A sugar free cream cheese frosting sweetened with stevia and vanilla. Use this as a sugar free alternative in your baked goods.
Stevia can add a bitter flavor, so experiment with using the least amount of sweetness you can tolerate for the best results.
Almond flour and cream cheese frosting sweetened with stevia makes my mini pumpkin cakes a low carb/low sugar/low calorie treat for the holidays. Only 50 calories per mini cake! Just don’t pop all 12 at once!
I’ve recently moved to a lower carb diet, which has altered my cooking style somewhat. While I have never been much of a baker or a cookie monster, there are times when sweet treats are desirable. Like holidays. With cooler weather settling in, I’ve experimented with lower carb/lower sugar treats.
At first glance, low carb desserts sounds like an impossible feat. There is a definite chemistry to baking, and baked goods have certain properties that determine how they look and taste. White flour and sugar are the biggest hurdles.
I’ve replaced white flour and sugar with almond flour, agave nectar, and stevia. 1/4 cup of almond flour contains 6g carbohydrates versus 22g carbs in white flour. Agave tastes sweeter, so less can be used than regular sugar. Truvia (stevia) is a no calorie sweetener that has somewhat of a confectioners sugar quality to it.
This is the recipe for the pumpkin cakes. Recipe for stevia cream cheese frosting to follow.
A vegan mushroom stroganoff. A good addition to a “Meatless Monday” or reducing meat consumption. I use all clean ingredients, and no frankenfoods.
I am an omnivore, but I am not opposed to vegetarian or even vegan food. My rules are:
1) It must be tasty.
2) It must not be a soy product that has become an overprocessed frankenfood.
My vegan mushroom stroganoff does not try to be a meat dish chameleon. If you want your taste buds to be tricked into thinking it is eating meat, then this is not it.
What this tries to be is a mushroom stroganoff. It is intended to highlight the taste of the mushroom in a creamy paprika sauce. It just so happens to be vegan.
Spaghetti alla Puttanesca is a fresher, lighter pasta dish than bolognese.
Most Americans grew up with spaghetti bolognese as a heavy meat based sauce. It tends to be the dominate flavor, and the pasta is merely the background note. Bolognese is the ‘all day’ sauce that most people associate with cooking pasta. Since it is a long, slow cooking sauce, the flavor of the ingredients melds together and become one.
Puttanesca, on the other hand, is a lighter, fresher sauce. The ingredients are distinct, and you can probably pick each ingredient flavor out if you were paying attention.
This uses a pan sauce style cooking method, like you might see at a restaurant, or TV chefs. It’s very easy. Do this when you have friends over, and they’ll think you are a professional!
Many people are afraid of pasta these days because of the low carb trend. There’s nothing wrong with enjoying pasta – just how much. White pasta is processed in your body like sugar, but it tastes good. My recipe uses a half mixture of white/wheat pasta. White pasta enhances the flavor. Wheat pasta enhances the nutrition. Only the pickiest of eaters would balk.
UPDATE 4/27/2011: As a friend mentioned, this is not quite a puttanesca. To make this a puttanesca, you should add olives and capers to the sauce. I did not have any at the time I made this.
The French have a well deserved reputation for making fantastic food. Soupe au Pistou is a French vegetable soup with pesto that is jam packed with flavors. If you’ve ever dreaded the can of vegetable soup, you have to try this at least once. It’s easy, and you’ll feel like a French chef professional.
Pistou soup was a random discovery. While on a recent working vacation to LA, I was flipping through channels. A show called “Avec Eric” came on PBS. My soup is based on his recipe Avec Eric: Pistou Soup
Make this with your leftover Easter ham!
Fresh, clean tasting carrot soup with a lemon/orange background. No dairy, and can be made vegan with vegetable stock.
Carrot soup is healthy and delicious. But a lot of recipes use heavy cream, which can make it a sneaky calorie bomb. I make a carrot soup that uses no dairy, but has a fresh, clean taste with the addition of orange and lemon juice.
Complete meal comprised of salad, lamb chops, rice pilaf, brussel sprouts and a glass of wine. Prepared fast and economical.
One of the trickiest thing to learn is how to prepare a whole meal without food overcooking, or getting cold while you wait for something to finish cooking. Knowing how to time things, and multitask, mostly comes from experience making the same meals over and over.
Here’s how I prepared an entire lamb chop dinner for two so the main dish, side dishes, and salad were all ready at the same time.
Chickpeas, or garbanzo beans, are one of the world’s oldest food. They are an ancient food that were among the first to be domesticated for farming. A plant source high in protein, they were an essential staple for ancient Mesopotamia, Rome, and Greece.
High in protein, low in fat: they are also a great fit for a modern healthy lifestyle. Hummus is a favorite way to enjoy these amazing legumes. It couldn’t be easier to prepare.
I like chutney, but a whole jar is too much. A few of tablespoons will get used for a couple of Indian dinners, then stuffed in the fridge and forgotten about.
Most internet recipes are large quantities for canning. I just wanted a little chutney for a dinner this week. So I scaled a recipe down to about 1 cup of chutney. This will make enough for a couple of recipes, or a plateful of tasty snacks.
An American classic, made for a single lunch.
What is the definition of a casserole anyway? The word for me usually conjures an image of canned tuna, pasta and cheese in a baking dish.
From Wikipedia: “A casserole, from the French for “saucepan”, is a large, deep dish used both in the oven and as a serving vessel. The word caserole is also used for the food cooked and served in such a vessel, with the cookware itself called a casserole dish or casserole pan.”
I mentioned in my Apple Crisp recipe that I bought a couple of small Le Creuset pots. They enable me cook single servings of things that I normally don’t want huge portions of, like desserts or casseroles.
If you’re interested, these Le Creuset Mini Round Cocotte* from Amazon.com are the ones I have. They are $19.95 each. However, I bought mine for $9 each at the Le Creuset outlet mall in Atlanta. See if you can find an outlet mall near you. It may be worth the trip.
When I was searching on AllRecipes.com for a classic casserole dish, I found a number of them that had 8 servings and over 600 calories per servings. Most of them had ‘cream of mushroom soup’ as an ‘ingredient’. Yuck.
I made a single serving rice and cheese casserole in my mini cocotte pot, using fresh veggies and a few leftovers.
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