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Why the Blogging Hiatus?

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Giant see through clock face

I haven’t been writing as often on this blog as I’d like.

Why?

There’s probably more than one reason for that:

  • I don’t write simply for the sake of it, so unless I feel I have something to say I’ll keep quiet
  • I’ve been very busy. Simple. I used to burn the proverbial candle at both ends a LOT, but I try to not “work” in the evenings these days.
  • I haven’t been as good at sticking to the diet recently as I’d like, so I’ve been avoiding thinking about it

Will any of this change?

Probably, but I’m not going to make any insane commitments.

I should write more often, but as I already said I’m not going to simply for the sake of it.

Over the last few months I’ve fallen off the bandwagon quite a bit. Put another way, I’ve been quite badly behaved. That’s partially due to my travel schedule and partially down to me being lazy and lacking motivation. When I look at how well other people I know have been doing I don’t feel motivated, though I am happy for them.

Now I need to work out how to get myself freshly motivated!

Roast Cauliflower Makes for a Tasty Side

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When you’re avoiding carbs you can easily fall into the trap of finding one or two sides that “work” and you end up sticking to them. Essentially that means that you end up eating them again and again and again. I was a bit like that with the cauliflower mash.

I think I’ve found another side dish which is just as tasty and super simple to make: roast cauliflower.

I came across the recipe when I was trying to make Indian butter chicken recently. While the butter chicken worked out pretty well (and even better since I’ve started cooking with ghee) the side dish was a revelation. Here was a simple way of cooking cauliflower that I could easily use instead of rice or potatoes with a bunch of different dishes. Obviously the original recipe uses a very Indian style of seasoning, but with a bit of tweaking it wouldn’t take much to convert that into a side dish that would work well with a big range of main courses.

I’ve tried making it with both butter and ghee and it would work well with oil – the main thing to keep an eye on is the oven temperature, as burnt cauliflower isn’t that tasty!

MyFitnessPal Adds Alexa “Skill”

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In common with a lot of people I’ve got a MyFitnessPal account. I’ve been a user for several years, though I go through phases with it. Sure, I can login to it daily, but I don’t log all my food and water using it a lot of the time. I will some of the time, but I tend to forget and then it’s too late, so I don’t.

A couple of weeks back MyFitnessPal announced that they’ve created an Alexa “skill”. I was curious to see what it could do so here’s the overview.

For now the skill is only available to users with an Alexa account in the US. So if you’re in Ireland or the UK you cannot enable it. I reached out to them to find out when they plan to add support for Ireland and UK users and the response I got back was non-committal:

Since we just recently rolled out the feature, we’re still working on getting it out worldwide. Unfortunately we weren’t able roll it out internationally when we first launched it.

If you are able to use the skill with your Alexa powered device it’s called “MyFitnessPal Lite” and it offers some basic features for now.

You can log water intake, log your weight and check your diary stats.

You cannot log food, which is really what I suspect a lot of users would want to do with it.

Here’s the command overview:

To log water, you can say:
Alexa, tell MyFitnessPal to log water.
Alexa, tell MyFitnessPal to log 3 cups of water
To log weight, you can say:
Alexa, tell MyFitnessPal to log my weight.
Alexa, tell MyFitnessPal to log my weight of 170 pounds.
To check your diary stats, you can say:
Alexa, ask MyFitnessPal how am I doing today?
Alexa, ask MyFitnessPal for my diary summary.
Alexa, ask MyFitnessPal how many steps have I taken today?
Alexa, ask MyFitnessPal how much water did I drink today?
Alexa, ask MyFitnessPal how many calories have I consumed for today?
To get started, ask Alexa to open MyFitnessPal. You can say:
Alexa, open MyFitnessPal.
Alexa, ask MyFitnessPal.
Alexa, launch MyFitnessPal.

Source: Amazon

Being able to use an Alexa device to log or get feedback on your weight loss or general fitness progress makes sense, so I’d hope they’ll roll out more features AND make it available for those of us outside the US!

More Low Carb Baking

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Once you get over the initial fear or general unease with baking then it becomes a lot easier. So after baking low carb bread a couple of times I thought it was time to try out some other recipes.

One I had spotted that caught my eye was this one for bread buns. It looked quite simple and apart from separating the eggs, which is not something I’ve ever had success doing, it seemed like I’d be able manage it.

