Tag Archives: recipe

It’s No-D-Day again! Time for a recipe.

October 1, 2013 – 7:36 am

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The idea for No D Day comes from George Simmons of Ninjabetic fame. It’s his way to get us to focus on the parts of our lives that aren’t wrapped up in glucose checks, boluses and basals, and carb counting, if only for one day. Today, many of us will try to post something that doesn’t really relate to diabetes. And that’s the last time I’m going to mention that word today. Interested in writing your own Non-D piece? Once it’s complete, be sure to add your link HERE so everyone will see it.

Okay, on to the recipe…
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I love to cook. But I can’t take credit for this recipe. It’s an invention of my wife’s, and it doesn’t really have any measurements. So I can’t make it too easy for you. But it really is pretty simple.

First, start with some fresh cherry tomatoes. The fresher the better. The ones you see here came from my garden. If you’re getting the ones you see under plastic in the grocery store, you’ll probably have to work with them a bit to get the same consistency at the end.

You’ll want to roast the tomatoes. Preheat your oven to 350 degrees. Place the tomatoes on a cookie sheet and cover them with olive oil, a little salt and pepper, and oregano. If you’re working with the grocery store tomatoes, take a sharp knife and put a little hole in each tomato so they’ll roast and release their juices little easier. After looking at the photo again, I think Maureen also sprinkled a little mozzarella cheese in there when I wasn’t looking.

Put them in the oven and let them roast for 15-20 minutes. Then take them out, toss them around with a spatula to make sure everything is mixed together well, and if you think they’re done, they’re done. If not, put them in for five more minutes and check again. Once the tomatoes are done, put them in a bowl (or something you can get them out of with a spoon) and chop some fresh basil on top. But be sure to get all of the goodness from the olive oil, the tomato juice, and everything else from the bottom of the cookie sheet into your container. At this point, it’s hard to keep your mitts off of everything. Your house will smell sooooo good.

For the presentation, we also toasted a rustic bread (bread, I know, right?– must remember: No D Day). With the oven still at 350 degrees, we coated the bread with olive oil and a light coating of celery salt and garlic powder. Then we put them in to toast. If you don’t want the bread, just find something that will work for you. Even rice cakes would be okay here. If you have to live with celiac (still no D-word… crafty, eh?), I’m thinking the Udi’s bread would be great with this.

Once complete, we served it up with some goat cheese. So imagine a layer of goat cheese underneath the tart, almost sweet taste of roasted cherry tomatoes. In our house, this was a recipe that will go down in history.
 
 
 

By StephenS | Posted in Non-D Day | Also tagged , , | Comments (6)

Recipe! Grilled Veg.

July 1, 2013 – 10:49 am

Seems simple… And it is.

This is the new summer favorite for The Great Spousal Unit. Go to a farm stand, find the best summer squash, onion, and pepper that we can find. The recipe is simple as can be.

Don’t blink or you’ll miss this.

First wash, then slice your vegetables in big enough widths to be skewered and stay on when everything on the grill gets hot. After that, you have your choice of waiting to skewer them so you can marinade them in your dressing, or just skewer them from the start and brush the dressing on later. As you’ll see in the photo, we did the latter.

The dressing begins with a simple vinaigrette:

3 Tablespoons red wine vinegar

¼ Cup extra virgin olive oil

Whisk the two together to emulsify. Once that’s complete, add salt and pepper to taste.

But wait… we’re not done yet! At this point, you also have the opportunity to get creative and add anything else you think might go well with this dish. We added lots of old bay seasoning. If you wanted to add some carbs, you could take some croutons or a couple of slices of bread and throw them into a food processor for about 15 seconds. Then you could sprinkle it into your mix as desired. If you wanted to brighten up things a bit, you could add the juice of a lemon or lime to add a citrus flavor. Your choice. But the vinaigrette gives you a nice base to start from.

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Then comes the fun part… the grilling. Get your grill super hot and toss on your skewers. Cook them 2 to 3 minutes on each side, and you’re done. The finished product looks like this:

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Estimated carb count per kabob: Are you kidding? Unless you’re adding the crouton or bread crumbs to this, this is a delicious, no carb dish. Hope you like it.
 
 
Do you do anything like this at your place during the summer?
 
 
 

By StephenS | Posted in Recipes! | Also tagged | Comments (4)

Recipe! Spring Goodness.

May 28, 2013 – 9:35 am

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Living on (or near) the east coast of the USA, you might get the impression that the environment around here is just a big concrete jungle. So I hope the photos above, from near Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge, of the peonies from The Great Spousal Unit’s garden, and the salad made from lettuce out of our vegetable garden, help to prove to you that not everything is paved over here.

In our little neighborhood, Spring is the magical season. When all of the azaleas finally bloom, the oak trees green up, and the homeowners looking to sell put the For Sale signs out on their lawns. I start the vegetable garden sometime in April, depending on when I feel like it won’t freeze anymore. I cheat a little, in that I purchase plants at the nursery rather than start the veg from seed.

The lettuce is always ready first. We’re just about finished with the 10 heads of lettuce we planted this Spring, but we still have some spinach that will keep going for a while. That’s a lot of salad. But when it’s this fresh, you start to feel like you could eat salad for breakfast as well as for lunch and dinner. Once the lettuce is totally finished, I’ll pull up the plants and replace the lettuce with red skin potatoes, which will take longer but can handle the hot Summer sun a lot better.

