Perfectly Paleo Pudding

[Rignold]

as per my Quest this month. After three trial and error attempts... Paleo pudding perfection. No sugar, no dairy, no gluten, no cooking, just yummy 'creamy' blueberry notcheesecake.

Children hoovered it up as if they had never been fed before.

[Vixchile Graduate]

You will have to share the recipe as that looks yummy!!

[Potty Graduate]

That looks gorgeous!

[ViaM Graduate]

Do you do home deliveries?

[Rignold]

recipe is simplicity itself: crust is almonds blitzed with a tsp of cinnamon and bound with coconut oil and honey. Filling is coconut cream whipped till it forms peaks then quickly mixed with 4 leaves of gelatin dissolved in lemon juice to get it to set, and the whole thing chilled in the fridge for 6 hours, then topped with blueberries.

I did try it before with peach slices but they were a bit too heavy.

[Vixchile Graduate in reply to Rignold]

I must try this, I think I can get some of those ingredients here. I will have a look in the supermarket and when I see blueberries I will try to make them (we don't always have blueberries, tesco et al. Seem to get the blueberries first)

Thank you for sharing !!

[misswobble Graduate]

My kinda pud that is. Mmmmmmmm

[ju-ju- Graduate]

That looks lovely, but no sugar?? I guess the honey sweetens it??

[Rignold]

Sugar is the Great Satan and has been banished from Rignold Acres. Vade Retro Sucra!

[frannyfran Graduate in reply to Rignold]

Honey is 80% sugar!!

[Rignold in reply to frannyfran]

Well. yes, and if you want to be really exact about it all carbohydrates break down into sugars. I was using the word to refer to refined sugar in this instance. Sorry if that wasn't clear.

[Curlygurly2 Graduate]

One place I worked years ago used to give us that sometimes, I never knew what it was called... I love blueberries..

[Hidden]

Yum

[GoogleMe Graduate]

Pretty sure your echt paleo types didn't eat anything like this in their caves all those years ago. Poor them.

[Pigivi]

looks yum.... just wish people would stop to call this kind if food "paleo" - I hate that misnomer!!!

[Rignold]

In what way is it a misnomer? The theory behind it is that we have been around and eating whole foods for 200,000 years or so but agriculture has only been around for the last 10,000, which is very little in terms of our evolutionary history. We have not had enough time to adapt eating processed foods and ground wheat, refined sugars etc - Neolithic foods, if you like

The term Paleo has been coined to describe an approach to diet based on naturally occurring ingredients that are suited to our digetive, metabolic and immune systems. It is a style of eating more akin

to that on our hunter-gatherer ancestors, but it is not some kind of historical re-enactment. I doubt cavemen had spinach egg foo yung for breakfast or used flushing toilets, but I'm not about to give up either of those.

As a term it has its pitfalls, I agree. It makes an easy target for jokes from peopel who can't be bothered to understand it, but its what we're stuck with.

[Dunder2004 Graduate in reply to Rignold]

I certainly get the principle behind it and there is no doubt that the modern food-chain is broken. Processed foods that are high in fat, and especially added sugar will cause all sorts of problems down the line.

My issue is simply with the statement "We have not had enough time............". It may seem logical, we think of the evolutionary process as taking place over aeons, but actual evidence to support such a claim is not exactly abundant.

[Rignold in reply to Dunder2004]

Well, that may be true. I have read somewher that hedgehogs have evolved to run rather than freeze in the headlights of oncoming vehicles, and that clearly has happened in a few score years not the 100,000 or so it supposedly take for an eveoltionary change to take hold. I would like to think that is true, and the reason you seldom see squashed hedgehogs on the roads nowadays as opposed to in my youth, rather than a simple decline in their numbers.

Timescale aside, though, my understanding of the evolutionary process (which I readily admit is not perfect) is that nature cherry picks the adaptations that improve the chances of survival and efficiency of the subject. An increase in consumption of the industrialised foodstuffs that were not part of of our original diet appears to result in increase in autoimmune disorders, cardiovascular disease, diabetes etc with no physical benefit. One could argue that the expolsoion in these chroonic ailments is, perhaps, an evolutionary response.

Anyway, I'm not trying to proselytise the Paleo diet. There are bits of it I still don't wholly follow or agree with - the legume issue, for example, and I'm not actually following it - it's just bits of it it very well with our current food approach: the sugars and grains part mainly. Not giving up rice any time soon though, or milk in my tea.

which can bring us on to another controversial headscratcher: it turns out white rice my be better for you than brown rice, after all this time.

And on that provocative bombshell, I'm off to shred a dozen cabbages before its time to shout at The Archers.

[Dunder2004 Graduate in reply to Rignold]

Nature doesn't really cherry pick anything. Genetic mutations are entirely random events. Those that turn out to be beneficial result in higher survival rates/longer life and thus are more likely to be passed to the next generation. Repeat this over a long period and you have a situation where one tiny mutation in an individual animal can be present throughout an entire species.

I think we can all agree that our bodies struggle to deal with the truly industrialised fare that now pervades our societies but when it comes to what should constitute a Paleo diet, I don't think there can be too many hard and fast rules/generalisations. There was clearly a great deal of variation (primarily geographic) in terms of adoption of agrarian practices, how much (if any) meat was actually consumed is still a subject of great debate and wild cereals/grains were consumed by many societies prior to agriculture. Consumption of creepy crawlies also.................... well best not go there!

The bottom line (IMHO) is that humans 10,000+ probably had very different tolerances to different foods depending of where they lived and generally ate whatever they could (starvation was certainly one of the main causes of death).

[frannyfran Graduate]

It still looks awfully good and I will be trying it next summer when the blueberries are plentiful in the forest!

[misswobble Graduate]

I gave this a whirl today but i didn't read Rig's recipe properly. I made the base with almonds, sticky dates and honey and it worked a treat. I cocked up with the coconut milk but i managed to sort it out. I should have strained the oil off it first. Doh!

i used rasps and blueberries. Mmmmmmmmmm lovely.