Bratwurst with Sauerkraut and Mustard

Hostels with kitchens - a big help for keto traveling

Another travel-friendly meal!  Sausages and hot dogs are pretty standard fare when camping, so we needed a way to make it keto-friendly.  Don't be fooled, the hot dogs and sausages you find at gas stations and little small town groceries are unlikely to cut it.  We only buy sausages that say 'carbohydrate: 0' on the nutritional label, which are few and far between.  Usually, those are bratwurst.  Boars Head makes a low-carb bratwurst, which we use as our carb value for calculating purposes, but it has proven to be quite elusive!  We made an exception for Trader Joe's very fat-tastic bratwurst coming in at 'less than 1 carb' which is not currently in the keto-calculator and which I am using for calculations here.

With the sausage sorted, we had to figure out a way to make it a meal.  Tristan was craving sauerkraut and mustard, which make a perfect accompaniment to a bratwurst and are wholly keto-approved.  Score!  If you aren't adamantly opposed to mayo with a sausage, it would be another great way to bump up your fat. (I love hot dogs with mayo.)  

To finish off the fat, pair with a creamy decaf   coffee (not pictured).

Ingredients:


Sausages:

2 Trader Joe's Hofbrau Brats
45 g sauerkraut
14 g yellow mustard (or 2 sachets nicked from a fast-food chain)

Creamy Coffee:

40 g heavy whipping cream (40%)
cup of decaf coffee

This is not strictly a recipe as such but more of a meal idea, so no real explanation needed.  Cook your sausages as you like (boil, pan fry, roast over a fire).  Just make sure they're cooked all the way through!

fat:  66.7 g, protein:  27.8 g, carb:  2.9 g

ratio:  2.2:1

Note:  Less fatty sausages (as most others, including Boars Head will be) will likely need a spoonful or two of supplemental fat to hit your desired ratio, so make sure to take into account the values for whatever sausage you use!

Spinach Salad with Bacon Vinaigrette

This salad is one of our go-to recipes.  In fact, the picture to the right was taken during our road trip, so its easy to put together when you're somewhere unfamiliar!  It is also a warm salad, so good for cooler weather when the idea of a cold meal is unappealing.

Ingredients:

Spinach Salad:

25 g sliced white mushrooms

50 g spinach

10 g green onion

50 g hard boiled egg

55 g bacon

Bacon Vinaigrette:

3 g yellow mustard

10 g red wine vinegar

1 g truvia

38 g bacon fat

Plate the spinach and arrange sliced raw mushrooms and chopped green onion.

Boil egg for about 6 minutes or until hard boiled.  Slice and place on salad.

Fry bacon to desired crispiness and crumble over salad.

Weigh your remaining bacon fat to get desired amount.  If you are outside of the US, then your bacon may not render a frying pan full of fat (yes, fellow Americans, I too was shocked that there is bacon that does not yield buckets of bacon grease!).  In that case, add as much olive oil as needed to the pan to reach the 38 g.

Over low heat, whisk in vinegar, truvia, and yellow mustard.  It may help to comine the ingredients before adding back to the pan.

Once rewarmed over the stove, pour over your salad, making sure to hit those mushrooms, so they soak up all that dressing!

fat: 63.4 g, protein:  24.5 g, carb:  3.1 g

ratio:  2.3:1

Variation:  If you are bothered by the idea of raw mushroom on your salad, you can always add it to the dressing when you are cooking it on the stove.  However, when you pour the hot oil on the salad, it does act as a sort of partial cooking.  Also, if you don't need quite so much protein, just use less bacon.  As you can see from the picture, there is bacon to spare!

Fruity Flax "Loops"

Cereal is one of Tristan's big 'misses' on the ketogenic diet.  I had seen a few different keto breakfast cereal recipes floating around the internet, but each had their drawbacks.  For instance, a paltry child's handful of brightly colored fruit loops might taste nice, but they would never satisfy as a meal, nor contain enough protein for an active adult man.  Instead, I combined the best of every recipe I found, along with a couple of twists of my own.  The resulting cereal has a very 'healthy' flax taste to it, but according to Tristan, is my most ingenious creation yet!

The other upside to cereal is that it doesn't need to be kept cool, and the hours of advance preparation aside, can be put together very quickly the morning it's eaten.  Good news if you're packing up a campground!

Cereal Ingredients:

28 g european butter

2 g truvia

2 g sugar-free jello powder (strawberry banana)

10 g raw egg white

15 g vanilla soy protein powder

43 g ground flax seed

1/3 C water

'Milk':

50 g heavy cream (40%)

50g unsweetened almond milk

Melt butter and add all other remaining cereal ingredients.  The 1/3 C of water makes the batter easier to work with, but does not need to be precise, whatever works for you and your climate!

Pour batter into a plastic baggie and cut off one of the corners.  Remember, the size you cut from the corner dictates how much comes out when you are piping.  Bigger holes go faster!

