Caramel Hot Chocolate
1 serving

6 ounces (180 mo) Blue Diamond Unsweetened Chocolate Almond Milk
1/2 ounce (15 ml) Torani Sugar Free Caramel Syrup

Put the ingredients into a microwave safe mug and heat on high until warm. How long depends on your microwave, but should be between 60 to 120 seconds. Remember: time will vary depending on whether you’re heating from room temperature or refrigerator temperature.

Alternatively, you can make it in bigger batches, though for that I would not recommend heating it in the microwave. Rather, heat it in a pan on the stove top, in a slow cooker, or if you have one, in a zip pouch in your SousVide Supreme water oven at 160F to 180F, depending on how hot you like your cocoa.

Enjoy!

But now that we’re committed to the journey, I’m busy looking for easy, savory recipes, particularly for acceptable side dishes, that will keep us on the path and still satisfy. And I ran across one in my clip file that is quite simply delicious. It appeared in a column by Lee Svitak Dean titled Flavors of Fall picked up from McClatchy a couple of years ago in our local daily bugle and I clipped it and put it away to try and then completely forgot about it. I tried it the other night and it is, to quote Rachael Ray, YUM-O. As Ms. Dean says, they taste like green french fries! Here it is:

ROASTED GREEN BEANS
From Come One Come All, by Lee Svitak Dean
Serves 6

Why is it that the concept of roasted beans sounds so foreign? These are wonderful, inspired by those served at 20.21, Wolfgang Puck’s restaurant at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. They remind me of green French fries. The beans can be roasted at whatever temperature your oven is already set, if you are cooking something else at the same time.

Ingredients:

1 1/4 pound. fresh green beans, ends trimmed, if desired
Olive oil
Coarse salt
Freshly cracked pepper (tricolor peppercorns look particularly nice)

Directions:

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees (see Note).

2. Toss in olive oil and place in baking dish. Roast in oven for 15 to 20 minutes or so, until the beans are cooked through. They will have shriveled slightly.

3. Remove from oven and sprinkle with coarse salt and pepper. Serve immediately.

Enjoy!

They’ve carefully crafted a guidebook to comfort food eating that harkens back, not to your old granny, but to your biochemical and physiologic roots: the paleo diet that we, as humans, were molded by the forces of several millennia of natural selection to thrive on, before the dawn of agriculture (by which I mean wheat and corn farming) when our human diet was primarily meat (meaning that which we could hunt or catch with a pointy stick and our wiles) supplemented by seasonal roots, shoots, nuts, and berries.

The book is a comprehensive tool for the paleo kitchen, offering recipes for appetizers, sauces and staples, soups and salads, side dishes, mains, and yes, desserts (afterall, as we’ve always said, even the paleo hunter stumbled into a honey tree from time to time.)

Mike and I love their Steak Roll (stuffed with onions, celery, mushrooms, leeks and spinach) but we put a sous vide twist on it so that we can have it reliably medium rare but still tender. And cooked sous vide, it’s something you can prep, roll, vacuum seal, and drop in the bath at 134F to cook all day while you’re at work or busy doing something fun. Then it’s just a quick sear in hot lard to put a golden crust on it and golly Bob howdy, that’s good eats!

Paleo Comfort Food is sure to become an indispensable go-to resource in any low-carber’s kitchen, whether devoutly paleo or not.

And best of all, no low carb pimping required for this recipe to work for us. It’s perfect just the way it is.

To quote the author,

Watermelon is the perfect fruit to enjoy on a hot summer day, as it consists of about 92% water by weight. It is an excellent source of vitamins A and C, and a good source of potassium.

I couldn’t agree more! And paired with salty goat cheese and the tang of red onion all wrapped up in creamy prosciutto, it’s got my vote for most appealing summer appetizer.

Here’s his delightful recipe.

Prosciutto-wrapped watermelon
Sam Edelman

6 ounces spreadable goat cheese

1 small (about 3-pound) watermelon, seedless preferred, cut into 2-inch-by-1/2-inch spears

1 small bunch fresh basil, leaves removed, washed and thinly sliced

1 small red onion, thinly sliced

4 ounces prosciutto, cut into approximately 3-inch-by-2-inch pieces

Spread about 1/2 tablespoon goat cheese on each watermelon spear. Add sprinkle of fresh basil followed by a couple slices of red onion. Wrap each watermelon spear in prosciutto and secure with toothpick. Refrigerate until ready to serve. You can substitute fresh cantaloupe, honeydew or any other melon if preferred, or use a mix.

Yield: about 25 servings

Thanks, Sam!

On my recent Santa Barbara Choral Society performance tour to Spain, where temperatures were pretty toasty as well, Mike and I discovered the Spanish custom of enjoying ‘the wine of summer’ and drank about a 55-gallon drum of it each.

