Topics:
1. Introducing our guest, Russ Crandall [3:01] 2. The Ancestral Table [14:48] 3. White rice or brown rice [18:02] 4. Paleo Takeout [22:20] 5. Authenticity versus convenience [30:26] 6. Umami sauce recipe [34:35] 7. American classics recipes [38:15] 8. Book Tour dates [44:34] [smart_track_player url=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/balancedbites/19720final.mp3″ title=”#197: Paleo Take Out with Russ Crandall ” artist=”Diane Sanfilippo & Liz Wolfe ” color=”00AEEF” social=”true” social_twitter=”true” social_facebook=”true” social_gplus=”true” ]
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Episode #197
Welcome to the Balanced Bites podcast with Diane Sanfilippo and Liz Wolfe. Diane is a certified nutrition consultant, and the New York Times bestselling author of Practical Paleo, The 21-Day Sugar Detox, and co-author of Mediterranean Paleo Cooking. Liz is a nutritional therapy practitioner, and the best-selling author of Eat the Yolks and The Purely Primal Skincare Guide. Together, Diane and Liz answer your questions, interview leading health and wellness experts, and share their take on modern paleo living with their friendly and balanced approach. Remember our disclaimer: The materials and content within this podcast are intended as general information only, and are not to be considered a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment.
Diane Sanfilippo: Hey everyone! Welcome back to the Balanced Bites podcast. I think we’re at episode 197, and I have an awesome guest today I’m super excited to introduce Russ Crandall.
Russ Crandall: Hi, how’s it going?
Diane Sanfilippo: Good, how are you?
Russ Crandall: I’m really good, thanks for having me on. This is my first time on, I can’t believe it took 197 episodes for me to finally come on. {laughs}
Diane Sanfilippo: I know, where have you been? Just kidding.
Russ Crandall: {laughs}
Diane Sanfilippo: Alright you guys, I’m going to give a quick bio on Russ, and then of course, I’m going to ask him to tell his story because as I dubbed him, I decided, at PaleoFx this year that Russ Crandall is the most interesting man in paleo. So, you know, no big deal, nothing to live up to there.
Russ Crandall: {laughs} No pressure.
Diane Sanfilippo: No pressure. So Russ Crandall is a home chef behind The Domestic Man, a leading food blog in the paleo, gluten free, and whole foods communities. After suffering a stroke at age 34 and being diagnosed with a rare autoimmune condition, he was sent home with a lifetime’s worth of medications. Disenchanted with modern medicine, Russ started searching for his own answers, and quickly discovered that eating a gluten-free, nutrient rich diet alleviated most of the medical issues that had plagued him for years.
Russ lives with his family in Pensacola, Florida, where he serves in the United States Navy. You just moved to Pensacola, right?
Russ Crandall: Yeah, about 6 months ago. It’s really awesome. Well, it was awesome until about 2 weeks ago, and now it’s really hot. {laughs}
Diane Sanfilippo: {laughs} And humid, right?
Russ Crandall: Yeah. Oh it’s so bad.
Diane Sanfilippo: It’s rough. So, I’ve heard little bits of your story here, and then every time I hear you speak, I hear more things that I just turn to whoever is next to me, I’m like, who is this guy? Are you 100 years old? Because the things that you’ve done and the experiences and the skills that you have are just really broad. I think if you and Bill Staley got together, it would be this weird superhero duo of skills and talents that, I don’t know if trivia night plus some kind of MacGyver, like you’re stuck somewhere, MacGyver island, whatever, and the two of you could probably master your way out of any problem.
Russ Crandall: {laughs} Yeah, that’s funny. I don’t know who would be Batman and who would be Robin, but yeah, we could definitely team up.
1. Introducing our guest, Russ Crandall [3:01]
Diane Sanfilippo: It would be hilarious. So, why don’t you tell our listeners a little bit about your story and elaborate on the quick bio I just gave?
Russ Crandall: Sure. So, it all started basically in the kitchen, right. When I was 16, I got my first job at Burger King, of all places {laughs} started into the restaurant environment, and kind of worked my way up. So over the years I worked at a pizza parlor, and then I worked at an IHOP for a while. Then I moved all the way over to a family restaurant, and we made everything from scratch, and I was the dinner chef, and I worked there for a few years. At the same time, I started going to college, and I just wasn’t paying the bills, so I joined the navy when I was 20. Signed up and shipped off. I learned Russian, I’m a translator in the Navy, so I learned Russian and later on I learned Indonesian, as well. So that’s what I’ve been doing for 15 years now.
About 10 years ago, a little over 10 years ago, when I was 24 I had a stroke. I was just sitting at home doing homework, and all of a sudden; I’m left-handed, and I couldn’t write anymore. I’m like, what’s going on here.
Diane Sanfilippo: Yay lefties!
Russ Crandall: Yeah. And then I was having a hard time walking.
Diane Sanfilippo: That is crazy.
Russ Crandall: Yeah. At the time, I was like, I don’t know what’s going on. I think it’s my nerves, or something. So of course the first thing I did was I said, well I’ll sleep it off {laughs} so I went to sleep and it took me a day to finally go, ok, this isn’t going away, I need to go to the doctor.
Diane Sanfilippo: {laughs} That’s such a male thing to do.
Russ Crandall: I know.
Diane Sanfilippo: “I’ll just sleep it off.”
Russ Crandall: Yep, yep. So I went to the hospital, and they were like you’re having a stroke. Or, you’ve had a stroke, at that point. So they figured out that something had caused blockage in the right side of my brain stem, which was causing left sided weakness. Really rough. I couldn’t even hold a fork, I couldn’t feed myself. I couldn’t walk anymore. So I just kind of stayed in the hospital for a couple of weeks, and then just slowly started recovering. That’s the cool thing about having a stroke when you're 24-25, is that your brain just recovers. It’s not like when you're 80 and it takes a long time to bounce back. Initially I was slurring my speech, and all those other things that you see a stroke victim having, but I’d say within 6 months nobody could tell that I had had a stroke.
I just kind of went on my merry way at that point and said, ok, well I guess that’s just a weird thing that happened to me. The doctors couldn’t explain what had gotten in there, or how it happened, or anything like that. So we just kind of moved on. And then about a year after the stroke, I was 26 at the time, I started getting really out of breath. I was a fit guy before then, I used to actually lead physical training sessions in the navy and stuff for other people, like remedial sessions. And I got to the point where they were starting to outrun me, and I was getting out of breath. It got to the point where I was walking and getting out of breath, and that’s when I thought, ok, back to the doctor this time. I went back and they immediately hospitalized me. They thought I was having a pulmonary embolism or something like that.
