Food Friday #3

This is the third post of Food Friday, where I share what I ate this week with you, and how you could eat it too.  I started eating by paleo guidelines a while back, focusing on whole, real foods, and cooking from scratch.  A lot of time people wonder what it is you eat when you cut out grains and a lot of carbs.  Well here is what I eat, I hope it inspires you to do some cooking of your own!


1. Roasted Squash Seeds
These are really just a "by-product" from #2 but I love eating roasted squash seeds.  These ones are from a spaghetti squash.  Separate the seeds from the flesh & goop, don't wash, add a little oil and whatever you like.  I used chill and garlic powder with some fresh ground pepper and salt.  Roast in a single layer in your oven at 350F until they're crispy and brown.

2. Pizza Spaghetti Squash Casserole
Apparently I didn't take any pictures making this, but I did make my very own pizza sauce for this.  In fact, the slow cooker recipe I used makes about 4 cups, so now I have 3 cups of pizza sauce ready to go in my freezer.  Best part is I know what's in it, and it's a lot less junk than the bought stuff.  It's super easy and delicious, here's the recipe I used.

For the actual casserole I used the recipe from paleomg found here.  I totally forgot that it had the sausage in it, so I had already thawed one chicken breast, so of course that went in too.  This turned out really great and I would make it again, maybe adding mushrooms and pepperoni.  Oh, and if you have the choice, buy the "sausage meat" that's like ground beef, otherwise you're just going to have to take it out of the casing, as you cook it like ground beef.

Super tasty, I would make it again, probably a mushroom and pepperoni version!

3. Spicy Crusted Salmon with Winter Slaw
I like this recipe for salmon because it's a little unexpected.  I like the uniqueness of putting spicy with salmon.  Here's the recipe I used.  I also used chill powder instead of cayenne.  Because I'm cooking just for me, my mixture makes more of a "crust" for the salmon instead of the way it looks on the recipe picture.  I like it like this, feel free to use less.

Winter Slaw
This one is again from Paleo Cooking from Elana's Pantry
Salad
 - purple cabbage
 - romaine lettuce
 - carrots (recipe says julienned, but next time I would use a carrot peeler for shreds because my julienning skills could use work)

Mix the veggies in the combination that makes you happy.

Tahini dressing (altered from the recipe)
 - 1/4 cup Tahini
 - 1/4 cup water
 - 3 Tbsp lemon juice
 - 1 Tbsp olive oil
 - 1/2 tsp sea salt

Mix all ingredients together with a blender or immersion blender and toss desired amount on salad!

 

The salad was good, but I liked it with more lemon  juice and would squeeze an extra wedge of lemon on before eating.

4. Crab Cakes
This recipe was based on this one here. I only had one can of crab meat (which definitely does not equal anywhere near a pound of crab) and so I modified and just used this recipe as a guideline.

They turned out alright, I would actually look for a different recipe, or try harder to use the right proportions next time.  I think I did end up for the most part eating these with avocado and lime, and more of the Tahini salad.