Saviolo
Saviolo's JournalLow-Carb Almond Butter Chocolate Chip Cookies Recipe (video)
These little cookies are delicious, low-carb, and flour-free! This is our take on a couple of different recipes we found that we wanted to slam together. They came out amazingly well. We replace all of the white sugar with xylitol, which is a non-sugar sweetener with a low glycemic index. We still used a small amount of brown sugar for that nice browning and molasses flavour. We also added a bit of dietary fibre in the form of acacia gum and inulin. Hubby supplements his fibre intake with both of these, and sometimes uses psyllium husks. It has the added benefit of lowering the general glycemic index of the food we're eating.
A caution about xylitol: It is very toxic to dogs, so please be careful around your pets if you're using xylitol. If you want to use white sugar in this recipe, it will work just fine (and the cookies may spread out a little bit more). The almond flour and almond butter really help these cookies to remain moist after baking. The crunch of the toasty slivered almonds on the bottom and the crispy flaky salt on top really elevate these cookies to something special.
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Homemade Hot and Sour Soup Recipe (video)
This is a Chinese take-out restaurant classic! It's a delicious soup, and it's pretty easy to make at home, aside from all of the knifework. It all takes place in a single pot (aside from whatever vessel you use to rehydrate the mushrooms). We used psyllium husks instead of cornstarch to thicken this soup, mostly to increase the fibre content. The psyllium had a very similar result to the cornstarch, so it definitely works nicely.
A word of warning! The black fungus usually expands *a lot* when you rehydrate it. You can see the tiny little brick we used in the recipe, and it expanded to fill the whole bowl. That may be the toughest ingredient to find for this recipe, along with the bamboo shoots. We're spoiled in our neighbourhood by having some really excellent Chinese and Indian grocery stores.
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Twice-Fried Pork And Shrimp Dim Sum Three Ways Recipe (video)
This was a total experiment for us! This is based on some dim sum we had recently in addition to a couple of different recipes we had come across. We sort of smashed it all together, and came up with this really excellent twice-fried dim sum. The centre of all three different formats here is the pork and shrimp farce that we start with and add to each of the ingredients. Then we fry them once in shallow oil at a low temp to make sure the farce is cooked through, followed by a quick deep fry at a much higher temp to get the outside golden and crispy.
We were amazed at the difference in the texture and flavour of the three different dishes. The lotus root caramelized nicely during the deep fry and got a great crispy starchy texture and really highlighted the pork and shrimp farce. The eggplant was probably the biggest surprise. The end result was so sweet it tasted like we had added sugar to it. The eggplant was crispy on the edges and very creamy in the middle, and accompanied the farce perfectly. The tofu also ended up nice and crispy on the outside (even if much of the batter came off), and the inside was fluffy like a cloud.
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Easy Homemade Negitoro Recipe (video)
We got our hands on some really excellent sushi-grade tuna that was remnants of off-cuts (hence the perfect little cubes of tuna here), so we decided we'd make something where we could really enjoy the raw tuna. This Japanese dish is usually served over sushi rice (seasoned with sushi vinegar), and has a small drizzle of the incredibly flavourful sauce. As you can see in this video, we made only a tiny amount of the syrupy sauce, because it does indeed pack an huge flavour punch.
The presentation is half of the dish, here. The beautiful perilla leaf (or shiso if you can't get perilla - they're different varietals of the same species, but shiso is usually easier to find) with the little dollop of wasabi and the bright red tuna (or salmon works well) with the green onion and nori. The total package is beautiful and delicious. Traditionally this recipe is made with the meat that is scraped from the bones of the tuna, which is usually quite fatty. Our tuna was a little more lean that we'd hoped, but it was still delicious. Ideally, though, you want to grab something a bit fattier if you can. And don't worry, it's a very healthy fat!
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Easy Red Lentil Spanakopita Recipe (video)
This was a bit of an experiment for us, and it worked out very well! It's based on a couple of recipes we had seen recently and put together our own version of it. The pastry here is a batter made from red lentils, cottage cheese, and eggs. If that sounds like it won't work, that's what we thought until we tried it! The end result was fluffy (thanks to the baking powder) and crispy on the outside, with a nice crispy bottom crust.
The filling is a very standard spanakopita sort of filling made from onion, spinach, and feta cheese. It probably could have used more feta, honestly. You could very easily adjust the flavour profile with the addition of garlic or other herbs or spices. Fresh dill would be an excellent addition to this. The garnish we were hoping for was nigella seeds, but we had a hard time tracking them down locally, so we just used black sesame seeds. You could also put some half cherry or grape tomatoes on top before baking, much like a focaccia.