So they did all these tests. I actually lived in the hospital for about a month. I was in Hawaii at the time, I flew from Hawaii to San Diego and back. Just all these tests. Eventually they figured out I was having some sort of stenosis in my pulmonary artery, which basically means that it was getting really narrow. It wasn’t getting enough blood back and forth between my lungs, so I was getting out of breath because of it. So they figured, well it must be some sort of autoimmune response. My inflammation markers were really, really high. So they said, ok let’s put you on some steroids and immunosuppressant drugs, and we’ll see what happens. And I responded. So because of that, I started getting at least to the point where I could walk again, and stuff, so they really started giving me really high doses, and they started putting me on blood thinners because they thought it was related to the stroke. At the end of the day, I was on a cocktail of about 15 medications at this time. Some of them I had to self inject into my stomach, you know, it was just really, really rough. And this was at 26 years old.
So I got sent back home, they said just take all these medications and see how it works. I did, and I did it for about a year, and I just hated it. I gained a bunch of weight, just because of the high dose steroids, and I got to the point where I started having side effects because of the medications, and stuff like that. So I went back to the doctors, and I said, ok, this isn’t working out for me. I don’t want to do this for the rest of my life, what else can we do? And they said, ok, there’s something we can absolutely do. We can do an open heart surgery on you, and we’ll go in and fix it physically. So being 27 at the time, I said, of course, let’s do that. {laughs} You know?
So I agreed, and I went and did this surgery in San Diego. They call it a pulmonary thromboendarterectomy. Specifically, that means that they pull blood clots out of the pulmonary artery, but for me it was inflamed tissue. So in order to do that surgery, which is really, really invasive surgery, I think I was number 2,104 of all the people in humanity who have gone through this, basically. The guy who did the surgery on me actually invented it in the 70s, and what they have to do, because your pulmonary artery is underneath your lungs, or not your lungs, but underneath your heart, so they have to basically drain a bunch of blood out of my chest cavity, open me up, and then had to cool the body down to about 60 degrees, which is basically hypothermic at that point, and then reroute all my organs through a machine, like a bypass machine.
So I was clinically dead for about 10 hours during that procedure, and then they put everything together and they zap me or whatever they did, like Frankenstein.
Diane Sanfilippo: {laughs}
Russ Crandall: And woke me back up. {laughs} So I came out of that, you know, and immediately I started recovering. And it was really tough. Your body is not a happy camper when you do something like that to it, you know. It took probably 4-6 months for me to start getting back to normal. And the worst thing was, the inflammation in my body just went right back up. So because I hadn’t cured any of the stuff within me, I had to go back on all those medications again. So, I basically just paid, well I didn’t pay, the Navy paid for it. {laughs} Somebody paid for a lot of labor and a lot of pain, and for this really cool scar on my chest, basically.
At that point, I didn’t know what else to do, and the doctor said, let’s just see how this goes and maybe over time you’ll get better. Flash-forward a few years. I’m 30 at this point, I feel elderly at that point, you know. I couldn’t do anything that resembled exercising. I was probably 40 pounds over what I felt was normal. Just really sick, barely making it through every day. The Navy decided to let me stay in the Navy, and that was basically because linguists and translators, they mostly do desk jobs. So they thought, well you can just continue doing desk jobs. So I got to stay in the Navy, just in this really kind of overwhelmed state.
I’ve always been into food, from my cooking days. I happened upon this random food blog post that said, there’s this new book coming out, it’s called the Paleo Solution, and it’s shown to help with all these diseases, including autoimmune disease. And I perked right up. At that point, until that moment, This is at 30 years old, I had never thought about the connection between food and health. For me, food was just fuel and something you ate, and your health was something else that maybe you took pills for, or whatever. So it was just a light bulb. I was like, ok, I’ll try this way of eating. And it kind of makes sense, historically, too. And I have a degree in history, so it all kind of fell together. I decided to try it.
I was actually deployed to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba at the time, so I remember going into the chow hall and going, ok.
Diane Sanfilippo: {laughs}
Russ Crandall: They’ve got meat, they’ve got vegetables, and I can put them together and I’ll just eat that and avoid the fried foods and avoid the breaded stuff, basically. So I did that. I did it for about 2 weeks, and then I ended up flying home to Baltimore at the time. And my wife was like, wow you look great! {laughs} And I’m like, you know I feel great, I’m starting to get energy and stuff. So we kept doing it, and I convinced my wife, let’s do it as a family. She was convinced already just by seeing how I looked.
I went to the doctors, and I said, hey I want to do a blood test, I feel really good. This is about 3 or 4 weeks into the diet. So they did the blood test, and they came back, my C-reactive protein and my sed rate, which are common blood tests for how inflamed your system is.
Diane Sanfilippo: Mm-hmm.
Russ Crandall: They came back like normal. Not to the point where it was like, oh your medication is treating it. To the point where I looked like a normal person on the blood work. So, the doctors immediately said, oh you’re in a drug induced remission. This is really great. {laughs}
Diane Sanfilippo: {laughs}
Russ Crandall: And I said, well no I think this diet thing is working. And they’re like, well, you know, typical anti-paleo stuff, oh you’re going to be missing out on a lot of key nutrients, stuff like that.
Diane Sanfilippo: You’re like, can you name these nutrients, sir?
Russ Crandall: Yeah {laughs}. So I said, well I’m going to keep eating this way and we’ll see how this goes.
Diane Sanfilippo: Yeah.
Russ Crandall: And so, it just kept getting better, and better, and better, to the point where I said, ok now I want to get off the medications. So we started with one, we started with prednisone, which is a high dose steroid.
Diane Sanfilippo: Mm-hmm.
Russ Crandall: And moved on down to methotrexate, and a couple of other ones, really invasive. Got off the blood thinners, and now to this day, I went from that cocktail of 15 and now I just take one really mild medication basically to keep my doctors happy. And that’s all I do now. I just had my blood work done last month, and it came out better than normal. {laughs}
Diane Sanfilippo: {laughs}
Russ Crandall: It came out below even the best inflammation markers. So it’s really a kind of cool sign that just over the past 5 years, I’ve really been able to tweak that and make it work. So I started blogging about it almost immediately, and I started cooking recipes kind of the way I wanted to do it. I’ve always had that restaurant background, so I’ve always been kind of catered towards taste, so I wanted to find basically the best taste I could with the ingredients that I had to work with. So I kept doing that, and then I wrote my first book, which is called The Ancestral Table, and that came out last year. And then Paleo Takeout, which is my next book, which comes out, or just came out June 23rd.