Eating out of the garden helps you to understand how good, how fresh this whole farm-to-table thing really is. If you’ve got a little space, I can tell you from about 20 years of experience that growing your own fruits, vegetables, and herbs is absolutely worth it. Even before we bought our house, we were growing tomatoes and peppers on the balconies of the apartments we lived in. If you’re interested in trying to garden, my only advice is to pick something that’s easy, give it plenty of sun, and enough water. That’s about all it takes.

So about the recipe… this is just a simple salad that includes all of the stuff that I like to put on a salad. Your Appetite May Vary (YAMV). We paired the salad with a veggie burger on a potato roll, with a little Frisch’s Tartar Sauce and pickles. The juice in the photo was because my BG was low before dinner and the only carbs in the meal were in the salad dressing, tartar sauce, tomato, and the potato roll.

So we started the salad with romaine and red leaf lettuce from the garden. We also threw in some of our fresh spinach, and a little fresh basil from the garden… unconventional, but who cares? Then I chopped up a spring onion that I got from a farmer’s stand nearby and threw that in. We added some sunflower seeds (which I’m completely addicted to), and chopped up some olives and added them too. After adding a fat slice of tomato on top of my burger, I chopped up the rest (it was a small tomato). Finally, we sprinkled some shredded cheddar on top. We enjoyed it with about 2 tablespoons of Ken’s Lite Caesar dressing.

Total Carb Count: 68 grams
2 grams from the dressing, 3 grams from the tartar sauce, 3 grams from the tomato, 31 grams from the potato roll, and 29 grams from the orange juice.

The best part about this delicious meal is that it’s only one of several like it that we’ll enjoy all summer long, with different ingredients as they ripen throughout the growing season. I hope you’ve got a good garden of your own, and if not, I hope you find a local farmer that can help you bring the bounty of locally grown produce to your table this summer.
 
 
 

By StephenS | Posted in Recipes! | Also tagged , | Comments (7)

Recipe… From whatever’s left.

March 18, 2013 – 10:09 am

I was away for a couple of days, and when I got back, I realized that it had been a while since I’d been to the grocery store. Since it was Sunday afternoon already, I found it difficult to get motivated to do it yesterday.

So I pulled together a salad for dinner that consisted of pretty much anything that was left that I could put on a salad. This isn’t so much a recipe as it is an exercise in emptying the fridge.

This salad consisted of:

– Lettuce, of course. You can tell from the photo that it’s the last of the head of romaine too. Not the nice, dark, green stuff from when you first bring it home. Oh well… someone has to eat this.

– Shredded carrots

– The last few olives left in the jar

– My last chopped green onion

– Some sunflower seeds

– Last of the turkey lunch meat

– And the last half of a tomato

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It doesn’t look like much, but it tasted really good with a little blue cheese dressing. I’m not even going to guess at a carb count for this, but it ain’t much, I can tell you that. Mostly from the tomato and the dressing, I suspect.

What’s the laziest, craziest thing you’ve ever made from whatever was left in the house?

More about my days away when I can figure out exactly what I want to say about them.

Happy Monday!
 
 
 

By StephenS | Posted in Recipes! | Also tagged | Comments (3)

Recipes! Things you can do with shrimp.

February 15, 2013 – 11:19 am

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Man, it’s been so long since I’ve done a recipe here. So how ’bout a 2 for 1? Two recipes from the same pound of shrimp that we picked up this past weekend. I wrote this last Sunday, but haven’t had a chance to post it until today. First up, last Saturday’s dinner. Please excuse my wrinkly placemat:

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This was really easy. Actually, both of these recipes were easy. First, I got a pound of shrimp. I peeled them and threw them in a bowl with the following:

– 3/4 cup of Ken’s Caesar salad dressing

– 1 teaspoon Old Bay seasoning

– 1 teaspoon garlic powder

– 1/2 teaspoon cayenne pepper

Also, I got together:

– 1 small tomato

– 2 tablespoons butter

– 1 tablespoon fresh cilantro, chopped

Put everything except the tomato, butter, and cilantro in a bowl. Mix it all up and let it sit for about half an hour. When you’re just about ready, get a nonstick pan hot on a medium-high flame on the stove. Pop the shrimp in there for about a minute and a half or two minutes. Turn the shrimp over and cook on the other side for about a minute or later, until the shrimp is pink on both sides. Don’t overcook them– that’s when they become rubbery and tough. Take the shrimp out of the pan and put it on a plate or in a bowl.

Once you’ve taken the shrimp out of the pan, slice up your tomato into about 8 or 10 pieces, and put the tomato and the butter into the pan. What you’re doing at this point is taking the liquid that’s left and cooking it down to concentrate the flavors. Cook everything down for about 2 or 3 minutes and then pour it out on top of the shrimp. Then take the chopped cilantro and sprinkle it over the top. We added the shrimp to a little garlic butter rice.

Carbohydrate count: 46 grams (all from the rice)
 
 
We wound up with some shrimp and rice left over, and I used both to help make a shrimp salad for last Sunday’s lunch.

I chopped up the shrimp and put it into a bowl with the rice (that’s right– I used rice in shrimp salad). I also took some cole slaw mix from a bag and threw about a handful of that in there. I chopped up a green onion and put that in there too. Then I plopped in a heaping tablespoon of mayo and a heaping tablespoon of horseradish hummus, and mixed it all up. I put it on toast that was lightly covered with garlic butter. Add a slice of tomato, and it turned out very tasty:

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Carbohydrate count: 36 grams

It is very nice when you can make something so delicious one night, and use it in another delicious context for lunch the next day. Hope you get the chance to dine on something as fantastic very soon.

Carb counts are estimates only. Check with a registered dietician to find out what a healthy carb count is for you.
 
 
 

By StephenS | Posted in Recipes! | Also tagged , | Comments (1)