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.

The Wonders of Double Cream and Gibraltar Living

Tristan has already written about the hope and disappointment of US keto-shopping.  Just as we had viewed the upcoming groceries stores of America as a keto-utopia while we were in England, our return to the UK also was being seen as rosier and rosier with every passing week we spent in America.  

We longed to return to double cream and nutritional information standardized to 0.1 g and per 100 g, regardless of the item.  We would know exactly what he was eating and be able to get more fat in him than ever!  

As with most things though, our return home was not the perfect paradise we had imagined.  We arrived back in our home after a total of 7 months away to find that the refrigerator is broken!  Back to living life out of an ice bag!  We were dismayed by our inability to stock up on keto-rific products from the local grocery store and begin the process of finding the very best cheese, sausages, and what not, but headed to the grocery store anyway as a sort of re-con mission and also pick up our life saver, double cream.  

One of Gibraltar's Macaques

Lo and behold, does the only British grocery store in Gibraltar, Morrisons, have double cream?  No.  They are out.  'Perhaps try again in a few days time. '  For anyone not British and in the know, double cream is essentially a Britain-only dairy cream product which contains about 50% fat and only 1.5 g carb per 100 g.  It tastes great, and makes our life so much easier when we're in a fat-pinch.

The sausage section had also been reduced to a gaping hole in the refrigerated aisle, and with Tristan's temperamental tendencies, it is a miracle one of us wasn't reduced to tears or found assaulting a Morrison's employee.  This time, I wouldn't have blamed him.  

One punched laptop later (someone was bound to get hurt, but the laptop took it quite stoically), we now finally have a working fridge, even if it is white and not sleek brushed metal, and we have also visited more grocery stores (Eroski carries some Waitrose products!)  Everything is actually going to be ok.

For the time being, there is no perfect keto-paradise.  Everywhere we have been has its pros and its cons.

America is stocked up on its low-carb wonders (still bugging Tristan to review his new favorite chocolates), and unusual ingredients like guar gum.  I have also come to realize what a true 'melting pot,' as it is so often called, America really is. Being from Texas, for instance, I take for granted the normalcy of having German sausages next to Italian next to Polish. Most of the cheeses in the 'fancy cheese section' as I call it may be imported for a hefty price, but cheese from all different European countries are a part of my normal cheese life.  It never would have occurred to me that it could be any other way.  These are great things, but I dont have to tell you, there are downsides to my side of the pond as well.

We are lucky in Gibraltar that we get the benefits of both British and Spanish products.  So for the next while, expect to see some British and Spanish cooking!

Protein Powder Pancakes

My recipe for Cinnamon Crepes is pretty low in protein, so I wondered what would happen if I added protein powder to the batter.  Adding more protein to the recipe meant I would need more fat as well, so I also added some butter to the batter.  What I got seemed a lot like pancake batter.  It cooks up thicker for a heartier version of the breakfast.

Ingredients:

Pancake Batter:

28 g cream cheese

52 g egg (about one)

12 g protein powder

22 g european butter

0.5 g cinnamon

5 g truvia

10 g european butter

50 g heavy whipping cream (40%)

5 g walden farms pancake syrup

Warm up your cream cheese until softened, or use room temperature cream cheese.  Mix well with the egg.  Add the protein powder, melted butter, cinnamon, and truvia.

Heat a skillet over medium low heat and add remaining 10 g butter to the pan.

Pour batter onto pan into three evenly sized pancakes.  Cook until bottoms are starting to brown and are stable enough to be flipped.

Leave pancakes to cool at room temperature or in fridge.

Whip the cream until stiff.

Spread the whipped cream in between the layers of pancakes leaving a dollop on top.  Spoon over 5 g of pancake syrup.

fat:  62.7 g, protein:  19.8 g, carb:  3 g

ratio:  2.8:1

Variation:  If you don't want to your pancakes with whipped cream or quite so much whipped cream, you could always add that cream to a coffee instead and enjoy them with just a modest amount of pancake syrup.

Sensational Sausage Stir-fry

For anyone who knows me well, it should come as no great surprise to hear of how excited I was on discovering of a truly excellent brand of sausage the other day. Innuendo and pun-tastic double entendres aside, I am, and always have been, a proud exponent of the humble sausage, perhaps even a sausage connoisseur, if you'll permit me this condescension. Whilst my options regarding this greatest of foods have become more limited since I began this diet, I have still managed to find plenty of high fat, zero carb sausages out there, particularly varieties like Bratwurst as produced by our good friends the Germans.


You will recall from a previous blog post that sausage, served with sauerkraut and mustard, was one of my standard 'go-to' meals whilst on my travels, however this meal always needed to be accompanied with a decaf coffee containing a rather hefty serving of heavy whipping cream as I simply could not get enough fat into the meal. 

That was until last week, whilst on one of our many wild goose chases around McAllen (zero carb goat's cheese on this occasion),  when we found ourselves at Ruben's grocery store. Located in what I have been told, is the slightly less desirable part of town, Ruben's stocks a veritable smorgasbord of imported foods from the Caribbean, South and Central America, and of course Mexico. It was here that I found Chappell Hill's Smoked Beef sausage. 

This amazingly tasty zero-carb sausage is actually made in Texas, and is not only high fat, but also relatively low in protein, meaning that I could eat 155g of sausage and still be within my 24g-a-meal protein limit. This also yielded me a massive 50g of fat, meaning that I did not need to 'waste' my carbs on heavy whipping cream and could liven it up with a stir fry of green peppers and spring onions. 

Ingredients:

155g Chappell Hill Smoked Beef sausage

60g green pepper

16g spring (green) onions

12g chopped pickled jalapeños 

13g olive oil

Simply chop up all the ingredients and sautée them in a little olive oil, garnishing with a few chopped picked jalapeños once done.

fat:  63.5 g, protein:  23 g, carb:  2.8 g

ratio:  2.5:1

Naturally not all sausage will boast numbers as good as the legendary Chappell Hill's. The recipe can therefore be amended by either adding a little more oil, which may be difficult to get down, or better still, by adding a creamy coffee to the mix, although note that it will add carbs so you will need to cut down a bit on those 'greens'.