Baked Garlic & Herb Chicken

  

This recipe is simple and great with salads or roasted vegetables. You can use any cut of chicken you prefer, I personally like chicken thighs. It’s a fattier meat which is good when you are doing a low carb lifestyle, since the fat is what keeps you full long after you’ve eaten. 

Ingredients:

6 chicken thighs, with bone and skin

Light drizzle of low sodium soy sauce

4 garlic cloves, minced

2 TBLSP dried chives

1 TBLSP poultry seasoning

2 tsp sweet summer savory

1 tsp kosher salt

1 tsp ground black pepper

1 TBLSP dried parsley

3 TBLSP expeller pressed coconut oil

Directions:

Preheat oven to 425 degrees, line a 9×13 baking dish with nonstick foil and drizzle with soy sauce. Set aside.

In a small bowl mix together minced garlic, chives, poultry seasoning, sweet summer savory, salt, and pepper. Set aside. 

Rinse and pat the chicken dry, separate skin from the top of each piece of chicken and rub on garlic herb mixture. Place skin back over the top of chicken and place in lined pan. On top of chicken, smooth room temp coconut oil over the skin and sprinkle with dried parsley. You can add a little extra salt and pepper on the skin if you like. 

Cover tightly with foil and bake for 15 minutes. Then reduce oven temp to 375, continue to bake for 35 minutes. If you would like a crispier skin, remove the foil and bake for another 20 minutes. 

This yields 3 servings(2 thighs per person) or 6 individual servings. Leftovers can be frozen. 

Nutritional Information(1/3 serving size or 2 thighs):

Calories: 600; Fat: 48.1g; Carbs: 3.6g; Fiber: 0.4g; Net Carbs: 3.2g

After deboning the chicken, I chopped it up and added it to my romaine salad. Since I can’t have salad dressing, I used the pan drippings as a substitute. Extremely delicious, very filling, and low in net carbs. As I mentioned before, you can use any cut of chicken: breasts, legs, wings or do this to an entire chicken! If you decide to use an entire chicken I suggest slow cooking in a crock pot. It’s hassel free and ready for you when you get home after a long day. 

Hope you all enjoy and have a blessed day!!

Carrot Cake (LC/GF/DF) & Update

Happy Tuesday to you all! I trust you all had a great Easter weekend with your family and friends!

I realize I didn’t give an update last week, there has been a positive turn with my health. Last week I checked my right breast for any signs of lingering blood and all is clear! Five weeks of eating clean, taking supplements, laying off dairy, gluten, and carbs as much as possible have really helped! This is why I’m thinking that my issue was a hormone imbalanace, which goes hand in hand in my PCOS. It’s amazing what a change in lifestyle can do!

Going low carb has not been easy for me, especially when the majority of recipes call for butter, cheese, sour cream, cream cheese, and heavy cream. All of those I used to use in great abundance, especially the cheese and butter!! Learning to go without has been difficult but worth it! Last week I lost another four pounds for a grand total of 21.9 pounds, I’m extremely pleased and shocked that in just five weeks I could lose that much. This has all been due to a change in what I’m eating, I plan to start exercising once I lose some more weight. My track record with exercising isn’t too good, I usually wind up injuring myself, which leads to months of recovery, depression, and undoing all my progress by eating all the wrong foods again. It’s what I’ve done for four years now, so this time HAS to be different. Easing into exercise, even at a snail pace, is the only way I can ensure I don’t overdo anything. And out of the rabbit hole now, lol sorry! Back on topic…

Low carb food options are even harder to come by when you HAVE to exclude gluten and dairy. One of the ways I’ve been able to manage without dairy is to use raw organic cold pressed coconut oil. It lacks the coconut smell and taste which allows me to use it for everything from cooking my morning eggs to baked goods. It measures the same as butter(eg. 1/2 c melted butter can be replaced with 1/2 c melted coconut oil) and I have used it in my baked goods with great success! And one such recipe was the carrot cake I make for Easter!

   (Voila!!! This is a crazy easy recipe and thankfully it doesn’t take everything in the kitchen to make it. I do have some slight adjustments I plan to make the next time I make this, such as reducing the amount of carrots and nuts. The original recipe is found at Ditch the Carbs site, and below I have copied here.)

