Making cauli-rice in a Vita-Mix

Cauli-rice, or cauliflower rice, is a staple food for many on the low-carb, ketogenic way of life. It's a low-carb substitute for things like rice, potatoes or biscuits.

Dana Carpender repeats the basic cauli-rice recipe she uses in many of her cook books. Her versions often call for 1/2 a cauliflower. I weighed my two cauliflower heads and averaged them, and came up with a 12 oz weight for 1/2 a cauliflower. That came to 2.5 cups of cauliflower after the cauli-rice making process. This is 3 servings, each with 5 grams of carbs. (And 2 grams of fiber, if you do the 'net carbs' thing.)

Dana suggests putting the cauliflower through the food processor on the shredding blade. I no longer have a food processor as I never used it, so I make cauli-rice in my Vita-Mix®️, which is kind of like a blender with superpowers. There are two ways to make cauli-rice in your Vita-Mix--- the dry chop method and the wet chop method. I tried the dry chop method first, and it left a lot of unchopped bits of cauliflower.

So I resorted to the wet chop method, as you will find in your owner's manual. I put in enough cauliflower to fill it within an inch or so of the top, and then added water to cover. You only need a few seconds of chopping to get it done. You put it on forward, then reverse, 3 times within your few seconds, and you will have a bunch of well-chopped cauliflower.

I steamed the cauliflower for about 8 minutes in my steamer pot. I first put the water in the pot and brought it to a boil, then put in the steamer insert filled with cauliflower rice.

Since I live alone, I put one serving of the steamed cauli-rice in each freezer bag, and froze them in my big upright freezer out on my porch. I then put the frozen bags into a larger sized freezer bag, so they would be double-bagged.

I also made up Dana Carpender's Fried Rice Recipe from her book 300 15-Minute Low-Carb Recipes. I omitted the cooked meat, since I planned to serve the fried rice with a meat dish. It turned out fairly well, but I thought the 2 eggs called for were a bit much. Next time I think I'll make it with 1 egg only.

Dana Carpender's cookbook also has several other recipes that call for cauli-rice, such as Spanish "Rice", Beef and Bacon "Rice" with Pine Nuts and Chicken-Almond "Rice"--- which is a lot like Rice-a-Roni.

I have a very nice kitchen scale which weighs things in pounds or ounces or also with metric measurements. It also "zeroes out" the weight of a container, so you can weigh food in a container without adding the container weight to the measurement. I find it a very useful item, as when I figured out how much 1/2 cauliflower weighed.

So now I have some home-made cauli-rice in my freezer. I plan usually to thaw it out in my fridge before heating, but I've heated frozen cauli-rice in the microwave before, and it was still OK.

Do you make and eat cauli-rice? What dishes do you make with it? Is it something you might try to add diversity to your diet?

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
A book and some products mentioned in this blog post. 

The Carbohydrate Addict's Diet: Just a You-Can-Still-Eat-Carbs Lie

Carbohydrate addiction. I can relate to that. Carbohydrates play the role of an addictive substance in my life. Which is why I bought the book  pictured at right: The Carbohydrate Addict's Diet. I thought it would help me deal with my addiction.

What would you think of a program for people addicted to heroin, alcohol, gambling, marijuana, casual sex or cigarettes that told the addict: You can still have your heroin, alcohol, casual sex or cigarettes once a day. And you can have as much of your addictive substance or practice as you can consume during one hour.

Would that actually be helping with the addiction, or just enabling the addict to live in denial about the addiction? Well, that is the plan of the Carbohydrate Addict's Diet. You eat two low-carb meals a day, and for the third, you get a Reward Meal, in which you can have all the carbs you can eat. Later iterations of the diet insist that you eat your regular low-carb foods--- your protein and salad--- and if you want more carbs than you planned on for your Reward Meal, you have to eat extra protein and salad as well.

In Dana Carpender's book How I Gave up my Low-Fat Diet and Lost 40 Pounds, Dana gives her own review of the diet. She likes the idea that if you eat excess carbs, it's physiologically better to finish the carb binge in an hour. But when she tried the actual diet herself, she plateaued at a weight higher than she liked, and she didn't feel very good with the daily excess carb dose, since she had been on low-carb previously.

My own experience is somewhat similar. Except that I am a real sucker for carbs, and once I felt permitted to eat any carbs I craved once a day, I didn't feel very inspired to concoct two low-carb meals, with salads, every day. (Call me a barbarian, but I don't regard salad as a meal, or even much of a meal component. I'd rather have bacon.)

