Zucchini "pizza" slices

Oh my goodness, these were tasty!  They were the "light entree" at our meal with hearty grain and veggie side dishes, or I could see making these as snacks for the kids too (and yes, the kids ate them up!).  I can also imagine using other pizza toppings like mini pepperoni, sliced olives and other veggies as well as the tomatoes.

You could preroast the veggies and prep the "pizza" in advance and only have to do the final stage of baking at dinnertime.  You might need to bake a few minutes longer if you have a straight-from-the-fridge, cold, prepped baking sheet to get the cheese good and melty.

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Beef Roast & Beef Manhattan

Beef Manhattan is one of those looked-down-upon dishes because you typically see it in cafeterias and hospitals.  Really, it shouldn't be overlooked.  It's a great way to repurpose leftover roasted beef.  The first day after we have roasted beef, there's an excited flurry of roast beef sandwiches for lunch, then...it sits.  Beef Manhattan revives and reinterests the dinner-time audience ;)

If you don't want to use Russian dressing (because, really, it is a bizarre form of salad dressing that's far better suited to marinades than dressing salad IMHO), use an equal amount of ketchup with liberal dashes of salt, pepper and garlic powder with a splash of red wine vinegar.  If you do use Russian dressing but wonder what else to do with it, I recommend this freeze-ahead chicken dish.

To make the gravy for Beef Manhattan, I used a red wine reduction to happy up the stock.  If you'd prefer to skip the wine, use 1 tbsp tomato paste and brown it very well (5-ish minutes over medium heat without oil) in the saucepan instead.

If you're planning well in advance, you can make the gravy without the cooking juices from the beef and freeze it.  When you're ready to serve the second-round Beef Manhattan, thaw the gravy, warm it to bubbling, add the reserved juices and chopped beef and simmer until it's a good consistency.

You can serve Beef Manhattan over bread (white or whole wheat) or over mashed potatoes.  If you're looking for a lower-carb version, serve over pureed cauliflower.

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Philly Cheese Steak Stuffed Peppers

Total Pin Win!  The hubbie loved it, the kids liked it, it was awfully darn easy to make.  I saw this on Pinterest and here's how I did it...

If you want a "fuller" stuffed pepper, double the amount of corned beef, mushrooms or both.

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Lemon Turnips

Totally gratuitous butter shot...cuz butter is purty ;)

It's pretty easy in my opinion to come up with tasty ways to prep meat-based dishes ahead and freeze them for convenience.  Not so easy when it comes to vegetables.  So I'm on particular lookout for recipes that do work for vegetables in the freezer, like this one.

Turnips are maybe not everyone's favorite, but lemon butter makes everything delicious.  They do nicely in the freezer and are lower carb than potatoes.  They pack a good wallop of vitamin C and fiber, and even have a significant amount of calcium per serving.

If you want to do these as a freeze-ahead dish, you will need to basically prepare the turnips in advance and package them up for reheating.  You want to stop just short of fully cooking them so they don't get squishy.  I reheated mine as an oven packet while baking off Chicken Wellingtons, but they could get reheated on the stovetop if it's more convenient to your menu.

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Tuna Bean Salad

I don't like canned tuna.  It's one of those foods, like "potted meat" and pickled eggs, that just creep me out.  I do, however, LOVE a few recipes that use canned tuna.  This is one of them.

It's a shop-ahead recipe at heart...a can of corn, a can of beans, 2 cans of tuna, salad dressing and some cheese.  All live happily in the pantry or freezer for several months.  Fresh onions/scallions are optional if you're planning this as a "rescue" meal (you know those nights, when all other plans have fallen through and you just need *something* for dinner without going to the store or carrying in).  It's also a great meal to plan on nights when you don't know for sure that dinner at home will happen...if it doesn't, your ingredients will keep and not go to waste.

It's also a make-ahead recipe...in fact, it tastes better after blending overnight (and therefore is delicious as leftovers).  If you want to serve it immediately, you can do that too, and it takes about 5 minutes to put together.  This is also pretty inexpensive at less than $1 per serving for the filling when I buy the ingredients at normal grocery store prices and even cheaper when you strike good sales on canned goods or cheese.

