Tag: low carb lunches

Curried Lentil Soup with Leftover Turkey

Emma4 Comments

diabetes dietToo much turkey? Here’s an idea for something to do with those scraps of meat you have hanging around. This recipe uses lentils – carbohydrates, we know. But in soup, their impact will be minimal, and they add fibrous, protein-y goodness to your diet.

Other good things in this soup include turmeric (your liver will thank you for it at this time of year), chillies and garlic to ward off colds, and onions and carrots. I also made the stock from scratch, boiling up the turkey bones with a couple of onions and some carrots.

Enjoy – and all the very best from all of us at The Diabetes Diet. We wish you health, happiness and success in 2018.

Leftover Turkey and Curried Lentil Soup

  • Servings: 4-6
  • Difficulty: easy
  • Print

  • About 150g cooked, left-over turkey
  • 1 small onion, diced
  • 2 medium carrots, cut into chunks
  • 2tbsp rapeseed oil
  • 2 cloves garlic, crushed
  • 1tsp chilli flakes
  • 1tsp turmeric
  • 1/2tsp freshly ground black pepper
  • 150g red lentils
  • 1.25 litres fresh turkey or chicken stock
  • Salt to taste

Fry the onion and carrots in a large stock pot in the oil until softened – about five minutes. Add the lentils, chilli, turmeric and black pepper and mix well so the lentils are coated in everything.

Add the turkey, stock and garlic and bring to the boil. Turn down to a simmer and cook for 20 minutes until the lentils are softened. Add salt to taste – lentil can take quite a bit of salt.

Each serving has 14g of carbs (for 4) and 6g of fibre, so 8g net carbs. For six, it’s 9g carbs and 4g fibre per serving.

 

Low-Carb Lunches – Asparagus Soup

Emma8 Comments

asparagusAsparagus – I’m not 100 percent keen on it as a side vegetable, but when you fry it with onions and garlic, add in stock and double cream, it becomes something else entirely…

Try this for lunch. When I have soup for lunch, I always add two boiled eggs for extra protein. It also makes an unbelievably filling dish. You might struggle to finish it all.

Asparagus Soup

  • Servings: 3
  • Difficulty: easy
  • Print

  • 400g asparagus
  • 2tbsp rapeseed oil
  • 1 medium-sized onion, sliced
  • 1 clove garlic, crushed
  • 1tsp salt
  • Freshly-ground black pepper
  • 600ml water or chicken stock
  • 60ml sour or double cream

Chop the asparagus into one-inch pieces. Fry in a saucepan with the rapeseed oil for five minutes. Add the onion and garlic, cover the pan and cook over a gentle heat for another five minutes.

Add the water or stock, and salt and pepper. Bring to a boil and then turn down to a simmer for ten minutes.

Add the cream or double cream and blend until smooth. Adjust the seasoning to taste.

4-5g net carbs per serving.

Asparagus wee… if you’re someone who gets this (your pee smells really strong after eating asparagus), Asparagus soup is going to give you a bad dose of it. There’s an explanation here about what causes asparagus wee why some people get it and others don’t. 

 

A Day of Low Carbohydrate Eating

Emma2 Comments

One person’s low-carbohydrate diet will look very different to another’s. When you eat low-carb, meals start to lose the distinction higher carbohydrate meals have.

At some point in the 20th Century, marketers decided that some foods were breakfast foods and some should be defined as lunch. Therefore, breakfasts should be cereal and/or toast, and at mid-day you should eat sandwiches, or bread and soup for example. That means you need ready-made products – boxes of corn flakes, or packets of pre-prepared slices of bread filled with cheese, ham and various other choices.

A low carb diet doesn’t usually include cereals and sandwiches, so anything can be eaten for breakfast or lunch. Leftovers from last night’s dinner, eggs and bacon for lunch – why limit yourself to a time of day food marketers have decided to earmark for certain foods?

To this end, I thought I’d document a day of low-carb eating. See what you think.

Breakfast

low carb breakfastsCream cheese and cucumber slices. We’ve been growing cucumbers this year – successfully too. I sliced some up and had them with some Asda soft cheese. It looks a bit like ice-cream doesn’t it?

Lunch

diabetes dietPrawns in home-made pesto, with baby sweet corn. I’ve got a couple of basil plants so I stripped the leaves from most of one, and blended them with 150ml extra virgin olive oil, one clove of garlic, salt, 40g sunflower seeds and 40g grated Parmesan. I use sunflower seeds rather than the traditional pine nuts as sunflower seeds are much cheaper.

This quantity will make you enough pesto to last a week. Store it in the fridge and use as a salad dressing, mixed with roast aubergines, peppers and courgettes, or spread on top of roast chicken.

Dinner

low carb saladsAvocado and chorizo salad. Recipe here.

I also ate an apple and cheese. The carbohydrate count for the whole day was roughly 50g.

 

 

 

 

What do you eat? What’s your favourite meal of the day – or your best meal? Let us know in the comments.

 

Disclaimer: my meal choices are not necessarily recommendations – it’s just what I ate one particular day.