Semi-Finals - Germany & Japan - World Cup Eating Challenge 2015

For the last four days of the challenge, I decided to just tackle each of the last four teams. It seemed the most fair to just give each of them a day instead of hoping that the results worked out in the best way for me. For the semi-finals, I decided to re-visit Germany and Japan.

Germany

Originally for Germany, I wanted to do jager schnitzel and spatzel. I ended up doing pretzels and brats. The pretzels had turned out so bad though that I felt they needed a redemption. I also didn't see a good way to make spatzel based on my earlier failures. I decided to split the difference... still do my schnitzel but re-do the pretzels.

This time I went with a recipe from a Paleo bread book called Every Last Crumb. I wanted use this recipe last time but it required some ingredients I didn't have. No really - there are about 5 different flours in here including both potato flour and potato starch. I had originally thought they were the same thing but the front material says that potato flour absolutely can't be substituted for anything... and that's the one I didn't have. I had to go to 3 stores to find it too. 

Anyways, the picture above kind of demonstrates all of the dry ingredients that were in here. You can kind of see the different colors and textures to get an idea of just how many components there were here. 

I mixed them all together and then put them in the my secret weapon... yes, my food processor! I got one that had an additional plastic blade for kneading. I figured I would never use it but I use it all the time for paleo breads and even mixing things like ground meats. It's so helpful and I really recommend it.

Next, I got my little bundles of dough ready for shaping.

After that the magic happened. I would try to describe the process but it required difficult shaping, two different oven sessions, and some seasoning. This was the result though. Aren't they beautiful? They tasted like awesome and were way closer to pretzel flavors than the last attempt. 

I just noticed that I didn't have any pictures of the steps for the schnitzel. For this, I got a bunch of thin pork chops. I luckily found some that were super thin on their own so I didn't have to do much to them. I just used the tenderizer on them a little bit to thin them further. 

From there, I dipped them in eggs and then my special "breading" which consisted of tapioca flour, almond flour, salt, and seasonings. I fried them all in avocado oil

For the "jager" sauce, I loosely followed this recipe. Jagerschnitzel is just schnitzel with a mushroom cream sauce on it but the name is really awesome and mushrooms are delicious so I was all in. The sauce was basically beef broth, sour cream, mushrooms, and xantham gum.  I didn't love the sauce - I think the cream broke and I wished I'd used coconut cream instead. Otherwise, the dish was awesome!

Japan

Since I'd already done sushi, I wanted my second attempt at Japan to focus on different dishes. I'd heard a lot about Japanese bbq and seen beautiful pictures of thin meat grilling on stones or wire racks and I wanted to try it as well as some other side dishes that I'm sure you've seen around.

Step one was to find some amazing high quality meat. I only added a light amount of salt to this because I wanted the meat to shine. The key to this is a meat that has good marbilization of fats without being fatty. I trimmed any huge chunks of fat to achieve this.

How beautiful is that? I loved the idea of just self grilling meats over a tiny flame. The problem is that my setup was useless at it. I tried a couple more things while Dan stood in the corner hoping I didn't set the apartment on fire. 

And finally I just ended up with this. It was a really good idea at first but eventually the fat dripping onto the burner started cooking and our apartment was just filling with smoke.

The meat was really delicious but the cooking process was not practical for an apartment. I really want to go out and try some in a restaurant now though!

My next dish was Yakitori, aka chicken skewers. For these, I skewered some chicken thighs and then brushed them with a mix of tamari sauce, fish sauce, and avocado oil and let them marinade in the fridge for a little while.

When I was ready to cook them, I placed them in the grill pan and rotated and necessary. 

Lastly, I wanted to try tempura. Originally, I was going to do shrimp. However, my meal was already very meat heavy so I decided to do veggie tempura again. I got some green beans and mushrooms. I dredged them all in egg and then a tapioca/almond flour/ salt mixture.

After that I fried them all in avocado oil.