Diane Sanfilippo: That’s right, this week.
Russ Crandall: Yeah.
Diane Sanfilippo: I think what’s so cool about your journey, because for those who follow me on Instagram maybe follow you, and a bunch of other folks, people have noticed something like white rice coming back onto our plates. I know you’ve been heavily influenced by the Perfect Health Diet by Paul Jaminet.
Russ Crandall: Yeah.
Diane Sanfilippo: Sorry, I’m stumbling over my words today.
Russ Crandall: {laughs}
Diane Sanfilippo: It’s like 5 o'clock on Thursday, and I’m kind of exhausted from the week. {laughs} I know that you were influenced by them, I know Chris Kresser has had a big influence by their book, as well. What I think is interesting about that is you, like most of us, probably followed a pretty strict paleo approach; meat, veggies, seafood.
Russ Crandall: Mm-hmm.
Diane Sanfilippo: You know, fish, eggs, fruit, nuts, etc., and did that pretty strictly, and then eventually got to this place where you realize that there are some foods that can come back in, and now, and this is what I see in the trend in what a lot of us are discovering, that real whole foods, for most people, rice was not the thing that made us sick. It’s just the context of everything else.
Russ Crandall: Right.
Diane Sanfilippo: The fried foods, fried in poor quality oils.
Russ Crandall: Yep.
Diane Sanfilippo: In the context of refined flours and refined sugars, and so much of it where we’re so disconnected. Like you said, you didn’t make that connection between food and health. I feel like for so many of us, it’s interesting to try and pinpoint that moment where we realize those two things were so connected. {laughs}
Russ Crandall: Yeah.
2. The Ancestral Table [14:48]
Diane Sanfilippo: So I really appreciate that about your work. Can you talk a little bit about the Ancestral Table, because I think some of our listeners probably have it, and have used it, but some of them don’t know about it, even though Paleo Takeout is obviously what’s new and fresh on your mind. I know you had a really different approach with what you wanted to do on the Ancestral Table. It’s not a strictly rigid paleo kind of book. So can you just talk about that a little bit?
Russ Crandall: Sure. So, my big push with Ancestral Table was really to kind of put into print things I had been putting out on my blog, which is The Domestic Man, and that was the idea that the traditional foods were really what we needed to look at. So it’s this idea that not looking at what a caveman made or anything like that, not that we can really tell what they were making for dinner. But really kind of looking at, ok, what did great-grandma do? So what foods are kind of part of our cultural history already. I wanted to recreate those instead of trying to reinvent new recipes using healthy ingredients. Instead I thought, let’s look at some of the original historical foods that we were eating hundreds of years ago, and then kind of tweak them as we needed to our modern palate, and to our modern grocery stores, too. So that was kind of the idea behind the Ancestral Table.
I pushed the boundaries a little bit, and I was really kind of particular about that. That I wanted to include a little bit of white rice, but then I also had substitutions for every single moment the rice appears in the book. I do a substitution for that. And then as well, I thought white potatoes, which are definitely growing in favor in the paleo community, I kind of pushed that one as well, and then dairy for those who tolerated it. But again, having substitutions for all three of those kinds of grey-area foods.
That was really to kind of look at, instead of it being a therapeutic first paleo book, I wanted it to be your second paleo book. So after you’ve cooked through one that may be kind of very perfect, squeaky clean paleo, if you’re ready to start branching out, I wanted to kind of put that in the most delicious context, possible. So that’s kind of the idea of the Ancestral Table. History plus a little bit of tweaking in the whole paleo concept.
Diane Sanfilippo: Yeah, I think when I first learned about paleo I had the same kind of thought process. That we’re looking at what our ancestors ate, and for us that could be all the way back to all of our ancestors. You know, as the human animals; or it could be our ancestors, just a few generations ago and the way they used to eat and this ancestral but just traditional way. I think that really makes the biggest difference, because that’s the food that we really know to be food. I don’t believe that well raised cows that are producing dairy, it’s not necessarily an unhealthy food.
Same thing, white potatoes. I think I had one recipe that used white potatoes in Practical Paleo, and I had another that didn’t make it in. Because it just was, I wasn’t that excited about the recipe, and then I was like, well people are probably going to go a little crazy if they see these white potatoes. But I was always on that side, I never really thought white potatoes should be a huge issue for somebody who doesn’t specifically have issues with nightshades, for example.
And yeah, white rice. Definitely. Kind of just looking at the different issues that people have with foods, it is what we kind of talk about as a safe starch, and maybe that’s something you can explain a little bit more, too.
Russ Crandall: Sure.
3. White rice or brown rice [18:02]
Diane Sanfilippo: Because I know that I talk about it a lot, and from my perspective. It’s funny, right? What we were always told growing up is that brown rice is healthier than white rice.
Russ Crandall: Yeah.
Diane Sanfilippo: And we learn that because of the nutrient value. So for folks who are just kind of hearing about this for the first time, a lot of the B vitamins and minerals that grains have tend to be in the bran and the endosperm which is that outer portion. It tends to be brown or tan colored, and white rice has had that polished off. But what we learn about in paleo nutrition is, more looking at what our digestive system does with those things, and whether or not we can fully break them down, and if we can’t break them down it tends to irritate our gut. So if we actually just get rid of that, we’re left with something that’s really more like a pure starch. Is that kind of where you take that perspective? Do you eat brown rice too, or do you mostly stick to white?
Russ Crandall: I totally agree with that 100%. Some of the anti-nutrients that are actually found in the bran of brown rice actually have a negative nutritional value, so they can actually bind to some of the minerals that are already in your digestive tract. So say you ate a really great steak, and there were all sorts of good vitamins in it; you're losing some of those vitamins, in addition to the fact that you’re not actually getting any of the vitamins from the brown rice, too. So I totally agree that white rice is basically just this pure starch, and that’s kind of the idea of safe starch, is that those are safe for the digestive system. They may not be high in nutrients, so white rice in general, but in macronutrients when you’re talking about carbohydrates and starch, it’s actually a fairly potent food source.
There’s another part of that, too, in that brown rice probably has about 2 or 3 times as much inorganic arsenic as white rice does, so it’s another reason to kind of avoid it, especially depending on where it was grown. So yeah, I’m a big fan of white rice, and for me it’s all about context. So I always cook my white rice in broth, so that way I’m getting nutrients put into it. We usually will top it with some sort of sauce or something that has a lot of tastiness to it, just to make it a little bit more palatable, and then to increase the nutritional value and the digestibility of it, too. Because when you add fats and acids and all that kind of stuff to starches, it tends to temper the glycemic load, and do all these other kind of things. And it makes sense, you know, in that humans have always kind of eaten these starches in the context of a full meal, not just in a vacuum. So replicate that idea.
