I’m in a rut. I’m eating the same old, same old stuff everyday. I look forward to eating my yogurt and sunflower seeds (plain yogurt) at the end of the day. I guess the main deal is that I’m tired after cooking for my family, and I don’t have energy or inspiration to spend even more time in the kitchen for me. I do make tuna salad, eggs with the low carb muffin, and an occassional quick stir fry with two ingredients. I brown a pound of pasture raised breakfast sausages that generally last awhile. I’m having problems with my kids eating my food, too. I guess I’ll have to label it. I cook like a restaurant for the family, and they eat it all up. How do you do it if you are the main cook?
Check out these sites for inspiration. You can Google low carb alternatives for family favorites. I do that when I get bored. My husband was craving chicken pot pie, a childhood comfort food. I made a low carb version that's better than the carb laden one. Hope you can find meals that will appeal to everyone. No fun cooking multiple meals! My husband eats what I do because I'm the one cooking. In the cold weather, I make stews, chili, casseroles & soups. I triple the recipe & freeze it.
http://healthyindulgences.blogspot.com/ (the most decadent low carb desserts!)
www.foodnetwork.com (you can search their site for low carb recipes)
Gosh, thanks for the suggestions!!! I’ll go back and allow myself time to browse, tonight. Truthfully, I think that I may be coming to the end of my honeymoon with LADA. When I cook something like a stew, soup, or chili, I know that I have to scrape the sauce or onion off to keep my bg low enough. In fact, I know that soup will drive it over unless I make it with no onions, carrots, or tomato. I have 16yo twins that dance four times a week beyond the dance classes in school. My husband is lifting weights at the gym and eats, too. I do cook lowish carb, but I need to stay under 30 carbs a day, for sure, which requires a different menu than what I use for my family. I’m pretty ok with this and haven’t cheated in a year and a half, but last night I had one of those moments where I looked longingly at a baking sheet full of roasted potatoes…It was hard to even package them up without tasting, but I didn’t… If I were to pop a tiny piece of potato in my mouth, I would get thirsty. I noticed that my bg will go up a few points just by variations in cooking times of the vegetables, and the types of vegetables that I cook is often different.
I use leeks instead of onions & pureed roasted red peppers sub for tomatoes. I don't use carrots. For stews, turnips in place of potatoes. Here's a low carb chili recipe that serves 6, 10 carbs per serving.
- 2 TBS virgin coconut oil
- 1 yellow bell pepper, chopped
- 1 red bell pepper, chopped
- 1/2 cup red onion, chopped
- 2 1/2 lbs ground beef
- 4 TBS chili powder
- 3 TBS ground cumin
- 2 cloves garlic, minced
- 1/4 tsp cayenne pepper
- 2 tsp kosher salt
- 1 tsp ground black pepper
- 1/2 tsp granulated garlic
- 1 14 ounce can fire roasted tomatoes, diced
- Shredded Jack cheese for topping
- 2 tablespoons chopped fresh cilantro leaves, or chopped scallions for garnish
Heat oil in a large skillet over medium-high heat. Add peppers and onions and cook until slightly tender. Add the ground beef and spices and cook until browned. Add the diced tomatoes and simmer for about 10 minutes, stirring occasionally
Top with shredded Jack cheese & sliced scallions.
A stick blender is great for pureeing, making whipped cream, etc. Faster than a regular blender & easier to clean. . Recipe below really tastes like potato soup. You can sub broccoli for cauliflower to make cream of broccoli soup.
CAULIFLOWER BISQUE--6 servings, 6 carbs per serving
1 cauliflower, cut into small chunks
1 small onion, diced chopped, 2 1/2 ounces
2 tablespoons celery, finely chopped
2 tablespoons butter
3 cups chicken broth
1/2 cup heavy cream
Salt and freshly ground pepper, to taste
2 tablespoons fresh parsley, finely chopped
Sauté the onion & celery in the butter until just tender. Add the chopped cauliflower & chicken broth; bring to a boil. Turn down the heat to low; cover and simmer until the cauliflower is very tender, about 20-25 minutes. Use a stick blender to puree the soup until completely smooth and thick. Stir in the cream. Add pepper & salt, if needed. Stir in the parsley.
thanks I really appreciate the sites -I’ll be able to get alot of ideas thanks
Ok, I was wondering how you could do tomatoes and onions! I'll just have to make side-by-side dishes my version. Trader Joe's has frozen leeks that are cleaned, and I have a bag in my freezer, already. I've made a version of the cauliflower soup, but I'll cut down on the onions. If you swap out cauliflower for cod, you will almost have a soup I made for the family the other night, but I think I used green onions. That's what I've been trying out - green onions instead of onion. I made two quiches for Christmas Eve dinner and made one with green onions. I didn't eat the crust, and it worked out ok. If my older dds are over, I usually just make a crustless quiche because they are gluten free.
It's still a lot of cooking...and pots. (My kitchen has pots all over the counter from two hours of cooking last night.) You have no idea of the volume of food that gets prepared...10 qts of soup will be gone in 32hrs, and I don't eat it. I've got to concentrate on cooking for me more this year. If I can't eat it, I just open a can of tuna and make tuna salad with celery or daikon radish.
