices, either by preparing and sourcing your raw meat carefully, or by cooking meat to minimize the harmful effects while still enjoying its benefits.

From a practical perspective, it’s usually more workable to eat cooked meat most of the time, because you won’t have to worry quite so much about quality. And it is a little socially strange to enjoy a big plate of raw steak (although every culture does have raw delicacies like steak tartar or ceviche). But in the end, the best meat is the one that fills you with energy and makes you feel healthy, happy, and strong: whether it’s raw or cooked, enjoy it!