Sharing is my very favorite thing to do. When I got started this morning, I imagined that I’d be sharing positive reflections on a new cookbook that I downloaded today. I had such high hopes. Instead, at bedtime, I’m frustrated, and experiencing a soupçon of dread. Let me explain.
A week ago, the other Anne at Rotary and I got into a conversation about the Keto diet. She said she was really enjoying a cookbook by a woman named Carrie Brown. She pulled it up on her Kindle app and showed me a couple of recipes. They looked good to me, but I did make a point of asking what exactly this ingredient “konjac” was. She told me it was a powder I could get at Vitamin Cottage (years later hardly anybody has adjusted to the name change to Natural Grocers) and the conversation moved on.
Flash forward to Friday or Saturday, and I finally remembered to look up the author. I found that she co-hosts a podcast called the Ketovangelist Kitchen, and I spent all weekend listening to episodes of it. Originally I thought I’d get lucky and get enough tips and recipes to eliminate the need to buy a book. To my surprise, I have discovered I absolutely love her. She’s charming, and her co-host Brian is amusing as well. By yesterday, I decided that the cookbook to start with was her crock pot version. I didn’t download it until this morning, although I started eating purely Keto as of dawn Sunday. (Disclaimer: I have no intention as of now of putting a diet to the forefront of this blog. My current goal is to do this for the four weeks between now and Christmas. If it lasts longer, maybe I’ll talk about it.)
Most of the crockpot recipes call for a half teaspoon of this konjac stuff (also called glucomannan, from the root of a Japanese lily) to thicken the sauces. Carrie Brown says that it's a miracle thickener, because it withstands the extended heat in a crock pot without separating or getting gummy. In fact, she insists never, ever substitute guar gum or xanthan gum for this stuff. It would ruin the effect. So I spent a couple of hours this morning and early afternoon reading through dozens of recipes, making a shopping list, with konjac powder at the top. I started out at Natural Grocers (sigh... or "Vitamin Cottage"), and I studied the baking aisle, near the gluten free flours and such (and I grabbed a bag of erythritol... this will be interesting). Never found it, and the guy who I grabbed to help had to Google it before he looked in the inventory list and told me they didn't have it. He said a little something about a supplement, but I breezed past that. I then went to King Soopers, got most of the other things on the list, and sort of looked for the powder in the baking aisle. I gave up quickly there, feeling like I was pressing my luck for having figured out where to buy nutritional yeast. I ended my quest at Whole Foods, dancing the same dance as Natural Grocers. "You want what?" (Google) "Let me check the inventory list." Again, something about a supplement. I left. It wasn't until I got home that I went to the Google machine for myself. Yeah. Supplement. Apparently this stuff was big on the weight loss scene maybe a decade ago. It's entirely possible that I would find the powder in the supplement section of any one of those shops, even the King Soopers, and it would indeed be the stuff I'm supposed to sprinkle over all of these sauces in the crock pot. I'll be going back tomorrow.
I never actually got to make a single crock pot recipe. I got home too late to start. So I made something else that fit the guidelines, and I'll try to do better next time.
If you're wondering about the dread... While at the first store, I found one thing made from konjac. It's my first experience with shiritaki noodles. I found a pack of Miracle Noodles, a watery bag of pale noodles that are made shelf-stable with lime (not the fruit). I knew nothing about them until tonight. I looked them up and found videos and reviews. Wow. I'm not sure I want to open the bag now. Apparently they stink, are somewhat fishy, are very rubbery, and take unusual prep time. You drain the water (when the stinky fish smell is worst), rinse them for several minutes, parboil them for a minute in salted water, and then dry saute them until they squeak. Yes, I said squeak. That's in the directions. They have no real flavor of their own, and benefit from heavy sauces poured over them. Also they have a "weird" aftertaste, whatever that implies. I was going to use them in pho, until I saw the videos. Now I'm not sure. Are nearly calorie-less noodles worth all of this? I'm not looking forward to finding out.
No comments:
Post a Comment