INGREDIENTS

Low Carb Carrot Cake

3 cups grated carrot

5 eggs

200g / 7 oz butter melted

3 tbsp granulated stevia or sweetener of choice to taste

1 ½ cups ground almonds/ almond flour

2 tsp baking powder

1 tsp ground cinnamon

1 tsp mixed spice

½ cup chopped walnuts (optional)

2 tsp vanilla essence

½ cup shredded unsweetened coconut

Cream Cheese Frosting

200g cream cheese

1-2 tbs granulated stevia, or sweetener of choice, to taste

INSTRUCTIONS

Low Carb Carrot Cake

Beat eggs, melted butter, stevia, and vanilla together.

Add grated carrot, walnuts, and coconut then mix ground almonds, spices and baking powder.

Pour into a greased and lined tin. Bake at 180C/350F for 30 minutes or until a fork pushed in, comes out clean.

Cream Cheese Frosting

Warm the cream cheese in the microwave for 20 seconds to soften it.

Stir in 1-2 tbs stevia or sweetener of choice.

You could also add some lemon zest to give it more flavour. This would add a small number of carbs.

Cover with cream cheese frosting.

NOTES

I used an 8 inch/ 20 cm cake tin.

NUTRITION INFORMATION

Serving size: 1 slice iced Calories: 321 Fat: 31.6g Carbohydrates: 5.8g Sugar: 2.9g Fibre: 2g Protein: 5.7g

Yes, this is a dense cake with a tremendous amount of flavor! It was so nice to be able to enjoy one of my favorite cakes without all the guilt. With that said, I did make a couple of changes to the recipe in order to make it dairy free and to make up for the lack of mixed spice(which I’m sure pumpkin pie spice could work also). 

I swapped out the butter and used melted coconut oil instead, very easy adjustment, and in place of the mixed spice I added 1/8 tsp each of ground nutmeg and ground cloves. Both enhanced the cinnamon flavor beautifully! I did make the cream cheese frosting, but chose to not add it on top of the cake. I left that as an option for my family to add to their own pieces. 

For myself, I made a whipped coconut cream, very easy and can’t remember where I saw this idea. If I run across it I’ll be sure to update this post. All you do, is the night before you make this, place a can of unsweetened full fat coconut milk in the refrigerator. Do not shake it up before doing so. What you are wanting to do is chill the separated fat from the coconut water that is on the bottom. The next day, open the can and scoop out just the chilled coconut fat into a small bowl(the leftover water can be used in low carb smoothies, in soups, and sauces, or you can just drink it straight), sweeten with a couple packets of stevia, a dash of cinnamon, and about one teaspoon of vanilla extract(or any extract flavor you like). Use a handmixer and whip the contents for 30-40 seconds, or until all the lumps are gone. And then enjoy! 

I wish I had known about the whipped coconut cream sooner, it’s also delicious in coffee! It doesn’t have the staying power of whipped cream, but hey the yummy cinnamon flavor is still there and it fills my coffee with healthy fat goodness!  What more could a low carb gal ask for?! Pizza smothered in cheese…but I won’t go there. 😒

Hope you all enjoy this recipe, please leave your reviews over at Ditch the Carbs for the cake recipe and I look forward to sharing more of my health journey with you all later and hope everyone has a very blessed day!

YAY!!!

Low Carb Taco Soup

Making tonight for the family! For a dairy free option, leave out the cream cheese and heavy cream. Substitute with unsweetened almond milk and to make it creamy add 1-2 avocados into the food processor and whiz down until smooth. Stir into soup and enjoy!

Simple Momma

This is one of my favorite soups. Since it’s similar to eating tacos, it is great year round–not just when it is cold! Plus it’s low carb!!

First, you’ll want to brown one pound of ground beef, or ground turkey if you prefer. You can cook the meat in a separate skillet or the large pot you will need for the soup.  Once the meat is brown, drain it and add in two minced garlic cloves and half a cup of onions. Stir those in and then add in your spices–one tablespoon of cumin and one teaspoon of chili powder. Let the spices soak in while you dice up an eight ounce block of cream cheese. Add in the cream cheese and use the back of a wooden spoon to mash it into the meat. You can use a metal or plastic spoon, but the cream cheese will not stick to the wooden spoon as much.

