My family has been doing our best to eat a really clean diet since the first of the year, and, surprisingly, we’ve actually been sticking with it about 90% of the time (the other 10% of the time I spend eating cake balls and chocolate covered oreos). We’ve learned a lot about food prep and planning and choosing wisely throughout this clean eating journey, but one thing that I wasn’t expecting to learn was just how wretchedly ugly food can be. Yes. UGLY. Let’s face it, when you aren’t eating anything artificial and nothing has gluten or sugar in it, sometimes the dishes we create taste wonderful but look a little… um… not so lovely. For instance, we made a meatza the other day. Yeah, a meatza. It’s a pizza where the crust was made of out of meat (ground chicken). It tasted surprisingly good. Looked like death, though.
I’m all kinds of addicted to instragram and, like pretty much everyone I follow, I really love snapping photos of my greatest loves, and food ranks up pretty high on my loves list. There’s been more than one occasion where I’ve taken a photo of dinner and immediately deleted it. I mean, c’mon, I think blackened brussel sprout halves roasted with bacon taste utterly delicious, but the shriveled up little cabbage pieces just don’t look nearly as good as they taste. So my challenge to myself lately has been to cook my family nutritious food, free of anything processed or questionable, AND make it look just as beautiful as I can. I made some paleo samoas the other day in an effort to curb my unending desire for girl scout cookies. Tasty? Yes. Beautiful? A resounding NO. I’ve had more failures than I can count (I blame the almond flour…), but here’s one recent success that kept our family full for days
Proscuitto wrapped tomato basil eggs
(recipe adapted from Nom Nom Paleo)
- 4 tablespoons fat (coconut oil, ghee, etc.)
- ½ medium onion, finely diced
- 3 cloves of garlic, minced
- 8 large eggs
- ¼ cup coconut milk (the fatty stuff at the top of the can works best)
- 2 tablespoons of coconut flour
- one big bunch of basil, roughly chopped
- 1 cup of cherry tomatoes, halved
- 12 slices (about 5 ounces) of Prosciutto di Parma (if you’re buying this from Trader Joe’s, grab two packages)
- Kosher salt
- Freshly ground pepper
- A regular 12 cup muffin tin
Preheated the oven to 375°F.
Heat half of the coconut oil over medium high heat in a large cast iron skillet and sauté the onions until soft and translucent.
Add in the minced garlic and season with salt and peper. Saute for about 2 more minutes, until garlic becomes fragrant.
Once garlic becomes fragrant, spoon the mixture onto a plate to cool to room temperature.
Beat the eggs in a large bowl with coconut milk, coconut flour, salt, and pepper until well-mixed. Then stir in the onion mixture and basil.
I brushed the remainder of the melted coconut oil onto the muffin tin and line each cup with prosciutto, taking care to cover the bottom and sides completely. Working with prosciutto is not totally fun because it is so thin, but trust me, it’s worth it :).
Spoon in the egg mixture and top each muffin with some halved cherry tomatoes.
Bake for 20 minutes at 375°F.
Enjoy while warm. These also keep really well and are great reheated throughout the week.
