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Recipe: I threw together a really nice pumpkin flan


BoCa

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Pumpkin Flan

 

I can coconut milk

4 eggs

2 egg yolks

half a can of pumpkin puree (not that big can. Just the normal one, same size as the coconut milk can)

Pumpkin pie spice

vanilla bean if you like

 

Warm 1 CAN COCONUT MILK. Add 4 EGGS plus 2 EGG YOLKS to the warm (not hot) coconut milk, still in the pan. Whisk. To this mixture, add HALF A CAN OF PUREED PUMPKIN. whisk until just mixed. Add some PUMPKIN PIE SPICE (as much as smells good to you -- I used about 1 heaping tablespoon). 

 

I did not use, but I would have if I'd had it, one vanilla bean (the seed part that you scrape off of the insides of the bean and maybe let the outside of the bean sit in the warm mixture for a little while).

 

Pour the mixture into 5 ramekins that are set into a high sided pan big enough to accommodate. Pour water into the pan until it rises up the outsides of the ramekins to just shie of the top -- but not so much that you can't lift it without spilling and making a mess.

 

Bake at 350 for about an hour. Just keep an eye on it and check with a knife. Once it comes out clean, you're done. You can tell. Might just be 45 minutes. Wont' be more than an hour.

 

I have to say that I'll really enjoy having some maple syrup on this flan. It definitely wanted the maple syrup. But for this month, it was good.

 

We ate it with our meal, as a side dish. It could be desert. Sort of.

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This looks much more like a dessert than a side.  With the words flan and maple syrup, this definitely hits the realm of SWYPO for me.  The ingredients are OK as written, but I'd say that it would be more in the spirit of a Whole30 to eat whole eggs and pumpkin than to mix it up as a flan.

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There is no maple syrup in it, though. That's for another day, another month. As it stands, as a pumpkin flan, the only "sweetness" is in the suggestion of spices. 

 

I don't know what SWYPO is. So I can't comment on that.

 

I do enjoy eating pumpkin separately and I do enjoy eating eggs separately. They are both quite nice. But sometimes I like to make a more prepared thing, a "dish" of some kind. Also, I can eat a flan straight out of the fridge with no prep, other than the prep needed to cook it in the first place. And I can't always cook a meal from scratch, three times a day, so this flan can be a lunch or it can be a side to a cold chicken leg and thigh, as I had it the day after. In this way, it's no different than when someone makes, for instance, a scotch egg. Yes, we can have hamburger separately and we can have egg separately, but if we mix them together in a dish of its own, it's something a little different, for variety. And that's the spirit of it, for me.

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So, for me, it is in the title and in the fact that it is associated in your mind with maple syrup.  It is reminiscent of a dessert which is why I called it SWYPO, which is described here: http://whole9life.com/2011/10/sex-with-your-pants-on/

 

Also, in the program rules, No Paleo-ifying baked goods, desserts, or junk foods. Trying to shove your old, unhealthy diet into a shiny new Whole30 mold will ruin your program faster than you can say “Paleo Pop-Tarts.†This means no desserts or junk food made with “approved†ingredients—no banana-egg pancakes, almond-flour muffins, flourless brownies, or coconut milk ice cream. Don't try to replicate junk food during your 30 days! That misses the point of the Whole30 entirely. - See more at: http://whole30.com/whole30-program-rules/#sthash.UlY3pKBr.dpuf

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Interesting. I do not see flan as a junk food at all. The fact that flan tends to be a desert doesn't mean that, to me, it is a desert. 

 

Perhaps if I simply renamed it. Because honestly, I don't see it as junk or a desert. I see it as a nice alternative to the same old same old, which is getting kind of dull.

 

Perhaps if I call it a crustless quiche? Or a flat souflee? The fact is, many main dishes or meal sides are a combination of egg and a vegetable. In the morning, we call it an omelet...

 

I really to think this is a case of tomAYto/tomAHto.

 

But intteresting perspective Thanks.

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 I see it as a nice alternative to the same old same old, which is getting kind of dull.

 

 

 

Maybe if you tell us about your foods, we can help you find more joy in whole foods.  This week, I discovered the joy of roasted cauliflower.  Just made my second batch and wonder why I didn't buy two heads of cauliflower.  I'm amazed at how good real food tastes and have been shocked to see that guests love it, too.

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I suspect there may be a culture gap here, though I'm just guessing.  In the U.S., many people eat very sweet foods all day, every day, including lots of extremely sweet after dinner foods.  We call them dessert, but the reality is that mostly we're just eating more sugar, again.  I've seen posts here before from folks who are in other countries, a bit bewildered by the SWYPO guidelines and noting that they would never really eat those foods anyway, so why mention them as potential problems?  I remember a man from a northern European country utterly bewildered by the no muffins rule, since he had never had a muffin before, at least not as they are made and consumed here in the U.S.  So - this may be a similar type of situation.  I suspect that in India people may not be as addicted to sugar as in the U.S., and flan may be just another way to eat some eggs rather than a super sweet sticky treat at the end of an already-sugar-filled day.  In that case, a savory flan would be a very nice accompaniment to a meal.  Here in the U.S., a flan would trigger many people's sugar addictions, even if it did not contain sugar.