Much like sangria, but much lighter and more refreshing, tinto de verano substitutes lightly sweetened sparkling water for fruit juice as the diluent of the wine. And this makes for a much superior thirst quencher.

Give a try to my low carb version, but I warn you, they’re addictive!

Low Carb Tinto de Verano
Serves 8

1 (750 ml) bottle red wine (Spanish if you’ve got it)
2 ounces (60 ml) DaVinci Sugar-Free Simple Syrup
3/4 liter (750 ml) sparkling water

1. Pour the wine and simple syrup into a 2 quart pitcher
2. Quarter the limes, squeeze their juice into the wine, and drop in the lime hulls. Or slice the limes and just drop them in.
3. Add the sparkling water and stir to combine.
4. Serve in a tall glass over ice with another slice of lime to garnish

Prepare to be cooled off!

Among the delectable treats we enjoyed was some pork collar (neck roll) and I can attest that it’s truly beyond divine. A meat-lover’s Nirvana. Savory and succulent and filled with sweet, tasty fat. Just one look at a photo, such as this one from the Chef It Yourself blog:

Does that look luscious or what? I am going to try to get my hands on one and sous vide it!

The piece, written the AP’s Michele Kayal centers around Mark Bitterman’s, new book Salted which extols the glories of the natural salts of the Earth and which I just received from my darling husband for Christmas.

The reason it caught my eye is that we are salt junkies of the deepest dye. We love natural salts of every hue, buy them wherever travel, and now have quite a collection of them in our kitchen. We have Truffle Salt, of course, French Fleur de Sel and Gros Sel de Mer with herbs and pepper, pink salt from the Himalayas, and Maldon flakes from England. In the photo above, counter-clockwise from the top left are some Jurassic Salt and Black Salt we picked up at Michael Chiarello’s Napa Style store in the wine country (the pinkish ones) and the Vital Mineral Blend Celtic Sea Salt we use for everyday cooking and seasoning.

Regular table salt, the kind that comes in the round cardboard canister, is NaCl–sodium chloride–of course, and while it may or may not be iodized, lacks most all the trace minerals present in natural sea salt. Those minerals are important to good health, particularly having all the proper forms of iodine (both iodine and iodide) required for optimizing not only thyroid function but all sorts of other glandular tissues that depend on it.

An accidental bit of kitchen chemistry I experienced a while back proves the point that there’s stuff in mineral blend sea salt that isn’t in plain salt. I was blanching some chopped red cabbage, which is one of Mike’s favorites, in a large pot of water. Once at the boil, I added a tablespoon of mineral sea salt to the water, then dropped the cabbage and let it briefly boil. I’ve done this countless times with Kosher salt or table salt, but using mineral blend sea salt something strange happened. The burgundy color of the cabbage and water was transformed to a shockingly bright blue. I mean bright blue with not even the merest hint of red in it. The cabbage tasted the same as it usually did, but the color was strikingly different. Repeat the experiment yourself if you like and report back. Maybe different salts will yield different hues, who knows?

I plan to do try the technique again when I need blue food (of which there are few naturally occurring ones) for some event — say July 4th or a Superbowl party, if the Denver Broncos or Cowboys or some team I like with a vivid blue in their team color scheme ever makes it back to the big dance. Obviously not this year for the Broncs or the Boys, but maybe a red, white, and blue theme for the Pats. That’s looking more likely.

Canned Pumpkin Shortage is Over

…and just in time for the holidays!

Pumpkin is such a wonderfully low carb vegetable–fewer than 10 grams per cup of mashed, cooked flesh–that it really puts a crimp in your pie not to be able to find it. I love to make soup of it in the fall. It just sort of rings in the season. And like so many low-sugar, low-starch, high fiber foods, it’s also dense with nutrients, just chocked full of alpha- and beta-carotenoids, potassium, magnesium, vitamins C and E to name just the highlights.

I had the devil of a time finding some of the stuff back during the summer when I was working on recipes for the SousVide Holiday cookbook that will be coming out this fall. The recipes are not necessarily intended to be low carb, though I sneaked in one for Cauliflower Puree, but some are pretty easily adaptable.

Among the dessert recipes is one for Pumpkin Creme Brulee, made in the original with sugar, but completely delicious made with Splenda, Truvia, or stevia or whatever non-caloric sweetener floats your boat.

Here it is, pimped low carb and with instructions for traditional cooking in a bain Marie in the oven.

