How is your kitchen/food preparation since you've started eating Primal? page 2

[Owly]

Most annoying: cooking with more fats means I seem to get grease spots on a lot of my t-shirts.

My ideal: a bigger kitchen with more prep space and more food storage space (big fridge, big freezer, proper pantry), a nicer knife set, and a gas stove instead of the electric in our place. Oh, and more seafood. It's pretty expensive here because we're so far inland.

[palebluedots]

I actually don't have a most annoying thing, but if I had to pick one, I guess it would just be learning how to cook meat. As a long time vegan, meat kind of freaks me out and I'm always worried about spreading bad bacteria or germs!

As for gadgets, I could go on for DAYS about them. I'm a total foodie, so we have lots of stuff in our kitchen. I also used to work at the corporate offices of Williams Sonoma, so I got 40% off.

Let's see, things I wouldn't want to live without:
-Vitamix (I use this daily to make my own salad dressings)
-Grill Pans
-Mini kitchenaid food processor (I also have a 12 cup one, and find that I never use it except when I want to shred cabbage)
-Excalibur Dehydrator (I dry my own fruits to make herbal teas)
-Vollrath nonstick pans... seriously, these are the best nonstick pans I've ever used (you can find them at restaurant supply stores)
-good basics like a veggie peeler, a microplane, silicone spatulas
-good knives are totally essential. I have and love the Wusthof Classic series.
-my grill.. we are not fortunate enough to have a gas stove, so our grill gets used almost daily

There's tons more, but those are the first things that come to mind.

[jojohaligo]

What do you find is the most annoying about meal/food preparation when eating Primal?
All the hunting and gathering! Seriously, with my current schedule I wish i could find everything I want in one stinkin' place. I hate having to go to farms, markets, and different stores.

If you had all the time/money/equipment, how would you want meal preparation to be like?
If money and time is not an object, then I would hire a primal chef. If I had to be the chef, then I would want a quality meat grinder, a really good dehydrator, a big ass freezer, and someone to teach me how to properly do my own canning (because it scares the shit out of me - you know: botulism).

[Paleobird]

I love cooking and I find Primal cooking to even be easier because I don't have to wait for the brown rice to cook. The annoyances of grease in the pans and stuff is all taken care of by my four footed dishwasher, also known as my Wolf Cub. I have all the gadgetry I need and then some. My favorites are my huge crockpot, the dehydrator for jerky and veggie chips, and the VitaMix.

It does take longer at the store because I have to get out my reading glasses and check the ingredients on everything.

[Sandra in BC]

Nothing much has changed, because I cooked from scratch most of the time before primal. There IS more room in my pantry now, since I don't stockpile pasta, flour, sugar, etc.

My shopping has changed. More fresh & frozen, less boxed and bagged. I used to get super jazzed about a cereal sale. Now I'm chasing deals on butter.

[sakura_girl]

Annoying thing is that I always have to shop for groceries for fresh proteins and produce. I keep emergency frozen vegetables and frozen ground beef and chicken breasts in my freezer, but I like my seafood and liver fresh. Before, I just ate canned seafood and ate liver once a month, maybe. Plus, grains could be stored, so I didn't have to cycle through the stuff in my fridge as fast.

Dream kitchen appliances:
- Vitamix blender
- Ice cream maker
- Dehydrator
- Room in freezer to store half a cow

[lorichka6]

Most annoying used to be that things no longer just came out of a box and were ready to eat... but I have actually come to enjoy the cooking part so it isn't annoying anymore We do go to the store A LOT more than we used to because everything is produce and not shelf stable.

Dream kitchen:

I'd have one of those pantries like the Master Chef TV show and would never have to go to the store

I'd have a Vita Mix

I'd have twice the counter space and storage space

I'd live in a place where a garden wasn't buried under snow for a few months each year and avocados would grow in my backyard

[PrimalKev]

I'll chime in.

What do you find is the most annoying about meal/food preparation when eating Paleo?

I would say the time it takes to prepare a meal. With cutting and boiling vegetables, cooking the meat and then doing the dishes, a 1 to 2 hours of cooking-eating-cleaning is a lot for a meal that will feed you for 5 hours.

This is usually the situation for egg breakfasts or when eating offal. The rest of the time, I make sure to have 3 or 4 portions of leftovers with a big batch of pre-boiled vegetables to eat with my eggs in the morning. This makes the 2 hours it takes a lot more worth it.

If you had all the time/money/equipment, how would you want meal preparation to be like?

With all the money, I would first buy (all All-Clad of course) a small saucepan, huge stockpot for bone broth, stainless steel frying pan and sauté pan. I'd also buy a Blendtec blender, as well as a hundred other things.

With all this equipment, I would like to have a rotation of large jars of 22-hour and calcium-rich bone broth, canned vegetables, sauerkraut/fermented vegetables and homemade jerky.

With all this cooking, I would be highly skilled in the kitchen, making meals incredibly tasty and taking 1/10 the time to prepare.

[Artichoke]

Undoubtedly the most annoying thing about going Paleo is the shopping. If it's available I choose organic which can mean hitting two or three supermarkets in one afternoon, like I did today, in order to get sufficient food.

As a college-trained ex-chef, married to the son of a Royal Navy chef, cooking from scratch was something we did before. However we now have a surplus of storage jars which used to hold pasta.

If I accquired shedloads of money I'd buy a Georgian house in Sussex and have a custom designed Mark Wilkinson kitchen, more knives and a walk in fridge.

[Rip @ MIPWID]

I would want to be able to work for myself, from home, so I could travel to the market whenever I wanted.

Food prep is no different now as we have always cooked from scratch.

In terms of facilities, I'd want a large fridge, with room to brine chicken in pots and cure pork belly into bacon. I would want a huge chest freezer and a large double oven, too. Outside, I'd want the facilities to roast whole pigs.