I'm a cheerleader for my dentist, who is not always doing well with his diabetes, so coming up with ideas for him will help me.
I made homemade macaroni and cheese last night along with chili and other food. It's still hard staring at bubbly mac and cheese...
Oh, I have a stupid question? Where do you buy your peppers this time of year? I notice you are from NYC. I'm from a Chicago suburb. My dd lives blocks from a Whole Foods, but I'm finding that organic peppers are so expensive at any grocery store that I just don't bother. Do you roast your own peppers? Peppers are high on the pesticide list, so that's one food that I only do organic or hydoponic. It is not unusual for me to wash four large peppers at a time just for the family to snack on. I seriously have to strike a balance while feeding all of us our special diets and not going broke.
BTW, everyone, I found frozen roasted asparagus at Trader Joe's. It works out well for me because I can count out the exact number of spears. They are thin enough to add to eggs.
Not a stupid question at all:) I’m originally from NYC, but live in rural VA now. I love Chicago. When red peppers are in season & reasonably priced, I roast my own. I buy organic whenever possible. Living in a small town organic produce isn’t readily available. Wish we had a Trader Joe’s. I use roasted red peppers sold in jars. Actually, they’re better than the ones I roast myself.
You’re stronger than I am! I couldn’t make mac & cheese & not dig right into it. Is a lot of cooking. I go for things I can cook in one pot whenever possible. I make brisket frequently & use turnips in place of potatoes. I add onions & carrots, but don’t eat them. I also use green onions & leeks & shallots. In some recipes I use a small amount of yellow onion & don’t cook it long. I sub out roasted red pepper for some, or all, of tomatoes called for. For stews I use red wine for flavor, a very small amount of tomato paste & lots of fresh herbs.
Well, I did a can of tuna and celery last night, again. I have one kid who hates turnip and won’t eat anything I put turnip into. I did make rhutabaga for the holidays and didn’t look it up, but it tasted too good to be true, so I only ate a little. Yes, brisket is something that everyone loves, but I pay $40 a brisket for pasture raised meat, which would be fine IF everyone didn’t eat it all up. BTW, I put the carrots in and don’t eat them, either. I made that cod soup last night, and it was a hit with brussel sprouts on the side. I count out five brussel sprouts.
I think I’ve got to go to Target, today, and pick up a cheap calender, or if anyone else has a better idea, please jump in…I need to write this stuff down at this point and start keeping better track of what’s happening. There are so many variables with exercise, stress, and even pain - I couldn’t figure out why in the world I was up ten points in the am, and my dh pointed out that I’ve been in pain. I think the whole stress of being a matriarch at Christmas tripped me up, and my autoimmune is going wonky.
This is a random thing, but does anyone use a diabetic watch? I don’t have an ipod or iphone, and I need to keep better track of one and two hours post-prandial, what I ate, etc. I live in a townhouse with 14 stairs. I keep two meters just because I know that when I’m in pain, I won’t go up the stairs, but the same thing hold true for writing it all down. My numbers are still good, but the range of high and low is gradually getting larger-my lows are lower, and my highs are a litle higher. Looking at myself in the mirror during hip-hop class last night and comparing that to the clumsy, stiff, achey person I am this am who doesn’t even want to lift the coffee cup is ridiculous.
I am a bit of a “gut” cook. I do all the cooking in the house and I have four diets to satisfy. A vegetarian, a pickatarian (picky eater), a relapsed carb addict and myself. I’ll often cook large meals over the weekend that can be eaten as leftovers during the week. I make a wicked all meat chili, even my son the pickatarian likes it. One my favorite meals is seared salmon with capers and lemon with garlic mashed cauliflower and fried green beans.
I will sometimes find dishes that everyone can eat, but by necessity I have to cook carby dishes. My daughter, the vegetarian is home from college and on Sunday I cooked her my macaroni and cheese. I made it with dreamfields, my recipe is based on Alton Brown’s and is very rich, but it is off plan.
I too take a lot of Alton Brown’s recipes and modify them to be low carb. Tonight Im making small pumpkin pies, yet another Brown recipe. Few days back I did a mixture of Gerris cauliflower bisque (from above) and Alton Brown’s pumpkin soup. Its a pumpkin bisque that even my 13 year likes. Shes a Pickatarian too. =^)
In our house we wing it a lot. I cook as often as I can, but usually get home from work later in the evening (7-7:30ish). So, my wife will put something together for her and the kids. When I get home I usually mod it as best I can to be LC. On the weekends I take over the kitchen and we end up with all sorts. As of late I’ve been making a lot of soups and cooking larger portions. Then freezing it post to allow for quick meals later.
I am like bsc and am a “gut” cook as well. Taking what we have (or I want and send kids to the store) and making meals of it. A good example is the prime rib we had for Christmas dinner, I took and sliced and made hot openface beef sandwiches with cauliflower mashed. Total carbs was about 16-18 including a slice of LC bread gravy with almod milk, and the cauliflower.
