Low carb Friday dinner

Hello, everyone. We're doing more walks these days and have started wearing a small weighted vest. We can feel the difference! 

A week or so back, I made low carb Friday night dinner. 

The picture (of course!) turned sideways. 

The patty is one of the salmon, jalapeño,  cheddar patties from our local HEB store. I cook them in a little butter in the skillet anf they're so yummy.

The salad is our new summer favorite, cucumber slices with yogurt vinaigrette. I added the last of the snacking peppers when I  was cutting vegetables. (Forgot to half-peel the cucumbers before slicing.) These vegetables, with some nice onion-y herbal sprinkle, taste good and avoid stressing out over whether the leafy salad things at the store are washed well enough before shipping. Actually,  when I buy fresh leafy greens I always wash and spin them at home. The few minutes to do this are worth every second in my opnion.

The yogurt vinaigrette is usually a combination of the very plain bottled vinaigrette at the store (I check to make sure there is no sugar in it.) and a couple tablespoons of plain, whole milk yogurt. S & P to taste.

More flowers!

Hello, everyone.  Summer has arrived, with our typical temps in the 90's F. 

Salad of cucumber, tomato, and garden pepper

Very low carb, dressed with viaigrette and some onion-y green sprinkle and parsley. 

Another of the desert rose plants is now in bloom.

My low carb breakfast today

Hello, everyone.  As part of being accountable for my food choices--part of staying on the wagon--to work on the weight, I'm taking photos of food. 

Three egg omelet with the last of the jalapeño cheese spread and some guac on top. Black coffee on the side.

This will keep me feeling full until well after noon.

Lower-carb foods

Hello, everyone.  I had been slipping on my food choices over the holidays, and paid for it on the scale readings. I'm climbing back onto the wagon now, newly determined in spite of all the bad foods and drinks people push at me. 

Some new things: 

Wild caught salmon (Orca Bay frozen fillets package) cooked gently in butter with 2 eggs over medium and the garnish is some verdolaga (purslane) from the garden. That was a really tasty breakfast. 

Pork steaks, baked on a rack in a sheet pan, seasoned with S&P, tenderizer, mild curry powder that was turmeric colored, and some Tony's cajun seasoning. Garnish on top is a jalapeño cheese spread. (I took all of the seeds and pith out of the little pepper before chopping it into little bits. The cheese gentles the heat also.) Garnish is more of the verdolaga. This was a yummy and filling dinner dish.

3 eggs omelet, filled with more of the jalapeño spread--I want to use it up--with a few drops of Cholula and another sprig of verdolaga. 

The verdolaga is free for the pulling, and I don't indulge on spraying in the food garden, so it's the garnish of choice. Besides being chock-full of nutrients! Other good choices for garnish greens: volunteer dill. Parsley. Fennel leaves. Tiny little thinnings of lettuce or mustard greens. Arugula. 

Making the food look pretty encourages me to eat better.

Tried the flourless Greek Yogurt Bread

Hello, everyone.  We're having a bit of a cool spell today: this morning it was about 50°F. We're wearing long sleeves,  of course! 

I had run into a high protein, no wheat bread recipe on Youtube, and today I tried it out.

These little sandwiches are on yogurt bread slices.

The recipe makes a slightly wet bread. The loaf fell a bit while cooling, bit it didn't collapse. There is no real strength to the structure. I had noticed this about another eggs and cheese type bread recipe also.

 If I do it again, I will adjust the time and temp for a slower, cooler cooking. I'm thinking my oven is a little bit hot. Though the bread's pretty good in turkey sandwiches. 

Lemons are ripe now

Hello, everyone.  It's lemon picking time, and so we're doing something with as many as possible. 

We have squeezed many lemons and filled an assortment of containers for frozen lemon juice. That way we have home grown lemon juice for much or all of the year.

The lemons that gave their peels to the recipe.

The lemon peel marinating in vodka.

This year we're doing crema de limoncello. Like regular limoncello, it's really sweet and involves alcohol. The crema also has boiled-down milk. This is about our third batch of the sweet dessert sipping drink. It's very tasty.

Fruitcake season!

Hello, everyone.  It is, indeed, fruitcake season. Or it would be, except the stores have no candied peel for sale. Sigh. I have a lemon tree and an orange tree. 

Peels cleaned and sliced for candying

After candying. These are lemon peels. Tomorrow I will candy orange peels. 

