Category Archives: Paleo

Muzzleloader mule deer hunt

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This year my plan was to have an easy hunt to fill the freezer with a cow elk early and then have a challenge hunt to really push it trying to get a 3pt or better mule deer buck with my muzzleloader.   Well, the elk hunt didn’t quite pan out so that put a bit of pressure on the mulie muzzleloader hunt.   I knew if I’d done this hunt during rifle season I’d probably be able to take a deer but really I wanted the challenge of a true stalk and having to get in close, especially since I’ve been so lucky the last several years.   Given the difficulty of a buck with a muzzleloader I decided to do the hunt at Red’s in Ellensburg and got access to their 16,000 acre Mt. Baldy Preserve and was the only hunter during muzzleloader season there.

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MS rears its ugly head again

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Back in 2014 when I was dealing with SIBO and my feet started going numb we were a bit worried about MS and my doctor sent me off to a neurologist to see what was going on.   At that time it turned out I had neuropathy probably caused by the antibiotics.   In 2015 we found I had myelin antibodies from the autoimmune panel from Cyrex and so I had to go in for another neurological check and an MRI.  That MRI came back clean in the spring of 2015 and so I sort of figured I was out of the woods on this one.

Fast forward to last fall.  I started having frequent burning sensations in the front of my left leg and assumed it was due to the bad discs in my neck which were found in the MRI.  I went to a chiro and did my usual routine on the discs but the burning pain didn’t really go away and slowly got more frequent to where it was a daily occurrence.  My new naturopath looked at my MRI and thought I had not only bad discs but also a thickening of the ligament that runs along the spinal cord.  So, back to the neurologist for me with hopes that this was a structural issue that could be handled by surgery.

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Pheasant Thai Coconut Soup

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While I usually pluck birds and roast them whole there are times when I either have one a bit shot up or too many birds to process that way in which case I breast them and take the  hindquarters (along with the heart, liver and gizzard for Lira.)   We use the breasts in place of chicken breasts in recipes and usually slow cook the the hindquarters in a creole, cacciatore or some other similar dish.   This last week I have had a bad cold and was in the mood for a Thai Tom Kha Gai soup so decided to try and make one from pheasant.   I merged together a few recipes I found on the web and came up with something delicious and  cleared out my sinuses.   The recipe is totally Paleo, Gluten-Free and Dairy-Free.

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Pheasant Creole

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While I’m busy prepping for the upcoming hunting season I’m also busy trying to clear out the freezers in hopes of re-filling them soon.  I had a few pheasants left from last winter and decided to try something new with them after doing some variation on smoked pheasant for the last several.   We had some Shrimp Creole a few weeks ago and are inundated with tomatoes from the garden at the moment so that inspired me to make Pheasant Creole last night and it was awesome plus I did it in the slow cooker so it didn’t heat the house up too much on a hot day.

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Smoke roasted venison

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This weekend we had a dinner party and I decided to make use of the last big leg roast from my buck but had no idea how I was going to cook it.   I ended up combining about 3 recipes to get the final result which was awesome so I thought I’d better document it for future use.

I started where I always start, Hank Shaw‘s Buck, Buck, Moose which has been my goto cookbook since last October, everything we’ve made from there has been fantastic.   Following his Roast Leg of Venison recipe he has a side-bar on Smoke-Roasting a Leg of Venison which is what I wanted to do.  Hank gives 3 options to deal with this in a smoker:

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Can you be vegan with SIBO?

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This is a question that has come up a LOT on the Facebook SIBO group and I thought I’d give my opinions on the matter having been a vegan and having suffered through SIBO.  I was on the spectrum from vegan to pescatarian most of my adult life, I think the last red meat or poultry I ate was at 18 years old until I got SIBO at 53.   This was a decision made for religious reasons as well as moral reasons to try and help save the planet and it wasn’t one made lightly.    Originally I was hard-core vegan living on rice and soy for the most part then switched to adding dairy and eggs to my diet with some occasional fish.  For many years we lived this way, eating fish often when traveling, otherwise maybe a few times a month.  Sometime a few years before I got SIBO I started having problems with dairy and went back to being vegan.

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Lots of bird hunting this past month

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img_2560In the last month since I got home from my Idaho deer hunt I’ve been spending a lot of time out bird hunting with Lira.  So much time, in fact, that I haven’t been fishing for a month now.   We’ve been spending time at Cooke Canyon in Ellensburg and several of the Snoqualmie Wildlife Areas on the west side.   Lira has gotten better and better at finding birds, holding point and retrieving over this month, it has been really fun just watching her progress.   She’s also graduated from needing to be leashed up to being able to be free and, for the most part she listens.  She definitely would just as soon go out and play with other dogs as hunt though, it takes some prodding and a few zaps to get her out of play mode into hunt mode first thing in the morning.

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First buck

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img_2462A few days ago I shot my first buck and must admit I had very mixed emotions about the experience which for me really began several years ago.   When I got diagnosed with SIBO and had to switch from a vegan/vegetarian to Paleo diet I made the decision to fully embrace the Paleo lifestyle and in March of 2015 part of that became taking up hunting again.   It all started when I re-read The Paleo Manifesto and the chapter where John Durant decides to go deer hunting to supply his own food.  I grew up hunting in Iowa and had indeed supplied my own food before so I knew I could do it.   But, I grew up hunting birds, rabbits and squirrels and while Dad had gone deer hunting I had never been along.   After my first bird hunt in 30+ years I began looking into big game hunting since the amount of freezer stocked is way higher than with small game.   Within a month I had read several books on deer hunting and was contemplating hunting deer.

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Hawkeye 25k and the magic of fat burning

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IMG_0885Two years ago I had planned on going back to Iowa to run the Hawkeye 25k and then SIBO hit me hard making it impossible.  Finally this year I was able to go for it and I was very interested to see if my new Primal Endurance training regime was going to pay off during the run.    I had done a half marathon last month at the Redmond Watershed and since then had been running fairly low mileage only up to a 7 mile distance on a weekend run but always kept my heart rate in the aerobic phase below 125bpm and sticking to nose breathing through my runs.  My plan was to do this keeping my breathing steady through my nose and not push my heart rate up.  I wasn’t competing like I did at the Redmond half but I sort of hoped I’d set a new 25k PR just because I was dealing with about 1100′ of elevation gain instead of 3000′.   This was going to be the longest distance I’d run since getting sick 2.5 years ago.

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More Portland Paleo

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IMG_0691Another trip to Portland and another restaurant to try out, we love eating in Portland.   I have done two posts already about this city – Portland Paleo and Portland Paleo II from last year’s trips.   We headed to Portland last weekend to go look at a dog and decided to try something new.  Originally I was going to just head to Brooklyn House but felt it was better to explore.  Tasty & Sons had been recommended to us by a friend and their menu had potential but it was one the other side of the river so I found Tasty & Alder which is just a block away from our hotel in the Pearl District and looked to be very Paleo friendly.

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