Mmmmm, Golden Chocolate

I have this thing I do, because I like chocolate candy.

I take half a jar of coconut oil, warm enough to be liquid, and add an equal amount of unsweetened cocoa powder and mix thoroughly.  





 I add a squirt of something - stevia extract, berry flavored MIO water enhancer…  




 Then I let it sit at not-summer room temperature so it'll be solid but not too hard to spoon out.  When I want candy, I grab a spoonful of this stuff and I'm happy.  Mmmmm, chocolate.

So then I really wanted hot chocolate.  Keto hot chocolate.  And guess what?  A good spoonful of this stuff in a mug of hot almond milk, with a little cinnamon, maybe whipped cream on top….  Mmmmm, HOT chocolate.

Then one night I couldn't decide if I wanted hot chocolate or golden milk - that yummy healthy turmeric drink - and it occurred to me that I enjoyed curried chocolate when I could find it, back in pre-Keto days, and it might be OK to mix the two…

So this happened:

Golden Chocolate

1 cup of warm-enough to be liquid coconut oil,

 
1 cup of unsweetened cocoa powder

1/2 cup turmeric powder

1 tsp. black pepper

Stevia to taste

Mix and cool.  Whisk a spoonful in hot almond milk.  Or, in half a mug of hot almond milk, then add coffee.

You can add cinnamon, too.

And that's what I've been using for hot drinks lately.

x

More Chaffles!

Bowl from stand mixer

I have decided that even the doubled recipe didn't make enough chaffles, so I doubled it again. That's 1 cup of coconut flour, 4 Tablespoons butter, 20 eggs, 2 Tablespoons baking powder, and 2 packages of cream cheese. I used my daughter's stand mixer, which made everything very easy. Pro tip: use the shield.


Since my Black and Decker waffle maker makes four at a time, it works well to scoop it out with a measuring cup. And if I do that into a small bowl, I can stir in different flavorings for each load.

My Black and Decker waffle maker / griddle

And so, today's chaffles:

Chaffles

• Plain. 
• Cinnamon vanilla. 
• Banana Rum (used banana extract and artificial rum extract.) 
• Three sheets of garlic chaffles for sandwiches.

When I was looking for ideas, I noticed pumpkin pie spice... So now I'm thinking I want to see if pumpkin chaffles can happen...

Chaffle tweaking

My current chaffle recipe:

10 eggs, 1 package cream cheese, 1/2 cup coconut flour, 2 tablespoons butter, 1 tablespoon baking powder, and whatever you want for flavor.  My waffle maker does 4 waffles at a time and this makes 12 to 14.  I use 1/4 cup for each waffle square.  I added the extra eggs to make it spread better.

Oh yeah, the garlic ones are my favorite. I used garlic paste.

Chaffles!

Chaffles!

When I was sorting through and downsizing the accumulation of Stuff I had in my storage, I got rid of my waffle iron / griddle.  I liked it for making bacon, but doing Keto I was no longer making pancakes or waffles and it was taking up space.  Plus the non-stick coating on the griddle side of the plates was beginning to peel and I'd already been told that replacing the plates would cost as much as replacing the entire appliance.

TWO DAYS LATER I started reading Facebook posts about these mysterious things called Chaffles.  What's a chaffle?  It's a waffle-shaped Keto-friendly concoction made with egg and cheese, maybe a little butter, baking powder, almond or coconut flour…  People were calling it a "game changer" and I wanted to try it.  But my waffle maker was sitting on the shelf of a Goodwill somewhere.

I went on with my life, working, wishing for easy packable Keto lunches.  I like roast beef on provolone slices instead of bread, but variety is nice…

.

Then I stopped in at a Goodwill and there was a waffle iron / griddle, same kind I'd had, but in much better condition.  As in barely used.  As in under $5.  As in, MINE, no hesitation.

So I've been making Chaffles.  I've made plain egg and cheese chaffles.  I've made savory chaffles with the same yummy seasoning I used in the mug bread I posted about last spring.  I've made lemon-ginger chaffles.  My favorite recipe is these cream cheese based chaffles.   I'm posting the link to the recipe here, instead of writing it out, because it's not my recipe and I didn't change a thing.  (OK, yes I did. I use a squirt of stevia extract instead of the powdered stevia.)  Go enjoy Jennifer's site and come back here.

https://www.isavea2z.com/low-carb-keto-fluffy-waffles-recipe/

When I make them, I do it in a Magic Bullet blender.  I put everything but the cream cheese in and blend, then add the cream cheese.  Seems to work better for me that way.

