Strawberry and Goat's Cheese Spinach Salad

This salad is our go-to meal for eating out at a friend's house.  When someone invites us over to dinner, we offer to make them something at their place.  This salad works as a starter or main (after all, when we have it, it's our whole dinner!) and with a few tweaks, it is quite palatable to non-keto people as well.  'The acceptable face of keto' we call it.  Also, it is easy to put together in an unfamiliar kitchen with ingredients that are pretty easy to find.

Ingredients:

40 g baby spinach

25 g avocado

30 g strawberries

100 g Eroski goat's cheese

28 g olive oil

7 g red wine vinegar

2 drops stevia

Note on goat's cheese:  Make sure your goat's cheese is <0.1g per 100.  Besides Eroski's home brand, Capricorn goat's cheese (UK) is good (although you can't find the values on the outside of the package, trust me), and Trader Joe's (US) also carried some.

Cut the avocado, strawberries, and goat's cheese into thin slices and toss over your bed of baby spinach.

For the dressing, combine the olive oil, vinegar, and stevia and pour over your salad.  Adjust the olive oil as needed if you use a cheese with different values.

fat:  63.1 g, protein:  22.7 g, carb:  3 g

ratio:  2.5:1

Variations:

Toasted pecans are another lovely addition to this salad, and allow you to cut out a bit more olive oil or cheese.  Make sure you adjust down your carbs elsewhere, such as by going down to 35 g of spinach.

Blue cheese also works well on this salad if you can't find an appropriate goat's cheese (like in south Texas).  It's too strong for my tastes, but Tristan likes it even better!  Alternatively, we've even used brie on this salad in a pinch, which is much milder.

Bacon!  I tried it on a strawberry salad in Austin and became a believer, so if you need a bit more protein in your diet, sprinkle some on.  Like the pecans, most bacon has carbs, so adjust your spinach (or other carb) down a bit to compensate.

Stir Fry Chicken Salad with Soy Lime Dressing

This is officially Tristan's new favorite meal, so definitely a must-share.  Asian foods are some of the hardest to do on this diet and what Tristan had been missing most, so I was determined to come up with something.  This salad really hits the spot.

Ingredients:

35 g spinach

15 g mung bean sprouts

5 g green onion

20 g salted roasted macadamia nuts

5 g fresh basil

75 g chicken thigh (cooked weight)

stir fry oil for cooking

Dressing:

4 g soy sauce

4 g lime juice

5 g toasted sesame oil

10 g stir fry oil

25 g olive oil

1 g truvia

Arrange spinach, bean sprouts, and chopped green onion on your plate.

Chop the macadamia nuts to desired fineness and sprinkle over your salad.

Cut fresh basil leaves in strips and scatter over salad.

Cut raw chicken thighs into 1 inch strips and fry in stir fry oil until fully cooked with crispy bits.  Stir fry oil is a combination of usually soybean oil, ginger oil, garlic oil, and sesame oil.  This is essentially to give the salad ginger and garlic flavors without adding the extra carbs.

For the dressing, just combine all ingredients and pour over salad.

fat:  62.9 g, protein:  24.2 g, carb:  3 g

ratio:  2.3:1

We ate this salad warm, but Tristan suspects it would be equally, if not more, yummy served chilled, so make a double batch and try it both ways!

Venison Steak Salad

I'm stealing a march on Samantha here, writing this from bed as she sleeps, her face nestled into her pillow beside me. Boris the Samoyed is also in the room, snoring away, or at least one of them is snoring away ... Though its the absolute definition of simplicity, I thought I would write a short post about a meal I prepared for myself yesterday.

Our good friends, twin brothers Eric and Chris own a ranch a couple of hours from McAllen giving them access to a seemingly endless selection of the freshest fish, vegetables and meat. Foods that that they had either caught, grown, killed or bartered for themselves and that they were kind enough to share with us over the weekend. 

Unfortunately my keeper did not allow me to get too close to the carbohydrate-heavy leeks or sweet onions, and I only got tastes of the free range chicken, or of the trout and fresh-caught tuna. However this was all immaterial as I had almost free reign of the venison steaks, and they were delicious. 

Venison is a relatively lean meat, so I needed to figure out how to eat it to get the correct fat content into my meal. The pictured meal shows 63g of venison meat, as I was saving some protein for my next meal, however a nicely sized 79g steak would do the trick for the requisite 24g protein.  Not being as creative as Samantha, I simply stuck to what I knew, employing all the now standard ingredients.

Ingredients:

79g venison steak

40g baby spinach

13 green onion

75g avocado

25g European butter

35g olive oil

5g vinegar

15 g heavy whipping cream (40%)

Pan fry the steak with the butter and the green onions. On this occasion the venison steak had already been cooked the night before on the barbecue, seasoned only with salt and a bit of pepper, so I cut the steak into strips and 'buttered it', placing the onions atop and microwaving on full power for about a minute. 

The spinach and the generous portion of avocado was dressed with the oil and vinegar mix, and the venison steak strips, together with the onions and melted butter were placed on top once they were done. 

Having some carbohydrate 'left over', I made myself a cup of decaffeinated coffee with the heavy whipping cream.

fat:  80.6 g, protein:  24.1 g, carb:  3 g

ratio:  3:1

The twins were nice enough to give us about another kg of venison steak, so I can repeat this meal again, together with some venison mince (ground meat) which we will be using to make some burgers in the weeks to come. 

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!

Best of Austin Low-Carb

Jimmy John's

I had been long looking forward to arriving into Austin, the first stop on our US road trip. Known for having a large hippie population, and a load of hipsters to boot, there was bound to be plenty of food alternatives for the difficult-to-accommodate diner.

JJ Gargantuan Unwich snatched from www.jimmyjohns.com

First stop Jimmy John's, one of Samantha's favourite sandwich bars and home to the 'Unwich' – essentially all the goodness of any of the bread rolls on the menu, but minus the roll. I had been saving some of my protein up for the meal but, unaware that full nutritional information was available on their website, I went a little overzealous and ordered the JJ Gargantuan unwich which turned out to be a bad decision when I saw that it contained 5.5 grams of carb and and a lot more protein than I had to spare.

Although a teaspoon or so of coconut oil would still be needed to supplement the fat content of this meal, what I should have ordered was the Club Lulu unwich and an extra serving of mayonnaise:

fat:  54.4g, protein:  25.4g, carb:  2.8

ratio: 1.9:1

The nutritional information on this website is fantastic, so try putting together your own perfect unwich!  For instance, the JJBLT unwich is perfect if you have lower protein needs.

Leaf

On day two we were keen to visit a place we had been reading about called Leaf which had been receiving rave reviews for its healthy salads, composed primarily of fresh, locally-sourced ingredients. With so many good choices on the menu, it was hard to choose which salad to go for, but I opted in the end for the Capitol City Cob (comprising grilled chicken, a hardboiled egg, blue cheese, roma tomatoes, black olives, bacon and avocado – served with blue cheese sauce), removing the tomatoes and the tasteless black olives, and replacing the blue cheese sauce with a healthy dose of extra virgin oil. Whilst we cannot provide exact figures for the salad, it tasted great and we are sure it could not have been very far off the mark when supplemented with a tablespoon of coconut oil to ensure I hit my 63g fat for the meal.

Leaf menu board