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Low Carb Chicken Tenders

August 21, 2018 by Michele Neylon Leave a Comment

Over the weekend I dropped into my favourite local butcher and picked up some bits and pieces, including the pork that I used for making the pork schnitzels. While I was there I got some chicken breast, but I didn’t have any firm plans for it. This evening I didn’t feel like doing anything terribly elaborate, so I thought I’d try my hand at doing low carb chicken tenders. If you can do schnitzels using almond flour, why not other “breaded” meats and poultry?

Chicken tenders are basically just strips of chicken in a bread. Once they’re breaded you can either fry them, deep fry them or, as I did, do them in the oven.

If you want super mild, yet tasty, you could simply use some herbs and a bit of salt and pepper, but if you want to give them a bit more “kick” there’s no end to the combinations of herbs and herb mixes you can use.

Low Carb Chicken Tenders

A simple low carb take on comfort food

Course Dinner, Snack

Cuisine American, International, Low carb

Keyword almond flour, chicken

Prep Time 5 minutes

Cook Time 25 minutes

Total Time 30 minutes

Servings 2

Calories 300 kcal

Ingredients

50 g Almond flour You might need more
1 medium egg
2 tbsp Cajun spice mix or mixed herbs with cayenne pepper
2 breasts chicken
1 tsp salt
1 tsp ground black pepper

Instructions

Heat the oven to 180 degrees C
Slice the chicken breast into strips. Relatively thin strips are better.
Beat the egg in a bowl
Mix the herbs and other seasoning together with the almond flour in another bowl or plate.
Dip each chicken piece in the egg and make sure it's well covered, then transfer it to the dip with the herbs and flour. Coat each piece of chicken well. Transfer the dipped chicken pieces to a baking tray which you've either lined or greased.
When the oven is ready transfer the prepared chicken to it. Cook the chicken for 20 - 25 minutes. The chicken pieces should be turned at least once.
Serve with your favourite dip or with a bit of salad.
Enjoy!

And no, you can’t really taste the almond! If you’re completely new to low carb cooking then you might notice a slight difference in the taste compared to more “traditional” flour mixes, but I don’t think it’s noticeable.

Kitchen Gadget: Stylish Handheld Spiralizer

August 20, 2018 by Michele Neylon Leave a Comment

I’ll freely admit that I can be a little bit addicted to kitchen gadgets, but my addiction is more under control now that it was.. honest!

I know I sound like a broken record, but not having pasta has been one of the more annoying and painful aspects of switching to a low carb diet. The bean based “pasta” is edible, but I’d always quite liked the taste of spiralized vegetables aka courgetti.

I’d had several spiralizers over the last couple of years. The tabletop one was a disaster (for me) and the handheld one I’d been using was a pain to use and even more of a pain to clean.

The guys at Joseph Joseph have an excellent track record in producing practical kitchen and household gadgets that look great and work. Price-wise they aren’t the cheapest, but you’ll often find their products at reasonable prices if you shop around a little.

Their take on the spiralizer is excellent. It looks well, it doesn’t take up a lot of space and using it is very easy.

It comes with three different blades:

coarse
fine
grater

The coarse one works well for doing courgetti. The “fine” blade would probably work best for shredding vegetables for a salad or similar, while the grater is meant to be for doing carrots etc., in tiny bits. I’ll freely admit the only attachment I’ve been using is the “coarse” one, but it works well so I don’t need anything else!

You can see it in action in their video:

I’ve used it several times over the last few days and it has won me over for three reasons:

It’s very easy to use. Other handheld spiralizers were hard work to use and didn’t work that well. This one works really well
It’s very easy to wash after use. This for me is key. I’ve got some kitchen gadgets that I’d love to use more often, but cleaning them after use is such a pain that I tend to avoid them
The little hopper thing means that you don’t end up with stuff spilling all over the place AND you can also use it at whatever angle you like (within reason)

Once you’ve spiralized the vegetables, which in my case is most often courgette, it’s just a matter of sautéing them a little before serving with the pasta sauce I’ve made.

Overall I’m really happy with it.

