When you find yourself longing for a return to the ‘old ways’ of eating, you may be thinking about Granny’s Sunday pot roast. But if you really want to return to the old ways, Julie and Charles Mayfield’s Paleo Comfort Food is the ticket.

They’ve carefully crafted a guidebook to comfort food eating that harkens back, not to your old granny, but to your biochemical and physiologic roots: the paleo diet that we, as humans, were molded by the forces of several millennia of natural selection to thrive on, before the dawn of agriculture (by which I mean wheat and corn farming) when our human diet was primarily meat (meaning that which we could hunt or catch with a pointy stick and our wiles) supplemented by seasonal roots, shoots, nuts, and berries.

The book is a comprehensive tool for the paleo kitchen, offering recipes for appetizers, sauces and staples, soups and salads, side dishes, mains, and yes, desserts (afterall, as we’ve always said, even the paleo hunter stumbled into a honey tree from time to time.)

Mike and I love their Steak Roll (stuffed with onions, celery, mushrooms, leeks and spinach) but we put a sous vide twist on it so that we can have it reliably medium rare but still tender. And cooked sous vide, it’s something you can prep, roll, vacuum seal, and drop in the bath at 134F to cook all day while you’re at work or busy doing something fun. Then it’s just a quick sear in hot lard to put a golden crust on it and golly Bob howdy, that’s good eats!

Paleo Comfort Food is sure to become an indispensable go-to resource in any low-carber’s kitchen, whether devoutly paleo or not.

7 Comments

  1. Looks good. Pun intended. Been thinking about names lately. We re name old things and call them new. Or, put a frame around what has been there all along and market it under a new perspective. Seth’s ‘permission marketing’. Permission as long as I’m in a certain mind set. Perspective shifting is really all there is. It makes a huge difference in actual life. Paleo. I like the new term, er…old.

  2. These types of food is not good for the health life, in these types of food calorie level is high and you only get fat from roasted foods!

    Comment from MD Eades: And your point is?

  3. I’m definitely going to get my hands on a copy of this book. I’ve been hearing a lot about sous vide cooking of late and I’m wondering what your take is on a couple of food safety issues. We’re often told not to cook in plastic. Have you any information about this as it relates to sous vide? Also, and I am not a food safety freak (the 5-second rule is okay by me), but I wonder about the safety of keeping food at 135 degrees for such a long time. I have my food handler’s certification and one thing we learn is that a perishable food should never be in the danger zone of 40-140 degrees for longer than 4 hours. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that there is no oxygen in the sous vide process?

  4. Mary,

    Thanks for the wonderful cookbook suggestion.

    Took a look at the Amazon reviews and other readers definitely agreed with you.

    They did however run into trouble with the book’s index and table of contents.

    Do you happen to have a top 10 list of recipes from the book already bookmarked with page numbers?

    Fair winds and light laughter,
    Sunny Lam

    Comment from MD Eades: Sorry I don’t have them bookmarked.

  5. I`m all for a paleo diet; I prefer my beef and lamb raw. I chop it myself for safety. I think it possible that the association between meat and cancer is really between COOKED meat and cancer. I’d like to see an analysis controlling for cooking.

    I don’t have a sous vide setup yet, but I’ll get one soon.

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