by Donna Reish
Picture this scenario. You’re a life-long dieter. You have done it all throughout your twenty to forty years of adulthood. Depending on when you began your life-long journey, you have done low fat (and almost fat free) with chicken breast, cottage cheese, egg whites, dry toast, saltines, pineapple, and frozen yogurt (while exercising with Jane Fonda or Richard Simmons—I’m really dating myself here!). You’ve done the calorie counting and/or points. As a matter of fact, you’ve done so many versions of the points that you can tell which things were free and which things *really* cost you in each point system. (Great point counter, you are!) You have gone low carb—and possibly even braved the Keto waters, in which you only ate five foods (green veggies, fat (including full fat dairy), meats, nuts, and eggs). You learned to cook and bake (maybe using this blog—thanks!) and then quickly settled in to a low carb lifestyle when you decided Keto was just plain boring! (Sorry Keto fans…a lot of us think that! ? We can still be friends, can’t we?)
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by Donna Reish
In my more “family style” cooking days, I had a LARGE repertoire of recipes. Now that I look back, I realize it was too large for our size of family (nine total) and for my time constraints (managing and homeschooling a large family didn’t leave a lot of time for the level of kitchen experimentation I did—and this often left me frustrated). Fast forward to my tweaking of recipes to make them more healthful, and I have some of the same problems—too much experimenting, too many recipes, and on and on! (Doesn’t look like I have learned much over the years!)
When I revisited this recipe to make it healthier, I thought of all of those things…then dug right in to it to tweak it! ? This is one of my freezer entrees. This means that you get the original recipe to feed six….then the doubled version and quadrupled version for your freezer.
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by Donna Reish
It’s apple season in Indiana. Some apples need nothing. No caramel. No peanut butter. No chocolate. No apple dip (made out of my Cream Cheese Dessert Base). No popcorn and cheese. Those apples stand alone, and when you find your faves, you can’t imagine not having access to them. This happened to us last fall when we discovered Sweet Tango apples. You might remember that my husband and I are ballroom dancers. We have danced sixteen dances together for twelve years now. But our love for all things ballroom (including the Latin dance called Tango) has nothing to do with our love for these apples. They just happen to share the same name! ?
But some apples are better suited to some gooey, nutty, creamy, or crispy combination. When a person goes sugar-free, apple treats are often forgotten. Apple pie, apple dumplings, apple crisp—and especially caramel apples. Those dishes are extremely sugar-laden and can be hard to duplicate. However, caramel-chocolate apples CAN be made sugar free! Especially if you make my Caramel-Chocolate Apple Nachos!
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by Donna Reish
Do you remember when you opened your first cookbook or recipe box as a child? Remember how confusing it was to try to determine the difference between t for teaspoon and T for tablespoon? Do you remember asking your mom or grandma over and over again ….which sugar is confectionary and which is granulated? How about all purpose vs self-rising flour? Entering the low carb cooking and baking arena can be just like starting completely over again as a young chef! Everything seems foreign. Everything is new. Everything is confusing. So where does a “young-at-heart” chef start?
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by Donna Reish
I recently re-created a recipe that I used to make many years ago when my olders were little, and we really liked it as it has shredded roast beef in it and isn’t tomato-based. It feels like many of my winter soups are more tomato-y. I forgot how easy it was—and how yummy it was.
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by Donna Reish
After ten months of testing, re-testing, and tweaking, I have my second recipe book finished! I have written over a hundred curriculum books, so you would think this book writing thing would be simple….agghhh….but recipe books are anything but simple! So much testing time and tweaking and trying again. But it’s done—and just in time for Christmas baking and goodies.
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