I usually serve it as a sandwich, but you could also use it as a stuffed veggie filling...whole tomatoes, cucumber "boats", well-steamed eggplant halves, boiled whole onions or lightly steamed zucchini halves.  Hollow out the veggies (after cooking, if they need cooked) with a spoon and fill with the salad.  If you are low-carbing, you could substitute 1/2 cup of edamame (frozen, for shop-ahead planning) for the can of corn.  And thanks to the increasing availability of low-sodium or no-salt-added products, a meal made of canned goods doesn't need to carry a huge sodium tab.

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Doomsday Chicken and Peppers

Doomsday Chicken n Peppers with rice and bok choy salad

I misread a blog post title here and I can't get the idea of Doomsday Peppers out of my mind now LOL  Red, orange and yellow peppers are on big sale at my grocery store this week, so I am taking advantage!

Actually, if you had to throw together dinner quickly b/c the world was about to end, this might the recipe for you ;)  I'm prepping it ahead b/c I am doing Big Things later today but the prep is so quick that you could easily do this at the last minute without turning a hair.  You could freeze this as a kit as well since you cook the peppers and onions into a soft, chunky, peperonata sauce anyway so the fact that they loose their crisp in the freezer isn't an issue.

The red-yellow family of peppers is certainly attractive and highly nutritious with all those colors, but if you'd prefer, you certainly can use green peppers.  If you do have an abundance of inexpensive colored bell peppers available, you can roast them and freeze them in bulk or incorporate some of these recipes into your weekly menu:

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Spinach burgers with green bean casserole

I have new toys :D  I was gifted a new cookbook for Christmas that I've already marked about 2 dozen recipes in called Fresh from the Farmers Market.  It's a nice mix of single-ingredient and convenience-food recipes and many include directions for freeze-ahead and prep-ahead cooking.  Keep tuned for a possible giveaway of this book and more recipes from it ;) 

Tonight's dinner consists of two recipes from this book...spinach-ified burgers and Emmitt Smith's Green Beans.  I'm tweaking (as usual) to suit ingredients on hand and to create less work (most notably the grilled turkey burgers are baked pork burgers tonight).  Both are prep-ahead friendly; the burgers are freezer-friendly.  Together, the recipes come in under 500 calories per serving (yes, we are counting calories as a New Year's resolution...sigh). 

My husband declared these burgers his "favorite ever", and the green beans could totally sub in for a lower-calorie (but still very rich tasting) version of the usual holiday green bean casserole.

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Roasted spicy chickpeas

A tasty, low-fat snack to start your New Year's healthy eating resolutions off right!  I've made roasted chickpeas before following the South Beach Diet's recipe, but they're pretty darn bland and I can't get my husband or kids to eat them (for whose benefit they are made, after all!)

Beans are a pretty healthy snack that most people don't think of.  If you roast them, they'll hit the same crunchy texture points that chips and nuts do but with less fat...see below:

Per 1/4 cup        Roasted Chickpeas             Raw Almonds
Calories             75                                        135
Fat (g)               4.5                                        11
Carb (g)            10                                          5
Protein (g)         3                                           5
(calculated by myfitnesspal.com)

So I decided to try making roasted chickpeas like I do roasted nuts...tossed with a bit of oil and some kind of seasoning...and it turns out that they're pretty darn good this way!  I used homemade taco seasoning so they're salt-free, but you could use packaged seasoning mixes like ranch dressing, mixed minced fresh herbs or sweet spice mixes like pumpkin pie spice.

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Lower Carb Pumpkin Cheesecake Pie

I say "lower" carb b/c pumpkin naturally has a LOT of sugar, so it's hardly a sugar-free recipe.  But in making a couple of simple and tasty swaps, I got the total number of grams of carb from about 50g per slice to 14g per slice.



No deep dish pie plate?
Use a cake pan!

I haven't done anything really extraordinary here...just started with this delicious recipe from King Arthur Flour, made my State Fair Show-worthy nut crust and subbed in Splenda for sugar.  I did however learn a few interesting things in paying close attention to my ingredients. 

First of all, nuts are not carb-free.  They're not like double chocolate cake or anything, but there's enough there to pay attention to.  Pecans and walnuts contain about 3 or 4g of carb per 1/4 cup serving and almonds have twice that much, so I chose pecans for this pie. 