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Restaurant-style Pepitas Crusted Scallops Recipe with Avocado Crema (video)
This recipe was entirely an experiment. It was based very loosely on something we had had at a restaurant, but that was more of a rice and plantain hash with little bay scallops in it. This dish is a little more like what you'd find at a slightly upscale non-chain restaurant, and the flavours here all work so well together, you'll be absolutely amazed.
We weren't without our missteps here. The avocado was a little underripe, so the texture of the crema was not quite right, but it was still delicious. Also, the plantain may have been a little overripe (or maybe we just paid too much attention to it), so it didn't end up with lots of nice little crispy cubes of plantain, but rather more of a mash with some excellent little toasty bits. It wasn't exactly what we wanted when we set out, but it was still incredibly delicious.
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Delicious Flourless Fruit-and-Oat Loaf Recipe (video)
This is another sort of dessert-y recipe, but this time it's a flourless sort of cake or loaf. The binding in this one is oats, and the rest of the batter is mostly eggs, yogurt, and fruit! We used a combination of fresh fruit (apples) and some of our own frozen local berries (blueberries and strawberries), but you could switch these out to whatever you have on hand. Replace the apples with rhubarb. Replace the strawberries with raspberries. Replace the blueberries with saskatoon berries or cranberries! We found that it worked best if, after slicing, you carefully brown the slices in a pan with some butter. It crisps up beautifully and deliciously.
As with many of our dessert recipes, we pull way back on the sugar, and this one is no exception. You want to be able to taste the fruit in this, and let them take centre stage! The only other flavouring we used in this was a bit of vanilla, but it could very easily take a bit of cinnamon, or even pumpkin spice. For that matter, you could replace the apple with pumpkin and make this a real fall experience. You could spice this up in many different ways, depending on how you prefer your flavour profile!
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Crispy Pan-fried Shrimp and Pork Patties Recipe (video)
This recipe was inspired by some really excellent south Asian food blogs we had been browsing. We assembled this from a couple of different recipes, and it came out really well. You can omit the sugar from this, it's entirely optional. Also, resist the urge to add salt to your protein before you add the fish sauce. The fish sauce is very salty and will definitely season the whole dish. We used regular bread crumbs for the binding in the patties themselves, and panko to bread the outside for that perfect crispy finish.
We used the spicy pineapple plum sauce with these and it was unexpectedly perfect. The flavours really complemented well. You could spice this up if you wanted, add some cayenne or chili flakes to the mixture, etc... We made a half batch from the recipes we had found, but because it's hard to cut an egg in half, our mixture came out a little wet. You can remedy this somewhat by adding a couple tsp of flour to help bind (we used dietary fibre - acacia powder and inulin powder), but make sure you take that step to let it hydrate before you form them.
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Homemade Classic Pot Roast Recipe (video)
A simple, delicious, low-and-slow-cooked pot roast! Nothing particularly fancy about this one except for the completely optional demi-glace, which adds a lovely richness and unctuousness to the dish, but this recipe is still excellent without it. We got our hands on some really excellent parsnips and potatoes, and some bog standard food service carrots. Hubby likes to go a little heavy on the bulby elements, so we have leeks, onion, shallot, and garlic in there.
For recipes like this, we always recommend you make them the day before and let them sit overnight so that all the flavours come together. They are always better the next day. To heat it up, we just sauteed the mushrooms until they got some good colour, and then poured the veggies and some of the sliced beef into the pan with them to get everything nice and hot again.
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Classic Spinach Salad with Warm Bacon Dressing Recipe (video)
A bit of a classic with a bunch of variations, this spinach salad with a warm basic dressing had a big revival in the 90's and has sort of stuck around since then. No wonder, it's super delicious and pretty easy. The acid of the vinegar counters the unctuousness of the bacon fat and everything is tied together with the bright fresh green of the spinach leaves. We prefer baby spinach for this, but you could use full sized spinach that has been slightly cut down to size.
We recommend a nice streaky bacon in nice thick slices, not just those paper-thin slices in most grocery store bacons. You need to make sure enough bacon fat renders out to cook the shallots and emulsify with the mustard and vinegar. If you wanted, you could whisk continuously while drizzling a thin stream of the bacon/shallot mixture into the oil and it would come out thicker, almost like a hollandaise, but that's a lot more work. Personal preference if you want a much thicker dressing.
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Gender: MaleHometown: Ottawa, Ontario
Home country: Canada
Current location: Toronto, Ontario
Member since: Wed Oct 29, 2008, 04:34 PM
Number of posts: 3,305