Crandall - Paleo takeout : restaurant favorites without the junk

RUSS CRANDALL

PHOTOGRAPHY BY RUSS CRANDALL AND GIANG CAO COVER ILLUSTRATION BY ALEX BOAKE

He that takes medicine and neglects diet, wastes the skills of the physician.
Chinese proverb

VICTORY BELT PUBLISHING, INC.
LAS VEGAS

First Published in 2015 by Victory Belt Publishing Inc.

Copyright 2015 Russ Crandall

All rights reserved

No part of this publication may be reproduced or distributed in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without prior written permission from the publisher.

ISBN-13: 978-1-628600-87-2 (paperback)
978-1-628600-89-6 (ebook)

This book is for entertainment purposes. The publisher and author of this cookbook are not responsible in any manner whatsoever for any adverse effects arising directly or indirectly as a result of the information provided in this book.

Photography: Russ Crandall and Giang Cao

Design: Yordan Terziev and Boryana Yordanova

Cover Illustration: Alex Boake

Printed in the U.S.A.

RRD 0115

SP_ver_a

TABLE OF CONTENTS

MY STORY

SO HOW DOES A REGULAR GUY END UP WRITING A PALEO-MINDED COOKBOOK? GREAT QUESTION. ID SAY IT PROBABLY STARTED WHEN I HAD A STROKE JUST A FEW DAYS BEFORE TURNING 25. BUT LET ME BACK UP A BIT.

I grew up in a small town (Yelm, Washington), doing the usual things that small-town boys did: playing in punk rock bands, chasing girls, and tipping cows (actually, Ive never been cow-tipping, but the option was always there). When I turned 16, I got my first job working at our local Burger King. I later moved on to work in a pizza parlor, and then I worked as a dinner chef in a small, family-owned restaurant, where I learned the fundamentals of cooking that I still use today. By age 20, I needed a breakcooking just wasnt covering my college billsso I joined the U.S. Navy in 2000, and Ive been serving as a Russian and Indonesian translator ever since. One cool thing about my current job is that Ive had the opportunity to travel, see the world, and try new cuisinesmany of which are represented in this book.

So, back to the whole stroke thing. One afternoon, the left side of my body stopped behaving the way I wanted it to. I went to the hospital and, yep, Id had a stroke in the right side of my pons (part of the brain stem), which was causing my left-sided weakness. One advantage to having a stroke at a young age is that the brain recovers quickly, so within six months I felt like I was basically back to normal. Learning how to walk, write, and drive again turned out to be pretty easy, in the grand scheme of things.

But then a year later I started feeling like I was constantly sick, and I had a hard time exercising and catching my breath. Figuring something was amiss, I went to see a doctorwho hospitalized me for a month to run the gamut of tests available to modern medicine. Turns out that my shortness of breath was caused by a narrowing of my pulmonary arteries due to inflammation. I was diagnosed with the rare autoimmune disease Takayasus arteritis, and I then spent a year on heavy immunosuppressant therapy. We tried a combination of steroids and other heavy-duty drugs, and they worked, for the most part. Unfortunately, the medications had some hefty side effects, so I quickly started looking for alternative solutions to my predicament.

In the fall of 2007 I volunteered to undergo a pulmonary resectioning surgery. The doctors removed the inflamed tissue surrounding my pulmonary arteries and enlarged the arteries using parts of a cows pericardium. The procedure is called a standstill operationin order to get to the arteries, they had to perform a full cardiopulmonary bypass, deep hypothermia, and full cardiac arrest. In laymans terms, that means they rerouted my vital organs through a machine, drained a lot of blood out of my body in order to reach my pulmonary arteries, and lowered my body temperature to about 60 degrees to keep my brain alive. I had a 10 percent chance of not making it off the table alive due to the inherent complications associated with the surgery. It lasted about ten hoursand no, I didnt see a bright light at the end of any tunnel, or my childhood dog, Davey (miss you, buddy). I did make it out okay, and now I have a killer scar and some crazy stories. Unfortunately, the surgery didnt ease my symptomsI was on the same amount of medication and saw little or no improvement.

So life went on. My continuous steroid and immunosuppressant medication therapy was starting to take its toll. I felt lousy most of the time, and worse still was the fact that I couldnt imagine it getting any better. I started developing kidney stones (youch!) and spent a month suffering through a serious bout of shingles. Basically, I felt elderly by the age of 28. I started to believe that the medications were going to kill me well before the disease ever could.

In 2010, at the age of 30, I happened across an article that mentioned the Paleo diet, which focuses on whole foods and has a good track record of helping to reverse autoimmune symptoms. Within a week I had devoured just about every Paleo resource I could find and switched my diet. My inflammation markers decreased significantly within a month.

Since then things have been much better. Im not curedtheres no mistaking that I still have a serious autoimmune conditionbut changing my eating habits allowed me to restore my health at a time when I thought it was game over for me. I started exercising for the first time in years. I was able to get off of steroid therapy, which was the most harmful of my medications, and since then I have weaned off nearly all my medicationsfrom over a dozen a day at my worst to just one as of this writing.

In December 2010, I started thedomesticman.com, my little chunk of the Internet. I use the website to archive my favorite recipes and to chronicle my health journey. In February 2014, I released my first cookbook, The Ancestral Table , which focuses on traditional recipes and techniques. And here we are with Paleo Takeout !