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LC/GF/DF St. Patrick’s Day

  

🍀I trust everyong has had a fantastic day, filled with amazing food, fun activities, and made some new memories!! 🍀

So what exactly is there to eat when you’re living a low carb life? It’s hard, especially when recipes such as colcannon and yummy soda bread keep popping up in all the search results. It gets even harder when you have to factor in gluten free and dairy free needs. There are some ingredients I don’t have access to, such as psyllium powder, and other ingredients I can’t use like tapioca starch and rice flour. I felt defeated thought I would have to finally accept that I wasn’t going to get my traditional soda bread to eat with a creamy potato chowder. It’s ok, I’m not pouting…that’s when I decided I could still have potato soup and bread, but with a twist! 

  

LC/GF/DF Potato Soup and Savory Zucchini Bread

Soup:

1 onion, chopped

3 stalks celery, chopped

3 carrots, peeled and chopped

32 oz frozen cauliflower, thawed and chop the bigger chunks

3 garlic cloves, minced

1 pound bacon, chopped and fried (reserve bacon grease)

Salt and pepper to taste

8 cups homemade chicken stock or broth

Directions:

Cook and drain bacon, set aside. Add half of the hot bacon grease to a large dutch oven soup pot, to this you’ll sweat onions, celery, and carrots. Once they are tender pour in chopped cauliflower, minced garlic and cook covered for 10 minutes. Season with salt, pepper, and pour in the stock or broth. Lower temp to simmer till the vegetables are soft. Reseason if needed before serving. 

Bread:

2 cups zucchini, peeled and shredded

6 eggs

1/2 cup coconut oil, melted

2 tsp vinegar(apple cider if you prefer)

1/2 tsp kosher salt

1/2 tsp black pepper

1 tsp garlic powder

1 tsp onion powder

1 tsp sweet summer savory or 1 tsp drief thyme

1 tsp baking soda

3/4 cup coconut flour

Directions:

Preheat oven to 350 degrees and either use coconut oil to grease a loaf pan or line with Reynolds non-stick foil. 

Peel and shred zucchini, do not squeeze out moisture with paper towels. Set aside.

In a medium bowl combine eggs, melted coconut oil, vinegar, salt, pepper, garlic powder, onion powder, and sweet summer savory or dried thyme. Use a handmixer to thoroughly mix together. Stire in shredded zucchini. Set aside.

In a small bowl mix together coconut flour and baking soda. Add into wet ingredients and stir to combine. Mixture will not be loose. Spoon into prepared loaf pan and make sure it’s spread even. Bake for 42-50 minutes, depending on your oven. Start checking it after 42 minutes with a knife in the center. If it comes out clean with no gooey uncooked dough stuck to it then the bread is done. Let it cool for a few minutes in the pan before turning out onto serving platter. Serve warm.

To serve:

Ladel the mock potato soup into bowl, add a slice of zucchini bread, and a chunk of kielbasa or Irish sausage. 

For me, I personally LOVED the zucchini bread in the soup. I tried a piece as soon as it came out of the oven and even though there were all those eggs and oil in the dough, the nature of the coconut flour still came through…very drying. It sucked the moisture out of my mouth. This is why I ate it with my soup broth and it was 🍀perfect🍀!! This is my new favorite soup and bread! I will update this post later with carb counts, I think the bread is a little over a carb per slice. Will make sure to double check. 

Let me know if you try this and what you think! I enjoy hearing feedback, however in order to comment below you have to sign up with WordPress. It’s free and you don’t have to have a blog in order to have an account. You can also sign up to follow my blog, it’s free as well! You’ll receive an email with my latest post every time I put up something new! 

All righty gang, stay safe, and see you all later! 

💚Love and blessings to all💚

  

Weight Loss Update

Good morning! Hope everyone is having a wonderful day so far 😊 I decided to share a rather personal and somewhat emtional hurdle that I’ve cleared. Anyone who has ever been so overweight that they couldn’t do something will understand the feelings behind this post and the difficulty in sharing it. 

