Here was the comment this morning, from sync.

New thread please Richard. This one seems to have lived its natural life. Thanks.

Yea, it wasn’t as though I had intended to not blog for some days, but life and fun got in the way.

At AHS11 last year in LA, a guy came up to me, told me how he loved this blog but never comments, and asked me to sign his The China Study book (I think Chris Masterjohn  and Denise Minger had already signed it and since, lots of others). I wrote “Fuck you Colin T. Campbell,” or something like that, which he loved.

Jan Petersen, from Denmark, has since come back to the U.S. three more times. He attended the Wise Traditions Conference in Dallas last year, then AHS12 in Boston, and now he’s back to attend Wise Traditions again, which starts Friday, close to my neighborhood. Jan was one of the first people I connected with when I arrived in Boston for AHS; we went out and had raw oysters and steak tartare that evening, and chatted here & there throughout. During that ordeal, I invited him to lodge for a few days at my place during his week here.

So that’s what I’ve been up to since Saturday when I picked him up at SFO. Of course, the obligatory meal the evening of his arrival.

Photo by Robert

On the menu was tri-tip roast, a combination of celery root puree and mashed potatoes, and a killer sauce with much concentrated nutrition.

Elements

That’s the cubed celery root being put to the boil in half & half, later to be drained and pureed in the Cuisinart processor (you can’t mash celery root—too fibrous). At the top is my sauce. That was created by roasting two beef shanks in a covered pot in the oven at 400F for 90 minutes (nothing added, just the shanks). In the meantime, I got two quarts of Kitchen Basics beef stock going on high in the crock pot, along with some chopped onion, celery, carrot and garlic. Then, after the 90 minutes, the shanks and bones went in for the afternoon, still on high.

At the end, I transferred it to the pot to reduce it more, and to the right, got some red wine reducing to some form of a thick wine syrup. I strained the sauce, added some butter to the wine reduction, then combined and naturally reduced the rest of the way.

No thickeners were used in the preparation of this sauce. Some salt & pepper to taste at the end, and we were done. The potatoes were just boiled in water, drained, and mashed with a bit of half & half, butter, salt, pepper and of course, the already pureed celery root. All pics can be clicked for the higher res versions.

The tri-tip was done with no seasoning, in the oven at 175F until internal reached 125, which took several hours. Then I let it rest 20 minutes, and fired on the grill on high for a few minutes each side.

Between 2.5 and 3 pounds of roast (raw weight) and it was easily devoured.

Jan and I have spent a lot of time just chatting about all things paleo. He’s an avid fan of a number of blogs and is really into the technical and science aspects of all of it. It has been a very enjoyable time.