Zucchini (squash) carbonara

It's Wednesday again, and time to share a new recipe. This time I'll share another quick dinner suggestion for all you fellow  time-poor people out there:

Ingredients
2 large zucchinis
2 large chicken fillets
250 g bacon
1 tbsp butter
2 cloves of garlic
100 ml cream
3 egg yolks
5 tbsp grated parmesan cheese
Salt and pepper

Procedure
Grate the zucchini using a julienne peeler. Fry diced chicken fillets and bacon. Whisk the egg yolks and the cream in a bowl. Fry the zucchini with the butter and the garlic in a medium-sized pot. Add the egg mixture to the zucchini and stir well. Then add parmesan and the spice. Lastly, add the meat and stir well.  That's it! Dinner in less than thirty minutes!

Note to self: Next time I'll use three zucchinis instead of two, if I use small ones like this time, as I would have liked to have a bit more green in this dish. 

Inspiration came from the beautiful blog www.sprudlendesunn.no/blogg/

Rich and creamy cauliflower soup

Winter is definitely here in the Southern Hemisphere. Some mornings it has got down to + 2 degrees, which is a lot colder than it sounds (in case there are any fellow Scandinavians reading this). Believe it or not, I'm actually feeling the cold a lot more than when I lived ten hours north of the Arctic Circle. The reason being that Norwegian houses are warm little humidity cribs, and Queensland houses are built to keep the heat out rather than the other way around... Which is why I've gone into hibernation-mode and like spending the cold nights under a blanket with a massive cup of tea or a big bowl of home-made soup to help me defrost.Today I made this totally divine cauliflower soup, which is a perfect dinner on a winter's night. LCHF of course, without any of the nasties the store-bought soups are full of. It's also quite quick and easy to make. Cole's has cauliflower on special this week, for only 1 dollar each, therefore this recipe is a great option if you are trying to live frugally. Who said living la vida low carb has to be expensive!

Ingredients
1 massive cauliflower (mine was more than 1.2 kg!)
1 chicken stock cube
300 ml cream
250 g bacon
nutmeg
salt 
pepper

Procedure
Separate/cut the cauliflower into bouquets and bring to boil with around 800 ml of water (this is a rough estimate, as I used a pot with a large surface area and therefore needed quite a bit of water to cover the cauliflower). Let boil for roughly a minute, then remove 200-300 gram of the cauliflower from the pot and let place it in a bowl of cold water. These cauliflower bouquets will be added in to the soup later. They are supposed to swim around in the soup whole and are only lightly boiled to retain a bit of crunch. 

Add the chicken stock to the remaining cauliflower bouquets in the pot and let it boil for twenty minutes. 
Fry the bacon while the cauliflower is boiling. 
When the cauliflower is soft, puree it using a hand-blender. Some of the water will now have evaporated, but there's still a fair bit of water left in the pot. Keep it, and add the cream. Now bring to boil again and add  spice after taste.  Let simmer for a couple of minutes, then add the cauliflower previously set aside. Now either add all the bacon into the soup, or just sprinkle it on top of the soup - or you can do a bit of both. 

Enjoy! 

This adds up to about four servings

I like my bacon well done, but the pieces were not really as charcoaled as they look here

The inspiration for this recipe came from the beautiful blogger Caroline. I changed the quantities somewhat from her recipe (http://fotballfrue.no/2013/05/01/oppskrift-onsdag-blomkalsuppe/), as I suspect that Norwegian cauliflowers are a bit smaller than the monster veggies here in Australia.  

Salmon lasagne

Growing up in the arctic part of Norway, I was blessed having endless access to the most gourmet fish, freshly caught from the local ocean, lake or river by my Dad. Fish was cheap, easily available and typically a fish-dish found its way to our dinner table three times per week. Since moving to Australia, I must admit that my fish-consumption has gone down the drain. One reason is that fish doesn't quite taste the same as when it's caught and prepared by my Dad. Even salmon, which I used to love, doesn't smell "quite right" and has a strange after-taste when bought in my local, suburban-Brisbane Woollies. Therefore I am so happy to have found this recipe! Thank you thank you thank you to the lovely Linn from "Sprudlende sunn blogg"who posted it on her blog some weeks ago. The secret with this recipe is that it camouflages the salmon-odor between layers of delicious spinach-sauce, bechamel-sauce and garlic. What I'm talking about is salmon lasagne. Preparing this dish once per week will make sure I up my fish-intake considerable. Well, enough blabbing, here it goes:

Fish-base

500 g  salmon fillets 

Bake the salmon fillets with some salt and pepper on 200 degrees C for around 15 minutes. Continue with the other steps while the salmon is in the oven.

