1001 Low-Carb Recipes: Hundreds of Delicious Recipes From Dinner to Dessert That Let You Live Your Low-Carb Lifestyle and Never Look Back (2 page)

What’s the hardest thing about your low-carb diet? And what’s the most common reason that people abandon their low-carb way of eating and all the health benefits and weight loss that come with it? It’s boredom. After a few weeks of scrambled eggs and bacon for breakfast, a hamburger with no bun for lunch, and a steak—no baked potato—for dinner, day after day, people get fed up and quit. They just can’t face a life of food monotony. Does this sound familiar?

If you’ve been getting bored with your low-carb diet, this is the book for you. You’ll find dozens of exciting ways to vary a hamburger, a steak, pork chops, chicken, and even fish. You’ll find a wide variety of side dishes and salads.

You’ll find snacks and party foods that you can eat without feeling like you’re depriving yourself. You’ll even find recipes for bread—really, truly bread—not to mention muffins, waffles, and pancakes. In short, this book has recipes for all sorts of things you never
dreamed
you could have on a low-carb diet.

Did I come up with these recipes for you? Heck, no! I came up with these recipes for
me
.

Who am I? I’m a person who, through circumstances that surely could have happened to anyone, has spent the past several years writing about low-carbohydrate dieting. In fact, I spent so much time answering questions for the curious that I finally wrote a book,
How I Gave Up My Low Fat Diet and Lost Forty Pounds!
To supplement
the book, I started an “e-zine”—an Internet newsletter—for low-carb dieters, called
Lowcarbezine!
So for the past few years, through the wonders of the Internet, I’ve been writing and developing recipes for a growing audience of low-carb dieters around the world.

I’ve always loved to cook, and I’ve always been good at it. My friends long ago dubbed me “The God of Food.” So when low-fat, high-carb mania hit in the 1980s, I learned how to make a killer low-fat fettuccine Alfredo, curried chicken and mixed grain pilau, black beans and rice, blue corn pancakes, low-fat cheesecake—you name it.

And I got fat—really fat and sick and tired. Thank heavens, in 1995 I got smart and tried going low carb, instead. Within two days my energy levels skyrocketed and my clothes were looser. It was overwhelmingly clear that this was the way my body wanted to be fed and that this was the way of eating that would make me well. I had set my foot upon a path from which there was no turning back; I was low carb for life.

The only thing that nearly derailed me was a terrible sense of Kitchen Disorientation. I had to discard the vast majority of my recipes when I dropped the grains, beans, potatoes, and sugar from my diet. For the very first time in my life, I’d walk into my kitchen and have no idea what to cook—and I had always known what to cook and how to put together a menu. It really was pretty scary, and it certainly was depressing. But I set out to become as good a low-carb cook as I had been a low-fat cook.

What you hold in your hands is the end result of years and years of trial and error, of learning what works and what doesn’t and of experimenting to find out which substitutes are yummy and which are just plain lame.

This is not, for the most part, a gourmet cookbook, which means that the recipes you find here are recipes you’ll actually use. You’ll find a lot of fairly simple recipes and a few more complex ones for special occasions. There’s lots of family fare here—pork chops, meat loaf, burgers, and chicken. You’ll find lots of meals you can cook on the stove top in a simple skillet and plenty of salads you can make ahead and stash in the refrigerator, ready to be pulled out and served when you dash in the door at a quarter-to-dinnertime. You’ll find many one-dish meals that are protein and vegetables combined, from main dish salads to thick, hearty soups to casseroles. You’ll also find ethnic flavors from around the world right alongside comfort foods you won’t believe are low carb!

If carbs are your problem, then they’re going to be your problem tomorrow, next week, next year, and even when you’re old and gray. You cannot think in terms of going on a low-carb diet, losing your weight, and then going off your diet—you’ll gain back every ounce just as sure as you’re born. You’ll also go back to blood-sugar swings, energy crashes, and nagging, insatiable hunger, not to
mention all the health risks of hyperinsulinemia. In short, you are in this for life.

So if you are to have any hope of doing this forever, you’re going to need to enjoy your food. You’re going to need variety, flavor, color, and interest. You’re going to need festive dishes, easy dishes, and comfort foods—a whole world of things to eat.

Because of this, I’ve included everything from very low-carb dishes, suitable for folks in the early, very low-carb “induction” stage of their diet, to “splurge” dishes, which would probably make most of us gain weight if we ate them every day but which still have far fewer carbs than their “normal” counterparts.

There’s another reason for the range of carb counts: Carbohydrate intolerance comes in degrees, and different people can tolerate different daily carbohydrate intakes. Some of you, no doubt, need to stay in that 20-grams-a-day-or-less range, whereas many others—lucky souls—can have as much as 90 to 100 grams a day and stay slim. This cookbook is meant to serve you all.

Only you can know, through trial and error, how many grams of carbs you can eat in a day and still lose weight. It is up to you to pick and choose among the recipes in this book while keeping an eye on the carbohydrate counts provided. That way, you can put together menus that will please your palate and your family while staying below that critical carb level.

However, I do have this to say: Always, always, always the heart and soul of your low-carbohydrate diet should be meat, fish, poultry, eggs, healthy fats, and low-carb vegetables. This book will teach you a boggling number of ways to combine these things, and you should try them all. Don’t just find one or two recipes that you like and make them over and over. Try at least one new recipe every week; that way, within a few months you’ll have a whole new repertoire of familiar low-carb favorites!

