Another week under our belts, literally! Here’s what we had. At the end of the post, I’ll list the carb count for each meal, more or less.
SATURDAY
Bagel sandwiches with egg, cheese, and sausage
An easy, agreeable meal for yet another miserable, rainy, snowy, unreasonable day, which the menfolk spent climbing around on the roof to satisfy the insurance company.
SUNDAY
Bibimbap
Such a stupendous meal. The night before, I took a pork loin and cut it as thinly as I could, then set it to marinate with some prepared gochujang sauce. Sadly, I had no plain gochujang (which I have since rectified. Affiliate link!), so the flavor wasn’t as intense as I wanted. Then I browned up the meat in some olive oil while the rice was cooking.
I also set out the following dishes:
Sliced mushrooms sauteed in olive oil with soy sauce
Spinach sauteed in olive oil
Bean sprouts
Plain and sriracha-flavored sesame seeds
Wasabi sauce
Gochujan sauce
Soy sauce
Quick-pickled sliced carrots and mini cucumbers
I meant to add sesame oil to the sauteed foods, but I forgot.
Everyone put rice in their bowls and then added as many ingredients as they wanted, then reported to me for a fried egg on top.
To make the pickled vegetables, I sliced the mini cucumbers thin and used the wide slot of the vegetable grater to make carrot strips. (I need a food processor!) I covered them with white vinegar and stirred in about half a cup of sugar, covered it, and let it sit all day. I did this in the morning, and they were nice and zippy by dinnertime. The kids love these.
Bibimbap is just a giant bowl of savory wonderful happiness with little treats all through it.
Once you get down to the rice, you just keep adding more ingredients in different combinations. Or at least I do!
MONDAY
Beef barley soup, hot pretzels
This is one of the most frustrating parts about relearning how to cook while keeping track of carbs: I can’t eyeball stuff like soup anymore; and if I happen to have weird ingredients on hand, I’ll have to recalculate the carbs all over again next time. Oh well. In the old days, if someone had T1 diabetes, the only treatment available was to restrict calories, and sometimes people would die of starvation instead of diabetes. So boo hoo, I have to adjust my soup recipe.
Here’s the recipe I came up with:
Cover the bottom of the pot with olive oil and saute one diced red onion, 1 Tbs minced garlic, and two diced carrots.
When they begin to soften, add beef trimmed and cut into bite-sized pieces (I think I had about 2.5 pounds).
When beef is browned, add 2 small cans of diced tomatoes with the juice, and 1 cup Shiraz, 5 cups of beef broth, and about twelve ounces of sliced mushrooms.
If you’re cooking on the stovetop, add 1/2 a cup of uncooked barley and simmer for about 40 minutes. I was using my Instant Pot, so I added the barley, sealed it, opened the vent, and set it for “soup,” then let it just cook itself the rest of the day. Add salt and pepper before serving.
I added some water, too, but this turned out to make it thinner than I wanted. It made a little less than a gallon of soup.
We also had hot pretzels, which everyone likes. Benny and Corrie were in charge of the salt, and their general approach is WOOHOOOO!
TUESDAY
Hot dogs, beans, cheezy weezies
Nothing to report.
WEDNESDAY
Terrible tahini chicken, rice, pineapple
I was sorrrrrt of following a recipe from the NYT? I was so thrilled because it said it was everyone’s favorite chicken thighs, and it only had five ingredients, and you just put the sauce on the chicken and cook it! So easy! No gathering purselane by moonlight or using special hand-braided cooking twine to whip the meat into tenderness before slowly poaching it over a steaming sea sponge while a bowl of fertilized quail eggs looks on. Of course, they did describe it as having a “salty, fungal deliciousness,” but that did not deter me.
Well, I couldn’t find miso for sale. I did a quick inquiry in the supermarket and discovered that there’s no real substitute for miso, which is fermented soybean paste, but sometimes people use tahini, so that’s what I got. And it said to use plain rice vinegar, not seasoned rice vinegar, but I used seasoned rice vinegar anyway, because Sim Sifton’s not the boss of me. And salted butter instead of unsalted.
WELL, that chicken wasn’t very good. It sure wasn’t. It came out of the oven looking intriguingly like a tray of toasted marshmallow thighs
and they tasted like . . . hot mealy peanut butter? And mud. Not great. Luckily, the chicken itself has no carbs, so Lucy just scraped the crap off the top, ate the chicken, and made up the carbs with some waffles or something.
We had white rice and fresh pineapple on the side.
And now there’s a giant platter of rejected chicken hulking in the fridge making me feel bad.