I will have to be doubling her recipe, though, for my waffle iron, which makes four at a time and the recipe seems to be right for six of that size.

I've been enjoying  chaffles hot with butter, chaffles with berries and whipped cream, and most of all, Tuna Sandwiches!!!

My next batch will be garlic-bread chaffles.  I'll let you know how that turns out.

Lunch on the Run

When there's not really time to pack lunch and you're up early for work and you don't want to try to find keto friendly food out there in the restaurant world…

In August I have worked as a traffic flagger, a reset merchandiser, and a census lister.  Some of that concurrently.  Taking your own food is important if you want to stay on Keto.  With flagging, it was complicated by having no place to put my lunch out of the sun - and one day ants got into it.  On the reset, there was a break room - and lunch was at 2 a.m.   As a census lister, I'm out and about.  I can take my lunch break when I want to, but the temptations of ice cream shops are lurking out there.

So what's in the lunch box?

• Sausage patties
• Hard boiled eggs
• Cheese
• Zucchini cut into strips and packets of guacamole
• An avocado when I have one ripe

What would be if I had more time to prepare?

• Mushroom caps stuffed with cream cheese and a green olive
• Mini-quiches
• Mug breads

I find veggies and salads take too long to eat, so I get those after work.

And, I have a new spinning wheel so non-work time is going to that, not to food prep.

My Keto Why

Yes, I skipped a week or two. There was work involved. 12 hour workdays aren't conducive to keeping up with the rest of your life, but paychecks are nice.  And don't you just hate it when a blog you follow posts so often that you can't find time to read it all no matter how much you want to?! I won't do that to you.

I've been working as a traffic flagger, which presents its own challenges for bring any kind of lunch, much less a Keto-friendly one.  I will be writing something about portable Keto food, when I get that figured out. But for now I just want to post a list of reasons I eat Keto most of the time.  Because if you keep in mind your "why", it makes it easier to resist temptation.

• Weight loss. And my smaller clothes fit!
• I don't need Tums every night - or at all. I used to.
• No flatulence. For me, carbs cause that.
• I have more energy.  I actually feel like doing physical stuff.
• I have more endurance. I can work shifts that cause young co-workers to whine.
• I have better flexibility. I know this because I dabble at yoga, and it is SO much easier than it was pre-keto.
• I have better mobility. I no longer need to push up from seats with my arms. I can get down on the floor, and back up, easily. I can even climb over stuff.
• I have better balance. That's IMPORTANT. Also yoga.
• I can lift heavier stuff. The guy at AutoZone was impressed when I carried in the group 27 battery Thursday. So was I.  The last time I tried to carry it, it didn't work so well.
• My mind works better.
• My knees work better. I don't know how much of that is less weight and how much is less Inflamation, but I'll take it.
• My bladder works better. What I thought was an age thing (I'm 69, which is NOT old no matter what I thought when I was 30) is actually a carb thing!
• I'm not hungry so often and don't have to interrupt stuff I'm involved in just to eat.
• Keto food is delicious. Cutting out sugar gave me my taste buds back.

I couldn't have forseen that a year and a half ago.  I just wanted to lose some weight.  Keto On!

Raspberries

On my way to West Virginia, I stopped by to visit my friend Cathy.  Early in the morning - a morning which would later include some amazingly successful yard sale shopping and an excellent breakfast accompanied by a bluegrass jam - we went off to a hillside she knew of and picked a mess of fresh wild red raspberries.  Smaller than what you find in the supermarket, their flavor is concentrated into that tiny package and they were wonderful.

I took some with me to Liana's in West Virginia, and made Keto-friendly Almond Flour Raspberry Pancakes.

And almost missed getting a picture for the blog before they were gone.

Here's how:

Mix with fork:

1 C. Almond Flour
1 tsp. cinnamon
1/2 tsp. baking powder
3 large eggs
1/4 C. heavy whipping cream
1/4 C. olive oil
Berries

Preheat griddle, and grease it.  I used butter this time, but it smoked way too much.  I won't do that again indoors.  (I usually do pancakes over an open fire on a hanging griddle, but that's a subject for a different blog.)

I do the pancakes one at a time, using a 1/4 C scoop or a particular spoon I have that holds that amount.  These will get bubbly much like regular pancakes when they are ready to turn.

We also enjoyed some of the berries just simply topped with creme fraiche.

Mug Bread

I was never really a big bread eater, but on Keto one generally does not eat wheat bread at all.  Way too many carbs.  But not only do I not have to give up bread, I have better bread.  Fresh almond bread beats ordinary wheat bread, in my opinion, hands down.