Diane Sanfilippo: Awesome. It’s definitely something that, if you’re new to paleo and you're tuning to this episode of the podcast, it’s something that I definitely recommend that people avoid for a while, and a while being at least a month, maybe 3 to 6 months. Avoid it, see how you feel, add it back in. and actually, for a while, I was having problems with white rice; it would just leave me kind of bloated, and I didn’t feel great eating it really early on when I went paleo and I would want to have something like Thai food as a treat. It just didn’t work for me.
Russ Crandall: Mm-hmm.
Diane Sanfilippo: But lately it actually feels fine, I don’t feel anything from it. Except I feel like I got some carbs in.
Russ Crandall: {laughs}
Diane Sanfilippo: So, it is something that is very individual. I think it’s great for us not to be super dogmatic about it, to keep an open mind and to realize that this is an ancient food, and it’s not something that’s modern refined in the way that we look at things like bread and cereals and things like that.
Russ Crandall: Yeah.
Diane Sanfilippo: I think it’s really important to maintain that perspective.
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4. Paleo Takeout [22:20]
Diane Sanfilippo: So, the Ancestral Table was a whole bunch of different kind of traditional dishes and taking this sort of paleo glance at them and giving alternatives and recommendations in that way, but when you decided to tackle Paleo Takeout, which I have to tell you. When I first saw the draft of this book, I was like, I was just totally blown away.
Russ Crandall: {laughs}
Diane Sanfilippo: I just thought, holy cow. Every takeout recipe you could ever imagine, every restaurant favorite that people get home and they’re like, man I wish I could make that. You really have it all covered. What inspired you? Obviously, you had some jobs growing up that kind of kicked it off.
Russ Crandall: Yeah, it’s a whole combination. Definitely having that restaurant experienced really helped, and secondly I mentioned earlier, but I lived in Hawaii, and I actually lived there for 7 years. During that time, I was deploying on Navy ships all over the pacific, so a lot of time in Malaysia and Singapore, Korea, Japan mostly, and really I got really into the international food culture. Which kind of influenced Ancestral Table, as well, but really kind of pushed that idea of what these flavors are and how do we get these tastes.
You go to a place in Malaysia, and you’re like, this is such an exotic taste, I don’t even know how to replicate it. To me, that challenge was enough for me to really try to figure it out. So, that was a big component of it, I’ve always wanted to replicate those flavors, and I felt like I’ve always been pretty good at doing that.
Secondly, just a random blog post I did last year, and I just said, I’m going to make a sweet and sour chicken recipe. I know there are a ton of them out in the paleo world, but I’m just going to do my own and see how it tastes. I played around with it, tinkered, and really got this kind of great sauce. So I put it up on the blog, and the internet basically exploded. {laughs} Everyone loved it!
Diane Sanfilippo: {laughs} Russ Crandall, break the internet.
Russ Crandall: Yeah, exactly. I was like, I had never really thought about it. To me it was almost like I was kind of stepping down the level of my blog, like I was kind of just saying, ok, where here’s a kind of every day thing.
Diane Sanfilippo: Right.
Russ Crandall: But then I realized that there was so much more to that. It really resonated with people, because everyone knew what that was supposed to taste like. So everybody was kind of an expert at eating it, and they really liked the flavor, so I thought, ok. Initially I thought, well I’ll just make an eBook of this. I’ll put together maybe 40 Chinese takeout recipes and put them all together. So I started working on that immediately after that. Then I said, well, let’s add a little bit of Japanese and Korean dishes in there just to kind of even it out, and it kind of grew.
Diane Sanfilippo: Just because I have some free time.
Russ Crandall: Right. {laughs} And then I’m like, well now the Vietnamese and Thai cuisines aren’t being represented, so let me add those in, so it grew to 85, and then at some point my publisher Victory Belt, or our publisher, basically they got wind of it, and they said, hey lets maybe do a print book of this, because there are so many people asking for a print version of it at that point. And I thought, ok, well maybe we’ll do this, and you’ll get a kick out of this. I said, ok let’s do it, and they said, can you turn it in in a month? And I’m like, sure. {laughs}
Diane Sanfilippo: {laughs} That’s amazing, because you're the one who’s like, yeah, sure, and I’m like, I’ll get it to you in 2 years.
Russ Crandall: Yeah, exactly.
Diane Sanfilippo: And then in 2 years it will be 6 more months. {laughing}
Russ Crandall: I had a 2 year lead time on Ancestral Table, and then I gave myself a month to do this Paleo Takeout. And then they’re like, can you do American foods too? And I’m like, of course. And I’ll still get it in in a month. {laughs} So crazy enough, I actually did turn it in within a month.
Diane Sanfilippo: That is crazy! Legitimately crazy.
Russ Crandall: So I basically just worked on it every night, I got home from work and then all the time on the weekends. I took a little bit of time off of work too, and then I had my friend Giang, who lives in London, who helped me shoot Ancestral Table, I basically sent him about 20 or 30 recipes, and said hey these are mostly complete recipes. Just cook them and take pictures of them, and I trust that you’ll get it right. And he totally did get it right. So he kind of helped me with about a third of the photography in the book. And then I did the rest myself in addition to making up all the recipes.
The thing is, when I turned it in, I definitely got the manuscript done in a month, but then we took like 3 months to edit it, because it just had so many holes in it. But overall, we got it all figured out, we have a really great product. What’s cool is that what started as about 40 to 45 recipes now has over 200 in the book, which is just so fun.
Diane Sanfilippo: That’s crazy. Actually, I think one of the biggest challenges that you mentioned as you were just kind of telling the story of it, and this is pretty unique compared to what most cookbooks do. Typically, you might have a smattering of this. But you're creating recipes in here that people have an expectation of how it should taste, and I think that, we definitely get that a bunch with baked goods, which is why I do not bake {laughs} for the most part.
Russ Crandall: {laughs} Yep.
Diane Sanfilippo: They’re very few treats in Practical Paleo, and any of my other books. Basically because I’m not a baker, I don’t have the confidence. I’m guessing you’re not really a baker. When you’re kind of more of a chef cook,
Russ Crandall: I’m not. {laughs}
Diane Sanfilippo: Yeah, you’re like, eh, I don’t do the whole measuring and all that.
