Category Archives: Low-Carb

That’s right, I’ve made this recipe three times, in three different formats. Each time just tweaking the spice mixture until it was to my satisfaction. Just different cooking times in different cooking vessels.

(Here’s the cookie version from today.)

1 15-oz can of pumpkin puree (pure pumpkin, please — none of that “pie filling” stuff)
1/4 cup (1/2 stick) butter, melted
1/4 cup sweetener*
2 eggs
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 Tbsp cinnamon
2 tsp allspice
1 tsp cloves
1/2 tsp nutmeg
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/4 tsp xanthan gum
1/2 cup coconut flour
1/4 cup almond flour

* Normally I use Splenda. This time I used about 3/4 xylitol and 1/4 Splenda. I’m moving over to xylitol for sweetening things, since it would appear that Splenda is even worse for you than originally thought. Xylitol is a sugar alcohol, but less gastrointestinally upsetting than most.

My coconut flour and almond flour are both from Bob’s Red Mill. Love that stuff.

Mix everything together, then either make 20 2-inch cookies, 12 muffins (please use paper muffin cups), or put it in a parchment paper-lined loaf pan for a flat, cuttable loaf (not so much a bread as brownie-like bars).

Bake at 350° for 20 minutes (cookies), 30-35 minutes (muffins), or 60-70 minutes (loaf).

For the cookies, nutritionally:

(per cookie, batch of 20 cookies)
60 calories
4.5g fat
4.25g carbohydrate
– 2g dietary fiber
1.5g protein

This is a recipe that’s forgiving to overcooking — the pumpkin keeps everything moist even if you go a little too long in the oven. I like to put everything in the fridge when done; something about that pumpkin flavor feels like it should be served cold, to me. Plus, moist can be an understatement — even though they’re fully cooked, all of these can have an almost custardy, puddinglike consistency. Refrigeration firms them up a bit.

I also shoved some white chocolate chips into a few of the cookies. They add a nice contrast, but it’s upping the carb count.

I have my meatballs totally dialed in. They’re not only delicious, but they’re also super tender. And gluten-free to boot!

Start with the non-meat ingredients:

1/2 cup potato flakes
1/2 cup grated parmesan cheese
1/3 cup water (or beef stock)
3 Tbsp dry parsley
3 Tbsp chopped garlic
1 tsp chili powder
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp pepper
1/2 tsp garlic powder
1/4 tsp thyme
1/4 tsp basil
2 eggs

Mix all that together so you get a spicy, gummy paste.

Then add 1 pound of ground beef and 1 pound of ground mild Italian sausage. You could go with the spicier sausage if you want, but I’m not that adventurous.

Smoosh it all together with your hands. I wear my always-useful powder-free disposable vinyl gloves for such things. Buying a big box of them was the best cooking/cleaning/hair-coloring move I ever made.

Roll into meatballs. Depending on size, you’ll get 30-45 of them. I like them about this big:

Where one can nest perfectly inside a tablespoon. That gets me around 40 meatballs. Again, I’m baking them on a wire rack above a foil-lined cookie sheet. I guess you don’t need the foil, if you don’t mind cleaning meat drips from your cookie sheet. Me, I’m a fan of easier cleanup. Since I still have to scrub the wire rack.

Bake at 400° for 15 minutes. Middle-ish rack in the oven.

After they came out of the oven, I tossed a few into some defrosted and reheated meat sauce and let them bubble while I cooked up a single serving of noodles.

I found the Ancient Harvest quinoa pasta on sale at the Whole Foods, at 2 boxes for $4. I used the ol’ food scale to measure out 2 ounces of dry pasta, which as always, doesn’t look like that much.

I then counted — turns out 2 ounces is just about 50 “garden pagodas”. Just like the De Boles “spaghetti style” pasta, I wonder if there’s some non-wheat reason why they can’t call this stuff radiatori. And it shows you how much wheaty pasta I used to eat, that I know the name of this shape.

Anyhoo, while the pasta is gluten-free (made from quinoa flour, corn flour, dried bell pepper and dried spinach [for the colors]), it’s certainly not a low-carb food. That 2-ounce serving packs 205 calories, 46 grams of carbohydrate, and only 4 grams of fiber. Still, eating it didn’t bloat me up afterward, and no next-day weight gain from water retention, so all is well. It boils for 6-9 minutes (I went the whole 9, after my De Boles experiments) with the strict warning DO NOT OVERCOOK. I wonder how gummy and/or gross these things get if you let them boil for too long. There’s also a warning that the water will turn yellow from the corn starches, which indeed it did.

At 9 minutes, the texture was just right. A very authentic pasta feel, with the slightest al dente bite. The plain white noodles really didn’t have a flavor of their own, which is a nice contrast from the distinctive rice flavor of the De Boles. The colorful noodles also tasted like standard red-pepper or spinach wheat noodles. Since it’s been a number of years, I’d clearly forgotten that I’m not the biggest fan of those pasta flavors. Next time I’d get this stuff, but in an all-plain variety. Looks like Ancient Harvest also makes spaghetti, linguine, elbows, shells, and rotelle (which they can say, but they can’t say radiatori?!) among others.