Spinach-sauce:

(It's not really a sauce, but I lack a better word)

500 g frozen spinach

3 tablespoons butter

1 finely chopped red onion 

2 stems of chopped spring onion 

A pinch of salt

Mix ingredients in a pot and let simmer for a few minutes 

Lasagna-plates 

I used the recipe from my lasagne-post:http://aussie-lowcarb-living.blogspot.com.au/2012/03/lasagne.html 

Bechamel-sauce

2 heaped tablespoons butter

3 tablespoons flour 

500 ml full cream milk 

120 g shredded cheese 

2 gloves of garlic 

Salt and pepper

Melt the butter in a pot, stir in flour and add the milk little by little. When thickened, add the garlic and the cheese. 

Now is the time to admit I did something very very naughty: I used white flour....(the shock! The horror!) But I reckoned it was a  very small amount, and when I calculated the nutritional values (see below) it wasn't too bad. However,  I'd be happy to receive some tips on what can be used in stead to get that silky, bechamel-feeling.  

Combining the layers: 

Mash the baked salmon with a fork. Place about half of the salmon in a buttered oven-safe dish. 

Place a layer of the spinach-sauce on top of the fish. 

On top of that, spread about  half of the lasagne-plates. 

Cover with a layer of  the bechamel-sauce. 

Add another layer: Salmon, then spinach, then bechamel sauce and lasagne-plates.

Cover with more shredded cheese (I ended up using 90 grams). Put it into the oven and bake on 200 degrees C for around 15 minutes. Let the lasagne rest for 5 minutes before you enjoy this little piece of heaven. 

The recipe is a little bit cumbersome, but so worth spending some extra time on, as it gave the two of us dinner for 3 days (a total of six servings)The approximate nutritional values per serving is as following: 

• kcal: 430
• Carbs: 7 g
• Protein: 31 g
• Fat: 31 g

(Not bad, considering that some of the evil, white stuff found it's way into the dish)

I have amended the recipe slightly from Linn's original. 

Note to myself: Next time I make it, I'll try with a bit more fish, perhaps around 750 grams. 

Super-quick chicken casserole

I can't believe it's been nearly three months since the last time I posted a recipe on the blog. One reason is that I've transitioned from the (relatively) laidback student-life to working 8.30-5 with an additional two hours of commuting each day... I'm not the most creative in the kitchen at the best of times, and when I get home at six-ish now, the last thing I want to do is slave away over the pans for another hour. The man in the house is an okay cook, but his  repertoire of things low carb is fairly limited, so his recipes tend to run on repeat. Also, he has the same crazy schedule as myself, so to have him cook each and every day isn't fair to him either. Therefore, there has been a few too many take-away dinners lately, and I have been resorting to junk-food such as the low-carb pizza from Domino's, which actually isn't very low-carb at all... Can anyone guess in which direction my weight has started to move?

 Out of desperation I googled something like "super easy low-carb dinners" (but in Norwegian), hoping to get some tips on what on earth I could cook that is both LCHF and doesn't require me to spend an eternity in the kitchen on those nights I have a flat battery. The saying goes "When the student is ready the teacher will appear", and that's exactly what happened! I stumbled across the brilliant blog http://www.lavkarbogjortenkelt.net/, which is packed with exactly the kind of quick, no-fuss LCHF recipes I was looking for. A couple of hours of intense studying later I blissfully emerged, armed with twenty or so dinner-ideas which will make my life so much easier in the weeks and months to come. Thanks to the blog mentioned, I've regained the inspiration that I needed to go on eating LCHF in these busy times. Being time-poor is something I believe most Aussies can relate to, and following a way of eating that requires you to cook most things from scratch can further add to the stress. Therefore I will share these quick dinner ideas as I go along, experimenting with new recipes.

