Diabetes Blog – Happy-Medium.net

This is the sixth year of Diabetes Blog Week, started by Karen over at Bitter~Sweet Diabetes. All of us diabetes bloggers are given a subject to write about each day during this week, and after we publish each day’s installment, we’ll go back and link our posts on her site. Want to know more? CLICK HERE.
 
 
It’s Frrriiiidaaaay! Today’s topic is all about what we’re eating:

Taking a cue from Adam Brown’s recent post, write a post documenting what you eat in a day! Feel free to add links to recommended recipes/shops/whatever. Make it an ideal day or a come-as-you-are day – no judgments either way. (Thank you, Katy of Bigfoot Child Have Diabetes for this topic.)

Today is a super busy day for me, so I must confess… I have to punt on this one.

Instead of talking about what I’m eating (this morning it was toast and coffeee… boring!), I’m going to go back and give you three of my favorite recipes I’ve posted here at Happy-Medium. You can use one for breakfast, one for lunch, and one for dinner. Or, as my grandparents used to say, one for breakfast, one for dinner, and one for supper.

Breakfast
First, my recipe for salmon cured with tequila, among other things. This is a great brunch food, actually.

This isn’t a Kosher-exclusive dish, to be sure, but had I not been exposed to the influences I’ve been exposed to here in Baltimore, I probably never would have tried this. And I love it! You’re going to find this is a very easy recipe, and one you can vary according to what’s on hand in your pantry and what you really like. If you close it up tightly after it’s cured, you can probably keep it in the fridge for four or five days.

I started with a ¾ pound filet. What you see was labeled as steelhead trout, but you might also see it as freshwater salmon in places. You’ll also need a deep dish, and a brick or something weighty to place on top of the fish while it cures. For my recipe, I included:

½ cup of kosher salt

1 tablespoon celery salt

1 tablespoon brown sugar

1 tablespoon dill (fresh is best, but I used dried because that’s what I had)

1 tablespoon McCormick’s® Grill Mates® mesquite seasoning

1 tablespoon extra virgin olive oil

Tequila

Basically, you mix all of the dry ingredients, then add the olive oil and tequila until you have what seems like a dry paste. If you think your mixture is too wet, just add some more dry ingredients.

Now it’s time to get your hands dirty. Put your fish in your deep dish… this is where it will sit for a couple of days. Take your mixture and rub it over your fish. Make sure the mixture covers every single inch of the surface of the fish. If you don’t have enough to cover the fish, make more.

Once the fish is covered in your seasonings, wrap everything up. First in plastic, then in foil. Again, make sure the entire surface of the fish is covered. Place the fish in your refrigerator, and then place your “something weighty” on top. We used a brick from our landscaping outside, and wrapped it in foil. This helps your spices to really get into your fish, and it helps with the curing process too.

Then the hard part starts. Because you have to wait 48 hours to unwrap everything and dig in. Don’t be surprised if some of the liquid drains from the fish during this time. That’s normal, and it’s why you have it in a deep dish.

Once your 48 hours are up, get the dish out of the refrigerator and uncover everything. If you have to, use a paper towel to remove any leftover moisture.

Here’s what the finished product looks like on a cracker with cheese and some tomato. Salty, a little smoky, and melt in your mouth good.

 
 
Lunch

Fish isn’t your thing? Have no fear. From Diabetes Blog Week 2012, the lunch menu includes a grilled pork salad:

Grilled Pork Salad

This is just an awesome salad, not only because it’s (mostly) healthy, but also because it includes grilled pork. Of course, if you keep Kosher, you’re Muslim, vegetarian, vegan, etc., substitute something that works for you. You can probably still use this marinade:

3 tablespoons red wine vinegar
1/4 cup of olive oil
1 teaspoon salt (or seasoning salt, if you like)
1 teaspoon cayenne pepper
2 cloves of garlic, minced
1 or 2 tablespoons of fresh sage, chopped (or use dried sage, what do I care?)
2 or 3 tablespoons of good mustard (your choice here; I used the spicy brown stuff)

Mix all of these ingredients together in a bowl. Then, get 1 to 1 1/2 pounds of pork. I used a pork tenderloin from the local Trader Joe’s. Then, slice or dice it how you want. You want to make strips? Go ahead. Slice it like steak? Okay. I cut it up into bite sized portions (that’s how it was going to go onto the plate anyway). Then dump it all into the marinade for about 30 minutes. It will look like this:

While the pork is swimming around in all that mustardy-sagey goodness, get to work on the salad. Everybody has their own way to do a salad, so I’m not going to give a recipe. Okay, I am, but it’s really more of a description of the salad I made. So that’s not a recipe, is it?

