Blogs

Sharon Zimberoff writes:

Wanted a smallish dish, somewhere between a snack and a meal, so I did this:

Drained a packet of tofu shirataki, fettuccini style. Snipped across them a few times with my kitchen shears, 'cause they're too long. Put 'em in a microwaveable bowl, and nuked them for a couple of minutes. Re-drained them, then gave them another couple of minutes and drained them one more time. This gets out a lot of excess water, and keeps them from diluting your sauce.

Being a dinosaur, I have a seven-day subscription to the dead-tree edition of my local paper, the Herald Times. Over all I think well of the HT, but Wednesdays always try my soul. Why? Because Wednesday is the day the food section of the paper comes out. And invariably, it is festival of reduced fat recipes, recommendations to eat less meat, how to add fiber, all that junk.

Dr. Matt Andry, the local doctor who diagnosed me with PCOS, has a radio show on WGCL, a local radio station. I got to be his guest recently! Here's the show. Hope you like it!

Since I talked on my last podcast about Dr. Andry diagnosing me with PCOS and putting me on metformin, I've had a few people post me to ask how it's going, if the metformin's helping. It's a little early to say yet -- when I recorded last week, I had just that day increased my dose from 500 mgs per day to 1000 mgs.

When I posted this evening that we were going to have Joe for supper, I was pretty sure that someone would say, "Joe?!" Sure enough. So here I am to explain.

Joe is one of the easiest and best -- and quickest -- low carb one-dish meals. Based on an old San Francisco favorite called Joe's Special -- I've also seen it called "Casual Joe's Special" -- it's been around for quite a while, and inspired a lot of variations. The immutable basics are:

Ground beef -- I use ground chuck, 1 pound will make about 4 servings

As those of you who have been reading since at least last summer know, I started taking gelatin as a supplement back in September, and was dazzled by the results. I've been taking it ever since; I just bought another 5 pound box of plain gelatin powder. I take a couple of teaspoons first thing in the morning, and 2-3 teaspoons before bed every night. Plan to continue forever, or until I die, which ever comes first.

Just a heads-up: My Chocolate Chocolate-Chip Pudding Cake recipe is now posted at CarbSmart. So go get it!

I was at my grocery store this afternoon, picking up a few things, when I noticed a new package with the other sweeteners in the baking supplies aisle. It was Stevia In The Raw, from the same people who have, for all these years, produced Sugar In The Raw. I won't use Sugar In The Raw -- see the part about "it's sugar." I don't care how "raw" it is (which it ain't), sugar is sugar, and it's all hard on my blood sugar. But this looked new, so I picked up the bag.

I have to say, I was getting really tired of that Fisher-Price theme we had going on! It may have been cleaner than the one before, but it got boring really quickly. This new theme is inspired by the one that Kevin, our podcast producer, chose for Dana's Low-Carb for Life. As soon as I saw what he had done there, I knew I was going to do something similar for Hold The Toast.

I made a big pot of chicken bone broth this weekend, and strained it out tonight, so soup for dinner was a no-brainer. Got started kind of late, so I didn't want to do anything complicated. Fortunately, one of our very favorite low carb soups is dead simple, yet rich and luscious. I didn't measure, but trust me, you can eyeball this one:

Remember I said I hadn't written down the first slow cooker pumpkin bread recipe? I did! And I found it after I sent in the manuscript with the second recipe, also great. So I can give you this one now, and you can have the other one when the book comes out in the autumn.

This calls for a big, round slow cooker -- my biggest Crockpot(tm) just exactly fits a bundt pan hanging from the rim. If you don't have a slow cooker that fits a bundt pan, you could bake this at 350 for about 50 minutes, maybe an hour. Why bother baking it in the slow cooker? Several good reasons:

Okay, I'm going to delve briefly into the realm of Too Much Information, but only because that information is needed to impart other information:

Some of you have written me, worried about the soy in the tofu shirataki. My stance has been that the quantity -- about a teaspoon of tofu per serving -- wasn't enough to worry about, since I only eat the noodle occasionally. However (TMI Alert), I can now tell you that the shirataki I ate last night are, ahem, still recognizable. How much soy can I have absorbed?

As I mentioned in my most recent podcast , I saw a new doctor yesterday. His name is Dr. Andry. I found him by googling "Bioidentical hormones Bloomington IN." I'm 52, and I was concerned about my estrogen levels. About 18 months ago, my primary care physician and I had hormone tests run. They showed I was estrogen deficient, and yet estrogen dominant -- ie, not enough estrogen, but considerably more estrogen than progesterone.