Wednesday, August 18, 2021

give me some ideas

I actually have a ton of keto recipes from YouTube that I'll be slowly going through, but in the meantime, I'm trying to create dishes of my own—things I can prep and eat repeatedly. In my Google Docs storage area, I have a folder called "Keto Stuff," which contains all things keto-related, including plenty of recipes, some of which date back months and months. Some of those recipes include: keto pasta, soegogi muguk (beef/radish soup), keto buns (hamburger), kimchi-jjigae, low-carb cookies, keto hummus, keto flatbread, keto gumbo (almond flour works surprisingly well in gumbo), chia-seed pudding, panna cotta, and pancakes (one of my oldest recipes, from Headbanger's Kitchen). Now, on top of that, I have an Excel spreadsheet devoted to an ever-increasing list of salads. I have a standard salad with vinaigrette, another with ranch, a caprese, one with egg and avocado, and a Greek salad. Keto Cobb is possible, I think, especially with shrimp instead of chicken, and using keto ranch dressing or some sort of keto bleu-cheese dressing (that I haven't made yet).

Anyway, I'm always on the lookout for new ideas, so if you have some suggestions—even if they're not keto—list them in the comments. Non-keto suggestions might just end up being made for a cheat day, so feel free to suggest whatever. Don't feel limited by my carb restriction. Besides, some of the salads I've crafted weigh in at almost 1500 calories and almost 50 grams of carbs, which is the daily limit I've set for myself. Other salads are more modest in their proportions, so I can pair them up with keto burgers, for example. Essentially, anything goes, so feel free to fire away. Do I seem to be dreaming of food? You bet. It's been a long ten weeks, and I'm ready to move on and eat more normally.



3 comments:

Charles said...

Do you still despise onions, or did your recent brain rewiring change that? Are onions even keto? Huh, Google says they are not. Oh well. I was just thinking of a really great Moroccan chicken dish I made last night with preserved lemons (which are also probably not keto). Preserved lemons are so good, by the way. They go well with chicken and fish, they're good with oven-roasted vegetables, etc. Pretty much anything you would think of putting lemon in can probably be made better with preserved lemons. I'm thinking of making a preserve lemon pilaf at some point, although that will definitely not be keto.

Truth is, I don't think a lot about keto, so I doubt any of my recipes will be keto-friendly, but I can recommend preserved lemons as a way to kick up a lot of different dishes. Oh, I just looked on google and apparently lemons are keto-friendly, so bonus! So you could make the Moroccan chicken dish and maybe just leave out the onions. I stole the recipe from here:

Moroccan Chicken with Preserved Lemons

Kevin Kim said...

I generally still despise onions, although there are (as there have always been) weird exceptions. Onions in most Korean jjigaes are fine because they've had the shit cooked out of them; onions in Brazilian moqueca are also fine (same reason, I guess). And in pico de gallo, probably because the onions are minced, not chunky. And in the dipping sauce for galmaegi-sal (in this case, I don't know why... maybe because the onions go right into ssam with a bunch of other things). But no big, chunky onions on burgers, in pizza, or in spaghetti. I hate that. If you put onions on/in those things, the onions need to be minced or pureed.

Didn't even realize onions weren't considered keto. I just looked up the macros for 100 g of onions, and NutritionX (one of my go-to sites for macros) says:

44 calories
1.4 g protein
0.2 g fat
10 g carbs

Yeah, that's a lot of carbs—10% of the onion's weight. For what it's worth, 1.4 grams of those carbs are dietary fiber, so they can be subtracted from the total, giving us 8.6 g of net carbs (or 8.6% of the onion's weight). I imagine the numbers are worse for dried onion, given there's no water content to dilute the carbs and other nutrients. That said, I see keto recipes that use onions all the time, so at a guess, it's a matter of what fraction of your meal is onions. As long as you stay under your daily carb limit, whatever that might be, I bet onions are OK.

I mentioned onions in my latest post (8/20).

Kevin Kim said...

That looks like a good recipe, and more authentically Moroccan than the Moroccan-inspired chicken I do.