THURSDAY
Cheese pizza
Did I mention that this week was spirit week? That’s when the school drums up energy and excitement by making parents make fourteen quick stops to Walmart, and the kids can go to school disappointed and angry and slightly loopy on pink hairspray fumes. There’s color day, dress-up or twin day (when you dress up as twins with someone else. One of the kids decided to dress up as Dipper from Gravity Falls, because he is a twin. We let it ride), crazy hair or hat day, favorite character day, and of course pajama day.
So Thursday was character day, and dear sweet Benny wanted to be Amelia Bedelia. Here she is:
So I’m making the pizzas, and we calculated that Lucy could have three pieces, which is a quarter of a large pizza. I thought it would be funny to let her have it in a big slab, rather than cutting it up; so I let everyone have a big slab. Same amount of pizza, of course, just not cut into individual slices. Lucy (here dressed as Tonks, sort of) thought this was moderately amusing:
Guess which kid was upset because she only got one piece of pizza instead of three? That’s right, the one dressed up as Amelia Bedelia. File under “things any halfwit could have anticipated.” We gave her extra pizza, and yes, I promised her a lemon meringue pie at some point, so she’ll keep me around.
FRIDAY
Sourdough grilled cheese, salad
Haven’t worked out the carbs yet. I’m stalling. We had a bit of a scare yesterday. A combination of too many sugary carbs without enough fiber and fat, a slightly weird meal schedule, and extra running around, and Lucy’s blood sugar kept dropping and dropping, even after she ate dinner. So, BOO DIABETES. Boo. Argh. We did finally get her stabilized, but it was scary. But we’ll figure it out.
And now for the carb counts!
Last week I posted before I had worked out the carbs for mac and cheese, but I have them now, so I’ll include them here.
If you’re using these recipes to work out your own carb-counting diet, please note that carb counts can vary by brand, especially in things like sauces, so caveat comendenti, or something. Most of the ingredients I use are from Aldi, FYI. Right now, Lucy’s dinner carb target is 95 grams. If she falls short, we make it up with odds and ends. If she goes over, we give her extra insulin. I try to make low carb dinners on weekends so she can have dessert without going too far over the target.
THE CARBS
Bagel, egg, cheese, sausage sandwiches:
Happy Farms white American cheese singles, 1 slice: 2
***
Bibimbap:
I didn’t work out the carbs for this whole meal, because Lucy only wanted rice, pickled veg, and an egg. Here are those numbers:
rice 1 cup cooked: 45 g
one carrot and one mini cuke, pickled in vinegar and sugar: 10 g (this was hard, because it was pickled with sugar, but how much actually got into the vegetables? I just had to take a guess)
egg: 0
***
Beef barley soup and hot pretzel:
olive oil: 0
5 cups beef bouillon from Chef’s Cupboard cubes: 5
(3 cups water)
Happy Harvest diced tomatoes with juice, 29 oz (2 cans): 34
11.36 carbs per cup of soup
Hot pretzels – Hannaford baked soft pretzels: 34 g each
***
Hot dogs, cheese puffs (she didn’t want beans)
2 Aldi buns: 46
Total: 81
***
chicken: 0
rice vinegar: 2 Tbs 10 grams
____
Total recipe: 142 for 16 chicken thighs
each thigh: 8.88
Doesn’t like pineapple
1/2 cup Reggano traditional pasta sauce: 13
Happy Farms shredded mozzarella, 3 cups: 12
12 pieces, each: 45.42
***
Instant Pot mac and cheese:
I used this recipe, scaled up (which made a ludicrous amount of food. I won’t do that again! Double at most), and added buttered bread crumbs.
3 lbs macaroni : 1008
Burman’s hot sauce: 0
1 lb Happy Farms pre-shredded mild cheddar: 16
24 oz Happy Farms aged New York sharp cheddar: 0
Optional:
Hannaford Italian style bread crumbs: 1 cup, 80 g
butter: 0
Total with breadcrumbs: 1143
I always thought this involved some kind of sugar syrup, because, duh, “caramel.” I was half right. Caramelization is an irreversible chemical process wherein water is released and sugar is broken down, producing a characteristic flavor. Sometimes you do add sugar, as when you’re caramelizing carrots or nuts; but onions already have sugar in them. (Many vegetables have sugar in them, actually, but wonderful things happen when you call it forth from onions in particular.)
Not, it turns out, a term for those weird paper booties they put on the turkey in Amelia Bedelia. Nope, a chiffonade is just what you get when you take a bunch of edible leaves, roll them up, and then slice them into thin ribbons. Pretty important if you still have Instagram friends who won’t blacklist you on account of your wantonly frequent photos of soup. WANTON soup, get it?