This dinner I'm going to share now was an instant success. It also took less than 20 minutes to make.  It's so easy that I can't believe I haven't thought about it before:

Ingredients
1 barbecued chicken (I got mine at Woolies)
1 red capsicum
Almost one whole leek 
1 cup pouring cream
Spices

Procedure
Chop capsicum and leek and lightly fry  in some butter in a wok. Cut the chicken into cubes and throw them in  with the vegetables. Add a splash of cream and some spice and let simmer until the cream has thickened a bit. Voila!  

This fed me and my better half and left one of us with lunch for tomorrow. Next time I will double the recipe as I love the feeling of coming home, realising that dinner will sort itself out after a couple of minutes in the microwave oven. 

Here are some photos. Unfortunately a bit blurry, as they are taken with my mobile. 

The spice you can see in the photo is about half a container (10 grams) of the "Masterfood Perfect for chicken herb and spice mix". with paprika, onion and garlic. It's full of sugar and surely other nasty stuff, but an easy option when you are unsure of exactly what spices will go nicely together. Any suggestions to what spices I can try next time instead of this? 

Moussaka

I used to love moussaka as a child, but for some reason I had totally forgotten about this yummy, Greek dish. But last week I came across a recipe for low carb moussaka on a Norwegian blog that I follow. I was tempted, and of course I had to try it. I can highly recommend trying this recipe, but be aware that it's not exactly fast food! So make sure you save it for a day you're not in a rush. I think I spent 3.5 hours in the kitchen - partly because the sauce went a bit pear shaped, and I had to do it  over again (only the sauce-part of it, luckily...). Traditional moussaka calls for potatoes in addition to eggplant. But this recipe here contains only eggplant, so it should be a perfect LCHF meal. 

For the eggplant base you need:

2 eggplants

Salt

Pepper

Butter for frying

Slice the eggplants as thinly as possibly, and place them on paper towels on the kitchen bench top. Cover the slices generously with salt. (The salt draws out a lot of water from the eggplants, and prepares them for frying). Let sit out for half an hour, and then wipe off the water that has gathered on top of the eggplant slices. Sprinkle the eggplant slices  with salt and pepper after taste, then fry in generous amounts of butter. When the slices are nice and brown, spread them out in a medium sized baking tray. This now forms the bottom of the moussaka. 

Next, make the minced meat filling, which will go on top of the eggplant.

Minced meat-filling:  

500 g minced meat

2 red onions

4 cloves of garlic

2 teaspoons cinnamon (ground)

4 bay leaves

1 can of tomatoes

4 tablespoons tomato paste

200 ml red wine

2 teaspoons oregano

salt

pepper

Chop the red onions and the garlic finely.Fry this in some butter in a frying pan. Then, remove from frying pan and place in a saucepan. Brown the minced meat, then add this to the onion mix in the saucepan. Now add the rest of the ingredients in the list above. Reduce on low heat. Then, remove the bay leaves, and pour the minced meat mixture on top of the eggplants in the baking dish. 

Next step is to make a cheese-sauce which will go on top of the minced meat. (Beware! This is the step where I messed up...)

Cheese sauce:

500 ml full fat milk

3 tablespoons full fat cream

2 tablespoons butter

1 teaspoon nutmeg

4 eggs

250 g grated cheese

Salt 

Pepper

4 bay leaves

Beat eggs until fluffy.

Boil the milk together with cream and butter until it has thickened a bit. Then add the beaten eggs to the mixture while constantly stirring. Add the spices to taste. Finally, add the grated cheese, and stir, briefly, until even. Then add this cheese sauce on top of the meat-sauce. 

Note: The first time I think I stirred to much, and it all separated into one yukky fatty phase and one aqueous phase... But the second time I was quicker, and it went ok. 

Bake on 190 degrees C in the middle of the oven for about 45 minutes. 

Serve with a Greek salad, and enjoy! I made the salad with cherry tomatoes, red onion, olives, feta cheese and some store-bought tzatziki. 

The two of us got at least three meals out of this generous recipe. 

