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Being from the south (I’m a Texas girl), I was born and raised on comfort food. We Southerners have fried chicken and mashed potatoes in our veins, and the waistlines to prove it. It wasn’t always that way. Cowboys ate the same diet, but I guess the average person doesn’t consider the fact that cowboys and farmers always worked 15 hours a day in the heat and sun worked that cornbread off. As our lifestyles have changed and become more sedentary, our diets have stayed the same, so the old saying “Everything’s bigger in Texas” now mostly applies to our posteriors. Of course that mentality isn’t limited to south. Comfort food has migrated to all parts of the country (because it’s delicious!) and when the word “diet” is thrown around, comfort food’s very existance is threatened. The idea that it could ever be considered healthy and actually taste good, is a hard one to wrap your head around.

And as we all know, people in general tend to buck at the idea of switching to any diet or lifestyle that requires them to give up those things that they love. We cling to our unhealthy favorite foods like a childhood saftey blanket. The great thing about “Paleo Comfort Foods” is that it eliminates that barrier. It introduces the paleo diet (one that usually intimidates people) in a way that is familiar, by tweaking typical comfort food dishes to make them conform to paleo and gluten-free rules (similar to “Make it Paleo” by with a tighter niche audience). 

The recipes in the book are delicious and photos are mouth-watering, like you’d expect from any good cookbook. You also won’t find ingredient lists that are miles long, which a big bonus. Cooking tasty meals shouldn’t break the bank. 

The only complaint that I’ve heard so far is that the index isn’t the most navigatable. Each recipe is listed by the name of the dish, so if you don’t know that the guacamole is called “Chunky Guacamole”, you’d have to thumb through the whole book, and it’s a pretty large book. Other than that, everyone agrees that it’s a top-notch cookbook for anyone on a paleo/primal/gluten-free diet.

Technorati Tags: gluten-free, Paleo Comfort Food, paleo cookbook recommendation, paleo cookbooks, paleo diet

You may have noticed the absence of the word “paleo” in the title of this recommendation and that’s because this book is NOT a paleo cookbook. It is however a book that I recommend to anyone who follows a paleo diet and cooks their own meal. Even though he doesn’t follow a paleo diet, Chef Symon shares many of our values. He advocates fresh real foods, he loves meat and he believes that rule which all of us paleoites have had to learn, which is “fat is our friend.”

While the book obviously contains many recipes that aren’t “paleo”, a surprising amount are. This book also offers a bonus for those of us who enjoy preparing every aspect of our meals – a chapter on charcuterie, which teaches how to make your own bacon, pancetta, sausage (poached foie gras bratwurst anyone?) and even duck confit. This chapter is immediately proceeded by one on doing your own pickling.

Like any good cookbook, “Live to Eat” is full of saliva-inducing photos, sprinkled in with charming pictures of Michael cooking or hanging out with his dogs. It contains an introduction to the chef by Michael Ruhlman (Chef, founder of OpenSky and creator of some of my favorite kitchen implements, including my meat tenderizing mallot/burglary deterrant) and a foreward by grillmaster Bobby Flay. 

Technorati Tags: charcuterie, cookbooks, live to eat, michael symon, paleo cookbooks

Make it Paleo is perhaps one of the most highly recommended paleo cookbooks on the market. It was written by authors, Bill Staley and Haley Mason, bloggers for the extremely popular website, The Food Lovers Kitchen (a blog that I follow religiously. I LOVE their new paleo grocery list app, “My Kitchen”!). 

“Make It Paleo” contains over 200 paleo and primal recipes with beautiful photographs and helpful tips. Many of the recipes are familiar to anyone on the paleo diet, but you’ll also find some great innovations.

Not only will you find your standard breakfast, lunch and dinner chapter, with both classic and cleverly executed contemporary dishes, but the real highlight of Make It Paleo is the dessert chapter. It’s packed with recipes for everything from cookies to ice cream, all made grain-free and paleo friendly. 

You can find “Make It Paleo: Over 200 Grain-free Recipes for Any Occasion” in paperback or Kindle edition in our Recommended Cookbooks section below.

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Our recommendation this week is actually one of my absolute favorite paleo cookbooks, because the food is both tasty and fun. One of the hardest things about sticking to a diet or lifestyle, such as paleo, is keeping things fresh and exciting. We tend to get stuck in ruts, eating the same things over and over, and it’s next to impossible to stick to a plan if you’re bored with it after two weeks.

Thanks to the brilliance of people like Melissa Joulwan, blogger and author of “Well Fed: Paleo Recipes for People Who Love to Eat”, we paleo dieters no longer have to suffer through another plate of scrambled eggs or a lifetime of grilled chicken salads. Melissa brings us page after page of scrumptious paleo options, mouthwatering pictures and awesome time-saving tips.

All 115 recipes in this book are actually prepared by Melissa and photographed by her husband, so you don’t end up looking at a beatiful picture in the book and a hot mess on your own plate. What you see in the book, you can create in the kitchen. So, whether you’re a kitchen novice or a seasoned cook just looking to up your paleo repertoire, Well Fed has something to offer everyone.

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If you read any of the forums online that discuss paleo cookbook recommendations, you’ll quickly discover that the most commonly mentioned book is The Primal Diet by Mark Sisson.

There’s a good reason for this. Mark Sisson created more than just a diet when he wrote it; he created a lifestyle, and for most paleo dieters, that what it is, a lifestyle choice. It’s not something that they do for a few weeks or even a few months. When they see the benefits of paleo eating, it becomes a permanent lifestyle choice. 

He based his diet on the evolutionary habits of both historical and contemporary hunter-gatherers, and applies those diets to our modern lives. What you eat in nature, you eat in his diet, and it’s not as hard as you’d think to do.

In The Primal Blueprint, Mark advocates eating meats (even organs), seafood, eggs, nuts, lots of vegetables and fruit. He suggests avoiding grains, legumes, dairy, all processed foods and limiting carbohydrates to less than 150 grams per day. 

He also gives advice for nutritional supplementation, exercise, sleep and stress management. 

After publishing The Primal Blueprint, Mark followed up with the incredibly handy The Primal Blueprint Cookbook, which is a must-have for anyone following a paleo-esque diet. Not only does it have a section on primal substitutes for your favorite non-paleo recipes (which is awesome), but there are sections for beverage recipes, dessert recipes and even a section on offal! For those non-foodies, offal are animal organs -liver, kidneys, brains etc.

Whether you’re new to primal dieting or a seasoned vet and just looking for some new paleo cookbooks, definitely check out The Primal Blueprint series by Mark Sisson, which is available in both book and Kindle form from Amazon. You can get the links below.

Technorati Tags: paleo cookbooks, paleo diet, primal diet, The Primal Blueprint