I went on a small bread baking spree this evening.  I took my basic mug bread recipe, and made 2 loaves of basic almond flour mug bread.  I also made a loaf of chocolate, a loaf of lemon, and a loaf of herb bread.  If I hadn't already cleaned everything up by the time I tasted the herb bread, I'd have made more immediately.  It was truly wonderful.

Here's the basic recipe I use:

In a straight sided coffee mug,
Beat with a fork one large egg.
Add 2 1/2 Tablespoons olive oil (or melted butter, or ghee, or coconut oil, or avocado oil...)
Beat in 2/3 C Almond Flour
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/8 teaspoon salt.

If you do it in that order, you can do it all in the mug.
Once that's all mixed thoroughly, put it in the microwave for 90 seconds.
Let it cool a couple minutes (or not) and dump it out of the mug.
If it doesn't want to come out, a thin knife or chopstick around the sides will loosen it.

And then there was chocolate:
1 egg
2 T. olive oil
1.5 Tablespoons cocoa (unsweetened)
1/3 C almond flour
a splash of vanilla extract
1/2 tsp. baking powder
1 tsp. Swerve, because I was out of STEVIA EXTRACT.  (I prefer Stevia but I had the Swerve because of some chocolate cookies I made a while back.)  Most people probably want to add more, but I thought it was SWEET ENOUGH ALREADY.

This was delicious topped with Creme Fraiche.

For the lemon loaf, I simply squirted lemon juice into the basic mug bread recipe and mixed well.

And the herb bread.  OMG!  Liana had an herb blend made by another friend, and I put a heaping teaspoon of that in the basic mug bread.  Now I've got to find out what's in the blend!  It smelled amazing, and when I tasted the bread it tasted amazing too.  Since I don't have a clue what it is, I suggest sniffing around in your herb seasonings and experimenting.

Swiss Chard

I can't believe in all these years I'd never had Swiss Chard until this week.  I intend to make up for lost time.

So this was my very first Swiss Chard, prepared by my friend Liana.  Here's the recipe:

Chop chard

Mince garlic

In a pan with a lid, heat 2 T olive oil, 2 T butter.

Add the garlic, add the chard.

Cover and steam.  Not very long.

Add lemon slices, partway through the steaming.

And Parmesan cheese.

We also added 2 pieces of leftover frittata toward the end, to reheat them.

Later this week we made more Chard, but we'd run out of lemons.  It was still good, but we missed those lemons.

Here's my frittata recipe:

In a pan, heat 2 T. butter (or EVOO or Coconut Oil)

Add 6 eggs, whisked

1 C. leftover meat (we had leftover pork chops this time)

1 C. cheese (this time it was shaved parmesan)

Cover, cook over low heat until you can turn it over.  Turn it over, cook 'til the other side's done too.

You may notice a lack of precise quantities and times in my recipes.  That's because a recipe is just a starting point for kitchen creativity.  This is how I cook.  Do what I can with what I have, where I am.  

I've decided to revive this blog, because I've been revived myself.

April 4, 2018, I finished eating or giving away all my high carbohydrate food, and began eating according to the KETO way of eating.  If you've been to this blog before, you know that's not really a radical change from my intended food choices.  

And yet, it was.  The key is that instead of just cutting out carbs and processed food, Keto allows your body to revive its mothballed cellular fat burning mechanism, and the addition of burning fat for fuel, both dietary and body fat, removes the carb cravings and hunger and facilitates sticking with this way of eating.  Without the body constantly requesting food, specifically carb food, the only obstacle to sticking with Keto is between the ears.  Most days I can handle that.

And so, I'm 50 pounds lighter, more energetic, more flexible.

See this awesome bathtub?  It belongs to my friend Liana.  

Last year just before I started Keto, I visited her and soaked in this tub.  It was difficult to get into it and darned near impossible to get out.  

I am visiting her again this week, and last night I hopped into this same tub for a soak, and got out with absolutely no problem at all.  

If you're a skinny 20-something you might not grok how important that is, but if you're 68 and formerly 60 pounds overweight it is a big deal.

It was also a big deal last week when I locked my keys in my camper van.  Getting in required climbing over the antique school desk that blocks the only door that was unlocked.  And I could do it without any problem!

In the Keto Facebook groups I belong to, we call these NSV, non-scale victories.  Scales are notoriously unreliable. My weight as measured on my daughter's scale (I don't own one) fluctuates 5# on any given day.  But the fit of clothing, and increased abilities, and better health and energy - these things are how we measure success.

If you're doing Keto and have NSVs of your own, please share them in the comments.  I'd love to see and be inspired by your successes too.