The $64 question is: can I make an edible fruitcake patch without any candied citron?

We found the candied cherries and pineapple in the grocery store. Unfortunately there were absolutely no candied peel packages. Thus the preparation of candied lemon peel, and soon, candied orange peel. I don't have a tree that produces citron. I have decided to do my best with what is on hand.

It's a sad thing when you think you maybe need to set an arrival alert with HEB grocery so you can make the traditional Christmas goodies. Really.

Fall gardening season is here

Hello,  everyone. It's fall, and the heat of summer is starting to moderate. The warm weather garden plants, after struggling earlier, are in their prime.

These five beauties are not the first, but there are enough to make a nice picture.

I like to cut them in 1/4" slices, salt them and drain them for a while, then saute them gently until there are little golden-brown speckles on both sides. Wonderful flavor! 

Wow, it's been a while (edited for spelling corrections)

Hello, everyone.  Things got so busy for a while that I forgot to post. I will try to catch up now. 

After the San Antonio visit, we had a little road trip to see relatives. After that, I had a trip to see other relatives. While there, I happened to see some wildlife in the town. 

These deer were right next to a fairly busy road. 

On returning home, there was sewing. 

I finished the sewing club project to make a hanger pocket.

Converted an old sweatshirt into a cat bed, for when we get a kitty visitor.

Made a strap pad for use with the embroidery machine tote.

Made some puff breads with verdolaga filling. They were okay, but I don't think I'll do that recipe again.

Finally decided on a design for the striped canvas. 

Here, the finished canvas bag and three of the "Hemingway" slant-zipper bags. The one on the right was made from the off-cut of the one on the left.

And then applied the same re-use idea to the off-cut of the patchwork one above. These little zipper pouches are a lot of fun to make!

Tapas ideas, American style

Hello, everyone.  We love eating pinchos and tapas so much when we're on the Camino. At home, we get to missing them. Sometimes we try to make some of our own.

Cucumber rounds with tuna and pomegranate on the blue plate, also bread rounds with soft cream cheese and wild salmon on the yellow plate

Cucumber with dates, walnuts, and goat cheese. After making these we concluded that peeling and making thick slices of the Cucumber and scooping out the middle with a melon baller would work better.

Bread rounds variety: cream cheese with wild salmon, slices of meatball with Mexican cheese blend, cream cheese with piquillo pepper relish, combinations of the above. This last plate was turned sideways by the Blogger app, I did crop it but the first version was still in memory or something like that.

Pistou con huevo (edited to add link)

Hello, everyone.  It's going to be hot today, and no rain in the forecast to cool it down. Pretty much the same weather we enjoyed during our time in Córdoba, after we finished our Camino Francés this year. 

As y'all will have noticed, whenever we go on a trip we notice new recipes (new to us, not new in the world) and when we come home we want to make that yummy food for ourselves. This time I discovered pistou, a dish that is both Spanish and French, which I had read about but never tried. I had pistou with eggs for dinner in Córdoba and enjoyed it very much. When we got home, I went onto the internet and found a pistou recipe at Spain on a Fork. 

Pistou involves onion, zucchini or equivalent summer squash, bell pepper, and tomato. Eggplant is optional. It's basically gently cooked veggies in the skillet. It goes great with a lot of protein foods, and if you feel like the plate is a little too low on fat, you can add some sour cream on top.

Yum.

Cloud Bread

Hello, everyone.  I know that cloud bread was last year's fad, or maybe a couple of years ago, but I only tried it this year. Today, wanting something to spread taramosalata on, I got out the printout of a recipe and made some...with an extra egg because I thought I had contaminated the first egg white with yolk. Some cooking things just aren't worth taking chances on. I put the maybe contaminated white into the yolks cup and separated three more. The batter was a little less stiff when it was time to fold it into the whipped egg whites.  This may produce a less dry result than the original recipe...I am kind of hoping for that. 

Top view after baking for 35 minutes.

Side view. In the background is the Air Bake cookie sheet I supported the pan with.

After a while I flipped the little rounds over onto the baking rack so the bottoms would not become mushy from steam inside the pan.

I like the cloud breads, even though with no wheat flour there is no gluten with its chewy texture. They do need to be used with soft spreads as the lack of gluten does make them crumble if the sandwich filling is the least bit tough.

Another low carb breakfast (edited for spelling)

Hello, everyone. Today's post is of the completely yummy dish Nopales con Huevo.

