300 15-Minute Low-Carb Recipes (4 page)

Tomatoes and tomato products.
Tomatoes are a borderline vegetable, but they are so nutritious, flavorful, and versatile that I'm reluctant to leave them out of low-carb cuisine entirely. After all, lycopene, the pigment that makes tomatoes red, has been shown to be a potent cancer-fighter. Who wants to miss out on something like that?

You'll notice that I call for canned tomatoes in a fair number of recipes, even some where fresh tomatoes might do. This is because fresh tomatoes aren't very good for much of the year, while canned tomatoes are all canned at the height of ripeness. I'd rather have a good canned tomato in my sauce or soup than a mediocre fresh one. Since canned tomatoes are generally used with all the liquid that's in the can, the nutritional content doesn't suffer the way it does with most canned vegetables.

Canned diced tomatoes with green chilies have become widely available in the past few years, and what a welcome addition they are! They let us add two great flavors by opening just one can.

I also use plain canned tomato sauce, canned pizza sauce, canned pasta sauce, and jarred salsa. When choosing these products, you need to be aware that tomatoes, for some reason, inspire food packers to flights of sugar-fancy. They add sugar, corn syrup, and other carb-laden sweeteners to all sorts of tomato products. So it is even more important that you read the labels on all tomato-based products to find the ones with no added sugar. And keep on reading them! The good, cheap brand of salsa I used for quite a while showed up one day with “New, Improved!” on the label. Guess how they'd improved it? Right. They'd added sugar. So I found a new brand.

Vege-Sal.
If you've read my newsletter,
Low-Carbezine!
, you know that I'm a big fan of Vege-Sal. What is Vege-Sal? It's a salt that's been seasoned, but don't think “seasoned salt.” Vege-Sal is much milder than traditional seasoned salt. It's simply salt that's been blended with some dried, powdered vegetables. The
flavor is quite subtle, but I think it improves all sorts of things. I've given you the choice between using regular salt or Vege-Sal in a wide variety of recipes. Don't worry, they'll all come out fine with plain old salt, but I do think Vege-Sal adds a little something extra. Vege-Sal is also excellent sprinkled over chops and steaks in place of regular salt. Vege-Sal is made by Modern Products and is widely available in health food stores.

Vinegar.
Various recipes in this book call for wine vinegar, cider vinegar, rice vinegar, tarragon vinegar, white vinegar, and balsamic vinegar. If you've always thought that vinegar was just vinegar, think again! Each of these vinegars has a distinct flavor all its own, and if you substitute one for the other, you'll change the whole character of the recipe—one splash of cider vinegar in your Asian Chicken Salad, and you've traded your Chinese accent for an American twang. Vinegar is such a great way to give bright flavors to foods while adding few carbs that I keep all of these varieties on hand—it's not like they go bad or anything.

As with everything else, read the labels on your vinegar. I've seen cider vinegar that has 0 grams of carbohydrates per ounce, and I've seen cider vinegar that has 4 grams of carbohydrates per ounce—that's a huge difference! Beware, also, of apple cider
flavored
vinegar—white vinegar with artificial flavors added. I bought this once by mistake, so I thought I'd give you the heads-up. (You'd think the Label Reading Police would be beyond such errors, wouldn't you?)

Wine.
There are several recipes in this cookbook calling for either dry red or dry white wine. I find the inexpensive wines that come in a mylar bag inside a cardboard box to be very convenient to keep on hand for cooking for the simple reason that they do not go bad because the contents are never exposed to air. These are not fabulous vintage wines, but they're fine for our modest purposes, and they certainly are handy. I generally have both Burgundy and Chablis box wines on hand. Be wary of any wine with “added flavors”—too often, one of those flavors will be sugar. Buy wine with a recognizable name—Burgundy, Rhine, Chablis, Cabernet, and the like, rather than stuff like “Chillable Red.”

Coconut Flour.
Once the coconut oil is pressed out of coconut meat, the remaining mass is finely ground into coconut flour. The stuff is loaded with fiber: 2 tablespoons (16 g) have 10 grams of carbohydrate, of which 6 grams are fiber. It has 2 grams of protein, too. There's a real learning curve to
cooking with coconut flour because of the super-high fiber content; the stuff sucks up moisture in baking recipes. But in this book, we primarily use it to flour poultry or fish, which is far less problematic. Around here, Bob's Red Mill brand coconut flour is pretty widely available; I've seen it in health food stores and regular grocery stores, both. If you can't find coconut flour in stores near you,
CarbSmart.com
and
Amazon.com
both carry it.

Coconut oil.
Long shunned because of its very high content of saturated fat, coconut oil has emerged as one of the healthiest fats you can use. I can now find it with the other oils at my local Kroger, or you can find it at health food stores and Asian markets. Whether your coconut oil smells and tastes like coconut depends on the brand; I've found that the expensive extra-virgin coconut oil has a coconut fragrance, while the inexpensive stuff is quite bland. Don't bother refrigerating coconut oil—because of its saturation it is extremely stable and won't go rancid on you.

Sriracha.
This is Southeast Asian hot sauce, and it's taking over the world—
Bon Appetit
magazine declared it The Ingredient of the Year. Find Sriracha in the international aisle of big grocery stores or in Asian markets—look for the bright-red sauce with the rooster on the bottle.

Erythritol.
This is one of the polyol or sugar alcohol sweeteners and the one I use most often. Unlike maltitol, which is widely used in commercial sugar-free sweets, erythritol has very little gastrointestinal effect. It also has the lowest absorption profile of all the sugar alcohols, so it has virtually no usable carbohydrate, while I generally count half a gram for maltitol. My local health food stores all carry erythritol, but again, you can buy it through
CarbSmart.com
or
Amazon.com
if you can't find it locally.