Going on the Carbohydrate Addict's diet just led me off low-carb and back into eating large amounts of carbs, like barbeque flavor potato chips, Butterfinger candy bars, pizza and cheeseburgers.  It worked about as well on me as a 'rehab' plan allowing alcoholics a 1 hour alcohol binge every day would help alcoholics.

One proof that the Carbohydrate Addict's diet didn't work for people in the long term is that there doesn't seem to be any community of Carbohydrate Addict's Diet devotees online anywhere. Another is that the original diet was modified in subsequent books to try to limit the carb consumption at the Reward Meal.

I believe that the Carbohydrate Addict's diet is not a help for real-world carbohydrate addicts, but a cruel lie. People who are tempted by this diet would be better off trying a standard ketogenic diet and actually dealing with their carb addiction instead of feeding it on a daily basis. Find new ketogenic-friendly foods you love, and those old carb foods will have less power to tempt you.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Have you tried The Carbohydrate Addict's Diet? Did it fail you, too? Or perhaps you are still on the diet and want to defend it. Your input is welcome in a comment!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Here are the books I mentioned in this blog post. I recommend the Dana Carpender book, but The Carbohydrate Addict's Diet, since I don't recommend it as a diet, isn't on my must-read list.

Recipe: Baked chicken with veggies in one oven pan

This is a simple way to make a chicken meal without much fussing. I started baking chicken inspired by the chicken wing recipes in Dana Carpender's 500 Low-Carb Recipes, which start in chapter 2. (Page 43 of my copy.)

I used chicken thighs instead of wings when I first made the recipes and it worked. Bone-in, skin-on thighs, of course. Why would I let a chicken processing corporation steal part of my chicken from me?

I have since simplified the baked chicken a lot, in part because I now harvest the schmaltz (chicken fat) from the pan for other uses, and so don't want it full of salt, spices and other things. Though I usually bake chicken thighs--- 2 for an individual serving, 3 if I'm extra hungry--- right now I'm working my way through a cut-up fryer from Amish Farms, some brand they carry at Jack's Market in Menominee (Michigan.)

PREHEAT your oven to 325 F  (170 C.)

Put aluminum foil over your baking pan for easier clean-up. Place your chicken pieces UPSIDE DOWN on the pan.  Do not salt, season or flavor the chicken.

Bake 20 minutes. Take your chicken out and flip it RIGHT-SIDE-UP, and put back in the hot oven for 20 more minutes.

PREPARE THE VEGETABLES:
I use frozen vegetables mostly. Which are pre-cooked (blanched) before freezing. In the picture I used chopped-up cauliflower, with a tiny pinch of frozen onions. I put in 2 Tablespoons of chicken bone broth, a splash of soy sauce, and about 1/2 Tablespoon or so of bacon fat. Butter, coconut oil or other good fats will do as well, including schmaltz. I put the veggies in a mini loaf pan, but you can also make a disposable mini-pan out of foil. Any low-carb acceptable veggies will do.

Next step: Take the chicken out of the oven when the second 20 minutes is up. Place the loaf pan with the veggies on the pan with the chicken, out of the way of the cooking chicken. Put back in the oven for a final 20 minutes. Use this time to set the table and prepare your plate.

WHEN FINISHED:
Take the veggie loaf pan out, with oven mitts, it is hot, and take a spoon to get the veggies out without taking the liquid from cooking. Put the chicken on the plate.
AT TABLE: sprinkle a little salt, seasoned salt, or soy sauce on the veggies. Sprinkle salt or soy sauce on the chicken's skin. You may remove the skin to save for 'dessert' and put a little salt or soy sauce on the 'naked' chicken, to make sure that part is flavorful too.

OPTION:
If you have a sauce made up--- Hollandaise, a Chinese peanut sauce from Carpender's recipe books, or a home-made Ranch dressing, you can warm that up a bit and serve that with the veggies and chicken. You can even warm your bit of sauce in a little container on the chicken pan for the last 5 minutes of the cooking! I'd use one of those foil cupcake pan liners for sauce-warming.

HARVESTING THE SCHMALTZ:
On your chicken-baking pan there will be some chicken fat left. To get pure schmaltz, you want to run it through a filter. I use a milk filter since I used to have dairy goats, but you can also use a coffee filter. Get out a small (1 pint or 1/2 pint) canning jar. Put a canning funnel or regular funnel on top of the jar. Pour the chicken fat from the pan through the filter and funnel. When the jar gets full of schmaltz, if you already have another container of good fat you are using up, you can store the schmalz in the freezer.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
How about you? How is your #ketodiet going today? Any tough times? Any easy times? Please share in a comment!