Low Carb Pork Schnitzels

August 19, 2018 by Michele Neylon 1 Comment

When you’re trying to stick to a low carb diet anything with bread or bread crumbs is off the menu. So when you’re perusing the shelves in your local supermarket you cannot simply pick up a pack of chicken or whatever in any kind of bread crumbs. That won’t work. However there is absolutely nothing to stop you from making your own, though using low carb ingredients.

Pork schnitzels are simple yet tasty. The traditional recipe uses bread crumbs, but it’s super easy to swap that out for almond flour or ground almonds (which is practically the same thing).

low carb pork schnitzels with almond flour

All you need are a few pork boneless pork chops, eggs, seasoning and almond flour.

My local butcher not only had the pork chops, but was able to remove the excess fat as well as pounding the meat for me, so that it was a thinner and more suitable for schnitzels. Yet another reason why shopping at a local butcher is always a good idea!

So how do you make them?

It’s incredibly easy.

Beat an egg or two in a shallow bowl or plate – you’ll be using this to dip the meat into.

In another bowl or plate mix about 100 grams or a couple of tablespoons of almond flour with your seasoning (salt, pepper and sage seems to work well)

Dip the meat in the egg, then coat in the almond flour mix and then simply fry it. Repeat for each schnitzel.

Fry the meat on a medium flame and make sure to turn them from time to time. Just make sure they’re cooked all the way through.

Serve with some lemon.

I also did some cauliflower mash to go with mine, which turned out very well.

Baking Low Carb Bread

August 12, 2018 by Michele Neylon Leave a Comment

While I like cooking in general I’ve never done much with baking bread. I was very good at eating bread, but I’d never made my own. I think I might have made an attempt years ago, but I don’t think it was a success.

When you’re avoiding carbs and trying to stick to a low carb diet bread is off the menu. Normal bread is very high in carbs, so there’s simply no way to eat it without breaking the basic rules of the diet.

But there are low carb versions of many bread based foods, so you can, for example, get low carb wraps and even loaves of bread, though they’re pretty expensive. So making your own is probably the best solution.

As somebody who has very little confidence in my ability to make bread I needed a recipe that was pretty much idiot proof. This one from Ditch the Carbs ticked all the boxes for me. It has a handful of ingredients and is super simple to make. You just measure out the dry ingredients into a mixing bowl, mix them, add the wet ones and bake it.

You can see a couple of photos of my first attempt below:

It came out pretty well. The only issue I ran into was that I didn’t have any greaseproof paper to line the baking tin. However as the tin I used is non-stick I was able to extricate the final product from the tin without too much difficulty.

I had to try it pretty much immediately, so I went for a bit of butter just to see how it was and I was not disappointed!

I’ll admit I sort of demolished most of that loaf yesterday evening as it was both really tasty and also a culinary achievement for me having never been any good at baking bread.

Most of the ingredients for this low carb bread or variants are readily available in any supermarket. The only exception being psyllium husk which you can get in larger supermarkets, health shops or online. I couldn’t find it locally here in Carlow, so ended up getting it online.

I’ll definitely be making this bread again now that I’ve got over my initial fear of baking! It’s handy to have a low carb bread for things like paté, cold cuts etc., Also if you have visitors who aren’t on a low carb diet they sort of expect you to have bread in the cupboards, so this solves that for you too.

Spice up Your Water Bottle

July 28, 2018 by Michele Neylon 1 Comment

Whether it’s for weight loss or just for general health drinking water is beneficial. Most of us probably don’t drink enough water and we probably aren’t properly hydrated most of the time. I know I didn’t for a long time. Sure, I would drink copious quantities of liquids, but I wasn’t drinking water by itself a lot of the time. If I was dining out I’d drink plenty, but up until quite recently I wasn’t in the habit of drinking water throughout the day. Sure, I was drinking enough, but it wasn’t really a natural habit up until quite recently.

In the office we have water coolers that dispense mineral water so I’ve no excuse. So these days I usually have a glass of water on my desk alongside my mug of coffee.

So what about water?

Recently Twinings, who are best known for their teas, launched a new range of products aimed at adding a little bit of flavour to your water. They call them “Cold Infuse” and the concept is really simple, yet brilliant. You basically drop a bag of the infusion into your water bottle and give it a little shake. The infusion adds a bit of flavour to the water and before you know it you’ve probably developed a mild addiction 🙂 Okay – “addiction” is probably a loaded term, but the infusions definitely make the water a lot more interesting, so I’ve found myself drinking quite a bit more than I had previously.