If you’re new to this blog, for a month now I’ve been living a low carb lifestyle with the aid of supplements and holistic treatment in the hopes to reverse some major health concerns. There have been some major sucesses! In a month I have lost 14.5 pounds, chronic pain and fatigue that I’ve struggled with for a decade are slowly easing up, energy is improving, appetite returning, basically I know that what I’m doing is working great for me! Which is why this morning I was in shock after seeing the fruit of all my efforts. 

It’s been a year since I’ve driven a car. The reason? The last time I drove, my stomach was pressed against the steering wheel. That was a painful realization for me which caused me to spiral away into depression and self loathing. I spent last year trying to lose weight but never sticking with it because I was hating what I had allowed myself to become but not enough to make the change for good. 

So this morning, I had to drive my dad to pick up the car he’s renting for the weekend and to be honest I was dreading it. Anxiety was riding high and I didn’t sleep good last night knowing I was going to have to stuff this body behind the steering wheel. As I was psyching myself up this morning I decided on the course of action to take. After I got dressed, I stood in front of my bathroom mirror and practiced sucking in my stomach as far as I could with the hope that it would be enough. Moment of truth came, I climbed in and held my breath as I got situated and that’s when I notice the amount of space between me and the steering wheel! 

I slowly relaxed my stomach muscles out and there was still plenty of room! I quickly buckled and was in shock. Dad got in and even remarked about the room I had, apparently he doubted that I even had an issue. That’s when I reminded him about a year ago and we were off. After I got home I had to share this with a very sweet woman, who is basically my sister from another mister, and through the tears I told her everything. This is a woman that truly understands the struggle, who has never judged me, or made me feel like less of a human being based on my size. She’s one of the few people who actually knows my weight and still sees my worth! 

Her response made me cry even more because it was filled with so much love, admiration, and honesty. I could not have asked for a better friend, she’s one of several folks who have come to me saying just how much I am motivating them, encouraging them to do better. Quite honestly, I didn’t understand how since I’m morbidly obese. Society cracks jokes about people my size, ridicules us for being so big, bashing us with the hopes that it will motivate us fat folks to change our lives for the better according to their standards. 

She explained it to me that it’s because I struggle through all of this, that I haven’t given in to the temptations that plague me that it’s motivating her and others to strive to do better. That hey, if Amanda can do it so can I! So when she put it like that, I was able to understand better why everyone keeps thinking of me in that way. It’s humbling, since I never set out with that mindset. I didn’t wake up one day and say, today I am going to see how I can motivate others. I began sharing my weekly progress on my private facebook account to keep myself honest. In the end, other blessings have come because of it, for everyone…including me! 

I hope this post has helped someone else, maybe it’s given someone the courage to try again. Let me tell you, it’s worth it…You. Are. Worth. It. 

  

Don’t give up!! We can do this 💪🏼

  

⬆️ This is a great reminder! Don’t forget it ❤️

Have a blessed week!! 

Wordless Wednesday Post

  

Health Update and Recipe

Since the new year began, I’ve had some highs and lows. Who doesn’t, right?! The lows have been outweighing the highs lately and so much so it had started to take its toll on me. What I am about to share may gross some folks out, so if you’d rather skip to the recipe below that’s quite all right. 

A year ago I discovered a massive bruise on the side of my right breast. It was the strangest thing, I remember going to bed without it and the next morning it was there! It never hurt though from it’s black-purple color you’d think otherwise. After a few weeks it finally went away and I never gave it another thought as 2015 pressed on. Fast forward to February 2016…I’m used to funky things happening to me thanks to my PCOS. Honestly, most things never surprise me or gross me out anymore. I’ve learned to deal and move on, except when I woke up one morning with dried blood around my right nipple. You bet I thought what the heck! After a mild freak out I hit Bing search engine up for a possible explanation. 

