I went to a book club over the weekend here in NYC and the young woman hosting it told me she was on a “weird diet.” She called it “keto,” I call it LCHF (low carb high/healthy fat) or “low carb.” Either way, we were on the same diet (“way of eating”) so we had a lot to talk about, and I even showed her that the “veggie cakes” she’d put out and I’d mistakenly thought were just homemade frittatas were, in fact, full of carbs, because my Continuous Glucose Monitor showed a huge spike in BG. But I digress.
She asked me for the butter chicken recipe I used and for any other ideas I had for her. So I wrote her the following, and I thought it may come in useful. It’s kind of a basic 101 to low carb cooking gleaned from over 2 years of experience:
Sure! So I highly recommend an instant pot because I use it a lot to braise meat (not just butter chicken!). Usually I just toss in some red wine and/or stock and whatever spices I feel like and let it pressure cook for 1-1.5 hours.
most of my meals are some crude version of protein and veg. With nearly every meal I’m roasting up veggies. Throw on some garlic powder, granulated onion and salt and then roast at like 450 for an hour. My favourite is cubed eggplant crisped up a bit this way. Cauliflower and broccoli work well too. Cauliflower obviously is super versatile, I’ve made coconut mash out of it and it’s great.
Lemon butter fish is another no-recipe go-to for me. I like wild caught Arctic char. Toss the fish in the roasting pan, throw some salted butter on top, squeeze half a lemon all over it, stick a probe thermometer in, roast at about 350F till the internal temp reaches about 55 Celsius. Perfect. Zero work.
Re books: I recommend The Four Hour Chef and The Food Lab. I’ll be working through the food lab for years, it’s superb. I also have Modernist Cuisine at Home but barely use it.
Podcasts: livin la vida low carb is good. 2 keto dudes is great too.
Forums:
There’s loads of keto tips I could give you but the probe thermometer is a big help, and miracle noodles are amazing replacements for rice and pasta. Also you can use coconut flour and fine grain almond flour to replace the evil white stuff in most recipes. I also highly recommend allulose as a sugar replacement. It’s actually a zero calorie rare sugar and seems to be very safe and well tolerated.