Improvisational cooking: Caveman style!

So this morning I awoke to realize that haphazardly we froze all the remaining bananas for our nightly smoothie, thus leaving me without unfrozen bananas for my paleo pancakes. Initially my reaction was: F*ck! How could I go on without my regular breakfast. Actually, I was not that upset, I was just still pissed off from having to wake up to two crying dogs that had diarrhea in their sleep area. Oh Joy! Poor lil' fellas!  Anyhow, I digress, the dog situation had long passed and I was ready to make me some grub... but what to do, what to do without bananas....? I thought, well, I'll just microwave (really paleo eh) one of my paleo banana nut muffins, they are essentially the same recipe just cooked differently. So I started my eggs and opened the fridge only to find that right next to the muffins was a pre-cooked sweet potato. "Hmmmm", I thought. I wonder if I could make a sweet potato pancake. Add a little cinnamon, ok. It turns out this works just dandy! Sure, it's not nearly as sweet, in fact it's a bit savory, but it satisfied my warm breakfast, paleo craving! And it's quite filling! So, I thought I'd share the recipe and a few thoughts about my am experience. Firs the recipe:

1 small, or 1/2-3/4 medium/large pre-cooked sweet potato (it should be so cooked that it's mashable)
1 egg
1 egg white
a (small) handful of ground raw almonds
about a teaspoon to a tablespoon of coconut milk
cinnamon (as much as you like)


Grind almonds and place in mixing bowl
Add egg and egg white and stir around. It should be pasty, sort of.
Add coconut milk
Add sweet potato

Mix all ingredients together until it forms a batter. For my particular griddle pan the batter has to be very think, almost doughy, else the batter just runs out flat and I have one huge burnt unflippable pancake! Talk about a bad way to start your day :-(

Once batter is prepped, heat the griddle pan (I can't grease mine because the stove gets so hot it actually burns the grease off, but I have found that some butter flavored spray enhances the flavor just a touch, especially if you like the taste of butter. I go without greasing only because I have to).  Cook like any other pancake, until you start to see some bubbles come through the uncooked side at which time you should flip. Be careful, any paleo pancake is not going to have the stiff consistency of modern pancakes to use a big spatula so that you don't lift half your pancake and leave half on the griddle. I've done that several times and it's really F-ing annoying. In order to circumvent that issue either use large spatula or make smaller pancakes. I choose the latter and it makes a nice stack of pancakes that dupes your mind into thinking you are eating at IHOP or something.

OK, that's it. Cook and eat. I use honey to top these. You could probably get more creative with your topping, like pure maple syrup would probably be fantastic as it is on just about anything.

There you go, a decent new recipe to try for a morning variation. These sweet potato pancakes are not as sweet as banana pancakes and are probably high glycemic and not "true" paleo, but they satisfy the not eating artificial modern shit, for me anyhow.  Also, this event this morning got me thinking. Initially, I was really shocked to find that I had frozen all the bananas and left myself without a breakfast option. I was very upset, ok, just a little, but come on... So I improvised. I improvised like our ancestors would have had to do had they frozen all their bananas the night before ;-)  Seriously, though. Our ancestors survived probably in large part to their ability to improvise, to think on the spot, to be creative, to think "outside the box". No claws, no teeth, slow, weak, no camo, no fur, no spines, no poison, no exploding ass (see bombardier beetle), and no venom resistance (see honey badger) - we're left with one fantastic evolutionary adaptation: a frontal lobe that is disproportionately larger than it should be for our bodies. I love evolution, by the way! So this frontal lobe, our executive brain, leaves us with the capacity to solve problems, come up with new solution, and think outside the box. This is the evolutionary adaptation that 1) makes humans different from other animals and 2) drove the agricultural and industrial revolutions that our paleo lifestyle now is designed to combat. Strange how these things work right. Our frontal lobes, about 100,000-200,000 years ago started to expand with increased variability in diet. Then somewhere between 150,000 and 10,000 years ago Hominid ancestors started to cook stuff. They somehow learned to harness the power of fire, probably first for warmth and then for cooking. They also learned about underground cooking - that is burying meat and veg with hot coals. This was an evolutionary milestone that resulted in even larger increases in brain energy utilization and expansion. See cooking shit allows our bodies to extract way more nutrients from the food. It's less energetically demanding to breakdown and the energy is easily utilized because the proteins are degraded through cooking. So, simultaneously we reduce our bodies energy expenditure associated with digestion and increase the energetic extraction from the food. MMMM. This is why if you eat everything that you current eat now in raw form, you WILL lose weight. Yeah sure the USDA says raw has more calories, but you shit about half those calories out. Raw diets produce weight loss. There is no debate about that!

