:eek:
:eek:
:eek:
I LOVE butter…but I do need something with it, no question. Doesn’t have to be a lot of something, but something.
Spaghetti squash! I’ve also seen people who thinly sliced portabella mushrooms for “pasta,” but I’ve never tried that myself and I’d imagine it gets expensive.
I’ve been making pad thai with cabbage noodles (stir fried). Works pretty well, but I’m not sure it would translate well to Italian dishes.
What are cabbage noodles? Are they like shirataki noodles? I’ve never seen these–they sound good.
Well I dislike spaghetti squash so that’s out…its more about finding a “wrapper” for a ricotta/parmesan/mozz/egg filling…I was thinking maybe I could do crazy-thin slices of brined chicken breast (brining for moisture and season) and create a kind of schnitzel-lasagne (schnitzel is crazy-thin slices of chicken breast..).
This is the difficulty in trying to get some variety into the menu…starchy foods serve a funciton that’s very difficult to replace: the bland wrapper or offset to otherwise highly flavored/fatty/loose foods.
Vegetable substitutes like eggplant and squashes and cauliflower are usually not very satisfying because they are so damn watery.
The go-to that I’ve seen pop up repeatedly to replace crumbs and coatings is crushed pork rinds, which I think is bizarre and disgusting. Don’t mistake me, I love pork rinds and fried pork, but very much in the context of eating them for the taste they have.. not to add that taste to other decidedly non-porky dishes.
I love lasagna really not so much for the noodles as for the yummy ricotta/parm/mozz/egg filling, the baked cheesy top, and just some sauce. But without something sorta bland with some standupness to it, it’s hard to create all the good parts.
Of course, since I really do not care for lasagna noodles at all, I could just use them for structure, then pull out all the good bits. 
Anyway, bit of a holy grail.
It seems like there must be a way to pulverize fiber and mold it into useful items that have essentially no flavor of their own but can give some texture and bland offset to otherwise rich dishes.
And I have to go back and see if there’s anything worthwhile in shirataki or has anyone ever seen or used the actual glucomannan flour for themselves?
Oh, and I wanted to know what kind of experiences people have had using erythritol? Do you find it triggering, does it interrupt ketosis or slow weight loss, etc.
I think it’s possible I may find it triggering, and I can’t decide if it’s psychological or physical, but when I use it to make my amazing creme brulee that has no brulee, it seems to fuel a bigger appetite, more roaming the kitchen for “sumpin’ to eat!” - I stick with my low-carb choices, I just eat a lot more. I can’t figure if it’s the actual taste and experience of eating a tasty sweet treat on my mind, or is it boosting my insulin?
Does anyone do blood sugar testing on themselves? I happen to have a blood sugar tester that I bought for my mother and I was wondering how it could be used to figure out how my body is reacting to things…figure out how much my blood sugar spikes after a meat/fat meal, after veges/meat…then test it after eating something with erythritol.
Well, with the zucchini noodles, I lay down a towel, shred 'em with the slicer into strings, lay 'em out and salt them. I’ll pack another towel (or stack of paper towels) on top, and then by dinner time they’re pretty well juiced out. The texture really is like a pretty good, al dente noodle, though you still have some of the zucchini flavor.
That sounds gross, to me. What about coconut “flour”? Or almond meal?
Hmm… eggplant, salted and drained? Very thinly sliced zucchini, salted and drained? Mushrooms?
I was just about to suggest all three of those. There’s a paleo site with a recipe that uses thinly-sliced butternut squash as the noodles in lasagna, but I haven’t tried that one.
Coincidentally, I just made lasagna without the noodles this weekend. I layered spinach, ricotta with egg, ground meat, sauce (x2) and baked, covered with mozzarella, baked again. It was pretty messy trying to get it out of the pan right out of the oven, but the next day – after it cooled off in the refrigerator – it was a snap to cut and serve.
BTW, Naja, you’re the sixth person I’ve had a hand in converting. The way I explain it to people is that you can have a regular diet and give up everything and feel terrible and hungry all the time, or give up only half the things you enjoy and eat the other half without guilt, plus feel better in the process. No-brainer to me. I’m down two clothing sizes in 3.5 months. Can’t beat it.
Just found the Squash Lasagna, in case anyone’s interested.
Does anyone know if it’s okay to eat less than 1000 cals/day low carb? I’m 26 and not very physically active but pretty busy and frequently I have neither the time nor inclination to eat more than that if I’m eating low carb. Is 4 days a week of 800 cals/day and 3 of like 1500 going to mess up my body?
No, they’re just cabbage cut into ribbons. If you cut a cabbage in half, then you can easily slice through the layers and make cabbage strings. Stir fried, they’re sort of noodly. You’re not going to mistake it for pasta, but it’s pretty good.
I’m pretty sure studies have been done that show that eating very low calorie for extended periods of time increases life span. But I’m not really in the mood to look it up now, sorry.
I’m happy today, because after eating low carb and low cal for 6 weeks now, I have finally lost some weight. It just was NOT coming off, I was going crazy. I’ve been exercising like mad, eating right, the whole thing and nothing was working. I’m finally down three pounds from where I started, yay!