Here’s a short video that explains how it works:

They’re sugar free, caffeine free and just damn tasty!

I got their “starter kit” a couple of weeks ago and since then I took the plunge and got the full range of flavours:

Watermelon, strawberry & Mint
Passionfruit, Mango & Blood Orange
Blueberry Apple and Blackcurrant
Rose Lemonade
Lemon, Orange & Ginger
Coconut, Pineapple & Green Tea

I’ve found that you can usually get three or four bottle per infusion bag, though if you want a stronger taste you might get less. I still haven’t decided which flavour is my favourite and to be honest I haven’t really disliked any of them.

You can get them directly from Twinings or via Amazon.

Obeo Need Your Support

July 28, 2018 by Michele Neylon Leave a Comment

I’ve mentioned Obeo a few times in the past. They’re an Irish company that produces organic waste bags. Unlike the standard biodegradable bags that you’d put in a kitchen food waste caddy, the Obeo bags replace the bin completely. So instead of having to deal with the messy and smelly bin you simply dump the entire thing into your brown bin.

Unfortunately a couple of months ago the business came under pressure and they decided to stop trading:

When I got that email I, along with quite a few other people apparently, were quite shocked and disappointed, as we thought the product was really good.

Fast forward a few weeks and the Obeo team decided to pivot their business a bit and to raise some cash by getting commitments from people for annual subscriptions. Note they’re not taking any money from anyone, they’re simply asking people if they’d commit to an annual subscription and if people do pay upfront they’ll get a full refund if the campaign goal isn’t reached.

You can read more about what they’re trying to do here.

My take:

Obeo is a very nice product. It solves a problem, which is what products should do.

The company behind the product is very small and they had done very well with their product being carried in some major supermarkets. Reading between the lines I suspect the production costs combined with having to extend credit terms to some of these shops might have combined to cause them the issues they ended up with. By switching to “online only” they should be able to keep going and potentially expand over time.
I wish them the best of luck

Disclosure: Much as I love the product I cannot commit to the subscription myself, as I simply do not produce enough organic waste – mainly because I travel quite a bit over the year. I’ve always bought Obeo in batches but I never subscribed.

Low Carb Pasta (Sort of)

July 24, 2018 by Michele Neylon 4 Comments

When you’re on a low carb diet there are a number of foods that are simply not on the menu. Pasta is a prime example. And that really hurts!

You can, of course, replace pasta with spiralized vegetables. So, instead of spaghetti you can serve that tasty pasta sauce with courgetti.

But what if you just want pasta? Or something with similar consistency to the pasta that used to be a staple of your cooking?

There are a few products that you can get that are low carb versions of pasta and other things that ordinarily wouldn’t be compatible with a low carb diet. Unfortunately they’re not readily available in supermarkets near where I live.

However for the last couple of months Aldi has been stocking a number of “alternative” pastas, which are aimed at the gluten free market. They are, however, all low carb, so they’re a very good substitute.

It’d be great if these were stocked with the “normal” pasta and other products, but for now at least they’re available, even if they’re in the “special buy” sections.

So what are they like?

I’ve tried most of them over the last couple of months and overall I think they’re pretty good. Sure the taste isn’t exactly the same as pasta and the consistency is a little different, but if you’re yearning for a pasta dish and want to stick to your low carb regime they’re a viable option.

In terms of preparation they’re basically the same as pasta. Boil water, add salt if you want and chuck the “spaghetti” in and let it cook for about 4 minutes. Drain and serve.

The one thing you will find, however, is that the spaghetti is both a lot shorter than normal spaghetti and also quite a bit more brittle, so you can easily end up with broken bits – though that obviously doesn’t impact the taste. Their consistency is also a little odd so when you’re trying to weigh out the right amount it can be a bit of a struggle getting them out of the pack without pulling out the entire packet’s contents at once.

Verdict? They’re perfectly edible and as long as I can get them easily in Aldi I’ll be able to add “pasta” back to my menu, which is very welcome indeed!

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Low Carb Chicken Tenders

Ingredients

Instructions

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