South Beach Diet Phase One Recipes Round-Up for October 2010 (Low-Glycemic Recipes)

Kalyn's favorite Phase One Recipes for October 2010 was
Thai-Inspired Turkey Mini-Meatball Lettuce Wraps.

Today's the day we start counting down to Thanksgiving, right? Just like I've done every year since 2006, I'll be sharing South Beach Diet Friendly Thanksgiving recipes during November. But before we start that turkey-day countdown, let's see the Phase One Recipes I've posted or spotted on other blogs during October. I'm not sure if many people start a diet in November or December, but I do know people come back to the monthly Phase One Recipes Round-Ups over and over, and I love knowing they're useful. If you can't imagine doing full-out Phase One during the holidays, you can always use these recipes to do what my brother Rand and I jokingly call Phase 1.5, when we mostly eat phase one foods, with a few indulgences.

(You can use the label Low-Glycemic Recipe Round-Ups to see all the posts like this one.)

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Five Fun Things on Friday (10-29-10)

What does The Oprah Winfrey Show have to do with this enormous can of whole green chiles from my pantry? Keep reading to find out, because I promise it's one of the most fun things I've ever shared on Friday!

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Kalyn's Kitchen Picks: Mount Olive Roasted Red Peppers

I love roasted red peppers as a pantry ingredient. Of course you can roast your own red peppers, and the freshly roasted peppers are fantastic when you have the time. But when you don't have that much time, using roasted red peppers in a jar is quick and the jarred peppers are amazingly flavorful. My normal grocery store carries two brands of jarred red peppers, but these Mount Olive Roasted Red Peppers are so much cheaper than the other brand and so consistently good that I decided it's time for me to add them to my list of Kalyn's Kitchen Picks, where I rave about products that I love enough that I'd happily buy them over and over.

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Recipe for Spicy Lime Coleslaw

I think I made this Spicy Lime Coleslaw at least three times before it ever occurred to me that it might be a recipe people would like to see on the blog. It started as just a variation of Spicy Mexican Slaw with Lime and Cilantro, but I didn't have cilantro so I just left it out. The next time I made this as a quick side dish for dinner, I had a bag of shredded carrots in the fridge so I threw some of those in with the cabbage, green onions, and spicy lime dressing. I loved this combination with the carrots so much, I almost didn't miss the cilantro. And I know there are some people who (gasp) don't like cilantro, so they'd never show the slightest interest in a recipe with cilantro in the title. This spicy lime coleslaw is just for you if you're one of those cilantro-averse people, but even if you like cilantro I bet you'll love this version of the salad as well.

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Recipe for Low-Sugar and Whole Wheat Pumpkin Muffins with Pecans

This week I got an e-mail from a reader named Sommer asking if I had a South Beach Diet Friendly recipe for pumpkin bread or pumpkin muffins. I can't always take recipe requests but Sommer's timing was great, because I'd recently written about Pumpkin Recipes for Cupcakes, Cookies, Cakes, Bread, and Muffins at BlogHer.com, and I'd been thinking about making pumpkin muffins or bread ever since. The muffins I came up with were adapted from a recipe in The Splenda World of Sweetness, a cookbook my blogging friend Amy Sherman sent me years ago, and happily they were a success from the first batch, which is pretty rare for me when it comes to baking!  (Edit:  Although the muffins were delicious with Splenda, now I would probably use Stevia in the Raw Granulated Sweetener.)

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Friday Favorites: Five Favorite Bean Soups or Stews for Autumn

For this week's edition of Friday Favorites I thought it would be fun to revisit some of the favorite soups or stews I've made with dried beans, starting with this Pinto Bean and Ground Beef Stew with Cumin and Cilantro. This stew made in the pressure cooker may look like chili, but there's no chile powder in the recipe. There are instructions for making this with canned pinto beans and cooking on the stovetop too, if you're not yet converted to the joys of the pressure cooker.