 

I'm just guessing, since I've never been to India (sadface) and know very little about the food and cultures of India.  But I do know that the U.S. is pretty much overrun with sugar addicts, and we have to be extra careful about what we eat as we're trying to overcome our sugar addictions. 

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Thanks for That, AmyS. I think you have really hit the nail on the head. I am indeed an American. However, I haven't lived in America for a very, very long time. I go back once a year and eat out of a health food store in my neighborhood. We've never gone to McDonalds (or anything like it) more than once in any given year since, oh, I guess 2002. Since 2002, we've lived in Bulgaria, Bangladesh, Frankfurt, Moscow, Geneva, and now India. We almost always eat "whole foods" and it would be weird not to. My reason for going onto the Whole 30 is because even though I make my own bread, I eat it with too much glee :-), and cheese, in Switzerland, is, well, air. It's just the air one breathes. It's excellent cheese, but too much of a good thing is still too much... So I'm really mostly in this to remove the breads, potatoes, cheese, dairy... The sugar has been no problem at all! Yes, I enjoy an apple gallette as much as the next person spending the day in Lyon, or a creamy hot chocolate at that incredible place in Paris (but it's made with melted chocolate and cream, not powder and boiled water!) when I'm there, which is not more than once or twice a year, so one can hardly think of my love of a hot chocolate twice a year as any kind of a "thing." So yes I eat sweats, but like that guy you spoke with, I think that my sugar consumption was actually pretty reasonable.

 

I think that is precisely the issue. I do not have an American reaction to the word "flan". 

 

My issue? I just love food and eat too much of it! Also, I really, really love the rice/potato/pasta portion of the meal best. I am trying to change that this month.

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Nico:

 

Tell you about my foods? First, I think I do eat whole foods. Tonight for dinner, for example, we are having a cabbage and coconut salad, roast chicken thighs and legs with a dry rub, and big chunks of sauteed pumpkin in ginger pickle (spiced kind of non-sweet chutney one finds here in India), onions and garlic. The onions have gone all caramelized and the pumpkin has a wonderful grilled quality to it. It's going to be delicious. Afterward I'll have a ramekin of strawberries, I think. Still thinking about the fruit.

 

For lunch I ate salmon, cashews, dried fruit, and a beet salad. It wasn't quite satisfying. It was tasty enough, but I'd have really enjoyed that pumpkin flan with it! It gives it that extra bit of an elegant culinary item that I think rounds out the meal nicely. Normally, I'd have liked roast potatoes with that meal, so I would love to find some other more filling kind of side. Beets don't quite do it. The flan, with the combo of egg and pumpkin (or something in that family of meal), is nice. Drizzle a little coconut milk on top, maybe flavored lightly with ginger, and it's a meal unto itself practically! So you see, that's why I try to find the prepared food, prepared by my of course, the more "recipe driven" sides. It just feels more... I don't know ... elegant? 

 

Breakfast was dull as dishwater but I had little time. It was scrambled eggs with a handful of nuts and dried fruit. Blah. 

 

Does that help you see what I'm looking for in a meal?

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Also, to add, I don't even know what it means to cook Paleo, so I doubt I'm Paleo-ifying anything :-)

If I could offer my perspective. Paleo-fying is when you take a treat that is not compliant with the whole 30 - lets use chocolate chip cookies, and you use compliant ingredients to make them. For example using almond flour, chocolate without any soy or sugar added, coconut milk, eggs and spices. Although the ingredients are compliant the food itself may trigger a sugar reaction or appease the sugar dragon and we might eat more of these cookies then we should.

 

The question is do you eat pumpkin, eggs and coconut milk as a dessert. If you don't have any reaction to this combination and only eat it every once in a while for a change in your meals then I say eat it. I think someone else nailed it when they realized that you are in India. You may not have the issues that we have in the US with sugar. For me this would be like eating a dessert and I might start to eat it for breakfast lunch and dinner.

 

That is what is so great about the whole30. We can each find out what foods cause us to make bad decisions and then avoid them or use them in a different way.