The nopal pads--prickly pear cactus leaves--are in season right now. My local HEB grocery store has little bags of cleaned, diced nopal. The spines are gone. I boiled them in a pan of water and then rinsed them thoroughly to remove the gelatinous sap. Then they went into the skillet where they were joined by a couple of lightly beaten eggs. A few minutes later, a great scramble. I did drizzle a bit of Cholula sauce on top for seasoning. 

French style shallow poached pork steaks

Hello, everyone.  Recently I tried making shallow poached fish. It was great, even with swai. (Swai being tricky to make tasty.) This inspired me to try the method with something else.

The method, on Youtube. This is from Chef  Stepháne. 

I had some pork loin steaks. Following the method, I salted and peppered both sides. Also I chopped up a shallot.

Put shallot into nonstick pan and added the meat.

Added broth (chicken because it's pork) and wine and so on as in the recipe, which I found in his cookbook that was on hand. (It's hiding in a recipe for fish with tomato and onion reduction or something like that, I just skipped the part about tomatoes etc and the rest was as in the video.) Put the cover on and let it gently cook just like in the video.

Finished as per the video and put it on the plate. YUM! And completely low carb.

Thinned the radishes a little today

Hello, everyone. We have been having a beautiful day today, with sunshine. We are also having the south winds that precede another cool front. Winter has finally arrived, I guess.

I dug out two of the white radishes today so the others can have some room.

This is the larger one. I use them in tortilla Espanola in place of potatoes. I also used them in the garlic shrimp on toast that was pictured recently. 

There are also a lot of green tops, which are good in Brother Victor's radish greens soup. (From _Twelve Months of Monastery Soups_ by Brother Victor Antoine d'Avila-Latourette)

These are the long, Japanese type of daikon radish. They're said to be good for loosening up tight clay soils.

An open-faced sandwich

Hello, everyone.  There are projects underway, but none is ready to show yet. There was, however,  an experiment in the kitchen. 

This is an open-faced sandwich with garlic shrimp and daikon on toast. It was delicious. 

I cut up and salted the radish to ease out some of the excess water. Put oil in the pan to warm up, then started cooking the radish pieces. When they were well along, added a pouch of frozen Costco garlic shrimp and let them all cook together.  At the end, dolloped the shrimp mixture and sauce onto toast slices. Yum!

I don't have proof of it, but I think the radish pieces are lower in carbs than similarly sized potato pieces.

It's been quite a while since I made this

Hello, everyone. Today, for (late) breakfast I made tortilla de rabano, with berenjena. (Radish with eggplant) 

Little bits of red bell pepper and cut up radish leaves for pretty, too.

Yum!

Gooey Butter Cake

Hello, everyone. 

Gooey Butter Cake has always seemed like a cousin of Lemon Bars: a base that's more dry and a gooey top. 

It's a standard of Duke's Bakery in Alton, Illinois, where on Sunday morning after church the cars line up down the block as people pick up their  breakfast. The butter vanilla scent fills the kitchen while it bakes.

I just had to share this

I like a lot of Spanish food. One of my favorite dishes is tortilla. I like the fancy tortilla con verduras (has vegetables added) and I like the Tortilla de Rabano that we have been making at home, using radish. I love the Tortilla with radish, mushrooms, and little shrimps. 

This is the simple, delicious, plain tortilla de patata. I almost forgot to take the picture. 

Lo carb and wonderful

 Hello, everyone. 

DH had dental work,  and I have been trying to thread the needle between eating lo carb and not stressing his teeth a lot.

Yesterday I was inspired by Mr. Bevin at Spain on a Fork (a Youtube food channel, y'all should check it out) and the discovery of a new variety of fish patty at HEB Grocery. "Cajun style salmon and crayfish" raw fish patty. A.K.A. fishburgers, I know, but many of their fishburgers have been good.

I had seen Mr. Bevin do a salmon and veg dish that looked really good, and decided to do the new style of fishburger that way.

It involved fat (butter this time)  in the skillet, then some diced onion and garlic, let it work on getting translucent, then two bell peppers diced, continue cooking, then the last part of the mixed super greens bag, let this wilt in. Then add the fish patties, and a little water and Better Than Bouillon vegetable concentrate, and cover.

This was the vegetables getting ready for the fish.

And here is the cooked fish with the vegetables. 

It really came out tasty!