carefree highway

Last night I succesfully made my own almond flour! I read through a few articles, including this one, and figured why should I pay $10 for something I could make with $4 worth of almonds and a blender? It was almost comically easy - just dump some almonds into the blender and hit the ice crush button a few times. Honestly, the hardest part of the whole thing was figuring out why my blender wasn’t turning on (turns out I had to reset the actual wall outlet. go figure.) I didn’t have one of those fancy flour sifter things, so I just used my metal mesh colander and in less than ten minutes I had a whole cup of almond flour.

So now that I had my wonderful almond flour, what to do with it? Make fried chicken, of course! I had gotten a big pack of chicken drumsticks at the supermarket for less than $5 in anticipation of making that recipe. It was so simple! The only problem was, the drumsticks I had were gigantic. I don’t think I quite cooked them long enough even though I doubled the time on the recipe. I ate the smaller ones though, and they seemed fine for the most part. The bigger ones I’ll reheat in the oven for a good while. But other than that, they were delish!

After I got done frying the chickens, a good bit of the almond flour & spice mixture was left unused. So I simply added a little bit of the eggs to turn it into a sort of dough, and plopped it into the still hot frying oil just to see how it would turn out. It made a little sort of hush-puppy-biscuit-cake thing. Not sure what to call it, but it was scrumptious!

I think for my next trick I’ll try making hazelnut flour. I picked up some raw hazelnuts to try a while back, and while I wasn’t too keen on their flavor by themselves, I think it’d be good incorporated into a recipe. And I’m also going to try my hand at making cinnamon coconut butter tonight.

I’ve also found quite a few amazing paleo recipes that use pumpkin (which is my favorite ingredient of all time. pumpkin all the things!) but as they also incorporate maple syrup or honey for a sweetener, I’ve decided to wait until after my first 30 days to try them. I found pumpkin ice cream sandwich cookies, pumpkin gingerbread cake, and pumpkin waffles (which excites me the most, as I got a waffle iron for Christmas and I haven’t even used it yet).

Randomly, if anyone’s on Pinterest, I have a board where I put any tasty-sounded Paleo recipes I find (http://pinterest.com/taggianto/paleo/). Honestly, I still really haven’t figured out what pinterest is really for. There’s nothing I can do on there that I can’t do on tumblr or facebook… and it’s just one more thing to update. I’ve mostly been using it as a sort of universal bookmarking location, a place to save recipes and pages when I’m not on my home computer.  I guess that’s what it’s for? Either way, there are some yummy things on there.