Russ Crandall: Yeah.
Diane Sanfilippo: So just kind of getting back to that point of an expectation; I think this challenge of creating this food at home, which for a lot of us, we can still go out and have Thai food, and we can eat it the way it’s prepared or maybe the restaurant in my town right now they do everything gluten free so I’m fine to eat that. But for a lot of folks, they can’t. They can’t trust that they’ll be able to get something gluten free, or there are other ingredients that they really have to be strict about avoiding, or they just really don’t feel good if they have them at a restaurant. Or, they really just want to know how to make this stuff at home.
Russ Crandall: Yep.
Diane Sanfilippo: So I think it’s kind of a huge feat to tackle to get these flavors nailed, and then give people a blueprint to go ahead and do that at home with a lot of confidence. So I’m totally impressed by that.
Russ Crandall: Thanks, thanks. Yeah, that’s one big thing. I kind of had two audiences in mind when I wrote the book; number one is people already in the paleo community. I thought, there are a lot of people who just have not been able to eat honey sesame chicken that they usually would get at Panda Express; they haven’t been able to eat that.
Diane Sanfilippo: Mm-hmm.
Russ Crandall: In however long they’ve been doing paleo because they can’t trust that company to make that dish the way that they’re supposed to be eating. So I wanted to kind of give all of those flavors back to the paleo community. And then the second idea, too, is that there are a lot of people who basically live off of the dishes that are in my book, just in other restaurants, right? And so I’m sure there are a lot of people who aren’t ready to take that step into paleo because they’re like, well I can’t give up my honey sesame, ugh, honey sesame chicken, my orange chicken, or whatever.
Diane Sanfilippo: {laughs} It’s contagious. My tongue tied problem.
Russ Crandall: Exactly!
Diane Sanfilippo: Yeah.
Russ Crandall: So yeah, I thought ok that’s my second audience. I want people who can say, oh look at this! This has everything that I thought I would have to give up in order to eat paleo, and look, I can actually make it paleo. So I wanted that to kind of be the foot in the door as well for people that are just entering the community, too, and I think that would be kind of cool, too.
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5. Authenticity versus convenience [30:26]
Diane Sanfilippo: Yeah, definitely. I’m flipping through the book now. I know I mentioned to you, I’m really excited to be able to give a copy to my dad, because he’s a huge Asian food at home, I don’t know, experimenter/attempter.
Russ Crandall: {laughs}
Diane Sanfilippo: They’ve got all kinds of sauces, and I’m like, can you not use the store bought Hoisin, please? {laughs}
Russ Crandall: {laughs} Exactly.
Diane Sanfilippo: Can you please stop using this. And I think this is really going to equip him a lot better. And that’s really exciting to me. Can you tell me, what do you think was one of the biggest challenges and also, I guess, triumphs in just the overall approach in trying to do this and trying to nail these flavors.
Russ Crandall: Yeah. The first thing that comes to mind, it always comes to mind, is the fact that I had to find this balance between authenticity and convenience. So for me, first starting out, I’m like, we’re going to make our noodles from scratch, we’re going to make our wrappers from scratch, you know for our spring rolls. I started working on all this stuff, and I’m spending hours and days in the kitchen working on it. And I’m like {sigh}
Diane Sanfilippo: {laughs}
Russ Crandall: You know, they have rice noodles that are just {laughs}
Diane Sanfilippo: You’re like, nobody’s going to make this.
Russ Crandall: I know! No one is going to make it, and they have rice noodles that are made with rice and water, right? And they’ve got rice paper that is made with rice and water. And I thought, why am I trying to do something that somebody has already perfected. It’s like the idea of, ok, I’m going to take some olives and I’m going to squeeze them really hard and I’m going to make olive oil. {laughs} Then I’m going to cook with that. It’s like, no, let’s let the experts make the olive oil. And that same idea, that was kind of my eureka triumph, the idea of, let’s push some of this back onto the manufacturers. Let’s find a really great sauce or anything like that that I would trust to be able to use. So one of those things was those wrappers and the rice noodles.
Then I thought, well not everyone is going to eat rice noodles, so let’s make sure we have every noodle available, so I had sweet potato noodles which were made with sweet potato starch, as well as spiralized vegetables, and then there’s even arrowroot starch noodles that are out there on the internet and stuff like that. So I kind of tailored the book to any taste and any kind of matrix of whatever you’re able to eat. To me that was really kind of fun, to just say, ok, this may have this one kind of variation to it, but look at all the other ones that these are options you can do. That was really a kind of fun thing for me to do, this challenge of trying to figure out how to make this work for everyone.
Then at the same time, trying to do it with ingredients that weren’t so exotic that people were never going to cook it. I tried to really minimize some of those. Some of those are kind of required to get that specific flavor, but for the most part, when you make a hot and sour soup, they’re throwing in a lot of sugar and peppers and then some sort of vinegar at some point and soy sauce and stuff like that. I figured out, well using apple cider vinegar kind of gives that fruitiness and a little bit of that sweetness, and then you add a little bit of lime juice and it actually almost completely replicates that same flavor. So I just kind of tweaked that until I got it right. I’m really happy with just the idea of using some pretty common, I would say common paleo pantry staples, at least, to be able to replicate almost all of these foods. It’s kind of cool.
Diane Sanfilippo: Yeah, I think when we were working on Mediterranean Paleo Cooking, for example, myself with Caitlin and Nabil I think what ends up happening, and this is like you were saying, a paleo pantry in general tends to have some different sauces and spices, etc., but probably with a lot of the Asian flavors, at least by different cultures, once people sort of stock a pantry with things like fish sauce or maybe shrimp paste, or some of these slightly more exotic ingredients, you’re not going to use a ton of it at a time. You’re going to have it in your pantry. I know, as I was saying, my dad’s cabinet-o-Asian sauces.
Russ Crandall: {laughs}
Diane Sanfilippo: It’s like, it’s there, he’s constantly going back to it, some of those bottles were probably really, really old. I was like, dad. But you can kind of keep those on hand and just go back for those little bits of it. Once you're stocked, I mean if those are flavors that you love, it’s worth it to have that stuff on hand to make the recipes whenever you want.
Russ Crandall: Absolutely.
6. Umami sauce recipe [34:35]
Diane Sanfilippo: I know that there is a special sauce in here that you started telling us about at PaleoFx.
Russ Crandall: Yeah.
Diane Sanfilippo: Do you want to mention what it is, and why it’s an important?
