300 15-Minute Low-Carb Recipes (49 page)

This is just fantastic with a steak, and try the leftovers in an omelet! Nearly any shredded cheese would be good here, so feel free to experiment.

16 ounces (455 g) sliced mushrooms—Buy them that way!

3 tablespoons (42 g) butter

2 egg yolks

1/3 cup (77 g) sour cream

1/4 teaspoon salt or Vege-Sal

1/4 teaspoon pepper

1/2 cup (58 g) shredded Monterey Jack cheese—or swiss, mexican blend, etc.

In your big, heavy skillet, over medium-high heat, start the mushrooms cooking in the butter. Cover with a tilted lid.

In the meantime, separate your eggs and find something constructive to do with the whites. Stir your mushrooms and re-cover. Put the yolks in a bowl, add the sour cream, add the salt or Vege-Sal and pepper, and whisk it all together until smooth. Go stir your mushrooms and again re-cover.

When the mushrooms have all softened and changed color a bit, turn the burner to lowest heat and stir in the sour cream mixture. Sprinkle the cheese evenly over all, re-cover, and let it cook until the fifteen minutes is up and the cheese is melted; then serve.

Yield:
4 to 5 servings, assuming 4, each will have 228 calories, 20 grams fat, 8 grams protein, 6 grams carbohydrate, 1 gram dietary fiber, and 5 grams usable carb.

Cheese and Chipotle Portobellos

I wasn't sure where to put these! They'd make a fine appetizer, a great side dish, or you could even serve two apiece as a light entree.

6 tablespoons (84 g) mayonnaise

2 chipotle chiles canned in adobo

6 Portobello mushroom caps

6 ounces (170 g) Swiss cheese in 6 slices

Preheat your electric tabletop grill to 350°F (180°C).

Run the chilies and mayo through your food processor. Brush the convex sides of the mushroom caps with a little of the chipotle mayo and then fill the cavities with a spoonful of the mayo. Put them in the grill filled-side up. Set a timer for 5 minutes.

When the timer beeps, open the grill and cover each mushroom with Swiss cheese—if the slices are bigger than the mushroom caps, tear and overlap them to fit. Use a cup or jar to prop the grill lid just far enough open that it's not touching the cheese and give the mushrooms another minute to 90 seconds—just long enough to melt the cheese.

Plate the mushrooms, spoon the rest of the chipotle mayo on top, and serve.

Yield:
6 servings, each with 237 calories, 20 grams fat, 11 grams protein, 7 grams carbohydrate, 2 grams dietary fiber, and 5 grams usable carb.

Briar Rose's Artichoke Salad

A cyberpal with the screen name Briar Rose suggested this combination of ingredients to me, and it sounded so phenomenal I just had to play with it. Extraordinary! I was hard-pressed to know whether to call this a side dish or a main dish salad—it's in the in-between range, protein-wise. Call it a substantial side dish or a light meal.

1 can (13.75 ounces, or 385 g) quartered artichoke hearts, drained and coarsely chopped

2 ounces (55 g) sliced pepperoni, sliced into

1/4-inch (6mm) strips

1/4 cup (40 g) chopped sweet red onion
^*

2 tablespoons (6 g) chopped fresh basil

1/2 cup (60 g) crumbled Gorgonzola

3 tablespoons (45 ml) extra-virgin olive oil

1/2 teaspoon minced garlic or 1 clove garlic, crushed

1 1/2 tablespoons (23 ml) balsamic vinegar

^*
Actually, Briar Rose doesn't like this, so leave it out if you want to. I'm hopelessly devoted to red onion.

Simply mix everything together and stir well. That's it!

I like to serve this on a bed of lettuce, but it's remarkably good right out of the mixing bowl. For that matter, you could toss it with lettuce that's been broken up well or with bagged mixed greens. Oh, heck, it's hard to think of a bad way to serve this!

Yield:
3 servings, each with 11 grams of carbohydrates and 1 gram of fiber, for a total of 10 grams of usable carbs (though quite a lot of that is a carbohydrate called “inulin,” found in artichokes, which has the lowest blood sugar impact of any carbohydrate yet identified, so this is actually a lot easier on your body than the carb count suggests) and 11 grams of protein.

Country-Style Green Beans

Okay, truly country-style green beans are cooked for a billion hours with bacon or a ham hock, but that hardly makes for a 15-minute recipe, now does it? And this version tastes very good and down-home.

1 pound (455 g) frozen cut green beans

3 slices bacon

4 ounces (115 g) sliced mushrooms

1/2 tablespoon butter

1 tablespoon (15 ml) lemon juice

Put the beans in a microwaveable casserole with a lid, add a couple of tablespoons (28 ml) of water, cover, and microwave on High for 7 minutes.