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Recipe for Ginger-Cilantro Rice with Green Onion and Sesame

I love recipe suggestions from readers, even if I don't have time to try more than a small percentage of the ones people send me. A few months ago a reader who signed her e-mail "Denise in Florida" suggested I might like the recipe for Ginger-Cilantro Rice on Epicurious.com. I did like the sound of rice cooked with ginger and then tossed with a dressing of pureed ginger, cilantro, green onions, olive oil, sesame oil, and rice vinegar. Denise advised me to reduce the amount of oil, and I read the comments on Epicurious and tried a few different versions until I came up with the one that seemed right to me. My version has (gasp!) less cilantro and more green onion, and I changed the proportions of the other seasonings as well, but the the recipe I ended up with is something that's going to be a regular side dish around here. Thanks Denise for the suggestion to give this a try!

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Recipe for Low-Sugar (or sugar-free) Teriyaki Chicken

(Updated and added to Recipe Favorites October 2010.) When my friend Bonnie told me she made the Teriyaki Chicken from the blog for her family and they loved it I first thought "I'm glad they liked it," followed by "That recipe really needs new photos!" So over the weekend I made Teriyaki Chicken and took a trip down memory lane, remembering a friend who moved to Hawaii and introduced me to some interesting foods when she came back to Utah. This simple way of making Teriyaki Chicken was her recipe, and it's been so good that I've never imagined any other way of making this dish.

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Recipe for Brown Rice and Green Garbanzo Salad with Carrots, Parsley, and Pine Nuts

Earlier this morning it didn't seem like the universe wanted me to share this recipe for Brown Rice and Green Garbanzo Salad with Carrots, Parsley, and Pine Nuts. I got up early and turned on the computer like I do most days, and I'd just started checking e-mail when my power went off. It didn't seem windy so I wondered what was up, but within about 5 minutes the power came back on. This time I'd made it through about 10 e-mails when the power went off again. It stayed off long enough for me to read the newspaper, eat an apple, make the bed, and get dressed, so I decided to make an early morning Costco run, and happily the power was back when I got back home. I saw power trucks and workers all along the street between my house and Costco, and had to restrain myself from getting out of the car, rushing over to the workers, and saying "Thank you for fixing it!"

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Friday Night Photos: Fall Colors in the Garden and Still a Few Veggies (2010 Garden Update #16 )

It's looking like fall, and the garden is winding down at my house. The weather in Utah has been glorious so far this fall, and the last few days I've been outside trimming the perennials, pulling a few weeds, and making an attempt to clean up the garden beds. I'm enjoying the fall garden colors, and although during the summer I don't love these vines that creep over into my garden from the neighbors yard, they're beautiful right now.

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Kalyn's Kitchen Picks: Jimmy Dean Low-Fat and Pre-Cooked Turkey Link Sausage

I've tried a few different brands of turkey breakfast sausage, but never found one that really wowed me until I tried this Jimmy Dean Low-Fat and Pre-Cooked Turkey Link Sausage that I found at Costco. Actually I spotted this a few months ago, but it came in a package with 48 links of sausage, and I wasn't sure I'd like it enough to buy that much. Then one day I was at Costco when they were giving samples of the sausage. I took one bite and a box of sausage flew into my cart.

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Recipe for Crockpot Pumpkin Chili with Ground Beef, Black Beans, and Kidney Beans

If anyone looks at this recipe for Crockpot Pumpkin Chili with Ground Beef, Black Beans, and Kidney Beans and thinks "Hmm, that photo looks familiar," it's probably because last night I edited these photos, loaded them into a post, and then accidentally hit publish instead of save. That means if you happened to click on the blog in the couple of minutes before I discovered my mistake, you saw these pictures with no words. One sweet reader even left a very tactful comment saying "I don't see where the ingredients are listed." My apologies for the confusion, and for making you wait another day for this delicious recipe.