Thank you to the person who bought items through my Amazon.com links. It is really helping me!

Keto Dairy-Free Chocolate Milk for National Chocolate Milk Day

Today is National Chocolate Milk day, as I've just learned from Twitter, and so I thought I should post 'my' keto & dairy-free chocolate milk recipe.

Chocolate Milk (2 servings)

Mix in a 1 quart wide-mouth canning jar, using a stick blender.

1 cup full-fat coconut milk, unsweetened
1 1/2 cups water
72 drops liquid stevia (Sweetleaf sweetdrops) Vanilla flavor is good.
2 Tablespoons unsweetened Cacao powder
1/4 teaspoon sea salt

Put it in your canning jar and run your stick blender half a minute or so. If you can tolerate dairy (as I can) use 1/2 cup of the coconut milk and 1/2 cup heavy whipping cream.

This recipe is adapted from one in Dana Carpender's Fat Fast Cookbook 2. Dana's got some great keto/lowcarb recipe books, buy some!

My keto diet experiences

My first experience with a keto diet was sometime in the 1990s when I picked up a copy of Dr. Atkins' first diet book in a Goodwill store in Iron Mountain, Michigan.

I read the book cover to cover and tried the diet. I was so surprised how easy it was to lose weight! The Atkins diet, at least in the Induction Phase, is ketogenic. Dr. Atkins recommended that you run out and buy ketone test strips and test your urine for ketones. That way you could tell if your body had shifted over into fat-burning mode.

After that point I started purchasing any diet book I could find that was low-carb or ketogenic in nature. I read all the info in the books, especially if they referenced scientific studies. And I tried low-carb recipes from a lot of different books.

I lost some weight on Atkins. But in time I stopped doing it. The reason was that it was just hard to find low-carb food you didn't have to cook from scratch. And I had to give up going out to restaurants. There were no restaurants in my area that had low-carb items. And my family members liked to take me out to eat.

I went back on Atkins at some point. I think I was on Atkins for a full year when my father died. But I had to go off the diet at that time because I was eating out with my mother, or eating at mom's house.

At some point, my mother gave me her old blood sugar meter when she got a new one from her doctor. I tried it and found out I had diabetes. My mom's nurse-practitioner put me on Metformin. Later another drug--- I think Actos--- was added.

I found that my blood sugar was only staying under control when I was ALSO doing low-carb. Since the nurse-practitioner didn't care what my diet was, that was working out. Except I wasn't losing weight much, since I was older, menopausal, and diabetic. I was more concerned with blood sugar numbers than weight at this point.

I got a bad number on a kidney test and so had to go to a kidney doctor. And then I had to apply for Medicaid and I had to get a new kidney doctor and new doctor-substitute. One of my kidney doctors took me off all my drugs saying they caused the problem. So I really had to go low-carb. A kidney doctor messed me up by demanding I go on a government approved diet (DASH diet) that did nothing to address my carbohydrate problems. But when I got worse blood sugar numbers she said I could do what worked for me.

I noticed that the more I stuck to my diet, the better my kidney tests were. My most recent kidney doctor told me that diet had no effect on kidney disease. Since I had recently read a medical journal article that said otherwise, and heard about others, she became my former kidney doctor.

I had been collecting cookbooks by Dana Carpender for some time by then. She came out with a new one with Jimmy Moore as co-author. That's how I learned about Jimmy Moore's health podcasts. And when he came out with The Complete Guide to Fasting with Dr. Jason Fung, a kidney doctor (nephrologist), I had to buy a copy.

I feel that I am getting very well read on the science behind ketogenic diets and behind fasting. But the follow-through is hard. I still live alone, don't have a dishwasher or running water in the kitchen sink, and have to drive to another state for a grocery store with good selection.

And so, this blog. I figure if I become a health blogger I will be more motivated to stick to my keto and fasting plan. And if I can help other people to become informed or inspired, that's a bonus. Since I am a Christian (Catholic flavor) I think helping others is cool. So, if I can help you--- maybe answer a question or something--- I will.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
My personal stuff.
On Sept 23, my weight was 199 pounds. (My all-time high was about 255 pounds.) My blood sugars, particularly in the morning, have been BAD. (Not saying how bad.) My blood sugar this morning was still BAD, but was significantly down from the 300+ blood sugars I have been getting in the morning. I have been doing Intermittent Fasting in the mornings, eating only after 11am. I'm trying to hold off until 12 noon every day, and stop eating after 6pm.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Some books mentioned in this post.