Cheers 
Honestly, I think the hardest part about it so far has been letting go of the need to control and obsess over everything that goes into my mouth. It turns out that all that “craving” wasn’t a diseased mind lacking self-control, it was really my body and brain telling me exactly what it needed. The more I fought it with low-fat and whole-grains, the worse and worse it got (and the more depressed, unhealthier, and ultimately heavier I got).
I honestly have not felt any misery at all for giving up whole grains or refined flour. And it turns out that if I just listen to the cravings and feed myself according to need rather than any given “plan”, I eat just the right amount, naturally. It’s a beautiful, amazing, wonderful thing to discover for someone with a severe history of eating disorders who has always felt (or been told) that the food regulation “mechanism” in her brain is diseased or broken, like an alcoholic’s in relation to alcohol.
I realize there’s no “one true way” and am doing my best not to get all evangelical about it, but it truly is a total revelation to me. And especially where friends of mine have some of the auto-immune issues that folks on the MDA forums talk about having greatly alleviated with a grain-free diet… I don’t know, I’m very self-conscious where dietary stuff comes in, and don’t want to go around spouting unsolicited dietary advice, so am doing my best to keep a cork in it. I sure am loving the Primal Blueprint “message”, though. It all fits in very handily with everything I’ve always believed about local/seasonal eating, naturally-reared animal foods, and so on. And permission to get off the “chronic cardio” rat wheel? ThankyouVERYmuch.
Oh! And that squash lasagna sounds amazing. I’m putting it on the menu for next week. Thanks a million!
I don’t know the answer to this for sure. I seem to remember reading that if you eat a bunch of fat with the sweet, it’ll offset the insulin spike (which seems to mean that creme brulee might be a perfect dessert in that regard). Were it me, I’d choose real, unrefined sugar (with all the molasses and minerals left in it), as little as possible to get the sweet you want, and just make it a rare treat. But that’s just my own philosophy–like the Primal Blueprint’s 80/20 rule. A little sugar now and then isn’t gonna kill you or wreck your healthy lifestyle. And for me, less-than-satisfactory sugar substitutes just lead to overeating on other stuff to compensate for the fact that I didn’t really scratch the “itch”. If I scratch the itch sensibly, I feel much better (and enjoy life).
But again–that’s just me. I’ve never been a constant sweet-tooth sort of eater. I loooove a good microbrew soda or quality creme brulee, but it’s not something I crave all the time.
I agree 100% - but that’s kind athe problem, the Truvia works like a charm in creme brulee… cuz for me it’s not about the brulee, I just adore custard. So I eat a lot because I love it.
I talked about that in the mondo thread. I’m not generally inclined to overdo on a day to day basis, but I do have a weakness when it comes to particular things and I find them extremely compelling and a little does not actually go a long way at all, a little just lights a fire. My own custards are high on that list.
I’m a very good cook, which has been a very bad thing in my life overall, since I am much much more likely to overdo my own cooking, especially sweets, than just any random food, but it’s a lifesaver as a low-carber, as Drain Bead pointed out somewhere along the way. If you aren’t a cook, it’s very challenging to make this work- the world is not built to support this way of eating without some effort. I do recommend Carl’s Jr. Low Carb $6 Burger, though…excellent. And it never fails to crack me up that they ALWAYS offer to make it a combo. Yeah, give me the low carb bunless burger..with fries and a giant coke, please! But I asked a server the other day and of course yes, people do it all the time. Good grief.
Mmmm… custard…
I don’t know the answer about Truvia. I’ve heard negative things about pretty much every artificial sweetener, though people tend to be very supportive of whole-leaf stevia or whole-leaf stevia powder. I don’t know if there’s any science to support that, or if it’s just the inclination to negate anything that came out of a lab. The noise on it seems to be that Truvia has a bunch of additives to make it patentable, but whether or not that has any actual effect on health or insulin levels, I haven’t been able to tell from the internet rabble.
I don’t like it myself, it leaves a weird taste in my mouth that the whole-leaf stuff doesn’t. But I don’t have any dietary tinfoil-hattiness about it. It just tastes noticeably “fake” to me.
I think there was a post recently in the Mark’s Daily Apple blog about how to test your blood sugar to monitor insulin response to novel foods. It gave the rating you should see within certain time-markers if your insulin levels are doing what they’re supposed to do. I’d love to know the answer, if you test.
Do you like coconut? I wonder if whole coconut cream and egg yolks with coconut and vanilla extracts would make a good custard for more routine indulgence? It’s lightly sweet, but not sugary-sweet. I can eat coconut butter out of a jar with a spoon.
Stoid, I found that sometime sucralose was very triggering for me. I made an ersatz cheesecake filling that was cream cheese, splenda, vanilla, and lemon juice. I ended up eating the whole thing in like a day . . . just kept going back for another spoonful.
So now I don’t make it anymore.
I just read last night about how insulin levels can be raised by a sweet taste, even a sweet smell!
Definitely something to be concious of.
If that were in any way remotely true, I wonder why diabetics aren’t keeling over constantly.
Probably because “can be raised” doesn’t have the same meaning as “will inevitably be raised to dangerous levels in every living thing without fail.” is what I’m thinking.