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Recipe for Low Sugar and Whole Wheat Peach Pecan Muffins

When I posted the recipe for Low Sugar and Whole Wheat Mango Walnut Muffins and mentioned that I thought you could use that same recipe to make peach muffins, I wasn't really planning to post the recipe and photos of the peach muffins. But then I mentioned on Facebook and Twitter that I'd made peach muffins people started asking when I'd post the recipe, and I realized that if you saw Mango Muffins in my recipe index you wouldn't know that they could also be peach muffins. After I thought about that I decided I'd better hurry and post the peach muffins in case anyone still has peaches. So by request, here's the recipe for peach muffins which turned out to be so delicious I had to quickly freeze about half the batch because I couldn't stop eating them!

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Friday Favorites: Thanksgiving Recipe Favorites in time for Canadian Thanksgiving

Every year in November there's a lot of hoopla on this blog about Low-Glycemic Thanksgiving Recipes, and for the past four years I've had fun testing new dishes that might be South Beach Diet friendly options for Thanksgiving. I'll be doing that again this year in November, but it occurred to me that my suggestions are always too late for my friends in Canada, since Canadian Thanksgiving is celebrated on the second Monday in October. That means my Canadian readers will be celebrating (and having a day off from work) this coming Monday, so I thought I'd wish them "Happy Thanksgiving" by spotlighting a few Thanksgiving recipe suggestions that were my favorites last year.

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Recipe for Horseradish Meatloaf with Caramelized Onions and Sour Cream-Horseradish Sauce

This Horseradish Meatloaf is really something special in the meatloaf world, with added flavor from caramelized onions, garlic, horseradish, Worcestershire sauce, and a touch of sour cream mixed into the meat before it's cooked, and a tasty sauce of sour cream, mayo, and horseradish. But this is not quick and easy meatloaf. This is meatloaf to make on Sunday afternoon when you have time to gently caramelize the onions, mix the ingredients together, mix the sauce, and then enjoy leftover meatloaf for lunch all week.

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Recipe for Low-Sugar and Whole Wheat Mango Walnut Muffins (or bread)

After a few years of experimenting with low-sugar and whole wheat baking, I feel like I'm getting the hang of adapting recipes for baked goods into something that fits my low-glycemic way of eating. I especially like baking recipes where fruit provides some or all of the sweetness, so I was intrigued by this recipe from The National Mango Board that uses mango pulp, diced mango, and lime juice in a mango bread or muffin that's just slightly sweet. I replaced the butter with grapeseed oil, used Splenda instead of sugar (or you could use Stevia In the Raw Granulated Sweetener), and switched the white flour for white whole wheat, and the resulting muffins were delicious.

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Friday Night Photos: Vinto Restaurant in Salt Lake City

This week I got an e-mail informing me that Vinto was celebrating the end of summer with a special Basil Gelato and Tomato Sorbetto with Sea Salt and Extra-Virgin Olive Oil. If you love fresh tomatoes and basil like I do, you can imagine how that description made my tastebuds wake up! The special ended on Thursday, but luckily I was having lunch with my brother Rand and friend Bonnie that day, and we loved Vinto's special end-of-summer dessert creation. All three of us are normally not dessert eaters, so we just got one to share, but we certainly savored every bite.

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South Beach Diet Phase One Recipes Round-Up for September 2010 (Low-Glycemic Recipes)

Kalyn's favorite Phase One Recipe for September 2010 was
Black Bean Salad with Jicama, Tomatoes, Cilantro, and Lime

Whew, another month has gone screaming by and it's time to add another post to my South Beach Diet Phase One Monthly Recipe Round-Ups where I spotlight Phase One recipes I posted that month or spotted on other blogs around the web. My goal with this is not to find *every* recipe that a blogger posted that would be Phase One; no one could possible keep up with that! Instead I'm searching all month for the most interesting recipes I spot that are suitable for phase one. Of course, every month I find good recipes that only need minor changes to make them South Beach Diet friendly, so it's noted after the recipe link if the recipe needs any changes to make it Phase One. And there are always good Phase One recipes that I don't even see, so if you're a food blogger who's posted something you think is interesting which would be good for Phase One, see after the recipe links for how to submit it.

(You can use the label Low-Glycemic Recipe Round-Ups to see all the posts like this one.)

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