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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