Thursday, July 29, 2010

Paleo lasagna



I created this dish one night when I was craving lasagna.  My family likes it better than "regular" lasagna. Both kids gobble it up. 

Ingredients
1 lb. ground buffalo (you can substitute any ground or diced meat)
1 onion, chopped
olive oil
5  medium zucchini, chopped
2 carrots, chopped
3 cloves garlic, minced
2 cans diced tomatoes, drained
italian seasoning
15 oz. ricotta cheese
1.5 cups mozzarella cheese

Directions
1.  Brown the buffalo with the chopped onion.
2.  In another pan, heat the olive oil and garlic.  Sauté the zucchini and carrots until they are tender.
3. In a separate pot, combine the tomatoes and the italian seasoning. Heat until bubbly.
4.  Spread some of the tomato sauce on the bottom of an oven-proof baking dish.
5.  Alternate layers of ingredients (veggies, buffalo, dollops of ricotta cheese, sauce) in any fashion you like.
6. Top with the mozzarella cheese.
7. Cover and bake at 350 for 15 minutes.  Remove the cover and bake an additional 5 minutes.

5 comments:

Don Wiss said...

If you use cheese in a recipe please don't call the result paleo. No dairy is paleo. Maybe you can call it primal, but not paleo.

Dairy products are implicated with many medical disorders. One of the reasons to go paleo is to avoid the diseases of civilization, and you won't be if dairy is still in the diet.

Cait said...

That looks delicious!

As for the primal vs. paleo issue: I wouldn't worry too much about labels. You're finding your way.

And to the previous poster - way to turn off a potential convert to the lifestyle. It's always a good idea to patronize newcomers and tell them what they're doing wrong. Atta boy! (On a side note: I'm sorry, but "the diseases of civilization"? Seriously? You mean like technology, modern medicine, and having a general life expectancy over twenty two? The horror!)

Jennifer said...

Don I was not aware of a significant difference between the terms paleo and primal.

I also think that dairy can be included in a healthy diet as long as there are no allergies or intolerances. I will try to do more research and maybe a post on the subject. My research time is typically limited to after my children are in bed though so it may awhile. If you have any websites you can direct me to that would be extremely helpful.

Cait, I'll do a post sometime on how the media inaccurately portrays the hunter-gatherers life span. I believe that in most cases people lived to a ripe old age if they were able to survive infancy.

Don Wiss said...

You are welcome to include dairy in your diet. It is just calling dairy paleo is muddling the issue and can cause confusion. Paleo does not included dairy. The issue is simply terminology

The short lifespan argument is bogus. Use some simple math. Sexual maturity wasn't reached until age 15-16. Then nine months to produce a baby. If you were dead by age 30 you would be dead before your first child was capable of reproducing. Then when breastfeeding the prolactin hormone is elevated and that keeps a women from becoming pregant again easily. So figure a four year gap until the next child.

Based on menopause being nature's way to keep from wasting effort on raising a kid and dying before they were independent, one can assume that they lived to about age 70.

Don Wiss said...

Primal is a concept invented by Mark Sisson. How he defines it is how it is. He calls dairy a gray area.

Paleo is the concept of what did they eat back then, and what didn't they eat. We have a good idea of what those foods are. What we don't know is in what proportion they were eaten. We do know they followed optimal foraging theory, and would go for what was the least effort to obtain. And that would depend on where they were. But that doesn't really answer the question of what quantities, so that is open for debate.