Dr. Moghissi's Kale Chips

I am not sure if you have noticed but it has been cold lately. Like really cold.

I grew up in Florida so anything under 75 is freezing.

This means that fall is just around the corner and with it comes all sorts veggies to experiment with. One such vegetable that Dr. Moghissi loves is kale. She comes in pretty much every day with a fresh batch of kale chips to munch on and she has graciously given me the recipe so that it can be shared with everyone!

Take some fresh kale (Dr. Moghissi gets hers from the local Farmer's Market) and tear it into chunks, about the size of a regular potato chip. How big or small you make the kale will alter your cooking time.

Toss your kale in olive oil and sea salt and place on a regular cookie sheet. The kale needs to be completely coated in olive oil when they hit the oven. Make sure that you spread the kale out so that the leaves are not overlapping too much. It'll help the kale get to uniform crunchiness. 

Cook your kale in a 350 degree oven for anywhere between 8-14 minutes. You want the kale to be crunchy but not burnt, so keep an eye on it. Just be forewarned, your house may smell after cooking kale like this (in a similar way to how brussel sprouts smell if that gives you any idea).

And voila! Here's the finished product of crunchy, good-for-you kale chips!

Fun avec du chocolat et crêpes

When I was in high school, we were required to take a language in order to graduate and in my infinite 16 year old wisdom I decided to take French. I learned two things in that class. One was the only French phrase that I remember, "Je ne sais pas", and the other was that I hated crepes. My fiance thinks crepes are pretty awesome, and so over the weekend, I sucked it up and tried a new Paleo recipe that Dr. Moghissi brought from The Paleo Chocolate Lover's Cookbook by Kelly Brozyna for Vanilla Crepe Cake with Chocolate Cream. Despite my best efforts, my crepe cake turned out to not be Paleo, but I was still happy with it.

The recipe was actually super easy to follow and didn't call for too many ingredients.  It  called for liquid vanilla stevia extract, but thankfully I just made my own with some stevia packets, water and vanilla extract.

=

Pile-o-Dates

 In case anyone was wondering it is kind of difficult trying to use my 1 cup food processor to puree all the dates that were needed (I had to do it in two batches-don't judge).

Most awesome paleo-ish thing ever

But the end result was this super awesome chocolate cream for between the layers of crepes. The cream started out paleo and then veered a hard left into not paleo when I used butter instead of coconut oil and cornstarch instead of arrowroot powder.






Apparently I am 1. impatient and 2. not handy with a skillet. My crepes came out awful. They didn't actually come out at all, they just kind of died in the pan and then went to the trash.

It all went downhill from here

After I dumped the remaining batter into the trashcan, I went with Plan B, which was definitely not Paleo of me.

I then started to assemble my cake...

Believe it or not, this is 5 layers in...

And then continued to build my cake. Instead of blackberries, I went with raspberries because they added more color (and are yummy).

I don't know if you can tell in this picture, but the cake hasn't really gotten any taller, Dr. Moghissi thinks that if I had made my own it would've been taller. This is 10 crepes layered with the chocolate cream in between. It may not look it, but this cake is super rich, it would probably be good with some whipped cream too to kind of lighten it up. I guess crepes aren't really as awful as I thought they were, because I ate my fair share of this cake.