Bacon Cookies and Sausage Salad

Bacon Chocolate Chip Cookies

My kids had been begging for some kind of treat, it had been a while since i had made something like cookies or brownies for them.  These cookies are from the Make It Paleo cookbook that I have referenced a couple of times now.  They are pretty much a standard almond flour chocolate chip cookie with the addition of some crunchy bacon that has been coated with a little maple syrup and cooked until crispy.  If you want the recipe, buy the book. It is totally worth it.  Recipes for every single thing you could ever need and beautiful pictures.  (Mine, however, are horrible.  I think I was too tired to notice I didn't have the flash on or something.)

Sausage and Spinach Salad

This may go under the category of "Dinners that taste much better than they look." That is one of my husband's favorite things to comment on.  Essentially this is a spinach salad topped with walnuts, chopped apple & sausage.  I purchased organic, gluten/casein/nitrate free sausage at Costco. It was already an apple and gouda flavor.  You could use any kind of sausage, or meat for that matter, that you had on hand. 

The dressing is made from 1 chopped apple,  (1/2 cup) walnut oil, (1/4 cup) apple cider vinegar, pinch of paprika, cinnamon, salt & pepper...all run through the food processor or blender.  (This recipe makes A LOT of dressing, you could probably cut it in half.  Walnut oil is expensive and the recipe doesn't keep for a long time because of the apple, so I think I would make less, especially if I was only cooking for 1 or 2 people.)

This is a recipe I got from Clean Eating magazine several years ago.  I think it called for quinoa for added protein.  Let me tell you, my husband is so friggin' glad that quinoa is not paleo.  He hated every bite of that stuff that I made him eat.  I may never live it down.  I actually kind of miss it, but tried it a couple of times since i converted to paleo and it does not agree with me AT ALL.  That bitter coating that you have to rinse off of it before you prepare it, is a warning.