America's Favorite Veggies (Fruits and Vegetables Continued)
What about high-carb vegetables? The list is far shorter. Unfortunately, three of America's most popular vegetables are on it.
Corn, peas, and potatoes are all high carb. They also have something else in common: They're only kinda-sorta vegetables. Corn is really a grain, bred for high sugar content and harvested before it's ripe. (When corn ripens the sugar turns into starch.) Peas are a legume, just like all the dried beans -- again, they're eaten before they're fully ripened. And potatoes, while a root vegetable, really fall into the starch category -- ask any chef.
Of the three, peas have the lowest carb count, at 20 grams per cup, 7 grams of which are fiber, for a usable carb count of 13 grams. (Those numbers are for frozen peas; canned peas are a bit higher carb, because they have sugar added.) That's pretty high, but peas are also quite nutritious. I've been known to eat 'em from time to time, when the rest of my meal is super low carb. I also sometimes add them to cauli-rice dishes; a half a cup of peas in a recipe that serves four or five is not a big deal, and adds a lot of color, flavor, and texture.
When I want to keep carb counts to a rock-bottom minimum, I substitute snow peas. 1 cup of snow peas has 7 grams of carb, with 3 grams of fiber, a big savings. Part of that drop in carb count is because snow pea pods don't pack into a measuring cup the way little spherical peas do, but even going by weight snow peas have roughly half the carb count of regular peas.
Of course, snow peas don't have the same texture as regular peas, and being a very different shape they don't mix in to dishes in the same way. I often snip them into half-inch lengths to help them distribute throughout a dish.
By the way, you can stuff snow pea pods with dip for a fancy low carb hors d'oeuvre. Simpler, you can pull off the strings and put them out for dipping.
Sweet corn has 30 grams of carb per cup, with 4 grams of fiber. I can think of better ways to spend my daily carb allowance, with one exception: Every summer at the local county fair, the Lion's Club sells roasted sweet corn. It's the best corn I've had since I was a kid, invariably sweet and succulent and with that wonderful flavor only roasting gives. So I indulge in one ear per summer, at 17 grams of carb and 2 grams of fiber. Given the frightening array of elephant ears, deep-fried Twinkies, and other truly egregious junk food at the county fair, I think I'm doing pretty well. (I haven't asked yet whether the stuff they dip it in is melted butter or margarine. I don't plan to. Anything I eat once a year isn't likely to be what kills me.)
As for potatoes, you know they're pretty much a dead loss for us, right? Not only are they high carb -- 28 grams of carb in 1 cup of mashed potatoes, with 4 grams of fiber -- but they've got a killer glycemic index -- 70 or above, depending on what variety and how they're cooked. Instant mashed potatoes have a GI of 100; you might as well main-line glucose.
It's a darned shame, because my own personal kryptonite is crispy potatoes -- potato chips or french fries. I admit to occasionally snagging a fry or two from That Nice Boy I Married's plate, and to eating a few handfuls of chips at parties now and then. These things do not, however, darken my doorstep, nor invade my shopping cart.
The one use I occasionally have for potatoes is making Faux-Po. This is what I came up with after Ketatoes left the market, to substitute for our favorite mash of pureed cauliflower with a little Ketatoes mix added. I have been known to steam four to six ounces of potato with a half-head of cauliflower and puree them together. If you serve four with this, each serving will have 10 grams of carb, 2 grams of which are fiber.
