Low Carb Vegan

Tempeh, or Tempe as it’s sometimes spelled, is a fermented soybean product formed into cakes. It comes to us from Indonesia where it’s most popular on the island of Java. It’s normally produced via fermentation with Rhizopus spores.

Tempeh, unlike tofu which is not fermented, has a nutty taste and texture all its own. And as a fermented product, it does not contain the phytoestrogens which have been tentatively linked to hormone problems. The fermentation process also produces a higher level of protein, fiber and possibly even vitamins than unfermented soy products.

While you can eat raw tempeh safely, I wouldn’t recommend it. It has an unpleasant bitter taste. To get rid of that taste, the tempeh needs to be cooked. Simmering it in a water and soy sauce (or Braggs) mixture for a few minutes is a good way to do that, or the tempeh can simply be fried. Be warned that uncooked tempeh can be a bit of an oil hog, you might want to simmer it first. Simply deep frying it and then soaking it in a Buffalo Wings sauce is one of my favorite guilty pleasures.

Soaking the tempeh in a marinade also works well. Salty flavors are particularly good. Tempeh doesn’t soak up a lot quickly so I would recommend at least a four or five hour marinade time but overnight works quite well if you have the time.

And last but certainly not least, soy is a complete protein so when the omnis ask, “Where do you get your protein?” You’ll have an answer.

When I’m in our local Bed, Bath and Beyond, I like to eavesdrop on the young couples picking out kitchen equipment for their wedding registry. “Oh, we really need this set of cookware” Or knives. Or something else. I don’t say anything in the store but I’m going to here. Specifically about knives. No, you don’t need the whole set of knives. In fact I’ll say you need two knives for your kitchen with one more being nice to have.

The first being a 8 inch (or longer) chefs knife. If you really like the santoku knives, you could use one but I find their blades too short. The longest ones I’ve seen are seven inches. In the picture above, the chefs knife with the black handle has an eight inch blade and the larger one with the white handle is twelve inches. I think a longer blade allows you a bit more efficiency when chopping.

A chefs knife is the most used knife in the kitchen. Chopping, slicing, dicing are all in the realm of this blade. It’s designed to do a number of tasks rather than be specialized in one.

The second must have piece of cutlery is a paring knife. There are times when the large blade of the chefs knife just gets in the way of a job. Things like separating cauliflower florets, stemming tomatoes and trimming a piece of fruit. Generally blade length is around three and a half inches and I prefer an edge with a pretty straight profile.

The knife that’s nice to have would be a serrated blade knife, sometimes called a bread knife. The edge on these knives are kind of notched, like a little saw. These are normally about eight to ten inches in length and don’t come to a sharp point. If you’ve ever tried to cut through a soft roll with a regular bladed knife, you’ll be able to appreciate what this knife can do. It also works really well for cutting tomatoes, which also tend to squish instead of cutting cleanly.

So there you have it, the two you really need and one that’s awfully nice to have. And I’m sure some of my sharper-eyed readers will have noticed I say you only need three knives but my knife bar, shown above, has five. Am I lying? No, not really. The large chefs knife I picked up at a local restaurant supply place as an experiment. First, to find out if I really prefer a longer bladed knife without having to spend a bunch of money. Secondly, just to see how nice the restaurant supply company’s knives are. I haven’t reached a firm conclusion yet but I’m certainly not going to hide my Shun knife away. So that’s why I have two chef’s knives. And the two paring knives? Well, I have a bad habit of using paring knives for things they aren’t really intended for. So the second paring knife is the one I reach for when I’m going to do something stupid. Kind of a sacrificial blade.

This post is here more as a place holder for me than anything else. During the summer it’s just too hot to fire the oven up so I try not to unless I don’t have a choice. One of the things that means is that I miss out on roasted garlic.

This weekend the weather has been nicely cool and the local big box store is running a sale on garlic bulbs. Of course I had to grab a handful. And, not having roasted any for several months, I couldn’t remember the details. Turning to my trusty Joy of Cooking, they turn out to be a 325 degree oven and an hour roasting time. That’s a little bit lower and slower than a lot of other places recommend but I think it turns out really well.

So pulling everything together, here’s how I make roasted garlic. Preheat the oven to 325 degrees. Take some garlic bulbs, you might as well make a bunch, and cut about the top third or so off. You just want to expose the individual cloves. Place the bulb on a square of aluminum foil and drizzle olive oil over it. Use about a teaspoon or two but don’t worry about measuring it. Tightly wrap the foil around the bulb and place it in a baking dish. Put the dish in the oven and roast for about an hour. Remove, cool a little and enjoy!

So for this new recipe I’m working on I need some garlic sauce to put over the finished dish. As much as I like garlic, I don’t really have a favorite sauce recipe. Yeah, there’s always saute garlic in olive oil and pour it over pasta but that wasn’t going to work here. I needed something a bit thicker.