I found this recipe on the very inspirational blog fotballfrue.no 

Lasagne

Different versions of pasta recipes have been going around the Scandinavian blogosphere for a while now, and today I decided it was time to try it out. I was a bit sceptical before I started and found it a bit hard to believe that a ‘’pasta’’ based on eggs, cream-cheese and psyllium-husk could actually taste like the real thing. But it did! At least when it was combined with loads of yummy pasta-sauce and cheese. Previously I have been using zucchini in stead of pasta sheets. That tastes quite alright as well, but this recipe here really had that lasagne-feel that I had been missing.

Pasta:

3 eggs

100 g (softened) Philadelphia cheese

50 ml (15 grams) psyllium husk

Beat eggs and Philadelphia cheese. Add psyllium husk. Let stand to thicken for around ten minutes. Cover a baking tray with baking paper. Place the pasta mass onto the baking paper, and place another baking paper on top of it. Use a rolling pin to spread the mass into quite a thin layer. Then bake on 150 degrees C for 10 minutes, with the baking-paper still on top. Then remove the top baking paper and part into little squares resembling lasagne sheets. Let it cool down.

Sauce:

500 g minced meat

1 onion

1 garlic clove

1 jar of tomato paste

1 1∕2 jar of cottage cheese

Spices (I used salt, Trocomare, pepper and oregano)

Grated cheese

Brown the mince and add garlic, onion, tomato paste and spices. Let simmer for a few minutes. Place half the mince into an oven safe tray. Then add a layer of lasagne sheets followed by a layer of cottage cheese. Now comes a second layer of minced meat, then lasagne sheets and cottage cheese. Finish with a layer of sprinkled cheese and bake on 200 degrees C for 30 minutes. Serve with a salad.

I got the inspiration from www.ingridsblogg.no, who again has found inspiration from www.fotballfrue.no I also found a similiar pasta recipe on www.lilalife.no. 

Tip: Instead of lasagne sheets, you can actually use the recipe to make tagliatelle. Then you first sprinkle the cooked pasta mass with some olive oil (avoids clumping), roll the cooked pasta mass up, and cut it thinly using a knife. For a photo, see http://www.matblogg.net/2012/02/03/er-det-pasta-mon-tro/ I haven’t made it yet, but it will definitely be my next project. 

My favourite stir fry

YUM! This is the best stir fry I've ever made! All thanks to Ingrid from  www.ingridsblogg.no, who shared this wonderful recipe.(I've found so many delicious recipes and tons of inspiration on her blog). The recipe makes an enormous portion, so I'm already looking forward to tomorrow's dinner :-D


Here it goes:

600 g chicken fillets
oil
about 1\3 cup of soy sauce
1 tsp. green curry
1 1\2 tbsp fish sauce (Squid brand)
2 tbsp chilli sauce
1 can coconut milk
1\3 of a ginger
1 chilli with seeds removed
2 cloves of garlic
1\2 bag of cashew nuts (approximately 125 g)
1 bunch of broccoli
1 tray of ready chopped carrots and beans
1 tray snow peas
2 capsicums
1 can of baby-corn 
1 red onion


Chop broccoli, capsicum and read onion. Add baby corn, snow peas, carrots and beans. Heat oil in the wok and stir-fry the veggies in three portions to avoid the wok going cold. Then remove the veggies and stir-fry the chicken. Chop the garlic and the chilli and grate ginger. Roast the cashew nuts slightly, then quickly fry garlic, chilli and grated ginger. Then add in the meat, stir, then add all the veggies. Now it's time to add the soy sauce, fish sauce and the chilli sauce and let it sit in the wok for a couple of minutes while stirring. Add coconut milk and the green curry. Let simmer for 5-8 minutes, then serve. 


Voila! So healthy and so yum! 