Russ Crandall: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So I’m super happy about this one. That’s my second triumph. I personally am ok with tamari, which is the original way of making soy sauce. It’s a 2-3 year fermentation process of soybeans into miso, and when they make the miso paste the byproduct of that is tamari. So I use that for cooking, and that’s my soy sauce, basically. That’s the original soy sauce. A lot of people use coconut aminos, too, and I think that’s just great. I include it as well, a substitution guide.
I made the book basically saying, ok, it’s got tamari in the ingredients list but then I have it as a substitution of how much coconut aminos to use to be able to replicate that flavor. And then at the same time as I’m buying the coconut aminos and tasting it and making sure it was good, I was realizing I was basically going broke because {laughs} it’s very expensive.
Diane Sanfilippo: {laughs} Yeah.
Russ Crandall: So I thought, ok, there’s got to be some way that I can make my own sauce. So just playing around with some different flavors and ideas, and kind of looking at just some different approaches. I created basically this sauce, which I call umami sauce. And it is, without giving too much away, you basically take a couple of different types of mushrooms, and you salt them pretty heavily, and you add a little bit of vinegar, a couple of other seasonings to it, and then you let it sit out for about half an hour to an hour. Then you wrap them up in a towel, and you just squeeze the living daylights out of it.
Mushrooms are almost all water, that’s the majority of what they are. But they have this very flavorful water, it’s why people add them to dishes, because they’re flavorful. And it extracts that water, and you’re able to squeeze out a good portion of liquid, which I call umami sauce. Which basically has this umami flavor to it that doesn’t have that pungency that fish sauce does, but still kind of has that little bite to it, which is really great. And then you can use the mushrooms afterwards, right? So it’s like you're basically getting a free sauce compared to coconut aminos {laughs}.
That’s one of the other triumphs of the book, was being able to come up with that sauce. And then I have a whole substitution guide of how to use that in place of tamari and coconut aminos. Yeah, it’s really cool.
Diane Sanfilippo: That’s cool too because there are a lot of people who, once they figure out they can’t do soy, or they can’t do wheat, some people also can’t do coconut. {laughs} And so, it’s probably worth it for that recipe alone to grab the book if you’re like, ok I just need a sauce for my sushi. You know? {laughs} You’re just wanting to dip it.
Russ Crandall: Yeah, yeah. It’s a really fun sauce. The worst thing about it, and it’s not even that bad of a thing, the color of it has got a little bit of a grey to it.
Diane Sanfilippo: Huh.
Russ Crandall: So sometimes I’ve found that the coloring of the food is a little bit different; but I’m telling you, the flavor is still there. We did a whole recipe testing Facebook group. I basically opened it up to the public, and I said, ok, join my Facebook group and I’ll give you one recipe, you can pick from the list, and then you can test it out and give me feedback. I got almost 600 people giving me feedback on recipes.
Diane Sanfilippo: That’s awesome.
Russ Crandall: And everyone who tried that umami sauce just loved it, and I got a couple of tweaks to it from that feedback, too. Everything’s been kind of tested from this group of people, which is really kind of fun.
Diane Sanfilippo: That’s really cool. I love looking through the index in the back of the book. To me, all the little thumbnail photos, this is like when I go to a restaurant, I want to see a picture of everything.
Russ Crandall: {laughs} Yeah.
7. American classics recipes [38:15]
Diane Sanfilippo: I want to know what is it going to look like, or at least what should it look like. And it’s just this amazing menu of selections. A little bit about the American classics, what are some of your favorites that you recreated. And they’re called American classics, but they are kind of a multicultural
Russ Crandall: Mm-hmm.
Diane Sanfilippo: American melting pot of what we consider takeout classics, or just those really prime restaurant foods. What was your take on how to pick what you would include there?
Russ Crandall: So what I looked at, initially I thought, ok, when you think American takeout, what do people think of? So it’s usually a burger and fries, that’s really about it. There’s not too much that’s considered really American. So for that American portion, I said, ok let’s do burgers and fries, chicken sandwich, and then chicken nuggets. That was kind of the American side. And then I thought, ok what else do Americans typically go out and eat, and they don’t even think it’s an international food, they just kind of consider it an American kind of thing. I started looking at chain restaurants and said, ok, a lot of people go to Italian American places, and they get pizza and calzones and things like that. So I replicate a lot of that stuff. Spaghetti and meatballs, that kind of thing.
And then I thought, ok, buffalo wings are another thing; that’s probably in the American camp. Then I kept moving along, and I thought, well ok there’s a lot of Mexican American stuff. People know they’re not getting real Mexican food; it’s more American than anything. So things like fajitas and tacos and burrito bowls, and all these other foods that Americans have just kind of Americanized. So that’s kind of the approach I took.
A couple of other ones, a little bit more exotic, like gyros, which is the Greek cone of meat that they shave off and put inside a pita bread.
Diane Sanfilippo: {laughs} I’m just picturing Ron Swanson.
Russ Crandall: {laughs}
Diane Sanfilippo: Because I’ve finally watched Parks and Rec, and now I feel like I should go back and listen. You haven’t heard all the episodes of our podcast, but Liz has probably been quoting Parks and Rec for like 200 episodes.
Russ Crandall: {laughs}
Diane Sanfilippo: And every time she quotes something that has to do with pop culture, I’m like, I don’t know what you're talking about, because I live in a bubble and don’t access much pop culture. But I finally watched it, and I’m imaging Ron Swanson after his meditation, didn’t he want, I don’t know if you watched it, he wants to go next door and get the Greek food. The cone of meat. {laughs}
Russ Crandall: Yeah, exactly. I’m the same way. I’ve always craved that cone of meat. Which is called many different things, like shawarma and kabobs and stuff depending on the country. So I replicated that basically forming them into loaves and then grilling them on the grill. Or you could do it in the oven, too, I have instructions for that too. So I was really happy with how that turned out, so I included that in the book as well.
So yeah, the American classics is really not necessarily looking at, for example diner food, which I think is not really a takeout food, that’s more a straight restaurant food. But more looking at what foods do people go out and pick up or do they go and quickly get a meal of. So that’s kind of the basis I had for that.
Diane Sanfilippo: For sure. And a lot of it, this is not meant at all as an insult because it’s not {laughs} it’s a total compliment. A lot of it is what I would think of as food court favorites, even.
Russ Crandall: Yeah, yeah.
Diane Sanfilippo: You know? I mean, look, you grew up working in restaurants. I worked at the mall {laughs} from the time I was 16. And gyros, and tacos, and some of it was that sweet and sour chicken or general Tso’s chicken, all of this stuff. The Panda Express, all of that. Although I have to admit I was eating chalupas also.
