500 Low-Carb Recipes: 500 Recipes, from Snacks to Dessert, That the Whole Family Will Love

845 Pages·2002·3.24 MB·English

by  Dana Carpender

500
LOW-CARB
RECIPES
Dana Carpender

To my husband, Eric Schmitz,
who has unfailingly helped me,
supported me, and believed in me.
I couldn’t have done it without you.
I love you with all my heart.
And to the readers of my Internet newsletter,
Lowcarbezine! You have taught me how
much enthusiasm, humor, intelligence,
caring, and love can come through
a fiber-optic cable. You have also taught me my job.
This book is for you, and for low-carbers everywhere.

CONTENTS
Introduction: Welcome to Low-Carbohydrate Variety!
CHAPTER 1 Ingredients You Need To Know About
CHAPTER 2 Hors D’oeuvres, Snacks, and Party Nibbles
CHAPTER 3 Eggs and Dairy
CHAPTER 4 Breads, Muffins, Cereals, and Other Grainy Things
CHAPTER 5 Hot Vegetable Dishes
CHAPTER 6 Side Dish Salads
CHAPTER 7 Chicken and Turkey
CHAPTER 8 Fish
CHAPTER 9 Beef
CHAPTER 10 Pork and Lamb
CHAPTER 11 Main Dish Salads
CHAPTER 12 Soups
CHAPTER 13 Condiments, Seasonings, and Sauces
CHAPTER 14 Cookies, Cakes, and Other Sweets
A Refresher on Measurements
Acknowledgments
Index

Welcome to Low-Carbohydrate Variety!
W
hat’s the hardest thing about your low-carb diet? And what’s the most
common reason that people abandon their low-carb way of eating and all the
health benefits and weight loss that come with it?
Boredom. People just plain get bored. After a few weeks of scrambled eggs and
bacon for breakfast, a hamburger with no bun for lunch, and a steak—no baked
potato—for dinner, day after day, people get fed up and quit. They just can’t
face a life of food monotony. Sound familiar?
If you’ve been getting bored with your low-carb diet, this is the book for you.
You’ll find dozens of exciting ways to vary a hamburger, a steak, pork chops,
chicken, and even fish. You’ll find a wide variety of side dishes and salads.
You’ll find snacks and party foods that you can eat without feeling like you’re
depriving yourself. You’ll even find recipes for bread—really, truly bread—not
to mention muffins, waffles, pancakes, and granola. In short, this book has
recipes for all sorts of things you never dreamed you could have on a low-carb
diet.
Did I come up with these recipes for you? Heck, no! I came up with these
recipes for me.
Who am I? I’m a person who, through circumstances that surely could have
happened to anyone, has spent the past several years writing about low-
carbohydrate dieting. In fact, I spent so much time answering questions for the
curious that I finally wrote a book, How I Gave Up My Low Fat Diet and Lost
Forty Pounds! To supplement the book, I started an “e-zine”—an Internet
newsletter—for low-carb dieters, called Lowcarbezine! So for the past few years,
through the wonders of the Internet, I’ve been writing and developing recipes for
a growing audience of low-carb dieters around the world.
I’ve always loved to cook, and I’ve always been good at it. My friends long ago
dubbed me “The God of Food.” So when low-fat, high-carb mania hit in the
1980s, I learned how to make a killer low-fat fettuccine Alfredo, curried chicken
and mixed grain pilau, black beans and rice, blue corn pancakes, low-fat
cheesecake, you name it.
And I got fat. Really fat. And sick. And tired. Thank heavens, in 1995 I got
smart and tried going low carb, instead. Within two days my energy levels
skyrocketed and my clothes were looser. It was overwhelmingly clear that this
was the way my body wanted to be fed and that this was the way of eating that
would make me well. I had set my foot upon a path from which there was no
turning back; I was low carb for life.
The only thing that nearly derailed me was a terrible sense of Kitchen
Disorientation. I had to discard the vast majority of my recipes when I dropped
the grains, beans, potatoes, and sugar from my diet. For the very first time in my
life, I’d walk into my kitchen and have no idea what to cook—and I had always
known what to cook and how to put together a menu. It really was pretty scary,
and it certainly was depressing. But I set out to become as good a low-carb cook
as I had been a low-fat cook.
Seven years later, my mission has been accomplished, and then some! What you
hold in your hands is the end result of years and years of trial and error, of
learning what works and what doesn’t, of experimenting to find out which
substitutes are yummy and which are just plain lame.
This is not, for the most part, a gourmet cookbook, which means that the recipes
you find here are recipes you’ll actually use. You’ll find a lot of fairly simple
recipes and a few more complex ones for special occasions. There’s lots of
family fare here—pork chops and meat loaf, burgers and chicken. You’ll find
lots of meals you can cook on the stove top in a simple skillet and plenty of
salads you can make ahead and stash in the refrigerator, ready to be pulled out
and served when you dash in the door at a quarter-to-dinnertime. You’ll find
many one-dish meals that are protein and vegetables combined, from main dish
salads to thick, hearty soups to casseroles. You’ll also find ethnic flavors from
around the world right alongside comfort foods you won’t believe are low carb!
Why Is There Such a Wide Range of Carb Counts in the Recipes
in This Book?
If carbs are your problem, then they’re going to be your problem tomorrow, and
next week, and next year, and when you’re old and gray. If you hope to keep
your weight off, you cannot think in terms of going on a low-carb diet, losing
your weight, and then going off your diet—you’ll gain back every ounce, just as
sure as you’re born. You’ll also go back to blood-sugar swings, energy crashes,
and nagging, insatiable hunger, not to mention all the health risks of
hyperinsulinemia. In short, you are in this for life.
So if you are to have any hope of doing this forever—and at this writing, I’ve
been doing this for going on seven years—you’re going to need to enjoy what
you eat. You’re going to need variety, flavor, color, and interest. You’re going to
need festive dishes, easy dishes, and comfort foods—a whole world of things to
eat. You’re going to need a cuisine.
Because of this, I have included everything from very low-carb dishes, suitable
for folks in the early, very low-carb “induction” stage of their diet, to “splurge”
dishes, which would probably make most of us gain weight if we ate them every
day but which still have far fewer carbs than their “normal” counterparts.
There’s another reason for the range of carb counts: Carbohydrate intolerance
comes in degrees, and different people can tolerate different daily carbohydrate
intakes. Some of you, no doubt, need to stay in that 20-grams-a-day-or-less
range, whereas many others—lucky souls—can have as much as 90 to 100
grams a day and stay slim. This cookbook is meant to serve you all.
Only you can know, through trial and error, how many grams of carbs you can
eat in a day and still lose weight. It is up to you to pick and choose among the
recipes in this book while keeping an eye on the carbohydrate counts provided.
That way, you can put together menus that will please your palate and your
family while staying below that critical carb level.
However, I do have this to say: Always, always, always the heart and soul of
your low-carbohydrate diet should be meat, fish, poultry, eggs, healthy fats, and
low-carb vegetables. This book will teach you a boggling number of ways to
combine these things, and you should try them all. Don’t just find one or two
recipes that you like and make them over and over. Try at least one new recipe