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BoCa,

 

It sounds as though you are looking for protein, fat, and veg to round out your proteins.  And, because you normally have something starchy there, you may be looking for some sort of root veggie.  I'm not a potato person, but I have found that rutabagas and celery root both fit the bill when I want a little substance.  Because it is Winter here, I am getting more starchies than I would like.  Thinly sliced, roasted carrots, parsnips, and rutabagas were on my menu this week.  And, I put pumpkin cubes in my beef stew (sometimes I use rutabaga).  I also cooked a celery root in some bone broth.  It smashes nicely, on its own, or with cauliflower.  I've also just discovered roasted cauliflower and am amazed.

 

Here is the cauliflower: http://www.paleofx.com/blog/perfect-paleo-cauliflower

 

Here are two oft cited blogs and both have some veggies with tons of flavor and some I see now that I want to try.  Remember, though, while W30 is paleo, not all paleo recipes are OK on W30.  Double-check the ingredients and feel free to ask if you need to find a good substitution.

 

http://nomnompaleo.com/recipeindex

 

http://www.theclothesmakethegirl.com/recipes-index/

 

Finally, I use the ISWF shopping guide to help me round out my meals with more veggies.  http://whole30.com/downloads/whole30-shopping-list.pdf

 

You sound like a bit of a foodie, not unlike me.  This Whole30, I am working to simplify my meals and practice cook-ups to make my life more efficient.

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I do indeed like to cook and I do enjoy a meal well-planned and interesting. I can't just eat a hard boiled egg with a salad every day. I'd lose my mind! But I'm not against making my own mayonnaise (I learned how to do that in Switzerland, actually, and haven't looked back since!) or whatever other "sauce" or spread to make a simpler thing more intricate, more interesting, and more of an occasion. I like to think of my meals as little tiny celebrations of all the good stuff. Snacking isn't as necessary for me when I think of food in this way, though I do fall back on snacking sometimes when I want salt (not this month, of course, but in life). But if I remember my viewpoint and try to stick with it, I can stay on track.

 

I will look at the recipes you suggest.I do not have a non seasonal range of options here, and many of the things that are on the "you can eat this" list cannot really be found here in a way that works (canned things have sugar, so I really need to go fresh or go another way). But I prefer fresh and in season anyway, so who cares? It's working for me.

 

It's papaya, oranges, and watermelon season right now, Kiwis look pretty good. Pumpkins are in, as are green beans and peas are just finishing up -- y I missed those! No peas this month for me... but we're freezing for later :-) and my kids are eating the fresh peas. 

 

If I were to look at flan, or other preparations like it, as a desert, I can see your point. I don't, so to wrap up the original discussion, for me, the flan is fine. I can see how others would react otherwise.

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Pumpkin Flan

 

I can coconut milk

4 eggs

2 egg yolks

half a can of pumpkin puree (not that big can. Just the normal one, same size as the coconut milk can)

Pumpkin pie spice

vanilla bean if you like

 

Warm 1 CAN COCONUT MILK. Add 4 EGGS plus 2 EGG YOLKS to the warm (not hot) coconut milk, still in the pan. Whisk. To this mixture, add HALF A CAN OF PUREED PUMPKIN. whisk until just mixed. Add some PUMPKIN PIE SPICE (as much as smells good to you -- I used about 1 heaping tablespoon). 

 

I did not use, but I would have if I'd had it, one vanilla bean (the seed part that you scrape off of the insides of the bean and maybe let the outside of the bean sit in the warm mixture for a little while).

 

Pour the mixture into 5 ramekins that are set into a high sided pan big enough to accommodate. Pour water into the pan until it rises up the outsides of the ramekins to just shie of the top -- but not so much that you can't lift it without spilling and making a mess.

 

Bake at 350 for about an hour. Just keep an eye on it and check with a knife. Once it comes out clean, you're done. You can tell. Might just be 45 minutes. Wont' be more than an hour.

 

I have to say that I'll really enjoy having some maple syrup on this flan. It definitely wanted the maple syrup. But for this month, it was good.

 

We ate it with our meal, as a side dish. It could be desert. Sort of.

I LOVE a sweet potato bake that I make over the Thanksgiving holiday.  It is a bit similar.  Regular recipe contains maple syrup (only 3T for 5# potatoes but still not Whole30) and brown sugar.

 

Mash baked sweet potato, add 4 fork-whipped eggs, lemon juice, cinnamon and sea salt.  Put in baking dish and top with dots of ghee (well, they say butter) and pecans (well, butter, pecans and brown sugar are mixed together for a crumble top in the regular recipe).  Bake at 350 for an hour until bubbly.  YUM.  You can 1/4 of ½ the recipe no problem.

 

I am going to add some coconut milk if I can do it without making it soupy.  Maybe 1/4c to replace the maple syrup?

 

It is still very good without the maple syrup and, for me, much better without the brown sugar topping.  I usually top ½ with the brown sugar for my daughter who also loves the recipe.

 

Your 'flan' sounds good to me!  Healthy fat bomb with MCT fatty acids.

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