Granular Sucralose.
Since
15 Minute Low-Carb Recipes
was first published, sucralose, best known by the trade name Splenda, has gone off-patent. There are now dozens of knock-offs and store brands, and there's no reason not to use them instead of the name brand. Do look for one that measures cup-for-cup like sugar. Be wary of brown sugar blends and other sucralose blends; these have sugar in them. And remember that because of the malto-dextrin used to bulk it, granular sucralose has about 24 grams of carbohydrate per cup—the 0 carb figure is an artifact of the teeny serving size listed on the label.

Liquid Sucralose.
More and more I use liquid sucralose because it's carb-free. I use EZ Sweetz brand, which I buy in dropper bottles from
Amazon.com
; one drop is the equivalent of 2 teaspoons of sugar—or granular sucralose—in sweetness. I have also heard good things about Sweetzfree brand. If you buy liquid sucralose, read the label of whichever brand you buy to work out the equivalencies to sugar/granular sucralose.

Sugar-Free Coffee Flavoring Syrups.
I specify
coffee flavoring
not because they're only useful for flavoring coffee—indeed, some flavors, like pineapple, would be wretched in coffee. Rather, I want to differentiate these from stuff like sugar-free Hershey's Syrup or pancake syrup. I'm talking about the sort of syrups you would find in a fancy coffee shop—vanilla, caramel, hazelnut, etc. A modest collection of these syrups broadens your culinary horizons considerably, especially if you like smoothies. The most widely available brands are DaVinci, Torani, and Monin's—they're all good. If you can't find them locally, they're available online.

Tofu Shirataki.
Finally, there's a genuinely low carb noodle! Shirataki are a traditional Japanese noodle made from a root called kojac or
konyaku
, sometimes mistakenly translated
yam
or
yam bean
. The konjac root is a rich source of a fiber called glucomannan, and it is that glucomannan fiber that forms the bulk of shirataki noodles.

Shirataki come in two basic varieties.
There is traditional shirataki and tofu shirataki. Traditional shirataki are translucent and gelatinous and very . . . well, Asian. They're good in Asian dishes but pretty weird in Western-style recipes. Tofu shirataki are white, considerably less chewy, and good in a wide variety of applications. My local health food stores carry them in three widths: fettuccini, spaghetti, and angel hair. I keep the fettuccine and spaghetti widths on hand.

Shirataki come pre-hydrated in a pouch full of liquid.
This makes them perfect for our super-quick recipes because you don't have to cook them, only drain and heat them. Snip open the pouch and dump them in a strainer in the sink. You'll notice the liquid smells fishy; you'll want to rinse them. After that, I put them in a microwaveable bowl and give them 90 seconds on high. More liquid will cook out of them, so I drain them againand heat for another 90 seconds, drain yet a third time, and then add whatever sauce I like. This keeps the liquid cooking out of the noodles from diluting the sauce. Shirataki keep up to a year in the fridge, so feel free to stock up.

Glucomannan.
This is another finely-milled soluble fiber, similar to xanthan and guar. I've been using it a lot as a thickener this past year and like it a lot. It is available from
CarbSmart.com
or
Amazon.com
. Buy it in bulk, not in capsules, and use just like guar or xanthan. Like guar and xanthan, glucomannan will keep pretty much forever, so long as you keep it dry.

Actually, this is a misnomer—most of these egg dishes will take you well under 15 minutes!

Please, please don't think of eggs as being only for breakfast. Eggs are the ideal low-carb fast food at any time of day. They're cheap, they're tasty, they're nutritious, and they can be prepared in no time flat. With a carton of eggs in the refrigerator, you're never more than a few minutes away from a great meal!

We'll kick things off with omelets, the ultimate low-carb fast food. Once you know how to make an omelet, a whole world of fabulous, quick meals opens up to you.

You can learn this quickly. Really you can.

To start, you'll need a good pan. What's a “good pan”? I prefer a medium size skillet with a heavy bottom, sloping sides, and a nonstick surface. However, what I currently have is a 7-inch (18 cm) skillet with a heavy bottom, sloping sides, and a
formerly
nonstick surface. I can still make omelets in it, I just have to use a good shot of nonstick cooking spray. The heavy bottom and sloping sides, however, are essential.

Here's the really important thing to know about making omelets: The word “omelet” comes from a word meaning “to laminate,” or to build up layers. And that's exactly what you do—you let a layer of beaten egg cook, and then you lift up the edges and tip the pan so the raw egg runs under the cooked part. You do this all around the edges, of course, so you build it up evenly. The point is, you don't just let the beaten egg lie there in the skillet and wait for it to cook through; the bottom will be hopelessly overdone before the top is set.

So here's the start-to-finish omelet method:

1.
First, have your filling ready. If you're using vegetables, you'll want to sauté them first. If you're using cheese, have it grated or sliced and ready to go. If you're making an omelet to use up leftovers (a great idea, by the way), warm them through in the microwave and have them standing by.

2.
Spray your omelet pan well with nonstick spray if it doesn't have a good nonstick surface and put it over high heat. While the skillet's heating, grab your eggs (2 is the perfect number for this size pan, but 1 or 3 will work, too) and a bowl, crack the eggs, and beat them with a fork. Don't add any water or milk or anything, just mix them up.

3.
Test the heat of the pan. The pan is hot enough when a drop of water thrown in sizzles right away. Add a tablespoon of oil (15 ml) or butter (14 g), slosh it around to cover the bottom, and then pour in the eggs all at once. They should sizzle, too, and immediately start to set. When the bottom layer of egg is set around the edges—this should happen quite quickly—lift the edge using a spatula and tip the pan to let the raw egg flow underneath. Do this all around the edges until there's not enough raw egg to run.