If you are going for loops, pipe into loop shape.  However, if you are making a big batch like I was, you will quickly end up saying f*ck loops, you're getting blobs!  I promise that blobs taste just as good as loops, so give your hand a break if you need to!  Stick to about 1/2 inch in size.

Bake at 350 F for about 15 minutes.  Time will depend on size.  They should be crunchy and golden when ready.

Serve with the cream/almond 'milk.'

fat:  63.4 g, protein:  24 g, carb:  3 g

ratio:  2.4:1

Variations:  I chose strawberry banana jello flavor which gives it a nice banana smell when it is baking. In the end, flax is the overwhelming flavor, but if you want to try other jello flavors, go for it!  Our protein powder is all the way from a Holland and Barrett in the UK and the lowest carb option was vanilla soy, but I imagine any protein powder should work, just make sure it is low on the carbs!

The Land of Low-Carb Opportunity

I had spent many a long (short?) English winter day looking forward to my arrival in the good ol'  US of A. Not only a land of the 'Free' which provides homes for the 'Brave', whatever that means, but also a return to 't-shirt weather' amongst a nation of people supposedly obsessed with 'fad diets'. It was an utopian future which I was envisioning, elbow deep in all sorts of low or no carb products, making kitchen life, nay life in general, so much sweeter. I had already seen the evidence online after all, so I knew these products existed. Recipes and blog entries showing how easy it was to eat 'low carb' as well as specialist products made for people like me. I just had to hunt them down and was sure that they would taste like manna handed down directly from the Gods.

My optimism was short lived.

Firstly, I found that all this talk of 'low' or 'no' carb was more a case of incorrect labeling that anything else. To describe the provision of nutritional information on US food products as simply 'inaccurate', does not do justice to the grand magnitude of lies being peddled to the American public by US food producers each year. I would go as far as to say that whoever is in charge of policing the US food labeling system has a hell of a lot to answer for, for the information provided is simply not accurate. 

By way of background, back in Europe, every product must show the complete nutritional information for 100g of the product sold to the nearest 0.1g (Note that 100g is just under 4oz for those of you still living in the Victorian era - hey, I'm just saying!). The values for (usually smaller) serving sizes can also be shown, but the 100g benchmark is always kept to and there is no possibility of rounding the figure up or down to the nearest gram. 

On the other hand, the US's system does not require a standard serving size to the listed, but rather leaves this at the discretion of the food retailer, allowing said retailer to also round down the values as they please. Therefore for example: A retailer who produces Product X which has 2.4g of carbs per 100g  may deem the appropriate serving size of its product to be 20g. The amount of carbs in 20g of Product X is 0.48g of carbs, which after a quick round-down equals 0 Carb. "Wow" says the innocent though uninformed shopper: "Product X has zero carbs, I can eat a gallon of this stuff and still get a pat on the back from Dr. Atkins". 

In an effort to try and overcome the rather creative approach food companies take to their nutritional labeling, we started to read more into the ingredients listed in the products we found in supermarket products. Unsurprisingly, what we saw only served to further confirm that this was not the Land of Low Carb Opportunity I was hoping it would be. 'Sugar', 'corn syrup', 'high fructose corn syrup', 'glucose', 'cane juice', 'refined sugar cane' - lots of different words which essentially mean the same thing --- that its almost impossible to find unadulterated food products in US supermarkets. Bacon, once a staple of mine contains sugars and therefore carbs. Turkey breast slices - carbs. Bratwurst sausage - carbs. Jerky - carbs (lots of them!). I also found there is no such thing over here as Double Cream, the closest being a less fatty 'Heavy Whipping Cream' which contains far more carbs also. 

I was distraught, but not inconsolable, because, leading me nicely into the subject of this post, I was placing all my eggs (about the only product in the US which doesn't have sugar added to it by the way) in the Walden Farms basket. 

I had been reading about this brand of condiments almost since they day I had to cut carbohydrates out of my life. This miracle company, no doubt, I thought, run by supernatural beings with divine agency, boasted a range of zero carb products which were meant to ACTUALLY contain zero carbs. Having read through their products' ingredient lists, I knew that 'nutritional' information on these products was clearly a misnomer to begin with, however such is the desperation of those on a low carb lifestyle, that I was ready to try their tomato sauce despite the fact that it contained not a hint of tomato in it. 

Chancing upon these products in the local health food store, I remember Samantha noting that I was buzzing with excitement, like a little boy with a sweet tooth in a sugar-free 'candy' store just before he found out that the candy was sweetened with sugar alcohols and therefore out of bounds also.

