My friend Chino and his family are Puerto Rican and helped sculpt my opinion that Puerto Ricans can cook anything and make it taste good. In one display of primitive seaside survival cooking, he would catch “pan crab” which is pretty much the same as blue crabs that are on the Atlantic coast from Maine to Texas.

Cooking was simple, he would simply drop them live by the edge of a hot bed of coals and keep pushing them back to the heat with a stick until they stopped struggling then remove them and split the shell from top to bottom to get at the cooked meat which was actually pretty good.
No salt added there.

In an equally primitive display of the culinary arts, he would wade in the shallow water until he found a live conch. If you try to remove a conch from the shell, with a stone, you can free the animal, but you end up with a slimy mess that is difficult to tenderize.

The more elegant solution was to fill the shell with water while it is upside down and place it by the edge of the fire until all the water was evaporated. The conch was cooked alive in it’s own seawater and the residual salt adsorbed into the meat. It is actually quite tasty and remarkably tender.

So the question is salt, no salt or occasional salt?

I have eaten four eggs a day for many years. I make a very large breakfast and then only eat most of it. Then for lunch I add another 1 1/2 kabobs and finish it off. It consists of:

1 1/2 Pakistani kabobs (now grass-fed lamb)
4 eggs over easy in coconut oil (eggs bought from the farmer)
~.15 lb of freshly ground organic walnuts (using old style oval Krups coffee grinder)
~1 cup homemade applesauce
6 oz frozen Wymans raspberries
5 oz frozen Wymans wild blueberries
So Delicious Plain Coconut Kefir drizzled on top

All in a big pile layered as listed above. Berries defrosted either partially in the refrigerator overnight, or entirely in the microwave. I use a scale to split the bags of berries up evenly, and knowing the weight allows me to learn the microwave times.
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I have never deep fried food. I have thought about it. If I did I would like to use coconut oil. But as you note it is an expensive way to cook. Even if you buy in large tubs it is expensive. What I do is to pan fry everything in olive oil with chopped onions (or shallots) and usually garlic. I use freshly ground pepper for spice. After it has cooked I add the juice of a half squeezed lemon. This will work for all meat and fish. I then mix in steamed vegetables.

When I wrote that definition back in January I learned a lot. I hadn’t known that coffee beans are actually fruit seeds. That gave me a good way to label coffee as not-paleo. Then while I don’t discuss potatoes (or tubers) there, I did learn that potatoes are stem tubers and all other are root tubers. Stem tubers are more exposed and the plant would have to have developed defenses to keep its reproductive cycle from being short circuited.

I hope you are also consuming plenty of water with that wine.

Either way you cant use the oil more than 3 times without changing the consistency and color which is really kind of expensive and disgusting when you think about all of the cheap fried foods served in restaurants. When done the best possible and only used three times my oil cost for one meal is around $6 for a chicken leg and french fries with out the cost of the actual food.

But there were probably no deep fat fryers in the Paleolithic so I guess this is all a moot point.

As to wine I doubt I will change because after 45 years with the same 1 bottle a day, I am not sure my old body could tolerate withdrawl.

The strangest “food” is cottonseed oil. Cottonseeds are, of course, by products of the textile industry. So what do you do? You create a cheap oil to sell to the frying industry. And then to cover it up and make it not look so bad, they list several oils on the ingredient list and state that it is one of them.

I consider wine to be paleo, but only if diluted down to 6% alcohol. My reasoning is in my definition.

At 65, I see no reason to change my diet to embrace a religion. I am fairly close on most issues and find the paleo diet more defensible then vegeterian and far more than vegan. I think I might rather die of hunger than eat biochemically produced tofu which was only invented by starving people in China around the time of Christ.

I also agree on the salt comment My recipes usually call for salt and pepper to taste which in my case is none. I just don’t like milk or cream and rarely cook with it even when the original recipe called for it. The cheese I add is usually a flavoring element in an Italian style meal which is also when I eat my off diet pasta.

I don’t believe that my deviations from the Paleo diet are either excessive or going to kill me. But when I die, both vegans and Paleos can claim a victory.

In the post, I said “I also like and eat rice, most legumes and moderate amounts of salt. I also take my multivitamins and must confess that I even eat fried foods once a month.”

Now the height of hypocrisy on my part is that she has convinced me to fry my natural pork with the skin on in very expensive grapeseed oi or olive oil rather than corn oil and use lemon and garlic to season the meat rather than salt.

As far as, I’m concerned, it tastes good is definitely consistent with the paleo diet but even after a couple of glasses of wine, I cant convince myself that it’s healthy so I only do it once a month, if that often.

And a recent find was we were eating crocodiles and other reptiles 1.95 million years ago.

The paleo diet is the way to go. You can find it defined here: http://paleodiet.com/definition.htm