Anyway, as a result, he did not have broilers for the monthly delivery on Saturday. I was given the option of taking a stewing hen or waiting a week for a different batch of broilers to be finished putting on weight. I decided on the stewing hen as I haven’t really found the broilers to be compelling anyway. I’m not sure if it’s my preparation or what, but I just haven’t been eating much chicken as I’m a little bored with it.

His email said “there’s a lot of flavor in a stewing hen.” What there is for sure is one hell of a lot of fat. This is not a bad thing, but I have never handled a chicken like this in my life.

I got up Sunday morning planning to pop it in the crock pot with BBQ sauce ingredients. Unfortunately, when I pulled out the crockpot, it was obvious that it would not fit in there whole. This meant dismembering a chicken at 6:30am before I’d had my coffee. OK, fine.

I got out my poultry shears and started on removing the spine. First note: the cavity was full of globs of dark yellow fat, and all the meat was obviously much darker than on a broiler. I continued cutting and found dark yellow fat everywhere, seemingly at random. This is all good, but like I said, usually chickens have a lighter yellow fat that’s in very expected places.

I put it in with the BBQ sauce stuff and cooked it for about eight hours, flipping the pieces top-to-bottom one time. I turned off the crockpot in preparation for deboning and skinning (the skin is NOT appetizing when you cook chicken low and slow – at least not to me). I came back an noticed that there was a heck of a lot of fat floating on top. I skimmed it off, and it turned out to be nearly TWENTY OUNCES worth. I set it aside since I needed to see how fatty the remaining sauce and pieces were before possibly putting some back.

The bones came out very easily, as they always do, but the weird thing is that all the long bones looked transparent. I removed the skin, but there was very very little to be found – it’s almost like it all melted. I wound up with about 1.5 quarts of meat and sauce plus the 20 oz. of liquid fat. I have no actual use for that fat, but the resulting pile of pulled BBQ chicken was fantastic. The texture of the chicken was tougher, and the meat was much stronger, but since I’m a dark meat person, this was a good thing. Overall, it was a lot more like pulled pork than chicken.

I would absolutely do this again. For what it’s worth, this farmer produces really great eggs. The layers and the rooster just wander around and eat bugs all day and then come in the hen house at night and presumably get a grain supplement. I’m pretty sure this hen was a layer. I don’t think you can actually buy stewing hens in grocery stores any more. Since we’re getting into chicken soup season, you might want to ask egg sellers at your local farmer’s market what they do with their old layers. Most people do want broiler/fryers, so they might be a pretty good deal, and if the eggs are good, you know the chickens are treated and fed well.

Anyway, I’ve done some analysis on my diet for April 18-24.

I have mixed feelings about logging what I eat into Fitday. I find that I do need to do it if I’m trying to do an under eating day, but otherwise, it seems to psych me out. If I’m not deliberately under eating, I just write down everything I eat. As it turns out, this week, I wrote down all five days I ate a normal amount. I swear, I did not fake this. It really is a coincidence!

Here are the individual days so you can see what I mean.

I really thought I ate more than an average of 2,000 calories a day. If you’d asked me, I’d have said it was closer to 2,200 or even 2,400, but I guess the “down days” really knock down the average.

Why the under-eating days? Basically, I spent about a month in St. Louis doing a lot of socializing and eating out at many different restaurants. In Virginia, I have a system to “eat clean” at every restaurant we routinely visit. Since I have celiac and Tino is a vegetarian, we don’t eat just anywhere, and I wind up asking a lot of questions or reading a lot of info on line. Anyway, long-story-short: I ate a lot of deep fried white potatoes, and I drank a lot of booze. I average out to about a glass of wine or one cocktail a day at home, but in St. Louis? I average out to more like double that, and most of it is not wine. Since I’ve been home, I’ve been doing kind of a bang-bang thing where if I’m over the trend, I eat very lightly that day. This has been averaging about twice a week, and I shoot for 1,250 calories on those days. I cut back across the board, but a lot of the cut comes from fats.

While I think it’s interesting to see a shopping list for someone who eats like this if you’re new at it, I was also really curious to see what my market order would look like for a week. I didn’t actually buy all of this in preparation for last week, this is what I actually ate according to what I put into Fitday. When I ate out, what I ate was easily reproducible in my own kitchen, so I added it to the order. I’ll cover my strategy for eating out some other time. I estimate the cost for this list between $60 and $75, and I do watch my grocery costs very closely, so I’m probably quite close on that number.

So, here’s the list. (This will pop-up a new window!)

I knew I ate a lot of produce, but wow, seeing them all on this list … the quantity really surprised me.
The asparagus and spring onions were from the Freight Station Farmer’s Market in Winchester, VA. I think that’s going to be our way of getting local veggies this year since we did not join a CSA. We are going there again today and will probably buy more from the farmer I bought from last time. As it turns out, she gets raw milk from Pine Grove Farm, and my dairy farmer had nice things to say about her. I was shocked to found out that West Virginia is one of those states where raw milk is illegal, like Maryland.

I had some help eating the pineapple, but it’s much cheaper to buy a fresh one if you want fresh pineapple at all. They were on sale for $3 at Wal-Mart. The bok-choy was similarly on sale at Wal-Mart for $1. Lemons and limes are consistently cheaper there, and often avocadoes are too. Yes, I buy stuff at Wal-Mart, and I even eat at McDonald’s (again, ingredient lists yield a strategy for this).

