Here’s a little Valentine’s Day treat you can make at home: Red Velvet Cupcakes! Yum. Easy to make, healthy and delicious.
A LCHF Friendly Valentine’s Dinner
Well the hubby and I decided to eat in for the rest of the month. So that mean Valentine’s Day Dinner is at home this year. Below is one of my favorites I enjoy making for special occasions. I rarely make beef tenderloin steaks and that’s a shame. So tender when cooked to perfection. Wrapping it in bacon just heightens the flavor.
I don’t cook these steaks often because the cut seems so cost prohibitive (organic, grass-fed and no hormones and antibiotic cuts go for $28/pound). Ugh! Talk about short-sighted. Last year for Valentine’s we went to a nice steakhouse and spent $300 (steaks, sides, shared dessert, bottle of wine and tip). $300!!!! The whole dinner in the video below set us back a whopping $30. Of course I didn’t buy wine.
Are you cooking for Valentine’s Day or heading out?
Yummy Lemon Blueberry Scones
For those of you who love scones in the morning, here’s my Lemon-Blueberry Scone video. Yummy + healthy = awesomeness!
If you want to even more flavor greatness, I’ve also attached the Lemon Buttercream Cheese frosting video.
Not a fan of lemon? Then just use a different flavored extract. The frosting is perfect for pastries, cakes and cupcakes (like red velvet, my fav!) too.
Low Carb Baking With Cacao Butter
My cocoa butter arrived! Let the low carb baking and ice cream making commence!
Amazon’s delivery fairies left a little package at my doorstep today – cacao butter (a.k.a. cocoa butter)! This weekend I’m experimenting with a few chocolaty fat bomb and dessert recipes. Double yum.
I’ve wanted to try cocoa butter for a long time. It’s an awesomely healthy fat. However I couldn’t find any at Whole Foods, Wegmans or Trader Joe’s near me. So I started searching Amazon. And yes, there were plenty of vendors who sell it, but who do you trust when you’ve never heard of any of them? And the prices ranged from dirt-cheap to “are you kidding me.”
If you decide to pick up a block, there are a few things to consider besides price.
Consistency. Does the quality of the butter change from order to order? For a lot of sellers, that isn’t the case. Read More
DYI Strawberry Ice Cream
My quickie strawberry ice cream took about 5 minutes to make using just 3 ingredients. It taste better than the real thing (which is loaded with sugar).
For a nice, New Year’s Eve treat I decided to “whip” up some homemade ice cream. While I really want to play with the husband’s ice cream maker (wow, that sounds inappropriate!), I wanted something quick. Like under 10 minutes.
I had frozen strawberries and asked The Google for help. But every recipe I found for strawberry ice cream was loaded with sugar or a low carb alternative. I’m not opposed to sweeteners, but strawberries are already sweet, why do I need to add anything?
So that got me thinking (a very dangerous thing!). What if I just add whipped heavy cream? No sugar. No honey. No Swerve.
It took a total of 5 minutes of prep time and 3 ingredients. The result? Awesomely creamy strawberry ice cream that mom and the husband devoured. Read More
Recipes: Home-Made Kit Kats & Chocolate-Avocado Pudding
Packing up a 3-bedroom home is a lot of work, so cooking any thing fun or new is kept to a minimum for now. But these two recipes came to my inbox, and I couldn’t resist sharing. They look amazingly awesome and healthy. When I’m back home I’ll give these a try, albeit tweaked slightly to reduce the carb/sugar count.
Hazelnut & Coconut Kit Kat Bar
The first recipe — Hazelnut & Coconut Kit Kat Bar — comes from the folks at Thrive Market, a cool online store that offers natural and organic products at wholesale prices. I’ve started shopping there and have picked up some good deals on coconut oil, nut butters, and Red Boat Fish Sauce.