Also, if you get lower fat dairy products (like fat-free evaporated milk and 1/3 less fat cream cheese), they tend to have slighter higher amounts of carb than their full fat counterparts...no extra sugar is added to these products but the part of the milk they are made from naturally contains more sugar.


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Low-carb Bang Bang Shrimp 'n' Chicken

Taking a favorite dish and tweaking it for my family's dietary needs. 

The original of this dish comes from the Bonefish Grill restaurant chain.  The copycat recipe I've worked with for some years now is ridiculously easy to prepare and slap-yo-mama good.  But it's pretty high in carbs between the Sweet Chili Sauce in the dressing and the cornstarch coating on the shrimp (about 43 g carb v. 9g in my recipe, per calculations from SparkRecipes.com).  So I'm setting out to make it much more diabetic-friendly and making a variation to serve those who have food sensitivities to shrimp.

As much as I care about my family and want to cook as healthfully as possible for them, I must confess that what really kicked me into gear about revamping this recipe was how hard it is to find the blasted Sweet Chili Sauce.  I really didn't want to have to make a special trip to an international grocery store 15 miles away for this one ingredient.  Boy was I glad to find out that you can make it at home, and moreover that you can make it sugar-free.  Thank you interwebs and shesimmers.com (original recipe)! 

I didn't search exhaustively for almond flour to use as a low-carb cornstarch substitute, but I know it's out there.  I used whole raw almonds ground finely in the food processor.  The result was a more textural crunch-coat on the shrimp and chicken than what you'll get if you use a superfine starch like cornstarch or commercially milled almond flour.  It was still good, but be aware of the difference in the final dish.

Lastly, the best way to avoid cross-contamination for folks with food sensitivities is to not prepare the problem food in the first place.  BUT since shrimp was on our menu, I did all the chicken-handling before even touching the shrimp (well, actually my husband did all the protein-wrangling this time).  So the chicken got cut, dredged and fried before doing the same with the shrimp.  They were plated on separate serving platters and handled with separate cooking and serving utensils. 

Sorry the "final plate" picture is of leftovers, but you're lucky there's a picture at all since what you see is all that was left!

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Crockpot Grinders

Oh. My. Gawd. These are good.  All my favorite things...crockpot-friendly, prep-ahead and freezer-friendly and garlicky.

You can serve the grinders on toasted hoagie rolls and topped with cheese, sauteed peppers, onions and mushrooms.  Just layer everything up and broil a minute or two to melt the cheese.  Or for a lower carb serving idea, serve the sauce and sausage over cooked spaghetti squash, steamed cauliflower or braised cabbage.

This recipe makes either 1 really big batch, or 2 smaller batches.  Perfect for dinner tonight and 1 freezer kit, 2 freezer kits or dinner for a crowd.  There's a lot of sauce here, and leftover sauce can be frozen to repurpose as pizza sauce or pasta sauce.

Adapted from the Better Homes and Gardens Better Than Mom's Slow Cooker Recipes.


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Cinnamon Marinated Fish

Cinnamon is usually thought of as a sweet spice, but it has a savory side.  In the absence of sweeteners, cinnamon has a peppery smoky quality that pairs nicely with fish.  The cinnamon comes across more strongly in the aroma of the finished dish and is subtle in the flavor.

If you want to do a "taste-test" batch of cinnamon oil, use just 1 cinnamon stick and 1/2 cup of vegetable oil.  It will be enough for 2 or 3 marinades.  When you crush up the cinnamon sticks, just pound them in a plastic bag with a meat pounder until they look like mulch. 

It's tempting to buy cheapie spices for this or use cinnamon sticks that have been hanging around since last autumn's spiced cider kick, but the fresher and more strongly flavored the cinnamon is, the better the marinade will be.

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Piri Piri Chicken

This was meant to be a one-off recipe...some friends (thank you again, Jason and Michelle) had gifted us some homemade piri piri (a lightly spicy pepper and oil condiment) that I needed to use up.  I marinated 2 spatchcocked whole chickens in it, grilled one, roasted another, and thought I was done with that.  Well, it turned out to be the best chicken we had ever had, so I was obligated to get the piri piri recipe from our friends and make more. 

