D-Feast Friday Five: 23 July 2010

This is a special edition of Friday Five because Karen, Elizabeth, and Lorraine arranged for the DOC peeps to blog about their favorite foods and recipes.  I love when we help each other come up with blog ideas!  Especially ones that can be so helpful.  So for this Friday Five, I'm going to go through my favorite meals to have for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and 2 snacks!  Try not to drool.

1.  Breakfast--Cereal.  Doesn't matter what kind.  I love cereal!  When I was a single gal, making an elaborate dinner for one person was never fun.  So, most nights I would have cereal for dinner.  But with diabetes, my cereal choices require some thought.  First of all, the carb content needs to be conservative.  On average, most cereals are 25g carbs/serving (which is 3/4 cup), add in milk and I'm pushing 40g already.  I try to look for cereals that will keep me somewhere around 30g +/-5.  Second, the cereal has to have a significant amount of protein.  This is the hardest thing to find in a cereal, because most of the cereals in aisle #2 (aren't they all in aisle #2?!) are colorful and sugary with barely any protein.  And protein helps to keep my BG more stable, so I try to have at least 10g protein in my cereal.  Lastly, it has to taste good!  I've found some cereals that meet the carb and protein requirement, but taste like wood chips.  I can handle them for about a week before I steal a bowl of my husband's Cookie Crisps (shhh, don't tell him).  I have found one, though, that meets all this criteria:  Kashi GOLEAN Original!

 Click on picture for nutritional information. 

Even though the serving size is 1 cup, I limit it to 3/4 cup for the carb content.  I also like Kashi because their ingredients are natural (I'm pseudo-organic).  And it has a nice honey taste to it, too!  Mmmm . . . 

2.  Snack #1--Greek yogurt.  I usually have this snack after I've been at work for an hour (and after my first cup of coffee).  I first heard of diabetics eating Greek yogurt when I started twittering and wondered what all the fuss was about.  Turns out, Greek yogurt has twice the protein of regular yogurt!  I had always liked yogurt, especially as a breakfast side, but most yogurts had too much sugar that I would end up crashing before lunch.  So, I bought one Greek yogurt to try, honey and vanilla flavor.  The texture is a lot different than regular yogurt--it's thicker and gummier (sp? word?).  But I loved the taste and the reaction it had on my BGs, nice smooth line until lunch time.  But in order to get some fruit servings into my day, I like this brand.  The fruit flavors have real fruit in them, and it's all natural (yay!).  These usually have 20g carbs and 14g protein; I like when they almost match.  My favorite is strawberry:  

 3.  Lunch--This meal is tricky because I don't really have a favorite that I eat a lot.  Usually lunch is leftovers from dinner the night before or a turkey sandwich.  However, if I have the time to make it, I like to make a salad that's from the Abs Diet recipes. It is a dark, leafy green salad with almonds, sliced ham, craisins, feta cheese, 1 chopped green apple, and raspberry balsamic vinaigrette.  The almonds and sliced ham give protein while the craisins and green apple provide the carbs.  I ate this 3/5 days during the week in grad school.  I just loved the taste of it.  But I ate it so much that I got sick of it.  Now, I'll make it every once in awhile if I have time.  Lunch is usually a "whatever we have" type of meal because I'm not ravenously hungry.

4.  Snack #2--Popcorn popcorn!  Popcorn popcorn YAY!  That's what I sing on the way to the microwave.  I love popcorn.  And popcorn loves me!  The graininess (again, I'm making up words) of popcorn makes me BGs slowly digest it and keeps me stable well into the afternoon.  I could eat a full tub of popcorn everyday (and I have . . . at movies.  Trey usually says, "OK, we need 2 large popcorns.  One for everybody to share and one for Holly.  :->)  So I buy the single 100 calorie (20g carbs) pack in this delicious flavor:

Lime & Salt!  Tangy & Crunchy! =P

5.  Dinner--Say it with me, salmon caesar salad . . . salmon caesar salad.  Hard to say, a pleasure to eat.  Whenever I tell Trey we're having SCS for dinner, he looks at me with hope in his eyes and says, "Really?  Don't toy with me!"  OK, I might be overexaggerating its awesomeness, but my mouth begins watering if someone says salmon, caesar, and salad in the same sentence.  

This meal is quite involved, so let's get started, shall we?  (I feel like a should do a vlog in a cooking-show like fashion.  Where's my white coat and funny looking hat?)  We begin with roasting the salmon, which I kind of follow the directions from this dLife recipe.  It uses snapper, but I've yet to find snapper. 

First thing to do is marinate the salmon in a citrus marinade described in the recipe for about 20 minutes in the refrigerator.  Preheat the oven to 425 F.  After marinating, rub the salmon with the oil and garlic mix:

Next, place the salmon on a baking rack above a roasting pan filled with tomatoes, white wine, and water: 

Roast in the oven for one hour, flipping the fish over once: 

Finally, decorate your salad with dark, leafy greens, olives (green & black), croutons, Parmesan cheese, Caesar dressing, and of course, salmon:

My phone camera really doesn't do it justice.  It is delicious!  

There are usually no leftovers from this meal.  I don't know the exact nutrition information, but I do know that I don't bolus for this meal unless I'm high and want to take care of those croutons.  But this meal has so much protein that bolusing is unnecessary.  

Even though I only listed five things for this list, there is one more snack that I'd like to sneak in (consider this a bonus).  When I was first diagnosed, I struggled to find an ice cream that had reasonable carb and fat content because usually low carb = high fat and vice-a-versa.  I needed to find a good balance of both, then I was introduced to this ice cream (more like ice DREAM!): 

HEAVEN!

I have a feeling that today's DFeast Friday Five blog entries will make for a lot of hungry diabetics.  =P