This is a perfect meal for those nights. All you need is a smoked sausage from your grocery store or local butcher (try to get one without added sugar or nitrates/nitrites if you can), an onion, and a bell pepper or two.

Slice the onion and peppers and toss them in a little bit of olive oil, then start them sauteeing over medium heat in a pan.

Meanwhile, slice your sausage. When you’re done, throw the slices in with the peppers and onions.

Toss and keep cooking until the veggies are the way you like them and the meat is heated through (remember, it’s already cooked so you don’t have to worry about that). Taste it and add some salt and/or pepper if you need to. But likely, you won’t need to add anything since sausage has so much flavor!

If sausage isn’t your speed, try Tuna Salad, My Way – it’s another super-fast meal which requires hardly any prep or clean-up.

But now that most of our grainy pantry items are gone, I try to make delicious party foods that I can actually enjoy while I’m at the event. So this five-part series includes a few of my ideas for primal party foods, because you can’t always bring steak and eggs. Several of these are healthy low-carb snacks, so if you’re an Atkins/South Beach person, you can also benefit from these.

This one is so obvious that seeing it on my blog might make your eyes hurt a bit… but sometimes it’s the most obvious things that seem to slip our minds when we’re wracking our brains trying to think of a great HEALTHY appetizer or party food that will be well-liked by most people in the crowd.

Making a veggie tray is as simple as buying a few different vegetables, washing and cutting them (and if you choose something like asparagus or green beans, you’ll want to blanch them too), and deciding on a dip or two. My problem is that I always end up buying way too many vegetables, but there are worse problems to have in life.

Some vegetable ideas are:

• Carrots, peeled and cut into sticks (much cheaper than baby carrots to cut up the big ones)
• Broccoli, cut into florets. A huge pet peeve of mine is when veggie trays have these HUGE chunks of broccoli – make sure they’re bite-sized, please.
• Cauliflower – same deal as the broccoli. Please make sure they’re sized properly so you don’t make your guests look like chipmunks with every bite.
• Bell peppers of all colors, cut into strips. Here’s my easy method for cutting bell peppers.
• Grape tomatoes. Cherry tomatoes tend to be too big, and if someone bites them they squirt the other guests. Eww! Best to stick to the smaller grape tomatoes.
• Asparagus, trimmed and blanched.
• Fresh green beans, ends trimmed and blanched.
• Cucumbers. Make sure to slice them thick enough to scoop up a bit of dip.
• Celery, cut into strips about 3-4″ long.
• Radishes
• Olives – green, black, Greek, whatever you like.
• Mushrooms
• Raw summer squash and/or zucchini – I like to slice squash but cut zucchini into spears.

And for dips, you may choose:

• Homemade Ranch dip
• French Onion dip
• Baba Ganoush (sort of like hummus but made with roasted eggplant instead of chickpeas)
• Olive Tapenade
• Cumin Yogurt Dip
• Muhammara , a roasted-red-pepper dip made with nuts and a touch of molasses or balsamic vinegar – sounds amazing.
• Another healthy option

Hopefully I’ve jogged your memory about how great veggie trays can be, and maybe even gave you a new idea you haven’t thought of before. No go forth into the party world, and spread delicious healthy food!

But now that most of our grainy pantry items are gone, I try to make delicious party foods that I can actually enjoy while I’m at the event. So this five-part series includes a few of my ideas for primal party foods, because you can’t always bring steak and eggs. Several of these are healthy low-carb snacks, so if you’re an Atkins/South Beach person, you can also benefit from these.

Coconut Fruit Salad Recipe:

A while ago, Elizabeth at Caveman Food posted her recipe for Coconutty Fruit Salad, and it looked AMAZING.  Unfortunately for me, I don’t have a source for coconut butter (yet) so I tried it with just the coconut oil and unsweetened dried coconut flakes. I used strawberries and blueberries to keep the sugar low, and it tasted great to me, but I got feedback from non-primal party friends who said it wasn’t sweet enough, so if you want it to be sweeter, you could use other fruits (plums, pineapple, and grapes would be great in it) and/or add some sweetener to the coconut oil.

• Hull and cut strawberries
• Wash and dry strawberries and blueberries
• Heat 2-3 Tbsp coconut oil to melt it.
• OPTIONAL – mix honey/stevia/truvia with the coconut oil before drizzling.
• Drizzle oil over fruit, tossing to coat.
• Sprinkle fruit with dried unsweetened coconut immediately. It will stick to the oil and become part of the “shell” when the oil cools and hardens.

Now, I enjoyed this fruit salad, but I think it would be even better with actual coconut butter like Elizabeth suggested. Just have to get my hands on some! Also, this salad has better flavor at room temperature than at fridge-temp (as is the case with most fruit things), so be sure to take it out of the fridge ahead of time!

But now that most of our grainy pantry items are gone, I try to make delicious party foods that I can actually enjoy while I’m at the event. So this five-part series includes a few of my ideas for primal party foods, because you can’t always bring steak and eggs. Several of these are healthy low-carb snacks (this one’s not low-carb, sorry), so if you’re an Atkins/South Beach person, you can also benefit from these.

Honey-Almond-Butter-Yogurt Fruit Dip

Think the name is long enough? Sorry I don’t have measurements for everything. This is one of those mix, taste, mix, taste, mix, taste recipe.

In a bowl, mix together:

• plain full-fat yogurt
• honey to sweeten – I don’t like TOO much, but some people have a sweet tooth and “need” more.
• almond butter (or natural peanut butter)
• vanilla extract

Serve with fruit for dipping. Apple slices are great, but remember to toss them with a bit of citrus juice so they don’t brown. Strawberries are also a good pairing, as are pear slices, or even cherries.