So here we have our caveman brethren having discovered, through creativity and ingenuity of the type we don't yet know about (no time machine), allowing or the generation of an industrial tool that increases energy utilization. Turns out our bodies capitalized on sending that energy to our brains: the human brain consumes more energy than any other organ system in the body, in fact relative to it's size it essentially hijacks a majority of the energy in the body. And I don't think any of us would argue with the fact that our brains, are, well, pretty important. But, take for example, neuronal firing (just one neural process) uses about 10% of the entire bodies energy potential. This shit is fucking demanding! So caveman brother finds a way to get more energy in the body by using a creative technique. Our brains were trying to grow but energetically limited. Cooking solved this problem. Then at about 10,000 (+/-) years ago, the modern estimate for agricultural (r)evolution we learned a new trick: farming. Farming allowed us to produce large quantities of energetically dense (read as loaded with sugar and protein) foods in one location (read as we did not have to forage, hunt, and gather). Another evolutionary milestone, the black stone in 2001: a Space odyssey. Right? And yet we now know, or many of us know, that this lifestyle, while hugely beneficial to our farming ancestors, was not good for our bodies. We've created a plethora of "modern diseases" as a result of agricultural evolution. OK, but we've also fed a lot of people, reproduced to almost planetary limits, and destroyed half the earth. Oh, wait, all bad too.... It's not bad though. This was a change in evolutionary history that further gave rise to expanding brain sizes. We know from the anthropological record (read as we think we know from fossilized skulls) that there were at least two distinct periods of hominid brain expansion that correlate very tightly with the discovery of fire pits remains and agricultural evolution. Neat, eh?  And yet, here I was, gutted in my kitchen that I had frozen all my freaking bananas and what was I to do. Well thank goodness for the ancestral fire pit and farmer - it's because of them that I have a modernized brain that allows me to improvise, think creatively, and survive (as if I would've died without my paleo pancakes! no seriously, I might have! LOL). I "foraged" (i.e. looked around purposefully) my "surroundings" (i.e. my kitchen, pantry and fridge [oh my!]). I discovered a food product - sweet potato - that is nothing like a banana, but somehow I knew (from experience) that it had similar properties, it was edible, and might suffice as a substitute. Then I engaged in an almost uniquely human behavior: I tried it! That's right, I went for broke, (whoa, I am really dramatizing this, aren't I? :-)  I experimented. Many organisms do not have the capacity for experimentation, tool use and creative thinking: they run on instinct. Humans (& crows, and domesticated dogs, and other primates) are among a few species that are able to do this. And, in closing, I must say, THANK GOODNESS, because I don't know what I might have done had I been woken up at 5:30 am to clean up dog diarhea and then not be able to eat my paleo breakfast >:-O

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On last note about Paleo (or ZONE-ish) healthy eating. I've now been doing this again for at least a month, maybe a bit longer, and I have noticed performance gains that are just awesome. Now, part of this is mental, psychological. I went for Level 1 certification, and I've been following CrossFit for a while now, and I've tried to become part of the CF Community, so all those things are driving me to do work harder, faster, again and again. But, I do really think the diet has a combinatorial effect. I am not the first to suggest this, not by any means, in fact it's partially prescribed by CF, but I did want to comment on the personal, self-experimentation aspect of it. Take for example the fact that I max deadlifted more than I ever had, while eating paleo. Then just yesterday my wife, a few students and a professor from the college's new fitness club SPORT (Students Participating in Organized Running and Training) ran a 5K for Georgia Fallen Heroes (actually it was longer than 5K, 3.7 miles) and I ran it in a personal record time. I am convinced that this works.... It's hard at times, but the longer you do it, the more people you recruit as supporters and collaborators in this effort, the more like-minded people you surround yourself with - the easier it gets!