When I weighed 325 lbs. I loved going to Chipotle. I couldn’t get enough of their beef barbacoa. Once I made the decision to go low carb I said goodbye to Chipotle and never looked back. Oh sure, I could have just had the amazing pulled beef over lettuce rather than rice to cut back on the barbs. Well that my friends means 27g vs. 61g of carbs. Not worth it.
However, with a little creativity, that doesn’t mean I can’t make my own deliciously healthy and LCHF-friendly beef barbacoa.
This dish is so tasty it requires 2 videos. The first is for a smokey salsa — a key ingredient for the spicy & smokey beef dish. Or just plain tasty with LCHF “chips” and cut veggies.
The second, of course, is for the beef barbacoa itself.
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
These devilish eggs include more than a few drops of Frank’s Hot Sauce between the egg white and the creamy, bacon-infused yolks. Yum!
After a fun grocery expedition with mom yesterday morning, my plan was to spend the afternoon food prepping and cooking a few meals. Well that went up in smoke when I got home. I felt exhausted…that happens when you wake up at 3:00 a.m. because a cat is walking on your head.
The husband suggest I take a little catnap. That little nap turned into 3 hours of solid sleep.
So I spent the evening in the kitchen, fixing dinner, chopping veggies and making snacks for the week.
Deviled eggs are one of my favorite go to snacks. Not only can you whip them up in no time, you can really get creative in your toppings — bacon, olives, fresh herbs, jalapenos, chorizo sausage, horseradish, smoked paprika, crab…
Well I love everything hot, so I had to make it. I just added some chives and my new sugar-free bacon. Yum! Now I have to admit my hand got a little heavy when I was adding the hot sauce. But in my defense, that’s the way I roll.
I’m not expecting these to last the weekend. So that means guacamole deviled eggs are up next!
Fun With Deviled Egg Toppings
Not sure what you can do to add some zip to your deviled eggs? Not to fear, there are lots of great recipes online to inspire you. Here’s a few of my go to recipe sites.
My traveling is taking a bit of a toll. I’m up a couple of pounds. Thankfully my last trip is this week. After that it should be business as usual.
The good news? My weight is no longer stalled. The bad? The scale is moving in the wrong direction. Ugh! I’m up 2 pounds. No doubt my traveling is taking its toll. For the most part I’ve eaten low carb when possible. But when traveling by car for hundreds of miles, we found it difficult to find restaurants that were low carb friendly.
At that point, all I could do was make the best choice and move on.
I have one more trip left. I’m driving to Vermont to pick up my mom. Of course it means 2 back-to-back days of 10 hours driving. Not great, but I’m packing my food for this trip. I’ve got green olives, macadamia nuts, cheese and pork rinds in snack bags.
That should keep me satisfied and keep the carb cravings, which kicked into over-drive after our drive back from Florida, away.
Looking for great lunch and snack ideas to spice up your lunches and keep that keeps the vending machine at bay? Check out Nom Nom Paleo (an awesome food blog you should bookmark!) for great, healthy lunchbox ideas.
My husband regularly comes home from work complaining about the assortment of donuts, bagels, Panera sandwiches, cupcakes, cookies and other carb-loaded, sugary temptations at the office. When he is home, I know he eats healthy because he eats what I give him. But for a man who proclaims “pie” as his favorite food group, that daily 9-5 grind is more problematic.
Sure I send him to work with healthy lunches, but are they appetizing? When I’m scrambling around in the morning to make his lunch, I’m going for convenience (for me). I never really thought my cooking was in competition with this processed junk.
Perhaps my lunches are too boring for the hubby’s taste buds. They certainly are losing out to the junk sitting out across from his lair cube.
Reality hit me the other day when he blogged about a nightmare he had the other night. A dream so hideous that it shook him to his very core — he was at a buffet and they never filled the French toast bin. Oh, the horror!
I think it’s time to rethink my lunches.
Thankfully Michelle Tam of Nom Nom Paleo packed a ton of great lunch ideas in one location on her awesome blog. For both kids and adults, her food combos can more than compete with any of that processed crap.
Besides her 20+ ideas, Michelle includes a mess of lunch related links to give you even more ideas.
We’re headed to Florida this week. While the hubby is attending a writer’s conference I’ll slave away on a game plan for next week’s lunches…all done poolside of course!
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!
Packing a few LCHF friendly snacks (which can double as a light meal) for my drive to TX.
I’m driving to Texas today to help Dr. Mom move. She’s coming to live near me in the Commonwealth of Virginia (Yeah, Virginia is to uppity to be a regular state).
So blogging will be light, although I’m hoping to take a lot of photos, especially of amazingly unhealthy truck stop food that I come across (but won’t eat).
I’m driving for about 2.5 days so yesterday I hit the grocery store for my low carb, high fat (LCHF) road snacks and/or light meals. Read More
Clockwise from top left: A sweating eggplant piece, fresh tomato sauce, pizza toppings assembled, and the finished product — eggplant pizza!
As you know, I’m all about Julia Child recipes now and here’s an easy, fun one that gets pizza back into my life — Eggplant Pizza. Going low carb means I gave up pizza crust. Well this recipe uses eggplant in place of the carb-loaded bread.
Now we’ve never been huge fans of eggplant. It always tasted a little off to me and my husband. Turns out, you need to use salt to sweat the eggplant before cooking it up. Letting it sit in salt takes out the excess moisture and removes that off-putting taste.
The fun thing about this recipe is that you can pretty much add any seasonings or toppings you’d like. You’re making pizza after all. Read More