The home-made Kit Kat sounds tasty. While I was never a big candy bar eater, Kit Kats tied with peanut butter cups as my favorite. In fact, those are the two types of candy bars I give out on Halloween each year. Since the idea of hazelnut and coconut flavors sounds amazing to me, I think I’ll make these when we have guests over. Something tells me I don’t want many leftovers around.
Single Serving Chocolate-Avocado Pudding
From the GreenLiteBites recipe blog of weight loss blogger Roni Noone, the Chocolate-Avocado Pudding is high on my “To Make” list. In fact, avocados are so cheap here in Texas I may whip this up before heading home to Virginia. I’ll just need to find some sugar-free maple syrup or perhaps use a maple extract instead. We’ll see.
If you try either of these let me know in the comments section, and I’ll post a photo of you enjoying it!
Low Carb Maple Scones With Frosting
Maple Pecan Drop Scone with Buttercream Cheese Frosting! This tasty low carb baked good is healthy and goes great with your morning coffee.
This morning I instead of the normal fair for breakfast – 2 eggs, ½ a plum tomato and 1 oz. of avocado – I quipped up some low carb scones to go with a hot Cup of Joe. It was delicious. The recipe, from George Stella’s The Complete Low Carb Cookbook, takes less than 30 minutes to make. And at 2.5 net carbs per scone, it was a great way to start off this very cold, snowy morning.
Over the weekend I made a batch of Buttercream Cheese Frosting, the recipe coming from the same book. I planned to make the scones today, so I got a jump on it and made the frosting ahead of time. Since my scone recipe only makes 6 and my frosting recipe serves 12, I decided to cut the frosting recipe in half. Read More
Taking Small Desserts A Little Too Far
Under 6″ in diameter, these pie pans are a great way to make smaller, pre-portioned pies.
Since it was just me and the hubby for Christmas dinner, I didn’t want to make a large dessert with leftovers. With all the holiday cookies, treats and snacks that arrived from friends and family, the last thing I needed to add was a tempting 10″ pumpkin pie. I really hate wasting food, but I knew I’d just toss it out after Christmas. Then I saw the solution to my problem in William Sonoma — small pie pans.
My home pie pans are all 10 inches — that’s a lot of pie. But I spotted these lovely dishes (under 6″ in diameter). Sweet! While my husband views these as a single serving (heck, he thinks a 10″ pie is a single serving too), I view it as a double serving, or two days, of low carb dessert. Not too shabby. Read More
Gobble, Gobble! Dot’s Healthy Turkey Day Menu
What am I thankful for this Thanksgiving? To have the smarts to plan my menu before Turkey Day arrives. A food strategy is the best way to make sure you don’t pig out! (Image via marthastewart.com)
Well Turkey Day is upon us and that means its time for another low-carb holiday menu. We’re staying put for Thanksgiving so that makes it easier for me to control the points and carb count. My goal for my weigh in after Thanksgiving is to maintain my weight. That means I need a menu that is both filling and delicious.
You can take a look at a snapshot of my menu with the carb and Weight Watcher point count. Below you’ll find either the recipes or links to the recipes for my Turkey Day menu.
Building My Menu
I’m allowing myself to eat up to 25g of net carbs. I have 29 daily Weight Watcher points. Because I plan to have wine and dessert, I’m going to tap into a handful of my weekly allowance points. But that doesn’t mean I go crazy. I’m allowing myself between 4-7 extra points. No more. I need to keep control. Just because it’s a holiday doesn’t mean food is the most important thing. Being with family is what it’s about…oh god, maybe I need to budget more points for wine! Read More
Low Carb Pumpkin Pie For The Holidays
I tested a low carb pumpkin pie recipe last night. Tasty and awesome, it will make my Thanksgiving Day menu.
I love baking. Putting my hands in the dough, turning raw ingredients into something else. It’s pure joy. Unfortunately, when I went low carb, I thought my newfound hobby was lost. Key ingredients – flour, sugar – are not friendly to my waistline. Thankfully, there are more alternative ingredients, sites and cookbooks popping up that focus on low carb baking. Read More