Russ Crandall: {laughs} Yeah.
Diane Sanfilippo: {laughs} back in the day, I was definitely a Taco Bell girl. But yeah, I think that’s going to be really fun for people. I’m excited to see what people start making. I think folks are getting the book, at least right now as kind of an advance copy, but by the time this episode airs it’s actually going to be released, so I’m super excited about that for you.
Russ Crandall: Yeah, I think it’s going to be really good, and people are really reacting well to it. And I love it, because people, like mentioned earlier, people feel like they’re kind of an expert in these flavors, right, so they’re really judgmental and I love that.
Diane Sanfilippo: {laughs}
Russ Crandall: I love the challenge of it. I’m like, bring it on, I’m pretty happy with how I did it. And when I made every recipe too, it wasn’t that I was trying to make my own version of these things. I wanted to make the version. Just kind of a baseline standard version. So I’m not going to lie, I went out and tried some Panda Express
Diane Sanfilippo: {laughs}
Russ Crandall: {laughs} You know, just to make sure I was getting those flavors right.
Diane Sanfilippo: Market research.
Russ Crandall: I paid for it, yeah, I totally paid for it afterwards, but at the same time I thought that was kind of important. Actually, I ended up going to some Chinese restaurants and going into the back, asking if I can go into the back, and looking at how they were making it, because I thought the technique was really what was kind of mystifying to a lot of people too. So I wanted to include that technique, as well. That had a really heavy hand in how I created the Chinese chapter, as well. So it’s really cool.
Diane Sanfilippo: So, randomly our friend Tony Kasandrinos was texting me during our interview, and he asked what I was doing, and I said interviewing Russ for the podcast, he said right now? Tell him congrats on his promotion.
Russ Crandall: {laughs} Thanks. Yeah, I was promoted a couple of months ago to Master Chief, which is the highest enlisted rank in the Navy, so I don’t have anywhere to go now. It’s kind of cool, I’m at the top.
Diane Sanfilippo: That’s amazing, congratulations.
Russ Crandall: Thank you.
Diane Sanfilippo: He was like, right now? I’m like yes, right now, don’t bother me, I’m busy! {laughs}
Russ Crandall: {laughs}
Diane Sanfilippo: But of course I had to say that on the show.
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8. Book Tour dates [44:34]
Diane Sanfilippo: So, today this episode airs, it will be Thursday and the date will be June 25th. So what’s going on coming up for you releasing the book?
Russ Crandall: Sure. So for starters, on the 27th, so this coming Saturday, I will be in Atlanta, Georgia, at FoxTale Books, which is spelled tale, like story, like a fairy tale. So I’ll be doing my first real big book signing; it’s also my book release party. So we’re going to have all sorts of snacks. Actually, I have it all set up so we’re going to do a broth tasting, so I’m going to take a couple of different broths from the book, a couple of different soup bases and I’m going to put them in these really big carafes and then everyone can kind of just, it’s like a wine tasting but with broth.
Diane Sanfilippo: That’s awesome.
Russ Crandall: It’s going to be cool. Yeah, we’re doing that and that’s on the 27th, Saturday. And then that following weekend, I kick off basically my book tour. I’m going to the West coast first, so on July 9th I’m going to Seattle, and then the following day I’m going to Portland, and a couple of days later San Francisco on the 12th. And then going back home, going to work for the week, and then the next weekend going back out to Los Angeles on the 18th, then going back home. This is the pattern, basically. The next weekend will be in Denver. The following weekend I’ll be in Boston, and then Washington D. C. that following weekend, and then New York City that same weekend, so that’s the August 7th August 8th if you’re looking at a calendar right now. {laughs}
Then August 15th I’ll be going to Austin, and this one is going to be really cool. We’re actually having a dinner using items that I’ve chosen from my book.
Diane Sanfilippo: Ooh.
Russ Crandall: We’re going to basically have a full on dinner that’s going to be on the lawn of Picnik, which is the paleo kind of food truck that’s in Austin.
Diane Sanfilippo: Mm-hmm.
Russ Crandall: And we’re just going to have this really big party and eat food from the book.
Diane Sanfilippo: That sounds awesome.
Russ Crandall: Yeah, it’s going to be really cool. And then one more weekend after that, and that’s going to be up to Chicago, and then down the Kansas City, Missouri, and then that’s how I’m going to finish it off.
Diane Sanfilippo: Fun! So, on your website, http://thedomesticman.com/ they can find…
Russ Crandall: Mm-hmm, yes I’ve got all the information, there’s a big badge they can click on that will show everything. All the dates and how to RSVP. All of them are free except the one in Austin, because I have to pay a caterer, and I don’t want to go broke doing that, so that one’s going to be a paid meal just to be able to experience that. And it’s going to be great, and we’re going to have a couple of other authors out there. So Josh Weissman from Slim Palate, as well as Jenni Hulet of Paleo Patisserie, as well.
Diane Sanfilippo: Awesome. That sounds like fun. And I’m so bummed; when I saw your calendar, we’re basically flip flopping the country at different times.
Russ Crandall: Yeah!
Diane Sanfilippo: I was like, oh totally come to San Francisco! But I’m going to actually be there for a week in between, so I won’t be able to come! I’m so bummed about that. But I’m excited for you, it’s going to be really fun. And I just have to say, kind of just my you know, never ending sort of perspective on what everyone’s doing out there with all of our books and doing the best we can to get out there and meet people and do right by sort of the business side.
Russ Crandall: Mm-hmm.
Diane Sanfilippo: Of writing a book, because I think it’s hard, hard work. I don’t even know how you finished what you were doing in that last month or three months even.
Russ Crandall: {laughs}
Diane Sanfilippo: This work is really, really hard. I don’t take it lightly; none of us take it lightly. This stuff goes to print, you can’t just republish that blog post or edit.
Russ Crandall: Right.
Diane Sanfilippo: It’s really hard work. But the crazy part about it is it doesn’t even end when that book is published.
Russ Crandall: Oh no.
Diane Sanfilippo: it’s only the beginning, and a lot of folks, they publish the book and they kind of, this is not about anyone in particular. Gosh, if I could, I would do the same thing. But people just kind of sit and hope that it will sell based on the content.
Russ Crandall: Yeah.
Diane Sanfilippo: And your content is amazing, but what impresses me about you time and time again is that you just kind of grind it out in terms of, you’ve got a full time job but you know that it’s the right thing to do for the book and also for the people that you want to expose to the book. If you want people to get excited about the book, getting out and meeting people and talking to them about it and answering their questions, that’s what really makes the difference. It’s not just about selling a book. This is your blood sweat and tears!