1 head of Romaine lettuce
1/2 of a Radicchio
1 cup of broccoli slaw (about a handful or two)
1/2 cup of chopped carrots
1 or 2 large green onions (also known as scallions; but I grew up eating these things, and they were never called scallions then, so I can’t bring myself to call them that now)
1/2 cup of sunflower seeds
1/2 cup of dried cranberries

Mix it all together in a bowl, and set it aside. When you’re finished grilling the pork (USDA recommends that the pork be cooked to an internal temperature of 145 degrees), let it rest for at least 5 minutes before slicing, if you have to do that. As stated above, I had mine in bite-sized portions already, and cooked them in one of those cage-like things people grill their vegetables in.

This is great for lunch or dinner. Trust me… you will love it.
 
 
Dinner

Finally, from last October, a flatbread pizza. We cooked it in the oven then, but we recently prepared this on the grill outside and it was amazing. Sorry if it looks like there’s advertising here; I’m just noting what I used, and I wasn’t compensated in any way for using these products.

Preheat your oven to 400 degrees fahrenheit. I’m still working on this; you can probably cook these a little lower, say around 350. The idea is to get all the ingredients cooked through while crisping up the flatbread, but not burning it. A little finesse is required. We’ve also done this on the grill, which requires a very low flame so you don’t burn the flatbread. Regardless, watch it like a hawk the first time.

I started with flatbread from Flatout Bread. Good size, easy to use, fits on a cookie sheet. 16 grams of carbohydrates per flatbread. They come in a variety of options, including Garden Spinach and Sundried Tomato. I used the Italian Herb. FYI: Their website contains great recipes from other bloggers.

I like to put a very thin layer of olive oil on the bottom of my cookie sheet, along with some garlic powder or celery salt, to give the crust a little zing. Then I went to the refrigerator.

I just looked for anything that might taste good on a pizza. I found turkey deli meat (for Maureen), salami deli meat (for me), green onions, baby portabella mushrooms, and green olives. I also had some cherry tomatoes left from my garden.
 
 

We began the pizza build with Classico Fire Roasted Pizza Sauce. The nutrition label says that ¼ cup carries about 6 grams of carbohydrates, and that’s about the amount we used on each pizza. I’m also a big fan of basil on my pizza; we didn’t have fresh basil, but I sprinkled some dried basil flakes on top of the pizza sauce to give it an extra layer of flavor.

Then we just started piling on ingredients! One thing about the tomatoes: A lot of flavor is in the juice of tomatoes, but that extra liquid can really make your pizza soggy if you’re not careful. These cherry tomatoes worked fine, but we made sure to put them on top of the other ingredients. If you’re using something like a Roma tomato, slice it really thin and place each slice on a paper towel first. It won’t drain all of the liquid from the tomato, but keeping the slices thin will keep from weighing everything down, while still giving you that tomato boost. Yes, I’m a fresh tomato addict.

Once we finished with our ingredients, all we needed was a little mozzarella cheese on top. Here’s a look at one pizza before the cheese and one after the cheese. Looks good, right?

 
 
Well, they were even better when we took them out of the oven. Cook your pizza at 400 degrees for 5 to 5 ½ minutes. In our case, thanks to our 50 year old oven (literally), we needed to finish it off for 30 seconds or so under the broiler to brown the top a little bit.

 
 
Well, I hope you made it to the end, and I hope you enjoy one or more of these recipes soon! To find more recipes, just click on the Recipes! category link on the left.