Experimenting in the Kitchen

It's Day 30! Last day of the Whole30 Challenge and with no cheats! The next couple of days are going to be pretty busy for me, but I should be able to post my findings on Monday or Tuesday!

Part of the fun of Whole30 is experimenting in the kitchen! It’s not always fun though. It’s incredibly disappointing when your food doesn’t turn out like you expect it to. Or worse – when it’s inedible after all that hard work! I mentioned a few posts back that I had made a garlic-tahini spread that I didn’t like, because it was too bitter. A day or two after that I used the food processor to make an avocado dressing that one of my CrossFitter-friends shared on her blog. I sampled it and it had that same weird bitter taste. In both recipes I used garlic... apparently rancid garlic! It was awful. It ruined my whole batch of dressing and I didn’t have time to start over! I don’t usually like to follow recipes --at least not verbatim. I like to do my own thing in the kitchen and usually it turns out fine or great. Then again, I have also baked a halibut filet into mush (I’m still not sure what happened there). I am not trying to discourage you from experimenting in the kitchen! Quite the opposite! If you are feeling crafty you should put the recipes away or maybe glance at a few and come up with your own! It's rewarding to become an artist in the kitchen and when you are in charge of the ingredient list, you use foods and spices that you like, so then ultimately you can not NOT like the end product!

The other night I used the recipe for pulled pork loin from PaleoOMG. I cooked the meat according to the recipe, but the second half of the recipe was for mashed plantains. I didn’t have plantains and didn’t want to buy some. I did however have half of a large baked butternut squash in the fridge. Instead of mashed plantains I made mashed butternut squash, by spooning the squash from its skin and mashing it in a saucepan with 2 Tablespoons of ghee, salt, pepper, and rosemary over medium heat. Voila! The sweetness of the squash easily took the place of the plantains and went really well with the pulled pork – which by the way definitely needs something like mashed squash/plantains or a sauce of some kind. Pork loin is lean, so therefore, kind of bland. But it was delicious with the mashed squash and avocado slices!