Summer Grilling Ideas?

I would really like to grill more often while it’s still nice outside. The only thing is that I am not creative when it comes to grilling. Burgers, sausages, salmon, steaks (which I prefer to be finished in a super hot oven anyway),  and kabobs can get pretty boring. I’ve recently tried to switch it up a little and try something new.

Swordfish
I bought a swordfish steak for the first time and had no idea what to do with it! Since I was too hungry to look for recipes or marinate it, I decided to throw it on the grill with just a bit of salt and pepper. Then I threw on some mango salsa that I bought prepackaged at Whole Foods. Can I just say that I make way better mango salsa than WF? This was super simple and kind of boring, but totally satisfying. This swordfish steak was massive!

 

What do you do with your swordfish?
 

Pork Chops

I usually roast or pan cook my pork chops so this was my first time using the grill. I wish I had thought to grill the nectarines and onions! That would have been amazing. Instead I was boring and just cooked those up in a pan with a tiny bit of apple cider vinegar. Fresh basil on top. This is one of my favorite ways to eat pork chops! I think I will do that next. Maybe grill some pineapple as well!

What are your favorite grilling recipes (especially for fish and pork)?? Send me some ideas!

I’m going to be on my way to Chicago in less than 6 hours for the Summerfest Boogie!! Boogies are basically skydiver conventions/events/parties. I’m super excited to skydive for 5 days straight with my friends from all over the country. They’re also attempting a new vertical world record where they hope to have 142 people head down in a formation. I won’t be on that, but I am super excited to support my friends and watch from the ground! Hopefully I can be on the women’s world record coming up and maybe the next world record! I’ll be back on Sunday night. I am camping the whole time at the dropzone so I’m a little worried about my food choices there. We’ll see how it goes!

Mango Tarragon Scallops

Second blog post in a week! I’ve been continuing to cook with fruit lately due to the abundance of fruit at my house right now.

This time I experimented with some mango! I saw a recipe card at Whole Foods while buying scallops for Scallops with Cherry-Tarragon Sauce. I was out of cherries, so after nibbling on tarragon and then nibbling on various other fruits, I decided on using mango. I mostly stuck to the recipe with a few substitutions, so I’ll just list the ingredients that I used. However, I added the mango at the very last moment for a quick stir because I didn’t think I would care for cooked mango.

Mango Tarragon Scallops

Ingredients:
– 3 large wild-caught sea scallops
– sea salt and ground black pepper to taste
– 1 Tbsp coconut oil (I would have used clarified butter, but was out of it)
– 1/2 to 1 shallot, chopped
– 1 Tbsp apple cider vinegar
– 1/2 cup mango, chopped
– 1.5 tsp fresh tarragon, chopped

I ate it with arugula, my favorite green! This was really good for the first scallop and then progressively got too sweet for me. I definitely enjoy the taste of tarragon and mango together. I also decided that I like my mangos cold, not so much warm. It’s also not much of a sauce and I can’t imagine it being saucy even if I used cherries like the original recipe. I think squeezing some lemon juice over everything would have brightened up everything for me. Or maybe some spices added to it to cut down on the sweetness. It was a beautiful plate of food though! I would make this again with a tart fruit.

I’ve been having a pretty awesome week with some pretty awesome friends!
Monday – “The Dark Knight Rises” in IMAX (loved it), tunnel flying
Wednesday – tunnel, 3 skydives, skating
Thursday – tunnel, indoor bouldering
Friday-Sunday will be full of more skydiving!!!

It was the first time I had been on the ice in many many months. My ankles and feet hurt really bad from not being used to my skates anymore. I’m still on my last pair of skates, made for me in 2006! That was after I quit, so the skates are still in pretty good shape. It’s crazy to think how much I used to skate to need new boots every year and blades every other year. They make super light skates nowadays though, I kind of want new ones! I’m starting to think I want to skate regularly again, just recreationally, to not waste the massive investment my parents made. I skated a public session so I didn’t try to do much, but I know I’m out of shape.