Buoyed by the actual sight of these products for the first time and a 2 for 1 offer on all Walden Farm products in the store, I started my spending spree, purchasing a range of Walden Farms products ranging from pasta sauce to peanut butter to pancake syrup, ketchup and barbecue sauce. I could hardly wait to get home and dip my little fingers in each of them. It was when I did that my whole world came crashing down on me. The crack team who were put together to formulate the flavouring for the tomato and basil pasta sauce and the tomato ketchup had clearly never been near tomatoes in their lives. The two varieties of barbecue sauce I tasted were completely unpalatable, a complete affront to the fine art of the BBQ - so much so that if Mr Walden had the audacity to set foot in the State of Texas, he would surely be hung, drawn and quartered. A missed opportunity really, since making him swallow a tablespoon of his awful sauce would be a far worse punishment. Finally a more than dishonourable mention goes to the so-called 'peanut butter'. The way that Mr Walden raped and pillaged this stalwart of the American sandwich is completely beyond any type of reproach. To get the taste and texture of peanut butter so completely wrong is perhaps the only 'miracle' which Walden should be laying claim to on his website, and I personally think a special section of hell should be reserved for him and his team of apes for building up my hopes as much as he did on this one. 

Ok, so you must be wondering about the pancake syrup. I suppose I must respectfully alight my high horse of criticism and negativity to admit that a small bow must go to Walden on this one. In small amounts and added to Samantha's special pancakes or cereal, it does provide the (tricks-me-into-thinking-it's-a) sugar rush I have been so desiring. But other than that, shame on you Walden you naughty, naughty man, I will certainly not be trying your chocolate sauce for God only knows what that vile brown mush will actually taste like …

One further note on Walden Farm products is that they are actually not zero carb at all, adding 'dishonesty' to the list of crimes Mr Walden should be answering to.

Cinnamon Crepes with Whipped Cream

I had been promising Tristan pancakes after we bought some Walden Farms pancake syrup (our only successful purchase that day which I shall leave to Tristan to blog about). My intent was to make American style pancakes, or try to, but in a moment of unprepared desperation, I settled for a simpler crepe recipe I nicked off the Internet.

It wasn't strictly keto by our standards, so after a little trial and error, I got a sweet breakfast or an equally nice dessert. It's low on protein, so if its breakfast it could be paired with a carbless, preferably fatty, protein or just the right breakfast before lunch at a steakhouse!

Ingredients:

53 g or 1 egg
28 g cream cheese
0.5 g cinnamon
10 g European butter
60 g 40% cream
5 g truvia
5 g pancake syrup

Microwave or otherwise heat cream cheese until soft and whip together with egg.

Add cinnamon to egg and cream cheese. This is quite a bit of cinnamon, so you could also reserve some to dust on top at the end.

Heat butter in nonstick skillet over medium-low heat.

Pour batter into skillet to desired size and flip when it looks firm enough to handle and bottom is lightly browning. I recommend roughly dividing in thirds to make 3 crepes.

Once they have all cooked, place in refrigerator to cool. This is necessary to prevent them from melting the whipped cream you now have time to make.

Combine cream and truvia and beat using an electric mixer until fluffy and spreadable but be wary of over beating. It is easier to make a larger batch of this which you can save for later sweet treats.

Layer your crepes and whipped cream with whipped cream spread between each crepe, reserving a dollop of whipped cream on top.

Last, lightly drizzle with the teaspoon of syrup.

Fat: 47.6 g, protein: 10 g, carb: 3.1

Ratio: 3.6:1

by Samantha

Broccoli Cheese Soup

Tristan and I are currently on the road (Kansas!), and I knew I needed to prepare food-wise for our 9 state road trip.  One of my ideas was pre-made soup which would be easy to reheat in motel room microwaves or over a campfire.  If you're traveling by car, freeze it solid, keep it on ice, and you're good to go!

In the early days of the diet, Tristan insisted that soup on its own could never be filling enough, but soup is the perfect keto meal, so he never stood a chance resisting.  He's definitely changed his mind about soup now!

Ingredients:

35 g chicken (thigh)

30 g broccoli (raw)

10 g green onion

30 g european butter

50 g cream (40%)

50 g cheddar

Start out by boiling skin-on, bone-in chicken thighs in a large stock pot until fully cooked.  The leftover water will be used in the soup.

In an adequately sized soup pot, add the broccoli, green onion, butter, cream, and enough of the chicken stock you created to steam the broccoli.  With the lid on, bring the liquid to a simmer and cook until the broccoli is tender.

While the broccoli cooks, remove the chicken meat from the bone to get 35 g.  It should fall easily off the bone.

Once the broccoli has cooked, add the chicken.  Using a blender, submersible or otherwise, blend everything until smooth.  

Add grated cheddar last, melting into the soup.  Note that I used dubliner irish cheddar which has 0 carbs.

Salt to taste.

Serving size will vary based on the amount of liquid you choose to add to thin out your soup.  The chicken stock will also vary based on the ratio of chicken meat to water you use, but it will contain a small amount of protein and fat which is consequently impossible to factor into the nutritional values.

fat:  65.4 g, protein:  24.2 g, carbs:  3 g

ratio: 2.4:1

This soup is really delicious freshly made.  The texture isn't quite as smooth after being frozen, but still tastes just as good.  After canning, well that's a whole new post ...