In the end, it all turned out delicious. I also made a little beef broth/ soy sauce dipping sauce which was delicious. The meat was AMAZING. It just shows that when you have high quality beef, you don't have to do much to make it shine. The chicken and veggies were great too.

All in all, these dishes were fantastic, but they also marked an important end to the challenge for me - the end of forced Paleo dishes. By that, I mean dishes that are not Paleo by nature but made so with alternative flours and oils. Even Paleo, tempura or fried pork or pretzels aren't that healthy. I was happy that for my final posts, I was going to go with better more natural foods and less Paleo crazy scientist foods. 

Round of 16, Day 1 - Germany - World Cup Eating Challenge 2015

I kind of love how things don't always play out the way you want. I was really hoping for an easy day Saturday. Instead I was choosing between Germany and Cameroon - a county I had really ambitious plans for and one I knew nothing about it. Saturday Dan and I were going to be at the County Fair since we were doing a race there so I was really hoping to get USA. On top of all of that, I had to take an unexpected trip out of town the two days before and couldn't plan any shopping.

All of that really just took it out of me. Part of me kind of wanted to skip this day or round or maybe just quit the challenge all together. But that's the thing about challenges - when things are the most challenging, that's when you need to keep going. 

So I decided to go with an easy option that would allow me to get this done without causing anymore trouble than I could handle. I knew I had some brats in the freezer. While Dan drove us home from the fair, I looked up pretzel recipes. I found one that used ingredients I already had. I already had bought a German beer so I knew I had enough to make a basic Bavarian meal.

I also have a paleo bread cookbook that I knew would have a pretzel recipe. The book is amazing for making breads that taste like the real thing. The only problem is this usually requires a crazy mix of flours. I have A LOT of paleo ingredients in my pantry but I just didn't have all of the flours needed for the pretzels.

I'm going to be totally honest here. I did not like the pretzels at all. Dan liked them but admitted they didn't taste at all like pretzels. I think we agreed they were more like pretzel shaped coconut flour poop. Sounds awesome, right? But yea - I'm not a huge fan of the coconut flour texture. These just seemed to take all of the extra dry and graininess of the coconut flour and magnify it. 

The brats and beer were great though! I really like Johnsonville brats and we get the big box of them from Costco. I'm not sure if they are actually Paleo but they make a great breakfast or dinner in a pinch.

I really wanted to get a nice German wine but I didn't see any Reisling or Gewurztraminer from Germany at Bevmo. These wines are pretty common but the style is really different in the US and Germany so I didn't think it would be authentic to get an alternative one. 

I opted instead for beer. 

There are tons of German beers but I decided to go with the Hacker-Pschorr because that was the most fun tent when I went to Oktoberfest. Speaking of - it wouldn't be German beer if I didn't enjoy it in my Oktoberfest mug!!

Mmmm beeerrrrr

Finals - German Chocolate Cupcakes - World Cup Eating Challenge

I just want to start out and apologize this post is so late after the World Cup finished! Excuses suck but I was really sick last week and it was a struggle just to do normal work and chores without having to also figure out how to write words and sound interesting. This week I'm pretty distracted by Comicon planning but if I don't write this post now, I never will.

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I had pretty ambitious plans for Germany. I had thought of ways to do schnitzel and spatzle in a paleo fashion and I'd seen tons of paleo German chocolate cupcake recipes. However, when my plans for the final four settled and I saw I'd be doing Germany the same day I was going to a BBQ, I knew I'd have to reorganize a bit.

The cupcakes would still be a great thing to make for a BBQ. Spatzle sadly wouldn't travel well and is hard to eat/ serve at a BBQ so I skipped that idea. I decided I'd start my cupcakes Saturday night and in the morning I could frost cupcakes while frying schnitzel . I had great plans for a productive morning. I was going to wake up early, go for a 4 mile run, frost cupcakes, make schnitzel , pick up some wine from a wine club and get to the party half an hour before the game started. I woke up an hour late, making frosting takes forever, and it was already 11:30 before we were out the door without schnitzel or running. I'm terrible at figuring how much time it takes to do things.

The good news is the cupcakes were awesome so here goes...