Climbing went a lot better. I let too many months go by without climbing as well. I had lost all my calluses and my hands were burning by the third route. However, I was super happy that I didn’t have to downgrade TOO much. I was climbing most V3s easily before I stopped climbing regularly, now V2s are still easy but V3s are more challenging than I remember. I managed to climb a couple of them, but with my hands and grip strength not where they used to be, it was much more challenging. I had really missed the climbing gym! I didn’t think I’d ever be so happy to smell stinky feet and sweat! Of course I renewed my membership, so now I have to go regularly.

Conclusion: I’m in excellent tunnel shape, but out of shape for everything else I like to do that I haven’t been doing. Time for more balance in my life!

Chops and Stone Fruits

I’m going to jump right back into blogging like I haven’t been away for 3 months. Life got in the way! I even stopped being paleo for the month of May with some pretty disastrous results. It was my 25th birthmonth so I wanted to indulge in everything. I did however have plenty of adventures! Including two trips to Twin Falls, ID for BASE jumping off the Perrine Bridge! My mom and I also opened a Korean restaurant, but after 10 days of being open we had an unfortunate car accident involving sudden unintended acceleration. Now we will not be reopening for at least another month. Let me just say that being in an out of control car speeding into the building is a lot scarier than jumping off or out of anything. I will get into all of that as I get back to blogging. I have lots of pictures and videos to share, but today I want to focus on the food!

I love shopping for food in the summer! I love going to farmer’s markets and picking up my weekly Tiny’s Organic fruit bag. Since this year I signed up for the all fruit bag, it means twice as much fruit to try and consume in one week. Lots of sharing is involved. Right now the bags are filled with stone fruits – apricots, apriums, plums, peaches, nectarines, and cherries!

I’ve been trying to incorporate some of the fruit into my meals rather than just snacking on them. I end up eating less fruit that way! Otherwise I will just eat pounds and pounds of fruit because I looove the sugar.

I also found this super tasty and definitely paleo Date and Cherry Balsamic Spread from Edible Gardens at Whole Foods. The only ingredients are dates, cherries, and balsamic vinegar. I’ve been putting it on pork chops and lamb chops!

Date and Cherry Balsamic Lamb Loin Chops

Ingredients:
– 2 Lamb loin chops
– 1+ Tbsp Date and Cherry Balsamic Spread
– 1 tsp minced garlic
– Dried thyme, salt, and pepper to taste

This was soooo good! Especially with the little salad I made – arugula, spinach, rainier cherries, and walnuts. No dressing, just the way I like it!

Date and Cherry Balsamic Pork Chops

The date and cherry balsamic spread is also super good on pork chops!! I pan cooked these pork chops (lightly seasoned in salt and pepper) and sautéed the onions with a little garlic in the pork fat. I spread the spread on the meat after everything was cooked.

I had a lot of apriums to use up from my CSA bag. I didn’t like the texture or the flavor of them while eating them fresh. Not quite apricot, not quite plum, but a weird texture in between. Ironically, I absolutely love pluots, which are more plum than apricot. Since one of my favorite pork dishes involves peaches, I decided to make another pork dish with these apriums instead of letting them go to waste. They were amazing cooked! I don’t eat pork chops very often, but there’s just something about stone fruits that pairs perfectly with pork chops!

Aprium Pork Chops
You could just use apricots. This was very simple. Caramelize onions in pork fat then add the fruit and a little garlic. I sprinkled it with some Italian seasoning at the end and ate it with a side of roasted brussels sprouts. I could eat this every day! I’ll probably make a more summery side next time though.

Thanks to all my readers for continuing to read my blog and sending me messages asking about my wellbeing! I’m pretty excited to be blogging again. It definitely helps me eat better and cook more!

Paleo Banana Berry Muffins

I’ve actually been meaning to post about these muffins for several months now! Holly, my tunnel coach’s wife, is an incredible baker and she was so sweet (seriously… she’s not even paleo!) to bake me TWO kinds of PALEO MUFFINS on one of my trips to Utah. On this last trip she made paleo brownies for me! I don’t go to Utah for tunnel time, I go for the baked goods… haha! They were all delicious, I think I almost cried eating them they were so good! I actually ate all dozen or so muffins in one day! And I have the recipes to share with all of you! I would absolutely love to spend a day baking with Holly, hope it happens soon!! Check out her food blog, Phemomenon!