Cut the bacon into little pieces and put it in a large, heavy skillet—I use kitchen shears to snip it right into the pan—and start cooking it over medium-high heat. When a little grease starts to cook out of the bacon, add the mushrooms and butter and cook it all together, stirring frequently, until the bacon is starting to get crispy and the mushrooms have softened and changed color.

Somewhere during this process, your microwave is going to go “ding!” When it does, go check the beans. Chances are they'll still be underdone in the center, so stir them up and give them another 4 to 5 minutes.

When the beans are tender-crisp, pull them out of the microwave, drain them, and stir them into the bacon and mushrooms. Stir in the lemon juice, let the whole thing cook together for just another minute or two to combine the flavors, and then serve.

Yield:
4 or 5 servings. Assuming 4 servings, each will have 10 grams of carbohydrates and 4 grams of fiber, for a total of 6 grams of usable carbs and 4 grams of protein.

Hazelnut Green Beans

Do you love Green Beans Almandine? Try these for a change.

1 pound (455 g) frozen green beans

1/4 cup (34 g) hazelnuts

2 tablespoons (28 ml) olive oil

2 tablespoons (28 ml) lemon juice

salt and pepper

Put your green beans in a microwaveable casserole with a lid, add a couple of tablespoons (28 ml) of water, and nuke on high for 7 minutes.

In the meantime, chop your hazelnuts. Put your big, heavy skillet over medium heat, add the olive oil, and sauté the hazelnuts until they're touched with gold and smell wonderful. Remove from the heat.

By now the microwave has beeped. Go stir your beans and give them another 3 or 4 minutes.

When your beans are tender-crisp, drain and add to the skillet along with the lemon juice. Toss everything together, salt and pepper to taste, and serve.

Yield:
4 servings, each with 154 calories, 12 grams fat, 3 grams protein, 11 grams carbohydrate, 4 grams dietary fiber, and 7 grams usable carb.

There are now approximately 482 varieties of bagged salad available in your average grocery store, and what a fine development that is. For once we have a packaged food that is as good for us as it is convenient, sing Glory Hallelujah!

Do yourself a favor and venture beyond the standard Iceberg Mix or American Blend. Iceberg is the least nutritious of the lettuces and the blandest, as well. If you buy bagged salad, try a new blend at least once every couple of weeks, to find out what you might have been missing.

You'll probably be buying bottled salad dressing, too. Remember that the fat-free dressings virtually always have a lot of added sugar! So, too, does any dressing that tastes sweet—Russian, Catalina, that red stuff that calls itself “French,” Poppyseed, Honey Mustard, Raspberry Vinaigrette. All are likely culprits, so read the labels carefully.

Overall, you can trust most of the following dressings in their full-fat versions: Blue Cheese (occasionally called Roquefort), Caesar, Creamy Garlic, Red Wine Vinaigrette, Italian, Ranch, Parmesan Peppercorn. However, read the labels to find the brands with the lowest sugar content.

Here's an unsolicited plug: I love Paul Newman's salad dressings. At this writing, I have his Original Olive Oil and Vinegar, Caesar, and Balsamic Vinaigrette in the house, and I think they're all terrific. If you buy the full-fat versions of Paul's dressings they tend to be lower carb than similar dressings in other brands, and they contain no junk chemicals. It's good stuff; look for them.

Now, bagged greens with bottled dressings are all well and good, but sometimes you want something more in your salads. I trust you're clear on the idea of adding some diced green pepper, sliced cucumber, some sliced scallions or sweet onion, a radish or two, or a few cherry tomatoes, but what if you want some crunch to replace the croutons? Try the following:

Sunflower seeds.

Diced or broken pork rinds.

Sliced, toasted, flavored almonds.
Sunkist recently started distributing these under the name “Almond Accents.” They're very crisp and tasty, and they come in a neat variety of flavors, including Roasted Garlic Caesar, Italian Parmesan, Bacon Cheddar, Garlic Teriyaki, Ranch, and Nacho Cheese. Look for them in the produce aisle of big grocery stores. These make a nice snack, too.

Crumbled bacon.
I can't abide fake bacon bits, nor do I like the real bacon bits in a jar—they're soggy and flat-tasting, if you ask me. But it's not much work to throw a few slices of bacon into a glass pie plate, microwave them on High for a few minutes, and then crumble them up. (In most microwaves, about 1 minute per slice is about right, but you'll have to play with your microwave to know for sure.)