The most important step to making cupcakes is getting your cupcake liners set up. I ordered a bunch of different colored liners from Amazon. This was kind of perfect because I doubt I'll have much use for the red so I was able to use a bunch on these cupcakes. I also probably didn't need to be so precise about alternating the colors since I'm the only one that saw this part but hey, wasn't it pretty?

Now that I had my colored liners in a row, it was time to mix my ingredients. I actually found a ton of Paleo German Chocolate cake/cupcake recipes which was awesome. Paleo baking is pretty easy as there are a lot of alternative flours and sweetners as well as allergen free chocolates. The hard part is frosting. I personally have had some failed attempts with whipping coconut cream frosting but German Chocolate uses a frosting made of pecans and coconut (all paleo) so it naturally lends itself better to being adapted in a paleo version.

I ended up picking this recipe, mostly because it was the prettiest. 

The instructions for these cupcakes were a little more involved than a lot of the other paleo baking I've done. There were a lot of steps that I hadn't had to do for any other recipe and the cupcakes on the surface looked a lot tastier than some of the other things I'd made. I think the creator of them did a great job of making a complicated process straightforward and I wasn't confused at any point on how to execute them all. I ended up doubling the recipe so I could have two dozen cupcakes and it was easy to do that after I'd already started which was nice. 

The next morning (when I woke up to not run or make schnitzel), I started working on the frosting. German Chocolate cake was always one of my favorite things growing up. That says a lot since I really don't like chocolate cake very much. However, I love coconut and so anything covered in coconut pecan caramel can't be bad. Making paleo caramel is pretty fun. I've never made the real stuff but it basically just uses coconut milk and coconut sugar cooked on the stove until it turns into awesome caramely goodness. It looks and smells amazing during the whole process and while it's kind of time consuming, I really like watching the ingredients completely transform before my eyes. 

The next step was to put it all together. Once my caramel was ready and had cooled down, I added the pecans and coconut. I realized my frosting wasn't nearly as pretty as the pictures. I think my coconut was shredded a lot finer so it soaked up more of the caramel and it turned out to be chunkier than the ones from the recipe. 

They tasted awesome though!! As I'd mentioned above, the process to make them was much more involved than other paleo baking I'd done. It really paid off. These were the most moist (sorry to people who hate that word) cupcakes I've ever made, paleo or not. I liked that the use of paleo ingredients lightened up the sweetness of them. Anything bursting with chocolate and sugar and caramel can easily be overly sweet and I'm happy that using the paleo alternatives leveled that out more.

I did have a little bit of a rant at the end of it all though. I took 20 cupcakes to the bbq... and came home with 16. There was definitely a comment thrown out suggesting that things don't taste as good because they are paleo and it's had me really frustrated for the whole week and a half since. Paleo or not - it drives me crazy when people won't even try something. How do you know that they don't taste good if you don't don't give them a shot? The few people who tried them all had great things to say. Dan and I were able to bring a bunch for co-workers who loved them as well. It kind of breaks my heart that I went through a lot of effort to make these and was really excited that the last thing I made for my challenge could be shared with a wider audience... and that excitement was crushed.

I was already planning on doing a post about paleo and my eating lifestyle choices so that's still coming. I do just want to say that this choice for me has been a huge factor in helping my health, lifestyle, and happiness. People think it's just some fad diet but it's really a choice to eat more fresh food, to know where your meals are coming from, and to put things in your body that it can process easier. Paleo cupcakes definitely aren't the healthiest thing in the world but they're better than crap filled with refined sugar and chemicals that you can't even pronounce. I don't want to tell anyone how to live their life or what dietary choices to make. I don't expect everyone to read this or try something I make and decide to do paleo. It's not easy and it's not for everyone, but it would be nice if you were open to other points of view. To assume something tastes bad because it's healthier or organic or unprocessed is just so closed minded. 

I don't mean to rant or complain but it's something that's had me upset for some time. The good part of it though? I still had one cupcake left yesterday and it was the best way to reward myself after my two hour workout.