This Week in Eating Paleo (1/20/11)

The meat cake Loretta made for our wedding... Paleo goodness!

So, this past weekend was a weekend of dietary cheats, as Darren and I got married on Sunday. Hooray for us! :) It did mean lots of desserts, though... cookies, muffins, and cakes (Loretta made the most amazing wedding cake... seriously, sinfully delicious).

She also made the meat "cake" pictured above... a tasty meatloaf, iced with roasted garlic and covered in bacon sprinkles. Also delicious, and not at all sinful. Definitely going to be making this again (if Loretta doesn't make it first!).

Here's a video which explains how to roast garlic... the process is pretty straightforward. Of course, I couldn't find a video or set of instructions which didn't suggest spreading it on bread or mixing it into mashed potatoes, both Paleo no-nos. However, you could easily mix it into masked cauliflower, use it with the jicama hash browns, ice a meat cake with it, or just eat it straight out of the oven with a spoon, because it's that tasty!

Otherwise, our week has been pretty standard; eggs, beef, veggies, nuts, seeds, a few clementines and apples here and there. Our food co-op has been out of beef for a bit, so we got some ground turkey instead, and that's been pretty tasty.

Also, we're investing in a deep freeze and going in with some other folks on 1/2 of a cow from Mundt Farms, a local grass-fed and finished farm run by some good friends of ours. This will bring the cost of the beef down to around $4lbs, which is about the average cost per pound of the crap beef you buy retail at mainstream grocers... the grain-fed stuff raised by industrial farming methods. And, again... that brings it to match the average price. But, all our beef will work out to that cost per pound, but a lot of what we'll have are steaks and roasts.  The retail prices for those cuts are a lot higher. I plan on doing the math once we get everything to see if investing in a cow actually makes buying properly raised beef cheaper than buying all the same lower-quality cuts at the store. I'm confident the answer is "yes," but look forward to that report.