Avocado Egg Salad Lettuce Wrap

Another great summery lunch!  Cool avocado and egg salad wrapped in a crisp iceberg lettuce leaf for a bit of crunch.

Ingredients:

175 g eggs (3 1/2 medium eggs)

50 g mayo (Musa olive oil)

35 g avocado

2 g yellow mustard

2 g lime juice

0.3 g paprika

30 g iceberg lettuce leaf

Hard boil eggs (boil for 6 minutes and immediately run under cool water) and peel.  Chop into bite size cubes.

Chop avocado into bite size cubes and combine with egg.

Mix in mayo, lime juice, mustard, and paprika until well incorporated.

If using freshly boiled eggs, chill for at least 30 minutes to get cold egg salad.

Wrap it all up in a large outer iceberg lettuce leaf and enjoy!

fat:  62.7 g, protein:  23.7 g, carb:  3 g

ratio:  2.3:1

Note:  I recommend making this in a double batch, otherwise you're left with half a boiled egg!

Coconut Fruit Pops

Tristan is meant to have a snack or dessert every day, so it's good to have something easy around.  Frozen treats are also good since its getting quite hot these days!  Pictured here are two flavors of coconut fruit pops, lime and raspberry.  I use frozen raspberries, again for convenience, and the nutritional values are based on those printed on my frozen raspberry bag from Carrefour.


Ingredients:

Coconut Lime Pops

60 g coconut cream (blue dragon)

18 g lime juice

2 g coconut oil

4 drops liquid stevia

Raspberry Coconut Pops

60 g coconut cream (blue dragon)

24 g frozen raspberries

3 drops liquid stevia

In the case of the lime pops, the ingredients only need to be stirred together and poured in popsicle containers which can hold at least 80 mL of liquid.  Be warned, these pops are very lime-y so decrease the lime juice if you don't enjoy sour sweets.

fat:  13.5 g, protein:  2.1 g, carbs:  2.5 g

ratio:  2.9:1

For the raspberry pops, combine ingredients in a blender and pour.  It's better to use slightly bigger pops if you can find them.  The consistency is quite like a very thick smoothie or milkshake, so another alternative way of serving would be as a frozen drink.

fat:  11.8 g, protein:  2.3 g, carbs:  2.5 g

ratio: 2.5:1

Variations:  I've also made a strawberry version, and I'm sure lemon or blackberry would work too (or combinations?) depending on what fruits you like!

Choco Squares Flax Cereal

Cereal for breakfast is a real miracle on the ketogenic diet.  For one, if you are not a morning person, it means getting an extra 30 minutes of sleep when you have morning commitments because it is storable and easy to put together morning-of.  It also means a break from scrambled eggs.  For Tristan, it is a real treat.

My fruity flax loops recipe was a big hit with Tristan and the blog as well (although still a dearth of comments!) based on views, but it was exhausting to make.  This recipe rectifies the labor-intensiveness of the last recipe by making a sheet of squares and utilizes the greatness of double cream to make the perfect breakfast!

Ingredients:

Cereal:

80 g ground flaxseed

30 g egg white

25 g melted butter

5 g Cadbury's cocoa

4 g truvia

50 g water (approximately)

Milk:

75 g Alpro unsweetened almond milk

50 g double cream (50.5% fat)

Combine ground flaxseed, egg white, melted butter, cocoa, truvia, and water in a bowl, mixing until combined.  You may need more or less water based on climate (from my experience).  Use the amount you need for the dough to be fully moistened but still a dough-like consistency.

Spread the dough thinly on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper.  The easiest and least messy way to do this is to spread it between two layers of parchment paper.  Oh the wonders of parchment paper!

Using a butter knife, score lines into the dough, making squares.

If you want to be done in a hurry, bake at 350 F (175 C) for about 20 minutes.  Be aware that if you want it crunchy, you run the risk of over-toastiness!  The more patient among us should give it a try baking at 150 F (65 C) until crispy which will keep away any chance of burning, but be high enough to fully cook the egg in the dough.

Serve with cream/almond 'milk'.

fat:  81.9 g, protein:  20 g, carb:  3 g

ratio:  3.6:1 (heck yeah!)

Note:  Despite chocolate being a pretty strong flavor, the overwhelming taste here is still flax.  If you can afford more carbs or a lower ratio, you can try adding more cocoa - no promises!  I also tried using cinnamon and vanilla as the flavor instead of cocoa, which Tristan liked equally well (still tasted like flax) so a good alternative for someone who doesn't like chocolate - like me!

Chocolate!

I love chocolate. Everyone does.

Well, I suppose Samantha doesn't. She likens its taste to that of 'burnt dirt', a flavour we are of course all familiar with.

Unfortunately for me though, normal person chocolate contains way too much sugar for someone on my diet, so while on the road I was without the dirty burnt tasting goodness for months.

Once settled in one place, we searched the web and found some stevia and erythritol-sweetened chocolate made by New York based Lucienne's.

Stevia, produced from the leaves of the stevia plant, is a carb-free sweetener in its pure form.  Erythritol has only about 1/20th the carbs of sugar and is therefore not too shabby either. Chocolate itself is not devoid of carbohydrate, so no bar will never be carb-free, however as a rule, the darker the chocolate (these are 83%) the less carbs it will contain.

Based on our estimations, each square has 0.5 g carb, 0.5 g protein and 2 g fat, adding up to a decent 2:1 ratio. Most importantly though, despite being a bit more bitter than what I would usually choose, all three flavours (mint, orange, regular) are really, really tasty, with orange currently the marginal favourite. The cocoa content is high, but you tend to appreciate a more intense chocolate hit when you're only allowed a couple of squares every few days!

Stevia has been slow to enter the European market, so these or similar chocolates are relatively hard to find over here, with shipping from the US tending to be on the expensive side. Luckily, Samantha seem to have her eye on a bag of cocoa butter at the local health food shop, so with my Lucienne's supplies running short I'm hoping we'll see a chocolate bar recipe on here sometime soon.