To deal with separating the eggs I got an actual egg separator. The KitchenCraft one was cheap and functional.

Yes I know I am a little addicted to kitchen gadgets and some of the stuff I’ve bought over the years is pointless. I’ll admit that. But in the case of the egg separator I feel like it’ll get some usage. You simply break the egg into it and then let gravity do the work. You can of course encourage it a little, but it’s a lot less messy than trying to separate eggs manually.

Anyway ..

The recipe for the bread buns was pretty simple. So I made a batch yesterday. I had to extend the baking time a little bit but apart from that I stuck to the instructions.

The final product worked out pretty well and goes well with a bit of butter

Poached Eggs With Low Carb Bread

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When I’m at home I generally stick pretty closely to a low carb diet. I like eggs for breakfast, but I’ve never liked poached eggs without bread. They just don’t “work” without some kind of bread to soak them up. Of course unless you have low carb bread that becomes a bit of a “catch 22”.

At the weekend I got to spend a bit of time in the kitchen and baked some low carb bread. It worked out very well, though I realise that I probably should have made more!

Bread with a little butter and poached eggs makes for a simple, yet very tasty breakfast. I’ve had it the last couple of mornings, but will have to bake more bread if I want it again tomorrow!

There’s no reason to completely forego the tasty experience of eating carbs while still avoiding them 🙂

Low Carb Easter Eggs

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It’s that time of the year when the shops fill their shelves with Easter eggs.

If you’re on a low carb diet, however, it’s impossible to be loyal to your diet and indulge in “normal” easter eggs.

Sure you can have *some* chocolate when you’re on a low carb diet, but you need to choose chocolates that are way higher in cocoa solids than the average. So you need to be looking for chocolates with 70% or more cocoa solids. Of course the more cocoa solids in the bar the more bitter it’ll be. Anything above about 80% is going to be really really bitter in my experience and while it’s fine to use it to cook with it’s quite hard to eat it.

However there are places where you can get easter eggs that are designed to be low carb or even keto friendly.

From my research, which is far from comprehensive, there seem to be two if not three paths you can go down:

  • very high cocoa solids, which will mean the carb count will be very low, but the taste is going to be really bitter
  • something with alternative ingredients, so the taste should be more palatable overall
  • cheat a little and opt for chocolates that are fairly high in cocoa solids, but aren’t as bitter. The downside to that will be that the carb count will be higher than you’d normally take..

So what is out there?

A UK company is producing a 100% cocoa solids egg. Yes, that does exist!

The “absolute black” egg is made without dairy products, sugar or anything else other than cocoa solids.

Here’s the breakdown in terms of carbs etc:

Full details on their site here.

CiaoCarb make a chocolate egg that uses a combination of ingredients but ends up with about 8g carbs per 100g, so similar to our 100% cocoa solids version, though probably a lot less bitter.

I’m not sure which Irish sites, if any, sell the CiaoCarb, but it’s available via Amazon UK.

If anyone comes across other low carb options let me know via the comments!

The Meatloaf Experiment

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Sometimes you get an urge for a particular dish. With me it was meatloaf. I got it into my head that I had to have it, but of course I wanted it to be low carb.

There are several excellent recipes for meatloaf that is compatible with a low carb diet – you don’t need to go very far to find them!

In my case I adapted a recipe from Ditch the Carbs, which is one of my “go to” low carb recipe sites.

My local supermarket didn’t have any pork mince, so I made my meatloaf with a combination of mince beef and mince turkey meat. Also as I was only cooking for myself I reduced the quantities quite a bit, though I did keep two eggs, as I felt that the mix needed them.

Also in order to make the mix into a loaf shape I used a silicone loaf mold pan.

Here’s a couple of shots to show how well it turned out:

meatloaf low carb covered with bacon
The meatloaf on its way into the oven

The cooking time of about 50 minutes was fine, but I reduced the temperature about half-way through cooking to around 150 degrees centigrade, as I was concerned that the bacon would get burnt.

Low carb meatloaf covered in bacon
Low carb meatloaf covered in bacon

I put a grated carrot in the meat mix as well as some grated cheese. The end result, pictured above, was fantastic. I served it with some cauliflower mash, though it’d have been as good with any number of vegetables or low carb rices.

I’ll definitely be making this again!