Holly used frozen huckleberries and raw honey. Huckleberries are by far my favorite kind of berry, but all I had on hand were fresh blueberries which worked just as well. I would love to bake these with a whole medley of different kinds of berries. I also didn’t have raw honey, but figured I didn’t need to add any extra sugar because I had super overripe bananas. Instead, I made a cinnamon-nutmeg-coconut palm sugar topping to sprinkle on the tops of my muffins for a little extra sugar and spice. Note: That’s why the tops are brown, I didn’t burn my muffins! My muffins weren’t as moist as the ones I had from Holly, maybe because I omitted the honey or because I used fresh instead of frozen berries? But it doesn’t really matter because they were fantastic!

Paleo Banana Berry Muffins
Ingredients:
1 1/3 cup almond flour
1/3 cup coconut flour
3/4 tsp baking soda
1/8 tsp sea salt
1 Tbsp coconut oil
2 large eggs
2 large overripe bananas
2/3 cup berries of your choice, fresh or frozen
2 Tbsp raw honey (optional)

Cinnamon sugar topping (optional):
1/2 tsp cinnamon
1/4tsp nutmeg
1 Tbsp coconut palm sugar

Directions:
1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
2. In a large bowl, mash the bananas, add oil and eggs (and honey if you wish).
3. Combine the dry ingredients, then mix into the bowl.
4. Gently fold in the berries. (My batter was more dough than batter.)
5. Fill cupcake/muffin pan lined with cupcake paper. (They don’t rise much, I use an ice cream scoop to fill the cupcake pans.) Sprinkle the tops with cinnamon sugar.
6. Bake for 30-35minutes.

Enjoy! 🙂

In case you were wondering, the other muffins from Holly were pumpkin! I’ll have to make those soon, too!

Carnitas attempt #2

Nothing but blue skies last weekend, perfect for some skydiving! I only did 4 jumps on Saturday and chose to spend the rest of the sunshine doing normal people things, like hanging out with my birds… More sun and more jumps this weekend!

Strawberries = my favorite snack this week. They are SO good right now! Perfectly ripe! (On a sidenote, I’m pretty impressed with my iPhone’s camera, pretty much all the pics on my blog are taken with my phone.)

Mukilteo Farmers Market – Every Wednesday 3pm-7pm. Maybe it’s because I’m used to the farmers markets in Seattle, but this was so underwhelming. There’s nothing that gets me more excited than farmers markets and I was sooo excited to see all these tents at the Mukilteo beach. But it was so small! Very little produce… I snagged some local raw honey and some beautiful red leaf lettuce. My mom bought a couple of hardy fuscias. I may or may not have bought some toffee after the guy snookered me into trying them…

Carnitas attempt #2: Pressure Cooker Carnitas
After carnitas attempt #1, I’ve been dying to try making carnitas another way. I still haven’t picked up a slowcooker, so I found this pressure cooker recipe. I used a little olive oil instead of the canola oil and used water instead of beef broth (not possible to find canned beef broth without MSG in it at my grocery store!). I also squeezed in a little lime juice. I only made a third of the recipe just in case it wouldn’t be very good and I’m so glad I did!

After browning the meat and adding the rest of the ingredients:

Pressure cooker!

The final result was… mushy. I actually really liked the texture of the meat, just wish it had crispy edges, which I could have attained by keeping it on the stove longer with the lid off or putting it in the oven. I did not care at all for the onion and pepper mush that resulted. I think the serrano peppers were not the right kind of spicy for the best flavored carnitas. I did enjoy the flavor of coriander and cumin together (I had left out the coriander in my last attempt), but that was completely overpowered by the peppers. It was also screaming for some salt. So my journey to make great carnitas continues! Attempt #3 is coming up soon!

My snuggly baby Maya! She is really the cuddliest bird ever. Like I always say, she’s more puppy than bird… must have been a golden retriever in a past life.