Low Carb Pumpkin Crème Brulee

Serves 6 to 8

1 – 2 tablespoons unsalted butter (for greasing ramekins)
8 whole eggs
2 cups heavy cream
1/2 cup granular sucralose (or amount of another sweetener equivalent to 1/2 cup sugar)
1 cup cooked mashed pumpkin
1 teaspoon pumpkin pie spice
½ teaspoon pure vanilla extract
2 tablespoons brown sugar (1/2 teaspoon each for finishing)

1. Preheat oven to 325F. Put a roasting pan on the rack and fill it with about 1 inch of water.
2. Liberally butter the insides of all the ramekins.
3. In a heavy saucepan, mix the cream and sweetener and heat until the cream begins to send up little tendrils of steam (thermometer should read 140F.)
4. In a medium bowl, beat the eggs until light yellow.∗
5. Slowly pour the warm cream into the eggs, a bit at a time, whisking all the while to temper them.
6. Add the mashed pumpkin, spice, and vanilla and whisk to mix well.
7. Pour the pumpkin custard mixture into each ramekin, almost to the top.
8. Carefully place each filled ramekin into the heated water bath in the oven.
9. Cook the custard for 45 minutes to 1 hour, until set.
10. Remove from the water bath, allow custard to cool to room temperature, then cover ramekins and refrigerate for several hours or overnight.
11. Before serving, let sit at room temp for about 30 minutes, then sprinkle each serving with ½ teaspoon brown sugar and caramelize the topping with a kitchen torch or under a preheated broiler.

At 5 to 6 grams of effective carb per serving, Pumpkin Creme Brulee is a real low-carb autumn treat. If you prefer, you can omit the caramelized sugar to save those 2.5 grams of pure sugar carb and simply top the custard with a dollop of artificially sweetened whipped cream instead. It won’t be creme brulee, of course, but it will still be finger lickin’ good!

I’m not, nor have I ever been, a big beer drinker, chiefly because I don’t even remotely like bitterness in food or drink. I figure natural selection gave me bitter taste receptors to warn me off of poisonous foods, so why tamper with 4 million years of genetic tweaking?

I can drink the maltier, non-hoppy brews (it’s the hops that impart the bitter character so many beer aficianados covet) and have found a very few microbrewery offerings that go down pretty easily over the years. But I’d still rather have something else and figured what with the carbs and calories involved why push myself to drink something that I don’t really enjoy and that can only cause me bariatric pain in the end? So in days gone by, when all around me were into their Black and Tans or their Guinness Stouts or their Firestone Double Barrel Ales at pub gatherings, I’d either opt for a glass of wine (which sometimes leaves you feeling like a bit of an outcast and in many cases isn’t the very best wine you could hope for) or I would painfully nurse a pint of something just to join in with the gang.

Then, about 10 years ago, I discovered hard cider and pub life was forever changed for me.

Now I had something that tasted as good as it looked, brimming golden over the rim of the glass, and that I truly could enjoy. Now, I, too, could order a pint!

And on this two week sojourn that took us from Dublin to Galway to Lahinch to Kinsale to Cork, I did so with (I admit it) pretty much reckless abandon. It was vacation, after all.

Historians tell us that fermented cider, not ale, was the chief alcoholic drink of the American colonies, so there’s even a patriotic connection to ordering a pint of cider to be proud of. Whereas the colonists probably fermented their apple cider in non-airtight containers and so didn’t capture the carbon dioxide released from the fermentation of sugar to alcohol, today’s hard ciders are made much like beers, giving them a lovely bit of sparkle. The result is a delicate beverage with a lightly sweet flavor and an alcohol content somewhere in the 4 to 5% range. Even though a portion of the natural sugar in the apple juice has been converted to alcohol, to be sure there still a bit there and so drinking a pint of cider is, for a low-carber, something of a guilty pleasure.

Drinking a lot of pints is a real dietary vacation!

I’ve long wished that someone would make a ‘light’ cider, so that I could enjoy with less metabolic impact. And, on this trip, I discovered that, at least in Ireland, someone does. Bulmer’s, the prevailing cider brand throughout Ireland, makes a Bulmer’s Light Cider that has only 92 calories and only about 3 or 4 grams (if I remember the label correctly) of residual sugar. It’s sweetened with a blend of sucralose and aceK. We ran across it in a grocery market in Dublin, sold in cans, and I had great hopes that I’d find it in some pubs along the way, but never did. Still, it’s a comfort to know it exists.

Bulmer’s cider has been imported into the US since about 2000, as I understand it, but under the Magner’s name. So far, I’ve only been able to trace the original product and have found no mention of the ‘light’ but it gives me hope that in the future some savvy beverage importer might bring the reduced carb/reduced calorie version to our shores.

If anyone out there knows of a US available light version, please do share with us all!

Until then, I will just have to content myself with the occasional pint of Hardcore on tap at my local Irish pub.