Dana's blog

Pumpkin

Here’s a riddle: What can weigh 100 pounds, has 9.3 grams of useable carbs per cup, and a twinkle in its eye? Did you guess pumpkin? I hope so. Fresh pumpkin is available for only a couple of months in the autumn, which is a shame. It’s wonderful!

Don't forget about sugar-free pancake syrup! I use it in all kinds of things, from pumpkin pie to barbecue sauce, and even that not-quite-Asian sweet chili sauce I published the recipe for recently. It's usually a maltitol syrup with some artificial sweeteners, too. I wouldn't use tons of it, but boy, does it broaden the culinary horizons.

The second strategy for decarbing recipes is to substitute lower carb ingredients for higher carb ones. This can be more complex than our first strategy of just cutting back on a higher-carb but flavorful ingredient. To illustrate: A common de-carbing strategy is to replace sugar with a low carb sweetener. But which sweetener? And how much?

That Nice Boy I Married and I went to a fund-raising banquet last night. I was so pleased with the menu, I just had to report back to you. The buffet tables held:

Salad, of course, with ranch or balsamic vinaigrette
Green beans, nicely tender-crisp and bright green, with almonds
Mashed potatoes
Summer squash sauteed with plenty of garlic
Sliced turkey in a light gravy with a few cranberries to make it look pretty
Roast beef, again in a not-gloppy gravy
Eggplant rolled around a ricotta filling, with tomato sauce
Rolls and butter
Cake

I am not a culinary genius. Oh, I'm a good cook, and I have the occasional kitchen brainstorm. But my most valuable skill set is my ability to look at other people's recipes and figure out how to cut out great, whacking chunks of carb, and still wind up with something worth eating. I thought maybe I'd spend a few days writing about the main strategies for decarbing recipes. May put myself out of business this way, I suppose, but it would be in a good cause.

So here, forthwith, is strategy #1:

Cut back on flavorful but carby ingredients.

Bloomington Indiana is blessed with what is actually a very good hometown newspaper, the Herald-Times, to which I have had a seven-day subscription ever since I moved to town over 18 years ago. They have even featured me a couple of times, yay! They are not, however, infallible.

You knew you could make chili in a slow cooker, I'm sure. And soup. And stew. You might have figured out that it works pretty well for pot roast. Taco filling. And it's the numero uno best for cooking tough, bony, gristly cuts of meat and turning them into ambrosia, far better than a filet mignon. I'll take a slow cooked lamb shank or a few pork neck bones over that filet any day -- far, far more flavor.

I started this post on Saturday, and got diverted:

As I posted at Facebook, yesterday morning my weight was at an unacceptable number. I put recipe development on hold for a few days, and am reverting to meat and eggs (and a teeny bit of Splenda-sweetened chocolate), and nothing else. This usually knocks a pound or two off of me in a few days.

Not-Quite-Asian Sweet Chili Sauce
I was looking at recipes for Sweet Chili Sauce, and found one that called for maple syrup, hardly an Asian ingredient! But it sounded intriguing, and I had sugar-free pancake syrup on hand. Instead of using all syrup, I used half erythritol, to mellow the maple note. It's an interesting combination with the Asian flavors, and really very good. Easy to make, too.

5 dried hot chiles -- Thai bird peppers, the little red ones
1/2 cup sugar-free pancake syrup
1/2 cup erythritol
3 tablespoons cider vinegar
1/4 cup dry sherry
1/4 cup soy sauce

Over at the Facebook page, Jennifer Rader asked: Forgive my ignorance, but what is this Shirataki you speak of ?

Oh! You need to know about the shirataki! They are Asian noodles, made from a root called konjac or konyaku, sometimes mistranslated "yam bean," though they're not related to a yam at all. The konjac plant has a soluble fiber in it called "glucomannan," which is filling, helps control blood sugar, even lowers cholesterol. More importantly, since it's a fiber, it's not a source of digestible carbohydrate.

I mentioned on Facebook that I was trying to come up with a blog topic for the day, and a couple of people made suggestions. So here, forthwith, is a blog post on one of those topics.

What do I eat for lunch?

I've had a few requests for an update on where I stand with taking gelatin, so here goes: I'm still taking it. Every day. 2 teaspoons in the morning, a tablespoon at bedtime, and, as often as not, some more in the mid-afternoon. I have not miraculously lost weight, but then I have been cooking a truly ridiculous quantity of food, and once again I have rolled around to the, er, fat time of the month. I'm still convinced that gelatin is making me feel stronger, more energetic, and doing excellent things for my mood.

Would you like to see just what we're up against? My friend Fred Hahn posted a fascinating link to Facebook today, which I reposted to both my Facebook pages, but felt was important enough to also reference here. Here's a link to the study in question. What it says is this: 137 participants were put on a control diet, a low carb/high fat diet, or a low fat/moderate carb diet.

You know how old I am? I'm so old I can remember when medical and nutritional "authorities" insisted that enriched white bread was nutritionally equivalent to whole grain bread. Prescribed menus, like the original Weight Watchers program, would allot "1 slice bread, enriched or whole wheat," as if it made no difference. People who insisted that whole grain bread was superior were branded "food faddists."

Ihave a woeful tendency to write about seasonal events too late -- like the time I wrote about the Superbowl on the Saturday before the game. So I thought that I'd get a Halloween article up now! I first wrote this in October 2003, but it required only a little editing.

Now that it's October, can the scariest day of the year be far off? Halloween can be utterly terrifying.