I can't vouch for freezer-stability of this recipe for more than 2 weeks...there's a pretty high concentration of acid in the piri piri marinade which could begin to have a negative effective on meat quality after some point (how long? I dunno), but I can attest to 2 weeks' worth of frozen marination resulting in uber-tasty results.

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Salsa V.

Despite looking like paper-covered green tomatoes, tomatillos are related to gooseberries, which probably still doesn't tell you much about them. Underneath the inedible papery husk, they are a bit sweet and tart all at once, rather like an unripe berry. They have the "green" flavor of a green tomato, but with a fruit-like acid tinge. And I caught my 18-month-old chomping on peeled tomatillos today like they were apples...there, does that help? 

I grow tomatillos in my garden for the express purpose of making salsa v.  One or two plants should do you, unless you REALLY like salsa v.  They tend to come in all at once (at least here in Zone 5B) which makes them ideal for this type of "putting up".  Rake in your whole harvest, make salsa and process...bing, bang, boom.  Any stragglers can go into late-summer fresh salsas.  This recipe scales up or down by the pound/pint, so you can make as little or as much as you want...the basic proportion for 1 pint of salsa v. is 1 lb. tomatillos, 1 jalapeno, 1 garlic clove, 1/2 onion, 1/2 tsp salt, 2-3 tbsp herbs.

Roasting the tomatillos before turning them into salsa gives a dimension of flavor not present with unroasted fruit.  You can sear them over a grill, under the broiler or on a cast-iron pan...or not at all, your choice.  Toss the dehusked fruits with a bit of oil, and give them a good 10-20 minutes of high direct  heat, until the skins are brown and the fruits are popping open.

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Caribbean Ratatouille

The South Beach cookbooks (whence the original recipe here comes) just say summer...lots of veggies, in all flavors and colors.  The OR for this dish calls for a variety of veggies that were pretty easy to locate in my grocery stores when I lived an hour away from South Beach...calabaza squash, chayote, green plantains...but which are hit-or-miss finds now that I live in the Corn Belt.  What follows is my Midwestern Caribbean Ratatouille which takes advantage of the current agricultural overlap in late summer and early fall produce.  It's full of color which means it's full of nutrients and vitamins...talk about cooking the rainbow!

This is a fast and light stew...goes together in less than 20 minutes once all the veg is chopped and the seasonings measured and sorted.  It *can* be frozen once it's cooked, but I think it loses a bit of its bright, fresh flavor.  It is perfect though for prepping ahead for same day or next day cooking.  Just chop all the veg, sort into containers, and combine the cooking liquid and seasonings for fast-fast dinner execution.

When you "peel" an acorn squash, don't sweat getting every last bit of peel off.  Once the squash is cooked, the peel will come away very easily from the squash meat.  Note: If you do use a green plantain instead of a green banana, start it with the squash and onion...they're more like potatoes than bananas when they're green and unripe.

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Pizza Meat Pie

Freezer kit

Another South Beach Diet cookbook adaptation.  This sounds so odd, but is so good.  If you think crust on pizza is a waste of stomach space (I know who you are LOL), this is the pizza pie for you. 

I elect to use oatmeal as a binder rather than the SBD-sanctioned whole wheat breadcrumbs since I grind up bread to make my own crumbs and sometimes I just feel lazy.  I also reduce the salt called for and use totally different toppings.  Use whatever toppings you like.

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Pork Rind Bean Patties

I've heard about using ground-up pork rinds as a low-carb substitute for breadcrumbs for some time, but have never tried it.  Until today.  I decided to try the bean patty recipe again and try making it more low-carb as beans are already right starchy little buggers.  The only significant differences I noticed were that the pork rind crumb coating was perfectly adequate in a single layer (as opposed to the crumb-egg-crumb double layer for breadcrumbs) and that the pork rind crumb coating didn't brown quite as dark as a breadcrumb coating. 

When you make these patties, whether you use breadcrumbs or pork rind crumbs, the mixture will be SOFT.  Don't add more crumbs to firm it up or you risk having dry, crumbly bean patties.  The right texture is like a soft cookie dough.  To make it easier to handle, refrigerate it for an hour or more before shaping.  Use a spoon to plop a blob of bean patty mixture into the crumbs, roll it around a little, then do the egg-wash and more crumb thing if you want.  Take a deep breath, it will be messy and that's ok. 