Now, I know what many of you are thinking, why haven’t you gotten your fanny to a doctor?! Well, a little thing called insurance…yeah, I don’t have it and not enough money to pay out of pocket at the moment. So, after spending an hour perusing the possibilities as to what it could be I decided to wait it out and see if could be the first option: hormone imbalance. For some women it can occur during their monthly cycles, I personally have never had that particular symptom happen before. I decided to give it four days to see if would go away on it’s own as per many online GYN’s  had said it should…but it didn’t. I won’t lie, I did panic at first and my mind began to reel with the possibility of ‘what if’. What if it’s not just a clogged milk duct? What if this isn’t just a serious bout of hormone imbalance? What if I have breast cancer? That last thought scared me the most. 

After talking with my parents, I came up with a plan to see if I could in some way alter certain symptoms. I have always shared on social media how cancer needs sugar and an acidic environment to thrive. Now it was time to start putting my own words to good use, live a low carb lifestyle and incorporate alkaline aspects(water, certain veggies, etc.). I knew it wasn’t going to be easy going cold turkey off of sugar, gluten, and dairy but with the idea of breast cancer hanging over my head as a major possibility I knew that once I start there would be no going back. No giving up. No starting and two weeks later giving up. It’s serious this time, and even IF it’s not breast cancer I ought to live as though it were. 

So, for two weeks I have been living an extreme low carb lifestyle. No sugar. No gluten. No dairy. Increased my water to 2L a day, every morning I drink a small cup of warm lemon water sweetened with stevia. Cut my caffeine consumption back to half a cup a day. Increased my usage of turmeric, ginger, and cayenne pepper. I add it on EVERYTHING throughout the day. Yes I was a total grumpy mcbaggy pants last week, an absolute bear because all week I was craving doughnuts. I didn’t care what kind homemade, Krispy Kreme, Dunkin…If someone had brought in a dozen I would have eaten the entire box! But I didn’t cave in, I stayed the course and munched on pork rinds any time the craving hit. It helped! My chronic fatigue is improving, I still get tired during the day but I’m not crashing on the sofa every afternoon like I had been. Slowly things are beginning to improve which is good! 

Even this morning I weighed myself and found that I’m 9 pounds down and the inflammation is lessening. Here’s a little tidbit of info for women with PCOS, dairy causes inflammation seriously consider reducing or cutting it out completely and notice an improvement to your overall health. I am starting to get around with better ease, my joints ache less, my lower back doesn’t hurt as much, and walking in general isn’t as tiresome. Turmeric and cayenne pepper have helped tremendously! I strongly suggest you start adding that to your daily diet and lifestyle. 

I’ll just tell you this, only time will reveal if what I am doing is truly improving my health and putting a stop to these weird symptoms. All I ask from you amazing people is to please pray for me during this time. 

Now, if I haven’t grossed everyone out with my health update, let’s move on to a fabulous lunch idea that’s full of good for you fat, will tackle inflammation, and is perfect for a ladies get together or brunch! 😉

  

You’ll need::

6 boiled eggs, peeled and mashed

2 leftover chicken breasts, boneless, skinless

1 c homemade mayonnaise

Salt and pepper to taste

1 tsp dried chives

1 avocado, peeled

Spanish Paprika

Cayenne powder

In a large bowl add peeled boiled eggs and use a pastry blender to chop it down as finely as you can. Set aside. Place leftover chicken breasts in a food processor and whiz it down until it resembles a fine texture, almost like a dry pate. Add to the chopped eggs. Mix with mayonnaise, salt, pepper, and dried chives. Cut a ripe avocado in half and carefully remove the seed with a sharp knife. You can leav the skin on if you wish, I prefer removing it. Fill each half with the egg chicken salad mixture, don’t be stingy! Sprinkle the top with cayenne pepper and paprika and enjoy! 

This is truly a deviled dish! That kick of cayenne is amazing with the smoky flavor of paprika. You can serve this with a side salad, gluten free low carb bread and almond butter, add chopped bacon on top, and of course a tall glass of lemon lime water! 

The carb count is low which is great for induction. You can use any leftover chicken, I just happen to have two pieces leftover from a low carb chicken paprikash that I made earlier in the week. Don’t be afraid to try new things and hope you all have a blessed weekend!