Book: 500 Paleo Recipes by Dana Carpender

Today I feel like I want to write about my one paleo cookbook, 500 Paleo Recipes by Dana Carpender. I'm writing about it first because:

1. It's the primary cookbook I use, and as such is very well-loved.
2. It's also guilty of some of the most mind-boggling problems I have with the paleo community.

So 500 Paleo Recipes is, as the title would state, a book of 500 Paleo Recipes.  I'm used to very, very simple recipes (meat with some salt and pepper and maybe garlic powder, eggs fried in coconut oil or ghee) and so 500 recipes is in some ways excessive for me.  What I like about this book is that it has given me inspiration for a lot of the random cuts of meat I pick up when I'm browsing the supermarket.  Even if I didn't quite follow the recipe, this book has helped me cook beef ribs, pig's feet, and various fish.  It's where I learned how to make Waldorf Salad and a great deal of condiments (including mayonnaise, ketchup, steak sauce, Worcestershire sauce, sriracha sauce).  There are also some recipes for coconut-based yogurt and sour cream.

Some of the reviews said it was "blah" and not very creative.  Personally, for me, there's lots of diversity here and I really recommend this book if you're good at following directions.

There are some things about it I don't like, though.  It's one of those resources that I look at and just think "Good Gods, people don't really have a concept of what paleo is, do they?"  It has some ingredients that are more "disputed" than actually forbidden, like honey and maple syrup.  It used to be that paleo explicitly excluded these, but now they're pretty regularly found in recipes.  She seems convinced that cashews are not paleo.  This is a common misconception; people often either mistakenly think they are legumes or mistakenly think they can't be eaten raw.  A select few think it's non-paleo specifically because of the high omega-6 (which it shares with a lot of other nuts and seeds).  But it's one of those things where I read it and just roll my eyes.

More bizarrely, she includes an entire section on alcoholic beverages.  So cashews are so "obviously" (she uses that word) un-paleo, but a Tom Collins isn't?

There are also no pictures in this book.  That's not a big deal, it's a cookbook, but often when it comes to food I'm at a loss as to what it's actually supposed to look like.  But there's a bright side to this:  No pictures means that she's probably not faking pictures (someday I'll review my book on making paleo bread and we'll talk about that one; it's actually a huge problem in vegetarian cookbooks oddly enough).