Fish-bake with whiting

I used to love a typical Norwegian fish bake-dish with lots of macaroni inside and with bread crumbs on the top. Naturally, this dish is not on the menu for me any more, and I was so happy to find a recipe for a dish just as good, but healthier.  Whereas I used to find it ready-made in the freezer in my local store at home, I had to make this dish from scratch. And surprisingly, it’s not much more time-consuming than buying the ready-made dish. Changing to a low carb lifestyle meant that I had to learn how to cook from ‘’scratch’’ rather than relying on ready-made food full of preservatives and cheap ingredients. And time after time it has surprised me how easy it actually is to cook healthy, using whole foods. Coming from someone who used to be a fast-food queen and who hated spending more than 5 minutes in the kitchen, it's quite a change... Well, enough rambling on, here is the recipe:

600 g white fish (I used whiting)

2 onions

4 eggs

200 ml cream

Salt, pepper, dill, other spices to  taste

Grated cheese

Chop the onions while you boil the fish. When the fish is well-cooked, mix fish with onion in an oven-safe tray. Beat the mixture of eggs, cream and spices lightly. Pour it over the fish. Sprinkle cheese on top and put the dish in the (pre-heated ) oven. Bake on 225 degrees C for around 25 minutes.  

Voila!

Let me know if you have got any suggestions on how to spice this dish up a notch: With other vegetables or perhaps some interesting herbs. I often find that plain fish can be a bit boring, but by making a fish-bake like this I ''camouflage'' the fish with lots of good stuff, so I trick myself into eating fish more often. 

This recipe is inspired by the wonderful Lena Beatrice who has the blog  www.lenabeatrice.net Unfortunately for the English-speaking world, it's in Norwegian... But google translator is improving day by day, so it's worth trying the translator function to see if it's making any sense. 

Pizza

There's no denying that wheat has a few awesome properties that I now and then miss while baking. This is especially true when making pizza. I've tried various recipes for pizza crusts, and either they end up like a big sponge or like an omelette on steroids. That was untill I found this recipe that gives quite a decent pizza crust (still not like a proper wheat-crust, but good enough for putting on all the yummy pizza fillings). I've found the recipe on the fabulous blog http://lchf-bloggen.blogspot.com. My partner, who isn't much of a low-carb fan, actually approves of this pizza. 

Here's the recipe for the pizza base: 

4 eggs
4 dessert spoons of cream 
2 dessert spoons of oil 
1 teaspoon baking powder 
2 dessert spoons psyllium husk fibre
200 ml grated cheese 
2-3 dessert spoons ground sesame seeds 
salt 
oregano 


Preheat the oven to 250 degrees Celcius. 
Mix all ingredients in a bowl and let the mixture swell for approximately 15 minutes. Spread mixture out on a baking tray covered with baking paper, using a spatula. Cook until golden. Cooking time will vary depending on how thin / thick you have applied the dough on the baking tray. 

Then, remove from oven and add whatever pizza toppings you feel like!

I like to spread pesto across the base, then add some pepperoni, bacon, onion and paprika, and LOTS of cheese. Did I mention lots of cheese? 

Put the pizza back into oven and continue to cook until the cheese on top is melted.

Bon appetite! 

If I remember correctly, this pizza is made doubling  the recipe
above. I tend to make huge pizzas, then have it for lunch
several days in a row. 

Salmon-bake

I've found a whole lot of yummy recipes involving meat, but not so many recipes with fish. Of course, fish in itself is perfect low carb food, just bake a piece of salmon in the oven and have it with an interesting salad and some dressing. But being Scandinavian and having grown up with all kinds of fish-recipes, I was longing to make something more exciting with fish.

Then I found this gratinated salmon recipe, from the wonderful blog www.linn-sin-verden.blogspot.com
I've translated it to English:


500 grams of salmon
1/2 cauliflower
1/2 capsicum
1 onion
1 tub of Creme Fraiche
1 packet of  chopped, frozen spinach
Grated cheese
Salt, pepper and dill

Dice salmon and put in a heat-resistant tray. Add cauliflower- buquettes, chopped capsicum and chopped onion. Sprinkle on some salt, pepper and dill. Mix ingredients together. Then make a dressing of the Creme Fraiche and the spinach (defrosted), and spread it on top of the fish-and vegetable mix. Lastly, add a generous sprinkling of grated cheese on top.

Bake in the oven on 200 degrees Celsius for approximately 25 minutes.

Easy as that! This recipe is enough to make 3 dinners for me and my partner.