You may have noticed from some of my posts – I really love food. Well, let me clarify that. I love good food. Food that is full of flavor, richness, and depth.
But I also know that my body feels best, functions best, and looks its best when I stay within a certain size range. The only time I ever weigh myself is when I go to the doctor’s for a check-up, but I do pay attention to how I feel in my clothes. And if I don’t feel amazing in my ripped skinny jeans, the world just doesn’t shine quite as brightly, know what I mean?
As a result, if I want to fully enjoy the foods I love I am going to have to do one of three things:
1. Exercise wayyyyy more than I have time for, (I walk daily and practice yoga most days)
2. Eat really, really small portions (not really possible with an intermittent fasting lifestyle) or
3. Find ways to make my food delicious, nourishing, and also lighter/low carb.
I choose #3. 💯. Which is as it turns out, is pretty fun. It gives me an opportunity to experiment in the kitchen and be a bit of a mad chemist, something I’ve loved since I started mixing coffee grounds with cough syrup in my grandma’s kitchen around 8 years old. My gran was awesome, btw, always encouraging my crazy ideas.
Tonight’s dinner is a perfect example of this. I had a mad craving for stir fry and rice, but as we all know, rice is a high glycemic food – so as a rule, I try to steer clear. Also tends to be high in arsenic, btw. Yuck, right?😳 But that same grandma who allowed me to play with random ingredients; eventually leading to my love of cooking, also loved to make fluffy white rice for me with lots of butter. Which means it’s a huge comfort food for me to this day.
But when the craving for my favorite comfort food hits me, I soak a few cups of organic brown rice overnight. This helps the kernels to better release nutrients, breaks down saponins, and lessens starch and arsenic. Win-win-win.
But I take it a couple of steps further. Because I just can’t help being a little extra.🤷♀️
In the morning I rinse the rice thoroughly, then add fresh water to an inch or so above the level of the rice. To this I add a ½ tsp. or so salt and two tablespoons coconut oil. Thrive Market has a bomb butter flavored coconut oil, and I looooove me some butter so it’s my go-to. And here’s the magic of this method, and where my mad chemist/scientist starts wringing her hands in glee:
“When you cook coconut oil and rice together, the oil binds to the digestible starch in the rice – that’s the starch that converts to glucose.
Once bound with the oil, the digestible starch begins to crystallize, creating another form of starch: the resistant variety. Researchers found that cooling the rice after cooking it promoted crystallization, leading to a shocking 10 to 15-fold increase in resistant starch compared to normally prepared rice.” – Dave Asprey
Cool, right???? Less digestible starch means less glucose, fewer carbs! The first time I learned this my mind was blown. 🤯.
I boil boil my rice mixture until the water is at the level of the rice, then turn to low and cover. I learned this technique of cooking grains from a wonderful Persian family I lived with over on the east coast. I still miss Mahin’s Fessenjan…🤤 but I digress. This technique shortens the cooking time by a good ten minutes, which is awesome for those of us born without the patience gene. After I have cooked my rice, I refrigerate, then reheat as needed.
Tonight I made fried rice to enjoy with my stir-fry, but because I may or may not – okay, I did – enjoy an impromptu “cheat day” treat – part of a sugary Frappuccino my friendly neighborhood Starbucks barista gave me, free of charge. While running errands, I had stopped for my usual stevia-sweetened iced green tea. The barista had apparently made too many Frappuccino’s for the last customer, so offered the extra one to me. What’s a girl to do? I didn’t want to be rude…
It was delicious, but if I was going to come anywhere near my usual -56 or so grams of carbs per day, I needed to make dinner a little extra extra low glycemic. To do this, I added a package of Shirataki “rice” to my dish, cutting carbs to approximately 15% of a 1-cup serving -and the calories significantly, too.
For my stir fry I just wok every veggie I can find in my fridge with fresh ginger, garlic, tamari, umami paste, sesame seeds, tofu or chicken, and my favorite low glycemic sweeter, monk fruit. Oh, and a generous portion of hot chili paste. The hotter, the better!
This meal was so, so good, but better still, so good for the body. 💪🏻
What do you do when you want to keep your diet light – without sacrificing flavor? I’d love to know!
This Blessed Sacred Life 