A friend of mine had referred me to this small butcher and I was pleasantly surprised to find that they carried some hard to find items. The two most interesting were smoked duck sausage and veal sweetbreads.
First off, the duck sausage was a-may-zing! Smokey, sweet, fatty, it was just perfect.
Second, I had always wanted to try sweetbread. After a little googling, I found that what I bought was actually the thymus gland from a calf. I asked the butcher how to cook it and was told to fry it in a pan with onions, peppers, and garlic. So this morning I did just that.
Overall, I’d say the sweetbread tastes kind of like a metallic mushroom with the texture of a scallop. It was definitely interesting. I think I like it. It’s so different, it is hard to be sure.
I looked up the nutrition data, and sweetbread seems to be very high in phosphorous, zinc, magnesium, and B-12. So a good source of some micro-nutrients that are often lacking in more common food.
Two of the primal laws expounded by Mark Sisson are to move slowly and lift heavy things. I found an activity that manages to accomplish both of these at the same time: rock climbing. I went to the Stone Summit Climbing & Fitness Center in Atlanta yesterday. It turns out that this new climbing gym is the largest in America!
Since I am totally inexperienced with regard to rock climbing, I wasn’t allowed to use the big wall since that required a knowledgable and skilled partner. There’s a class to get the knowledge and skills, but you have to reserve your spot ahead of time. So it was bolding for me. Bouldering is basically the same thing but with short walls and lots of padding on the floor. So there isn’t that far to drop if you do fall.
I’ve always wanted to try climbing since it liked like a lot of fun, and it is. I had not expected how hard it would be though. After 2 hours of intermittent climbing, my forearms were shot and my hands were raw. I’m writing this the day after, and I can tell that tomorrow some serious soreness will settle in.
This past weekend, i weighed myself as I sometimes do. My weight came in at 184 with a body fat measurement of about 23%. Now I know that body fat scales are notoriously unreliable, but I think I can trust the trend in coming down from 35% or so. So overall I have lost about 50 pounds total, pretty much all of which was fat. Yay success!
On the failure side, my cheat meals and lack of really serious exercise have led to a plateau in the 182-185 region that I’ve been on for the past couple months. Ideally i would like to still get rid of some more belly fat and get a bit stronger. So that means cutting out more crap and working out twice a week or so.
However, I do have a few planned cheats in the near future. Tomorrow night I’ll be having dinner with friends that I haven’t seen in years and later this month is my birthday. On both of those occasions I will indulge in cheat meals without any remorse. Other than that I am going to keep it pretty clean though.
For some bizarre reason I decided that i didn’t need to eat lunch today. Oh, I remember what it was, i was playing fable 3. Anyhow, time got away from me and i had to leave for work.
So now I’m starving. Normally, I would just IF, but it’s just not happening today. Fortunately I have my primal snacks at work. Pork rinds and salsa to the rescue!
So today I used the first of my 5-gallon gasoline tanks in rotation. As a quick recap, I bought 2 of these 5-gallon tanks last week with the idea that I could use them to effectively extend my fuel storage and driving range if we hit another shortage.
The gas station I regularly use is in the same parking lot as my work, and I fuel up twice a week. I brought the 5-gallon tank with me. The idea was that I fill the car from the reserve tank, finish filling the car from the pump, and then refill the reserve tank from the pump. All in all, it worked out OK, but I definitely learned a few things.
Lesson #1: Holding up a 5-gallon gas tank at chest level to fill the car is awkward and hard and takes a long time. Maybe this means I should work out more?
Lesson #2: No matter how well you think you have sealed your gas can, never bring it with you in the passenger compartment. This was super-dumb.
Lesson #3: Forget lesson #2 because I am obviously doing this wrong.
So here’s the new plan. I’ll fill up the car from the reserve tank at home, then drive in to work and fill both. Another option is to get some sta-bil and do this only once a month or so instead of every week.
If you’ve ever watched westerns, you might have heard of pemmican. I know that I had heard the word before I got into primal prepping, but I really had no idea what it was all about. It turns out to be one of the most important aspects of primal prepping.
Food is a critical need. Therefore, storing food is important. The problem is that most stored foods rely wholly, and sometimes exclusively, on grains. There is a reason for this: grains are naturally very hostile things, so they store very well (and they’re cheap!). The only problem is that grains are one of the least primal things out there.
Grains produce inflammation, a high insulin response, and actively take away from your health with the various poisons and anti-nutrients in them.
So how can we store food for the long term that will be a healthful blend of all the goodies we like to eat? It turns out that Native Americans solved this problem a really long time ago with pemmican.
Pemmican is a mixture of dried, lean meat that has been ground to a powder and rendered fat. Honestly, that’s it, although you can add spices and fruits for flavoring. I decided to make a video tutorial using my homemade dehydrator, the first part of which you can see below. So sit back, grab a bucket of jerky, and enjoy the show!