I use a lot of cauliflower for cooking. Its LC and can be made into almost anything that I used to eat as a carb (e.g., rice (spanish, white or, any other style), soup base, mashed, etc.). We eat a fair about of breakfast for dinner (e.g., eggs benidict with low carb bread, bologna sausage gravy, omelets, etc.). Also, we do salads, soup and sandwiches (mine LC of course), mexican food (usually cauli rice, hamburger, lettuce, cheese, sour cream, avocado, etc) on LC taco shells or LC tortilla, sloppy joes with veggies in the mix and LC bread. What we do is essentially take our meals and I swap out carb rich stuff for LC stuff. Then the kids get a square meal and I can stay alive longer. =^)
You said “I’m having problems with my kids eating my food, too. I guess I’ll have to label it”
Perhaps you can develop some low carb dishes everyone likes and cut down on the multiple meal preparation, at least part of the time.
This group has broadened my culinary horizons, Lots of tasty ideas. I really don’t feel deprived eating low carb, there’s lots of good things I still can eat. Perhaps your family will agree.
onesaint, I’m going to have to get better at lc cooking. I bought several lc books, including the Eades’ book. Do not buy Dr. B’s recipe book. I just have been winging it for the past 1.5yrs. I had been trying to get up to speed on gluten free cooking for my dds when I became diabetic. I’m fairly restricted without the diabetes because I can’t eat Corn in any form, including dextrose. (I had to send to India for glucose not derived from corn in order to take a glucose tolerance test.) So, this past holiday, it was bizarre with the gluten free section, milk free section, fruit free section, nut free section, and me with parts of all of the above plus diabetes…You should have seen me trying to get people to taste the stuffing for the turkey for seasonings…which would not be bad, but for every dish I made for regular people, I had to make a gluten free version, including pies, so at the end, I was too tired to do anything for me other than eat a hunk of meat. I should have more time in my life since I won’t be watching my grandson as much, so I’ll have to experiment.
What kind of lc bread do you use? One of the crisp bread products that Dr. B recommended went belly up. I forget which one. I went to the Polish Deli to get crisp bread, but everything was in Polish, so I really wasn’t sure I was buying something with four carbs. I like cauliflower, but I’m not sure that I can handle a lot of it if it isn’t barely cooked. I made some mashed cauliflower, and it was awful, but maybe I wasn’t adding sour cream or something.
Which brings up another point - the kids are 16yo and can eat anything, but my dear husband is 60yo. You either have to go lc or not - you can’t eat the fat content of most of the lc foods part-time, so I’d have to pick my recipes carefully if I make lc food for all the family.
BadMoonT2, I’ll definitely have to work on finding a middle ground. I really don’t have to eat much, at all, at 57yo. Seriously, there are times that I feel, why bother because my metabolism is so slowed that it’s not worth the trouble or mess. I eat a lot of nuts and seeds and save my cooking legs for the family. I quadrupled the recipe for pancakes tonight, and few were left. I read about using vital wheat gluten to make lc pancakes, but I just grabbed some almonds.
Which brings up another issue…I found out I am diabetic because I have the common gene for Celiac and LADA and got the GAD antibodies tested. However, all my immunoassays for Celiac were negative up to 12/2008. Also, I had Cushing’s for some of those immunoassays, which meant that I was producing large amounts of cortisol supressing true results. Now, I have been gluten free/carb free/corn free, which is terribly restrictive. I have no idea if I am Celiac or not, and there is no current way to know. On top of that, they still don’t know how eating wheat affects Celiacs who are diabetic. Does it hasten the demise of their pancreatic beta cells? Also, Celiac is no longer limited to wheat intollerance and now includes Corn, which I couldn’t eat in the first place. I haven’t figured some things out, yet, but really, neither has medicine. I can switch out red peppers for tomatoes, use cauliflower, and leeks instead of onions, but every addition has to be thoroughly thought through. I am going to buy some sour cream right away. Costco sells big tubs of Daisy brand.
I don’t need a formal recipe, but how do you make your meat chili?
I posted a meat chili recipe on the previous page. Spices have quite a few carbs, so calculate them if you add more or others.
I remembered this as stew in my sleepiness, but I had printed it off along with some of the stuff I linked to. The organic produce I’m seeing in the stores has been awful and expensive. If I make a 45min trip to Whole Foods, it’s just expensive. I use plenty of spices, as I have my china cabinet now filled with spices and herbs from Penzey’s. I’ll look for the fire roasted tomatoes and the roasted peppers, but I think I hesitated on the prepared kind because a lot of those types of things have sulfites or other preservatives that I can’t have. I’ll recheck. So much of this depends on brand. Trader Joe’s is frequently hit or miss, but they have had some good things in the past like frozen avocado halves. I’m using frozen green beens, frozen asparagus, and frozen brocolli from Costco right now until the crops damaged by extreme weather recover.
Dehydrated chives is another thing that I use, but we are out at the moment. You can mail order from Penzey’s, but I’m just going to make the drive. I had no idea that spices would ever add to the carb count, but I can see that, of course, it would - especially cumin. There are dozens of carb counters out there. Which one do you guys use online. I went to Borders and got discouraged because all the books that were there we full of prepared food, which I never use.