Dah DAAHHH!!
The exciting new Game is LOOOWW CAAARB EXPERIMENTAL COOKING and anyone can play.
The idea of the game is to keep the serving sizes and find fantastic tasting new foods without carbs. then test them on your friends and house mates. And of course keep our BS down and lose a bit of weight.
Anyway I wrote the following and I have posted it before but it might help.
LOW CARB DIETS
Why and How
By Mango Chutney
If you have not been comatosed in recent times, you will know that our modern diet contains too much carbs (carbohydrates) and it is the root cause of overweight and related health problems.
So the time has come to do something about it, particularly if you are overweight, pre-diabetic or diabetic. The problem is we eat too much grain products, bread, rice, pasta, cereals etc and too much starch i.e. potatoes and sweet potato and too much sugar of all types including fruit.
They do not want us to eat extra protein or overload on grease, good or bad and we need to get enough to eat.
We can, of course, make up the difference with garden veg. but we can follow my simple tips and convert our recipes to Lo-carb.
Bakery products.
Sugar alternatives are available and I call it “pretend sugar”, eventually you will get used to the taste.
Wheat flour is a problem and we eat a lot of it one way or another and the alternative is nut flours. The nut flours that are easy to buy are coconut flour and almond meal and both are made from the waste left after the oil is extracted.
For cooking, nut flours have a major problem because they have no “glue” to hold cooked product together, wheat flour has gluten.
Some glues for nut flour that I use are; eggs, olive oil, grated cheese and gelatine. I use them in flour recipes, there are no hard and fast rules, just use what you think suits the end product.
A lo- carb self-raising wholemeal flour alternative I use is;
½ cup of each of 3 flours (self-raising flour, coconut flour, almond meal)
½ cup of crushed nuts
1 cup desiccated coconut
1 teaspoon baking soda
Plus whatever glue (see above) I choose i.e, grated cheese for flat bread, eggs and olive oil and gelatine for cakes.
This will produce some flavours that you might not like but you can override them with spices and curry powder and vanilla essence or even cocoa. Peppermint essence, if not too heavily applied, will just become a clean tasting mask.
Note about coconut flour.
Coconut flour absorbs huge quantities of fluid so it is best to not waste ingredients by having them absorbed into the coconut flour (add water to the coconut flour first).
If you search the net you will find lots of lo-carb recipes and plenty for bread alternatives but most of them read like an omelette recipe with stacks of eggs. There are some good ones tho, that will even make bread that can be toasted, and there are some that cook in a mug in a microwave.
Potato Alternative
I use extra pumpkin and zucchini instead of potato.
Don’t forget all the beans are OK and the nuts are all fine too, and you do not just have to eat salads.
Soups, stews, curries, stir-fries, baked dinners, bacon and eggs, BBQs, cakes, diet jellies and egg custard are all good.
There is a microwaved chocolate cake around that is magnificent and delicious icing can be made from cream cheese, pretend sugar and lime or lemon juice.
Frozen berries are convenient (lots of taste and not much sugar) and they can be microwaved and sweetened for cakes or desserts and they can be made into jam and chutney.
To make jam, cook the berries a bit in the microwave with pretend sugar then add gelatine. You can make a chutney/relish by adding Worcestershire sauce to your jam.
If you are an experimental cook - then go for it and if you like to follow recipes the net is chocas with lo-carb recipes.
Enjoy!