Feb 19 2009
Cooking Dutch Babies
Having recently been diagnosed as diabetic, I’m back on the low-carb diet again. My diabetes meds don’t lower my blood sugar enough and I know the low-carb regime will.
And so I am spending some time every day cooking Dutch Babies. No, there is no cannibalism involved. A Dutch Baby is a kind of puffed up pancake you bake in the oven. Several of my low-carb cook books have low-carb versions of the Dutch Baby. And I have plenty of eggs from the chickens, eggs being the main ingredient in the dish.
A working writer, published or not, has a lot of health concerns because of the amount of time he spends sitting on his butt. You sit on your butt writing, you sit on your butt reading, and for most writers you may sit on your butt a lot at your day job. And so many of us writers eat a lot of bad foods because they are convenient.
But diabetes and its complications are anything but convenient. Especially if I have to have my extremities amputated. So— back to the low-carb future.
I have one advantage in that I don’t have a family to cook for and who would insist on my keeping forbidden and tempting foods in the house. But living alone I have to do all my cooking myself. It’s rather time consuming, having to make this that and the other dish all the time just to keep myself fed.
I do have a lot of low-carb cookbooks and I also look up recipes on the internet. This helps me find things that are relatively easy to make. Eventually I hope to find enough good recipes that I can get back in the routine again.
It was a lot easier to go low-carb a few years back when it was the big fad. Walmart carried a lot of low-carb foods. Living as I do in a rural area, I don’t have the food variety that big-city cookbook authors take for granted. The best thing was all the delicious low-carb candy bars. Ever since the low-carb diet went out of fashion, the delicious low-carb bars are no longer available— in some cases, the companies that made them are out of business— and the only ones left are rather boring offerings from Hersheys.
Yesterday I tried a meatloaf recipe, and it turned out great. I found some ketchup at the grocery store that claimed to have ‘zero-carbs, zero-calories’ and used that in the recipe. It was grand. I also made some cauliflower puree which was supposed to be a mashed potato substitute but it was truly vile. The cats ate it, though.
The recipe for the meatloaf is ‘homestyle meat loaf’ in Dana Carpender’s ‘500 More Low-Carb Recipes’. If you are low-carbing, do get Dana’s books, they are great. I also make the home made yogurt from Dana’s ‘How I gave up my Low-Fat Diet and Lost 40 Pounds’. I use the milk from my goat Kallisto (mother of baby goat Krystyna). If you decide to try making your own yogurt, do not skip the step where you scald the milk. Now, I drink raw milk all the time. It’s healthier if it is milk from a healthy animal. On one memorable occasion when my car broke down while I was transporting a goat, I actually drank some goat milk right from the goat’s udder during the long hike home. But in yogurt making you need to scald the milk or the yogurt may not ‘yo’. Update: after some research and some more yogurt-making, I have found out that you can so make yogurt from raw milk, but it’s thinner than yogurt from from scalded milk.
All this cooking and diet obsession does take away from my writing energy. But in the past when I’ve gone on the diet after the first week or so I got into a routine and it didn’t take any extra time/energy. Plus the diet gives you extra energy. I hope this happens again. The difference is that now I am on 3 different meds— an anti-depressant, a high blood pressure pill, and the diabetes drug metformin. That may have some unexpected effects.
I know what you mean about cooking for just one person! I have to do that too when my little boy is with his dad..It’s a drag..