Hello, all you pretty, lovely people! It’s hump day, which means it’s time for another Whatcha Wednesday! I wasn’t planning on going in any sort of order, but I haven’t done a recipe in a while, so I thought I’d tell you what I’m loving to shove in my piehole right now.

I’m a granola addict. Like, I loooooooove the stuff. My favorite was Erin Baker’s granola (fruit and nut) and it was OMG SO GOOD. I’d have it every morning on my greek yogurt with bananas. And then we started paleo and found out that while EB’s granola was pretty good on the crap-to-good-stuff ratio, there were still ingredients totally not okay for paleo. So I moped and I womped and I cried and then I went to Pinterest and went digging for a paleo recipe. How you do.

And what did I find? This glorious, glorious recipe. Now, I know what you’re thinking. “An all nut granola? No. And not only no, but hell no. I need oats!” Not so, my friend. Not so. I promise you will not even miss the oats.

I made some adaptations to this recipe because I’m a lazy baker and whatever I have on hand is whatever I use. So here’s mine, as adapted from The Roasted Root:

Ingredients

• 2 cups raw (or not) walnuts
• 2 cups raw (or not) cashews
• 1 cup raw (or not) almonds
• 1 cup unsweetened shredded coconut
• 1 cup raisins
• 1 egg white, lightly beaten
• 2 tablespoons water
• 3 tablespoons extra light tasting olive oil or coconut oil
• 1/3 cup honey
• 1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
• ½ teaspoon ground cinnamon
• ½ teaspoon finely ground sea salt (I omit if I’m not using raw nuts and they’re already salted)

1. Preheat oven to 300°F and dress up a baking sheet with parchment paper.
2. Toss all your nuts in a food processor and pulse those babies a few times to get smallish pieces, but not finely ground bits. Some larger chunks are okay, so don’t freak out when you pull out that mostly-whole almond.
3. In a medium-sized bowl, whip that egg white and water mixture until foamy. Whip it real good.
4. Add oil, honey, vanilla, cinnamon, and sea salt. Mix that shit up.
5. Toss in your chopped nuts, then add your coconut and raisins (or dried fruit of choice). Stir well until everything is coated.
6. Pour this glorious mixture onto your dressed up baking sheet and pop that baby in the oven for 30 minutes. Stir/flip granola mixture after 10 minutes, and keep on eye on this, because it goes from perfect to over-done lickety split.
7. NOW THIS IS IMPORTANT. Don’t touch the granola once it comes out of the oven. Don’t you do it. You’ll ruin it. And you don’t want to be a granola ruiner, do you? Let it sit for about 15 minutes so it can cluster up and become glorious.
8. Stuff your piehole.

That’s it! I store mine in a ziploc baggie in the fridge. I’m not sure how long this would stay good for, as we’ve never had it longer than a few days.

Now go and make it and then come back and tell me how you didn’t even miss the oats.

Happy Friday, you lovely, gorgeous creatures! It’s time for another Friday Round-up over here, where I show you what I’ve saved from the Interwebs over the past week. I swear, every week I go into my Pocket account and think there’s not going to be anything there, and I’m always shocked that I have a dozen things saved.

First thing I saved was this craft book called Romancing the Beat: Story Structure for Romance Novels. I’ve seen lots and lots and lots of mentions of this one in my different feeds, and I’m pretty excited to dive in and check it out.

Next up is a Crossfit journal discussing blocks of food. I saw someone (Juli Bauer, maybe?) post about this resource and wanted to check it out. We switched to a 90/10 Paleo diet at the beginning of the year (though if I’m being honest, the last four weeks have been more like a 40/60 Paleo diet…), and it really is a whole new beast. Learning to eat again—the right way—when you’ve gone decades doing it totally differently is hard. I’m not sure that this will work for us, but it’s something I want to at least educate myself on. Side note: can we talk about who counts out 24 peanuts to eat them? Not this girl.

I am always looking for awesome bookish things, so when I saw this post on Fiction Fare, I knew I’d want to save it forever in my Pocket. I have an obsession with book related items, especially jewelry. *heart eyes*

And then not at all related to book things, but totally related to healthier eating: local, grassfed beef. I’ve been thinking about ordering this for a while because A) organic, grassfed beef is fucking expensive in the store and B) I like knowing exactly where the stuff I’m putting into my body is coming from. So my friend Ellis and I started chatting, and we just might share a cow. Just like the olden days.