Delicious! I’m giving the plain noodles a 9 out of 10.

This plate is so full, by the way, because we got rid of most of our large (10″) plates and now almost exclusively use the Corelle luncheon plate (8-1/2″) for everything. You can get them at Wal*Mart for a couple of bucks apiece, if you don’t have a nearby Corning/Revere factory store. Which we don’t. Seriously, Orlando is the home of outlet malls, and there’s no Corningware to be had. Absurd! Anyhoo, we mixed-and-matched geometric patterns.

I packed away the rest of the meatballs, putting some in the fridge and some in the freezer. They microwave beautifully from both places.

Second attempt, with some recipe adjustments. I made the balls a little smaller, and put them up on a wire rack over a foil-lined cookie sheet so they wouldn’t be swimming in their own released fat. I also used less fatty beef, but that’s primarily because it’s what was on sale this week. And I added another egg.

2 lbs. ground beef (93/7)
1/2 cup potato flakes
1/3 cup water
2 eggs
1/2 cup grated parmesan cheese
3 Tbsp chopped garlic
3 Tbsp parsley
1 tsp chili powder
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp pepper
1/2 tsp garlic powder
1/2 tsp Worcestershire sauce
1/4 tsp oregano
1/8 tsp thyme

This time, I did things in a different order as well. First, I threw the potato flakes in my big bowl, and put the water on top to hydrate the potatoes. Mixed that up, then added everything else but the beef. I stirred it all together so it was one big sludgy mix of seasoning. Then I tossed the ground beef on top, and worked everything together with my hands. I think making the sludge (I really should write restaurant menu copy, right?) helped in letting me see when everything was fully combined.

Rolled out 40 of the little guys, roughly an inch and a half across.

Baked the same as last time: 400° F for 15 minutes.

This was a much improved batch. Still tender and juicy, but I didn’t have to dig them out of the pools of fat. The wire rack was easy as pie to clean off. But even though I increased all of the seasonings, we both still thought they could use MORE flavor. Even though I tossed in almost everything but the kitchen sink this time.

Maybe more salt. Certainly more garlic, in both varieties. Probably more chili powder and pepper. But these are totally edible. I portioned them out in sets of eight, and threw some in the fridge and some in the freezer. We’ll see how they re-heat.

BBQ sauce is a tougie as far as low-carb goes. There used to be a sugar-free sauce put out by … I’m tempted to say K.C. Masterpiece, but I may be wrong. One of the big names, anyway. It was discontinued probably 2 years ago.

It looks like there are a couple of sugar-free BBQ sauces on the market, but I’ve never seen them in any store. Scott’s, Smokin’ Joe, and Nature’s Hollow all come up on a Google search for sugar-free sauce, but I’d have to send away for them via mail-order. Since I’m both lazy and cheap, I threw together a sauce from what I had on hand.

For the base, I used the Heinz reduced-sugar ketchup. Many recipes would have you start with tomato sauce or tomato paste, but I figured the ketchup already has a little flavoring zip and zazz in it. Plus, it’s easily found — both the SuperTarget and Publix grocery stores in my area carry it. Look for the blue label — that seems to be the agreed-upon color for lower sugar content. Be warned, this ketchup is sweetened with sucralose (aka Splenda) instead of sugar, so if you’re avoiding artificial sweeteners, you would want to go with regular tomato sauce/paste.

Side note: it used to be, in days gone by, the condiment aisle had both ketchup and catsup. These days, at least in central Florida, it’s 100% ketchup. Did everyone decide on a common spelling at some point? Or is the southeast all about ketchup the same way they call pop “soda” all the time? Maybe there’s still catsup in the northwest. Anyone?

Anyhoo, here’s what I mixed:

5 oz. Heinz reduced-sugar ketchup*
1/2 tsp garlic powder
1/4 tsp smoked paprika
1/4 tsp chili powder
1 tsp apple cider vinegar
1 tsp liquid smoke
1/8 tsp black pepper
1/8 tsp cumin
1/4 tsp worcestershire sauce
2 pk (4 tsp) Splenda

* I did the ketchup by weight, so I could just squirt it straight into the saucepan, and not dirty up a measuring cup. But if you don’t have a food scale, I’d say it was roughly a cup or so of ketchup, maybe a little less. Since the bottle of ketchup is 14 ounces, it’s a little over a third of a bottle.

Mix it up, and heat it in a saucepan. (You can see some of the scratches on this saucepan — I’ve had the set since college.) For the batch, you’re looking at somewhere around 12 grams of carbohydrate. We threw some gluten-free little smokies in there, and ended up with three servings, so 4 grams of carb for the sauce on each serving.

