Chicken

Chicken is one of my main meat choices, for a bunch of reasons (cost, not super-greasy, try to avoid red meat due to kidney stones). Here’s some tips for it:

• Dark meat (chicken thighs) can be a nice change of pace from white meat… it’s more flavorful, and actually fatty (which is not a bad thing)
• I cook chicken in a pan sometimes, generally with an initial sear and the low and slow with the lid on (or open a bit to help shed some of the “15% added water” that much chicken has)
  • this is my favorite pan: nice and big with high sides, good lid, and that extra handle means I can carry it easily and rest it across the edges of the sink while it cools and when cleaning it. For all  non-stick pans: try not to introduce temperature variations to them, for example putting cold (or even “hot” water) into a hot pan; and never put them in the dishwasher, even if they claim to be dishwasher safe.
• My new favorite way to cook chicken (and just about everything else) is my Instant Pot, which is an electric pressure cooker/sauté pan/slow cooker/rice cooker etc. Here’s what I do for chicken:
  • start the sauté function
  • put in some oil
  • brown the chicken breasts on both sides, while adding spices (my faves: garlic salt, Montreal steak seasoning)
  • then pop the lid on and start the Poultry program, and add 5 extra minutes to it with the plus button (because I like my chicken fall-apart tender).
  • I will often just let it go overnight, as the Instant Pot automatically goes into keep-warm mode for up to 10 hours when finished.
  • Then I remove it and slice it (for entrees or grab-snacks) or dice it (for salads); a large cutting board with juice grooves is an essential part of my kitchen.
  • There will be some water/juice/spices left in the pot, and I often pour most or all of this over the chicken, because the cooked chicken will naturally dry up when cooling down, and that added liquid is flavorful and helps keep the chicken moist.

One of my main meals: salad

I didn’t used to like salad very much, but then I realized: I don’t like iceberg lettuce at all, and Romaine lettuce only a little better. Now my salads are based on either baby spinach, or spring mix, or something other that’s more interesting.

Because I like my food well-distributed*, I usually start by cutting it smaller with a couple butter knives; if you do this after it’s all assembled, it can help mix everything together, too.

Dressings: there’s lots of good salad dressing out there, and on this eating plan you can get what you want as long as it’s low carb (my threshold is 2 grams of carbs or less per two tablespoons). Some of my favorites are:

• Balsamic vinaigrette: this is one of the few sweet-tasting dressings** with low carbs
• Caesar
• Ranch: and there’s some nice variations: bacon, 3-cheese, spicy, etc.
• Olive oil & vinegar

I am lucky to have a good cafeteria at work with a *great* salad bar, so I’ve accepted that on low-carb days I’ll be spending 6 bucks on lunch, and I choose my items carefully. Remember that when you’re eating from a salad bar you don’t actually have to have any lettuce if you don’t feel it that day… I’ll sometimes just get meat, cheese, red onion, a few seeds or beans, and top it with one of the aforementioned low-carb dressings. Pro tip: you can get enough make two meals out of it, especially if your eatery charges by the container as mine does. Eating less at lunch might help you stay awake better in the afternoon, too.

 

*  I like my food better when I get some of everything in each bite. I detest poorly-made burritos where one bit is all rice, another is all beans, etc. And what’s the deal with croutons? When did we decide that croutons were to be the size of Volkswagens? I remember the days when they were small cubes of carb-goodness that would gracefully top a salad, and weren’t cubist absurdities that make the room shake when you accidentally drop one on the floor.

 

** I’ll talk more about this stuff in a future post, but you can make any dressing sweeter by adding Stevia, which is a blood-sugar-friendly sweetener that’s available in packets, or in bulk for cooking/baking. I like to try different condiments, and I recently bought some shawarma sauce that was just to tart, so I added in two packets of Stevia and shook it up good, and it’s much better now.

 

Low-carb literally cheese pizza

One of my favorite things to make is low-carb pizza. Like regular pizza, they’re great cold, or warmed up in the microwave, or hot out of the oven.

Ingredients:

• 2 cups cheese (mozzarella, Parmesan, sharp cheddar, whatever you like)
• 1 egg
• Spices (I like Mrs. Dash, garlic salt, Pizza and Pasta Magic, red pepper flakes, in combinations thereof)
• ½ cup chopped Veggies (I like red onion and mushroom, gonna try green pepper)

How-to:

1. Preheat oven to 350
2. Mix everything above
3. Put a silicone baking mat on a baking pan or cookie sheet (seriously, those things are great, and nothing else will work as well in my opinion)
4. Spoon the mixture onto the baking sheet into one big lump (if you want to make slices later), or as I prefer, smaller piles, for single hand-friendly little pizzas
5. Bake for 18-22 minutes, longer is crunchier edges, which is a good thing
6. Let cool several minutes before you remove them from the pan… I layer them with quarter-sheets of paper towels to keep them from being so greasy

I’ll splash a little hot sauce on them if I didn’t put enough spices in.

 

 

Spice it up

One of my favorite condiments is the zero-carb Cholula, which is more flavorful than hot, and has the posh wood-ball top.
Cholula Hot Sauce
Zero carbs

Ingredients:
Water, Peppers (Arbol And Piquin), Salt, Vinegar, Spices And Xanthan Gum.

Sweet beverage

It only takes a bit of reading to find that soda, diet soda, and fruit juice drinks are not very good for you. I've tried to like flavored seltzer water, but it just isn't flavorful enough. Luckily I found out about the sweetener Stevia, which can actually help improve the blood glucose levels of diabetics, and is good and sweet, and inexpensive to make:
Crystal Light Pure drink mix
Less than 8 carbs per two quarts, at least in my favorite flavor here (there are other flavors, and smaller packets meant to flavor up a single bottle of water):

Ingredients:
Sugar, Citric Acid, Malic Acid, Stevia Leaf Extract (Sweetener), Sodium Citrate, Maltodextrin, Contains Less Than 2% Of Natural Flavor, Magnesium Oxide, Black Carrot Extract (For Color), Kiwi Juice Concentrate.

Hard boiled eggs

Eggs are a great source of no-carb food, and hard-boiled eggs are made especially easy in an Instant Pot (the process that works for me). But I can't eat them plain, and they're only slightly better with salt and pepper, and I usually don't have time to make deviled eggs... so I slice them in half and use one of my favorite condiments and salt/pepper to dress them up, usually eating them over the sink before I leave to do something.
Horseradish sauce:
Less than 1 gram carbs per teaspoon.

Ingredients:
Soybean Oil, Water, Corn Syrup, Vinegar, Egg Yolks, Modified Corn Starch, Horseradish, Salt, Artificial Flavoring, Potassium Sorbate (A Preservative), Xanthan Gum, Calcium Disodium Edta Added To Protect Flavor.