Lastly, I saw this awesome post on time management and color coding. The approach of organizing tasks by the time increments they will each take really clicked with me, and I can’t wait to start implementing this in my planner.

And speaking of my planner…did you see the peek I posted of it on Instagram? That’s my Rhodia Webnotebook and we’re getting married. I hope you’ll all come to the wedding.

See you guys next week! Have a fabulous weekend!

I’m baaaaack! Just in time for another Whatcha _______ Wednesday post. I had a lovely time on vacation, but I came back to a to-do list seventeen miles long—just how it always seems to be.

First on that to-do list? To share with you all this glorious, glorious deliciousness for Whatcha Cookin’ Wednesday. I’ve been modified (read: lax) Paleo for over two years, but we just did the switch to the whole family in January. And when I say the whole switch, I mean we detoxed the kids off of sugar for two weeks and everything. It actually wasn’t as bad as you would think, and my uber picky seven-year-old whose favorite foods were mac and cheese and PB&J is now eating vegetables. Without harassment. It’s a Paleo miracle. We are now a happily 90/10 Paleo family, which means we eat Paleo (or primal) 90% of the time and cut ourselves some slack that other 10%.

The thing that’s made it easy for my kids to do is that I search high and low for great food that doesn’t taste like they’re getting cheated. Who wants to eat plain brussels sprouts when you know the delicious, cheesy goodness of mac & cheese? Not me, I can tell you that.

That’s where Pinterest comes in. It’s a treasure trove of awesome food. While, yes, I’ve tried some doozies there, for the most part, the recipes are top notch.

My absolute favorite Paleo dish I make is this chicken pot pie. I promise you’ll love it and you (and your family/friends) will never have the foggiest idea it’s paleo. After making this no less than a dozen times (I’m not kidding…this is on our menu at least twice a month), I’ve changed up a few things. And you, my fine friends, are going to benefit from my trial and errors.

First, I make a double batch of the crust so I have one already prepped in the freezer and ready to go every other time. And, actually, now that I’ve snagged the Mac Daddy of all food processors, I think I might make a quadruple batch so I only have to go through that pain once a month.

Second, I only use 1/2 a pound of potatoes, and I use them all for the creamy sauce. I feel like I can be honest with you and you won’t judge me, so the first time I made it, I screwed up and pureed all the potatoes instead of leaving chunks. I didn’t notice (and I actually liked it better), so I continued on that way. I just decreased the amount so the “thickening” sauce was creamy instead of gloopy.

Third, I tend to just pour the coconut milk into the food processor until I get it the consistency I want. Of course, on your first time, it’s always good to follow the recipe (unlike I did as mentioned above), but don’t be afraid to add a bit more if it’s gummy. And for those of you who are turning your nose up at putting coconut milk into your potatoes and afraid everything will taste like coconut, to you I say: HAVE YOU NO TRUST IN ME?!

Lastly, I only bake mine for an hour, then let sit for 10 minutes. Mostly because the first time I made this, I didn’t plan appropriately for time, and everyone in my house was moaning over their roaring stomachs.

And I know I said lastly, but a couple more tips for you:

• Prior to rolling out your crust, lay your wax paper down and place your pan on top of it (upside down), tracing around the edges with a sharpie. Use that to guide how big to make your crust.
• Bake this sucker on a pan underneath it because parts of the crust will come off. Also, eat those. They’re delicious.
• The recipe creator recommends trimming excess off the sides and throwing it away. Um. No. That crust is like gold, so keep all that you can. (tip one will help with the reduced excess and tip two will catch everything that is and then you can shove it in your pie hole.)
• Lastly, if for some strange reason you are not a fan of potatoes, you could sub cauliflower. I’ve never tried that because I hate cauliflower and I love potatoes, but I’m willing to bet it’d be doable. And that your kids still wouldn’t notice.

That’s it! Make this and then come back and tell me how amazing everyone thought it was and how you tricked your kids into eating something totally healthy and 100% clean.

Also, I’m leaving you for another Friday post. I’m sorry! But I have a writing retreat this weekend, and I imagine I will be running around like a chicken with its head cut off Friday morning. But next week, I’ll be back with three posts!

*This post contains affiliate links. In plain English, that means if you purchase something from these links a small percentage of the sale comes back to me (at no cost to you!). It’s Amazon’s way of saying, hey, thanks for mentioning this product! Here’re some pennies. I promise I will never post about things I think suck. I’ll only ever recommend items I really, truly love!