You will, as I just mentioned, find recipes in this book for what are best considered low-carb treats. Do not take the presence of a recipe in this book to mean that it is something that you can eat every day, in unlimited quantities, and still lose weight. I can tell you from experience that even low-carb treats, if eaten frequently, will put weight on you. Recipes for breads, cookies, muffins, cakes, and the like are here to give you a satisfying, varied diet that you can live with for life, but they should not become the new staples of your diet.
Do not try to make your low-carbohydrate diet resemble your former Standard American Diet
. That’s the diet that got you in trouble in the first place, remember?

One other thought: It is entirely possible to have a bad reaction to a food that has nothing to do with its carbohydrate count. Gluten, a protein from wheat that is essential for baking low-carb bread, causes bad reactions in a fair number of
people. Soy products are problematic for many folks, as are nuts. Whey protein, used extensively in these recipes, contains lactose, which some people cannot tolerate. And surely you’ve heard of people who react badly to artificial sweeteners of one kind or another. I’ve also heard from diabetics who get bad blood-sugar spikes from eating even small quantities of onions or tomatoes.

Yet all of these foods are just fine for many, many low-carb dieters, and there is no way I can know which foods may cause a problem for which people. All I can tell you is to pay attention to your body. If you add a new food to your diet and you gain weight (and you’re pretty certain it’s not tied to something else, like a new medication), or you find yourself unreasonably hungry, tired, or “off” despite having stayed within your body’s carbohydrate tolerance, you may want to consider avoiding that food. One man’s meat is another man’s poison, and all that.

You may or may not be aware of the concept of the usable carb count, sometimes called the “effective carb count”; some low-carb books utilize this principle, whereas others do not. If you’re not familiar with the concept, here it is in a nutshell:

Fiber is a carbohydrate and is, at least in American nutritional breakdowns, included in the total carbohydrate count. However, fiber is a form of carbohydrate made of molecules so big that you can neither digest nor absorb them. Therefore fiber, despite being a carbohydrate, will not push up your blood sugar and will not cause an insulin release. Even better, by slowing the absorption of the starches and sugars that occur with it, fiber actually lessens their bad influence. This is very likely the reason that high-fiber diets appear to be so much better for you than “American Normal.”

For these reasons, many (if not most) low-carb dieters now subtract the grams of fiber in a food from the total grams of carbohydrate to determine the number of grams of carbohydrates that are actually a problem. These are the “usable” carbs, or the “effective carb count.” These nonfiber grams of carbohydrates are what we count and limit. Not only does this approach allow us a much wider variety of foods, especially lots more vegetables, but it actually encourages us to add fiber to things such as baked goods. I am very much a fan of this approach, and therefore I give the usable carbohydrate count for these recipes. However, you will also find the breakdown of the total carb count and the fiber count.

I can’t tell you how to plan your menus. I don’t know if you live alone or have a family, if you have hours to cook or are pressed for time every evening, or what foods are your favorites. I can, however, give you a few pointers on what you’ll find here that may make your meal planning easier.

There are a lot of one-dish meals in this book—main dish salads, skillet suppers that include both meat and vegetables, and hearty soups that are a full meal in a bowl. I include these because they’re some of my favorite foods, and to my mind, they’re about the simplest way to eat. I also think they lend a far greater variety to low-carb cuisine than is possible if you’re trying to divide up your carbohydrate allowance for a given meal among three or four different dishes. If you have a carb-eating family, you can appease them by serving something on the side, such as whole wheat pitas split in half and toasted, along with garlic butter, brown rice, a baked potato, or some noodles. (Of course, I don’t recommend that you serve them something like canned biscuits, Tater Tots, or Minute Rice, but that shouldn’t surprise you.)

When you’re serving these one-dish meals, remember that most of your carbohydrate allowance for the meal is included in that main dish. Unless you can tolerate more carbohydrates than I can, you probably don’t want to serve a dish with lots of vegetables in it with even more vegetables on the side. Remember, it’s the total usable carb count you have to keep an eye on. Complement simple meat dishes—such as roasted chicken, broiled steak, or pan-broiled pork chops— with the more carbohydrate-rich vegetable side dishes.

There’s one other thing I hope this book teaches you to do, and that’s break out of your old ways of looking at food. There’s no law insisting that you eat eggs only for breakfast, have tuna salad for lunch every day, and serve some sort of meat and two side dishes for dinner. Are you short on both time and money? Serve eggs for dinner a couple of nights a week; they’re fast, cheap, and unbelievably nutritious. Are you planing a family video night or game night? Skip dinner and make two or three healthy snack foods to nibble on. You just can’t face another fried egg at breakfast? Throw a pork chop or a hamburger on the electric tabletop grill and you’ve got a fast and easy breakfast. Are you sick of salads for lunch? Take a protein-rich dip in a snap-top container and some cut up vegetables to work with you.

• If you’re not losing weight, go back to counting every carb. Remember that snacks and beverages count, even if they’re made from recipes in this book. A 6-gram muffin may be a lot better for you and your waistline than a convenience store muffin, but it’s still 6 grams, and it counts! Likewise, don’t lie to yourself about portion sizes. If you make your cookies really big, so that you only get two dozen instead of four dozen from a recipe, the carb count per cookie doubles, and don’t you forget it.

• Beware of hidden carbohydrates. It’s important to know that the government lets food manufacturers put “0 grams of carbohydrates” on the label if a food has less than 0.5 gram per serving and “less than 1 gram of carbohydrate” if a food has between 0.5 gram and 0.9 gram. Even some diet sodas contain trace amounts of carbohydrates! These amounts aren’t much, but they do add up if you eat enough of them. So if you’re having trouble losing, count foods that say “0 grams” as 0.5 gram and foods that say “less than 1 gram” as 1 gram.