But now that most of our grainy pantry items are gone, I try to make delicious party foods that I can actually enjoy while I’m at the event. So this five-part series includes a few of my ideas for primal party foods, because you can’t always bring steak and eggs. Several of these are healthy low-carb snacks, so if you’re an Atkins/South Beach person, you can also benefit from these.

No-Carb Snack Skewers

These skewers are great if you are trying to get in some protein while keeping your carbs as low as possible. Maybe you’re in ketosis and want to stay that way, or maybe you just love meat and think veggies are for sissies. Either way, you’ll enjoy these easy-to-make snack skewers. They couldn’t be simpler.

Thread onto bamboo skewers:

• Summer sausage, cut into chunks (be sure to get one that doesn’t have added sugars or nitrates/nitrites, if you can)
• Aged sharp cheddar cheese chunks

That’s it! A great way to enjoy a “meat and cheese platter” without having to deal with the bland, crumbly, carby crackers.

Cute image from http://twibies.com/

Just a few quick notes tonight:

• In the right sidebar, there is a poll asking about what social media / sharing sites you use. If you haven’t taken the time to vote, please do. I’m really curious to see which sites are the most popular with you guys! (If you are reading this via feed or email, please click through to the website to see the poll.)
• I’ve recently started tweeting via twitter. I wasn’t sure if I would want to continue doing it, but after getting a new iPhone (omgomgomg I love it) I can see how it will be really fun to keep up with on a day-to-day basis. Please give me a follow if you’d like. Right now I’m using it to micro-blog my way across the country as we drive to CA, including lots of pictures. I won’t be putting the same things on this site, so don’t worry about double-posts. If you want to, you can subscribe to those posts via RSS if you don’t have a twitter account.
• There is an iPhone app for Wordpress and while you may have noticed the “test” post show up on my website, that is the only one that actually worked. I tried writing a couple other posts from the road, but the app is buggy and posts can mysteriously disappear… so until that is fixed, I won’t be blogging on the fly, other than with twitter.
• We’re in El Paso, TX tonight, about halfway to our new home in California. Tomorrow we’ll be stopping in Tucson to see my little sister and I’m pretty pumped about that! Sunday morning we’ll start another long drive and we will stop near LA for the night. Then Monday, we’ll arrive at our new abode! I will definitely write about the new house once we get there.

But now that most of our grainy pantry items are gone, I try to make delicious party foods that I can actually enjoy while I’m at the event. So this five-part series includes a few of my ideas for primal party foods, because you can’t always bring steak and eggs. Several of these are healthy low-carb snacks, so if you’re an Atkins/South Beach person, you can also benefit from these.

Antipasto skewers:

Thread onto bamboo skewers:

• grape tomatoes, cut in half (to avoid the surprising squirting that sometimes happens at parties when people bite a small tomato. ew)
• cubes of whole-milk mozzarella, preferably fresh
• green olives

Drizzle with extra virgin olive oil and balsamic vinegar, and sprinkle lightly with sea salt if you’d like. Let marinate in the fridge until your party starts.

These skewers are great for the stand-around-and-mingle parties, but for a sit-down dinner, you could make them and give everyone a small dipping bowl of homemade fresh pesto. Wouldn’t that be fantastic?

I guess gardening entries aren’t really something you can write ahead of time and schedule to post 2 weeks in advance, either. So I’m going to have to get better about immediacy of posting next gardening season.

Our garden went through so many iterations of life and death… It had a slow start, with our peas and beans dealing with aphids. Then, everything was bushy and green but not producing much. Our zucchini was giving us root-rotted veggies, and so were our tomatoes. We got some calcium pills at GNC and crushed them up to add to the soil, and the root rot was cured!

We had a short period of enjoying lots of yellow squash before that plant died of unknown cause. We pulled it up, along with our beans which we never seemed to harvest on time. We got a few random peppers that seemed to take forever to get big enough to pick…

Then we were getting ready to move and neglected our garden. We let things die, and only watered every 3-4 days. Everything looked shriveled and brown. But during a garage sale we had, I trimmed away all the dead parts and discovered that we had some extremely healthy plants underneath… our tomatoes started fruiting like crazy, and we have enjoyed tons of bell peppers since then.

We only got a couple honeydews and watermelons the whole season, but the ones we got were really juicy and flavorful. We might try growing them again, but not necessarily in the boxes. We might let them sprawl a little, like they’re designed to do.

Now that we’re moving on the 15th, the garden boxes have been emptied, the soil and our compost packed into big rubbermaid bins, the trellises removed, and the poor thriving plants had to be pulled up (we cut them up and mixed them into the compost though – so it’s not a total waste).

I wonder what you can grow in the central valley of California during the fall/winter seasons. I did find this month-by-month calendar of garden chores for the central valley, which looks helpful.

In any case, I’ll try to be better about updating the garden section once we get to California!

So I started experimenting with the canned coconut milk, trying to dilute it into the right thickness. Nothing seemed to work.

Until… once I hit on the right thickness, I decided to try adding vanilla and sweetener. That was it!!! It tastes exactly like I remember!

Coconut Milk Drink Recipe

• 1 can coconut milk
• 2 cups water (or a little more than that)
• 1 Tbsp vanilla and some truvia to taste
• OR 1 Tbsp sugar-free vanilla syrup (like the kind you can get for coffee)

It’s so refreshing! Store in the fridge, and serve over ice.

Some separation might occur in the fridge, but that’s normal. Just stir it before you pour.