Russ Crandall: Right, yes, that connection.
Diane Sanfilippo: Absolutely, making that connection. So I just wanted to say how impressed I am by you, and you’ve always had that work ethic that I think is just really astounding and to be able to do that work, do the work of the book and then also do the work to get out there. This is really, it’s not a knock at anyone who doesn’t or can’t do it, because there are plenty of folks who also physically can’t. They’re ill or something is going on, so it’s absolutely nothing to do with that. But I wanted to give credit where credit due and just say how impressed I am by your tenacity and willingness to do that.
Russ Crandall: Cool, thank you! Likewise, too. It is really rough. I think part of it comes from a former life, right after I joined the Navy I was really into music and played in rock and roll bands, punk rock bands, all this kind of funny stuff. But that’s the way it is in the music world, too, which I was really familiar with before I started doing the cooking stuff. And it’s this idea that you have to go out and grind it out. You have to go out and do your tour. You may get 2 people at one signing and you may get 120 people at the next one.
Diane Sanfilippo: Yep.
Russ Crandall: You never know. So, that’s kind of that approach I’ve always had, you have to do that leg work as well. I agree, it’s tough. But man it is so worth it to be able to sit down with somebody, you know, shake their hand, make that connection, and sign a book for them. Hear their story.
Diane Sanfilippo: I think it makes all the difference, and it not only makes a difference from that business perspective where it’s like, yeah you really want this book to sell, you just put so much work into it. But as somebody who, the work that we’re doing. Obviously you have a day job, that’s full time. But for me, this is it.
Russ Crandall: Yeah.
Diane Sanfilippo: To not be able to interact with people who are receiving the work that I’m creating and who are taking it into their lives. On the internet is fine, I absolutely love when people interact online. But to be able to have that connection in person and realize, not only are they real and they’re receiving it and they’re using it and they’re benefiting from it, but they realize also that we’re real, you know?
Russ Crandall: {laughs} Exactly.
Diane Sanfilippo: I’m a real person. I might have a pimple today, or I might be missing eyebrows?
Russ Crandall: Yeah! {laughs}
Diane Sanfilippo: {laughs} Should you mention in case people meet you?
Russ Crandall: Yeah, let’s talk about that.
Diane Sanfilippo: Those are going to take a while to grow back, Russ.
Russ Crandall: Right! I know. So, I was on a local TV program 2 days ago, and I went on at 9 a.m. local time.
Diane Sanfilippo: {laughs}
Russ Crandall: {laughs} I was getting ready, I took a shower, and I had just finished shaving, and I thought, you know, I need to trim my eyebrows a little bit. I kind of have busy eyebrows, I’ll admit that. So I usually shave them down just a tiny little bit just to take away some of the fluff, you know.
Diane Sanfilippo: {laughs}
Russ Crandall: I did not look at what guard I had on, and I shaved my eyebrows off. I didn’t even look. I just went across one time, zhoonk! And they’re just gone. {laughs} I look up, I look in the mirror, and
Diane Sanfilippo: {laughing}
Russ Crandall: {laughs} I couldn’t take it. Can you imagine? I looked like Vincent from Beauty and the Beast, the 80s TV show.
Diane Sanfilippo: Oh. Em. Ghee. I really want to see a picture of this. I saw you responding to folks on Instagram, because as women we’re like, how can that happen? How could you not be looking? But I realize that dudes are very utilitarian. Like, I just closed my eyes and put this thing across my face and it’s done.
Russ Crandall: Right. I’ve done it 100 times, how could I get it wrong?
Diane Sanfilippo: {laughing} The one time people are going to see you.
Russ Crandall: It’s like an hour before getting on television. {laughing}
Diane Sanfilippo: And your wife wasn’t even home to help you draw them on.
Russ Crandall: Nope. Nope. I just went in there, just kind of bare. {laughing}
Diane Sanfilippo: {laughs}
Russ Crandall: Yeah I walked in the studio, and was like, this is just kind of how I look now, I guess.
Diane Sanfilippo: {laughs} So, for anybody who is going to go out and meet Russ, definitely take pictures.
Russ Crandall: Yeah.
Diane Sanfilippo: Everybody take a picture of Russ.
Russ Crandall: Please. The sun is so much shinier now because I don’t have anything blocking it. {laughs}
Diane Sanfilippo: {laughs} Oh, that’s amazing. Well, thank you so much for taking time. I know you were at work today, and you came home and you got on the call for this interview, so thank you I really appreciate you taking the time to chat with me today.
Russ Crandall: Yeah, I really appreciate you having me on, it was a lot of fun. Thanks.
Diane Sanfilippo: Awesome. So you guys, you can definitely find more about Russ and both of his books, Ancestral Table and Paleo Takeout at http://thedomesticman.com/. He’s obviously also on Facebook and Instagram. Are you on Twitter, too?
Russ Crandall: I am, yeah. It’s all the domestic man.
Diane Sanfilippo: And Periscope.
Russ Crandall: Periscope.
Diane Sanfilippo: I saw you posting some videos on Periscope. So I think we’re all trying to figure that one out.
Russ Crandall: Not anymore. Now that I don’t have eyebrows I’m not doing that for a while.
Diane Sanfilippo: {laughing} You can do some cooking demos. You don’t have to face it on you.
Russ Crandall: Right, that’s true. {laughs}
Diane Sanfilippo: But I think we’re all having a great time trying to figure that one out, too. So definitely look for Russ all around the internet, and definitely check out his tours. It’s mostly going to be weekend dates, so if you guys are having a tough time getting to a lot of these other gigs we’re all doing on like a Thursday, you can definitely join Russ and any other assorted authors that may be joining him, so check out his website for details on that.
Russ Crandall: Cool.
Diane Sanfilippo: Awesome, thanks so much!
Russ Crandall: Yep.
Diane Sanfilippo: Bye-bye.
Russ Crandall: Bye.
Diane Sanfilippo: Diane Sanfilippo: Alright, that’s it for this week. You can find me, Diane, at http://dianesanfilippo.com, you can find Liz at http://realfoodliz.com/, and you can find Russ at http://thedomesticman.com/. Don’t forget to check out his upcoming events and his new book that releases this week, Paleo Takeout. Join our email lists for free goodies and updates you don’t find anywhere else on our websites or on the podcast. And, while you’re on the internet, leave us an iTunes review. We’ll see you next week.