I’d made this before, but I didn’t write the recipe down, or measure anything. Foolish! This time I used actual measuring implements, so I could report to you fine people. In future batches, I think I’ll add even more liquid smoke, because it wasn’t quite smoky enough. It was good, but it could be better. I think I’ll also squirt in some brown mustard for additional tanginess. So I’ll probably go with 2 tsp liquid smoke, and 1 or 2 tsp brown mustard.

At any rate, the smokies were grand. I believe these were the Target house brand.

Before we get to the recipe, a couple of things. First off, Gary Taubes, author of Good Calories, Bad Calories and Why We Get Fat, will be appearing on the Dr. Oz show today. It’s my understanding that Dr. Oz is a big proponent of vegetarian eating and “healthy whole grains”, so it should be a fascinating program.

Also, on one of the low-carb blogs I read, today someone posted a recipe without any pictures. I gasped and clutched my pearls. Unbelievable!

Onward! The other day, The Gluten-Free Homemaker posted a recipe for meatballs. I’ve tried meatballs before, but without the breadcrumbs, they get really dry really fast. This recipe tickled me because she used potato flakes as the filling/binding agent. I read that and thought to myself, “Self, didn’t you used to put actual grated potato in your meatballs, years ago?”

Why yes. Yes I did.

So I made a few changes to GFH’s recipe, adding in more of the Italian flavorings I crave.

Gluten-Free, Low-Carb Beefmeat Balls

1-1/2 lbs. ground beef (I used 80/20 chuck)
1/3 cup potato flakes*
1/4 cup water (or milk, or stock, or broth — something to moisten those dried taters)
1 Tbsp parsley
1/4 tsp pepper
1/4 tsp salt
1/8 tsp garlic powder
1 Tbsp chopped garlic (that’s right, double garlic)
1/4 cup grated parmesan cheese
1/2 tsp chili powder
1 egg

* I figured the potato flakes would be way carbier than they actually are. For the 1/3 cup, it’s 17 grams of carb, with 1 gram of fiber. That means for this batch of 20 large-ish meatballs, it’s less then one gram of potato-based carbohydrate per meatball. Compare a dish of 6 big-ass homemade meatballs to one of those craptacular low-carb wheat tortillas for the same carb load, and this meal totally comes out on top in any battle.

I threw on some of my trusty rubber gloves and mashed it all together. You certainly could use a mixer with a paddle attachment, but for me half the fun is getting in there with my hands.

Roll them into balls and put them on a baking sheet or pan. I used my cake sheet pan, lined with non-stick foil, because I didn’t know how big a pool of fat would form at the bottom. I’m glad I did — with the 80/20 beef, it was a sizeable amount of beefy grease. It might have overwhelmed a cookie sheet.

Bake in the oven at 400° for 15 minutes.

Now in my house growing up, we’d pan-fry meatballs. Which can be kind of messy and splattery. I’d never done them in the oven, and now I can’t imagine doing them anywhere else. They browned up beautifully, got a little of that crust on the outside, and were done through.

I made enough so that I could freeeze half of them. We’ll see how they microwave back up. Here I scooted them all off to the side, so that the pool of grease could cruise over to the other end of the pan. I should probably keep that grease, but I don’t know what I’d do with it. Treat it like any other cooking fat? Pack it in a container and stick it in the fridge? Fry things in it? Hmmm.

Scott and I agreed that these were good, but they need even MORE spice next time. Maybe I’ll try adding some oregano or basil as well.

Previously, I had a bunless burger at Fuddrucker’s as part of our moving weekend feasting. And it was a delightful thing.

I’ve had bunless burgers at other places: Burger King puts everything into a little bowl, Red Robin wraps it in lettuce leaves, even the noisy and hideous T-Rex restaurant serves theirs on a plate with decent fixings.

So I decided to try going bunless at Five Guys Burgers & Fries. At least I can still have the fries, which are always fantastic. No gluten in those little fellas.

What a disappointment. Two foil-wrapped bundles, one with lettuce and pickles, the other with a cheese-covered patty. The patty was small and falling apart, and most of the cheese stuck to the foil. I had to scrape like mad. They also gave me little side cups with mayonnaise and onions. I ordered the burger with ketchup and mustard as well, but I didn’t get those. I guess because both can be found on the condiment rack next to the pop machine. (That’s right, Florida, I still won’t say soda. Suck it.)

I scraped my cheese, put it back on the burger, threw on mayo and ketchup, then cut off a piece. The cutting action immediately sliced through the tissue-thin foil and revealed the tabletop underneath. For the rest of the burger, I was very, very delicate with my knifework.

So overall, a great disappointment. I’d say they’re not used to doing burgers without buns, but “no bun” is a programmed option on their cash registers. I’ll just have to go elsewhere for a bunless burger, and only hit Five Guys if I’m either desperate for their fries (I loves them, I do) or if it’s February or beyond and I’m willing to risk the bloat and gas from eating the bun.