Making the crumbed patties and freezing them ahead makes them MUCH easier to fry, since you cook them from their rock-solid frozen state.  When you flip, use two spatulas...use one to gently lift the patty, and turn it onto the 2nd spatula held at about a 90-degree angle to the first, then lower the patty gently to the pan from the 2nd spatula.  It makes a much gentler turn than slamming the delicate patties a full 180 degrees with just one spatula.

One 6 oz. bag of pork rinds blitzed down in the food processor yielded about 2 1/2 cups of crumbs, just right for this recipe.  Don't add any extra salt as the pork rinds are already salted.

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Savoy Cabbage Rolls

The first time my parents went out of town and left my teenaged brother and I home alone for the night, I seized freedom with both hands and...cooked cabbage rolls.  What a rebel I was ;)  I have ever since had a soft spot for all sorts of cabbage rolls, as I mark that recipe as the first time I ever *really* planned and cooked a meal.

The original recipe comes from the behemoth European cookbook "The Silver Spoon", though I have experimented wildly with storage and delayed-cookery options, rewrote the recipe to use less weird measurements and upped the vegetable ante.  SS assumes that you will have time to prepare the leaves, prepare the filling, roll the rolls and cook them all at once.  Bwahahahahahaha!  I made the rolls and froze them individually, then cooked mine from the frozen state on the stovetop.  Turned out really well.  I'd guess that the crockpot will work just as well, though thawing the rolls first would make fitting them into the pot (on the stovetop or in the crockpot) easier.  You can also bake them in the oven, but that will take longer and you really will need to thaw them first. 

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Low carb, high protein snack foods

If I titled the post Tofu Jerky, would you have bothered to read?  Thought not.

It's been a bazillion years since I made this, and I forgot how much I actually like it.  Granted, you gotta like jerky in general.  But let me tell you, the kiddos are loving it...their gateway into the world of truck stop food :D  And it doesn't need refrigerated (which a lot of low-carb snack foods do).

The trick here is to press as much water out of the tofu as possible first so that it takes up as much marinade as possible.  That means this is a 3 step process (press, marinate, bake) and none of those steps are short ones.  So make a lot at once to make it worth your while.  Also, slice the tofu as thin as you can manage to get a better finished product and to shorten up the baking time...more thickness means more moisture means longer baking. 

If you have a food dehydrator, you can use that too instead of baking or Alton Brown had some kind of jerky-making set-up involving a box fan and an A/C filter that you can try, if you're so inclined.

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Grilled Zucchini Meatloaf

I'm taking a page from the South Beach cookbooks and using oatmeal as a binder in this meatloaf.  The old-fashioned oatmeal (not quick or instant) will absorb more liquid in the meatloaf, and you'll need less and get more fiber.  All good things for reducing glycemic impact.  In fact, the recipe is so low-carb, I feel at liberty to use a shmear of jalapeno jelly on top as a glaze, but feel free to skip the extra carbs/calories if you desire.

I'm experimenting with cooking this puppy on the grill (ETA: experiment was SUCCESSFUL!!), cuz it's that time of year, it keeps the kitchen cool and everything is better with a little smoky grill flavor (and I love hearing my 3yo say, "Looklooklook, Daddy cooking dinner OUTSIDE!").  I threw foil-wrapped potatoes on the grill at the same time as the meatloaf, and put sliced zucchini directly over the coals for the last 10 minutes of cooking for a complete grill meal.

This makes a LOT of meatloaf, so freeze extras ahead, cook for a crowd, give them as gifts, whatever.  With only egg in play, it's hard to scale down.  But if you REALLY wanted to, you could use 1 tbsp + 1 tsp of liquid egg substitute per loaf, or use 1 whole egg but add some more oatmeal to compensate for the extra liquid.

Frozen wine and tomato paste

I dip into my freezer stash for the tomato paste and red wine.  I freeze extra wine in ice cube trays, and leftover tomato paste in a small ziptop bag.  That way, I can cook with small amounts (as called for below) without having to crack a whole new bottle or can.

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