Here’s a quote from Ray Audette himself from this interview:

Q: Unfortunately the palaeo way can be an expensive one…..those who promote it are often seem to be affluent professionals with big incomes, able to afford lots of meat and organic vegetables. Do you have anything to share in terms of eating a healthy, paleo diet on a budget? How would the unemployed or student cope? Can we avoid being forced onto cheap carbs to survive?

A: I am very poor. I shop at Walmart and other supermarkets. I often eat at McDonalds. I don’t buy into the whole “organic” thing. I don’t find my diet to be a financial burden.

I’ve always seen organic as a big business, just based on how agriculture works in the United States. Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma just confirmed all my suspicions. Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods are not your friends – they are in it to make a buck, and organic certifications are what they are. At some point, I will discuss how I think organic has become a special kind of bullshit. Local and Biodynamic farms (like Polyface or the farm where I get my eggs, milk and now chicken) ALWAYS trump organic. Talking to the farmer is way more important than an organic certification.

I get a dozen eggs and a 1/2 gallon of raw milk every week from the same farm. The half and half is the first I’ve had in a while – I found a reasonable source for local, grass-fed half & half that is pasteurized in the normal way, unhomogenized and contains nothing but milk and cream. The net cost on the milk is $6 a week, the eggs cost $3 a dozen and the cream was $4 a quart.

The chicken breast and steaks were out of my freezer, and both were from Costco. I’ve used up all the chicken, and I’ve now replaced it with cut-up pastured broiler from the farm where I get my milk and eggs. Pastured chicken is not available consistently at a reasonable price, so I do sometimes buy antibiotic and hormone-free from the grocery store. My grocery store carries no ground beef that I’m willing to buy, so if I can’t make it to the butcher to get local, grass-fed ground beef, I buy ground bison. The ham was the last bit left from Easter. The summer sausage is locally produced by my trusted butcher who sells only local humanely-raised and slaughtered meat. She can always tell me about the farm and the farmer.

I am using Tamari again after not touching any soy (knowingly, anyway) for about 9 months. It doesn’t seem to be an issue for me, and it’s a really useful ingredient. I think that’s all I have to say for now. I will work on explaining *how* I ate all of this in my next post, but I really need to do some work for, you know, MONEY, so this is it for now.

While watching the third installment of The 100 Mile Challenge, I was annoyed by how these folks who *volunteered* to only eat foods from within a 100 mile radius of their home were totally freaking out about not having wheat-based bread and pasta. This seemed especially wimpy to me for a variety of reasons, but the folks acting as guides and leaders, James and Elisa, thought that if they didn’t find some wheat, and soon, they would have too many drop-outs from the challenge. I realize that a lot of the problem is that people can’t cook, but how hard is it to just *let go* of it? The spices and the coffee would be a lot harder for me than bread, but then I’ve gone without bread before. Still, it’s only 100 days.

Another glaring example of this is what has become of Atkins Nutritionals. Atkins now seems to involve eating some Frankenfoods every day, right from the beginning. The original diet (Induction, first phase) was about eating meat or eggs, real cheese and several servings of non-starchy green vegetables (and there are a lot of those as options!). The diet now allows soy products and one to two servings of Atkins bars and shakes. The ingredients list on the shakes and bars is really alarming. They now contain peanuts, soy and milk. The low-carb baking mix (which I always found disgusting anyway) contains gluten. If you do the 1972 version of Atkins, you get a far more natural diet, and you might even find out that one of the common allergen foods is a problem for you. If you do it the way Atkins Nutritionals would have you do it, you’ll have no chance of that. Does the diet even *work* any more? Who knows.

The largest problem with Atkins is that people don’t seem to learn anything from the diet, go right back to eating all their favorite sugary foods and gain all the weight back. If they had to do a real re-think on what they were eating, maybe they’d, you know, develop some good life-long eating habits?

Most gluten-free cookbooks seem to be about cakes and cookies and especially cupcakes. The end product of gluten-free baking is even more calorific, sugary and fattening than the stuff made with wheat. It’s *very* hard to bake without wheat, but the hoops you have to jump through to make a cake rise are simply not pretty. Cupcakes are smaller and more error-free. I can make a decent flat bread/wrap kind of thing and a good pie crust, but I don’t eat these all the time. To make use of one of these cookbooks, I’d have to eat dessert every day! The other thing that bugs me about gluten-free flours: bean flours are actually quite hard to digest – they are not something you want to be eating if you can’t digest gluten.

And while were on the subject of sweets, what *is* it with Paleo and Low-Carb recipe sites? The seem to be about 75% desserts. A certain kind of Paleo-Diet-following-person seems to eat some kind of almond or coconut based pancake nearly every day for breakfast. Many seem to eat a lot of cookies or other desserts involving agave nectar and almond flour. I’ve never had agave nectar, but no matter what you want to say about where it falls on the Glycemic Index, it’s an intense source of sugar, much like honey. This is not something Paleolithic people would have been eating even once a month. There are so many hacks commonly used, but they really amount to eating processed foods that just barely fit into a rigid set of rules (grains, legumes, sugar, dairy or potatoes, though adherance on the potato thing varies and some people don’t count sweet potatoes). If you bake almonds into a cake or pancake, you are eating a huge amount of them – far more than you’d be likely to eat otherwise.

What are you really missing out on, and why are you missing it? If you gave those things up, you had a reason.