Well, the original would have probably had Toum on it. For those of you not familar with Toum, it’s a garlic sauce normally prepared in Lebanon. It’s very much an add things in until it looks right kind of deal but a general recipe would be something like this:

Take four peeled cloves of garlic and a good sized pinch of salt. Crush them in a mortar and pestle. Drizzle in about a quarter cup of extra virgin olive oil (not EVOO!) while mixing. Stop when the mixture won’t absorb anymore. Finally stir in the juice of a lemon.

Now that’s good stuff but it’s quite strong and more than a bit on the time consuming side. I really needed something I could take to work without violating the Clean Air Standards and I was feeling a bit lazy. So on with the quest.

I thought about it and came up with something a little more promising. And I got to play with the blender!

Garlic Sauce

3/4 cup garlic, peeled and roughly chopped
2 tablespoons Vegan Mayonnaise
1/2 cup extra virgin olive oil
1 tablespoon lemon juice
salt, to taste

Take the garlic and mayo (I like Veganase made from grapeseed) and combine them in the blender. Slowly add in the oil until you get the consistency you want. I was going for something like mayonnaise. Add the oil in with the blender running if you can. Add the lemon juice, you might want a little less to start with, and the salt. Let the blender run on high for a couple of minutes to get everything nice and emulsified.

And that’s it. No picture because it pretty much looks like any other white sauce. It’s still pretty strong but not as much as the Toum. If you’re not a big garlic fan maybe you could try a garlic mustard sauce? Hmm, that actually doesn’t sound bad …

It strikes me that I’m asking a bunch of folks to give up a little bit of their time to read my writing and right now, it’s not all that clear what’s going to be going on around here. So I thought I’d put together a little bit of a ‘mission statement’ if you will. Hopefully this one will actually make some sense and contain actual practical information.

What LCV is

I’m a vegan, that’s a very important part of who I am and I don’t see it changing. My diet changes around a little as I try new things and learn new information but vegan is a constant. And I define vegan pretty strictly. I don’t worry too much about what anyone else considers vegan but for me, no animal products means none. So I’m not going to slip in my grandmother’s Chicken Soup recipe. If you want to sweeten something with honey, go ahead but I won’t. It’s not low carb anyway.

I’m going to put up information about cooking techniques. I’m occasionally surprised by the number of people who have just never been exposed to cooking. Or have a very limited view of what cooking is. Putting the frozen package in the microwave is not cooking folks! Now I don’t claim to be a great chief or Cordon Bleu trained. I’m just a guy who spends a little too much time in the kitchen and has to eat his mistakes.

As we look at how to cook, what to use will come up as well. I’m a pretty much a traditionalist here. I’m not a fan of having to have every last gadget known to man. Simpler is better. I’m reminded of visiting Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s home, when I was a kid. They took us out to the kitchens which consisted in large part of basically big fireplaces with grates and hooks to put the pots and pans on. No setting the knob to low/medium there! And the guide pointed out that state diners were prepared there, with all the different kinds of food that implies. And if those people could make great food in those circumstances, we surely don’t need all of the stuff in Bed, Bath and Beyond.

And we certainly can’t forget the food we’re actually cooking! There are a lot of ingredients out there and not every one is an expert in where they come from, what to do with them, what’s in them and what not to do with them. I know I feel like I’m giving the cashier a pop produce quiz when I go to checkout. There’s spices and special vegan ingredients as well. We’ve all seen and probably eaten tofu but how many folks know how it’s made? A friend of mine says her store in Japan carries something like forty different kinds of tofu. We don’t have that many kinds out here but there are still several.

And certainly not to be ignored; food, health and nutrition are in a constant state of flux. I’m not a medical professional in any sense but I try to stay somewhat up to date. Navigating the minefields of studies proving this or that which will change next week is a struggle. Hopefully we can discern some general principles to guide us through the morass.

What LCV isn’t

I assume that my readership is at least interested in a vegan lifestyle. I’m not going to be posting graphic slaughterhouse images or railing against the evils of animal agriculture. There are plenty of places where you can find that if you want, it won’t be here.

As I mentioned above, I’m not a medical professional. So there isn’t going to be any medical advice. I’m not qualified to give it and hopefully you’all are smarter than to take it from me. I’m also not going to give any specific nutritional advice. That area is constantly changing and there are trade offs to be made that only you can make.

In that regard as well, I’m not going to do diet planning. No sample menu, specific nutrient targets or anything like that. We all have different bodies, different problems we’re working on and different life styles.

And in that theme, I don’t specifically do extreme low carb. I know some diets recommend total daily intakes of 20 or 30 grams of carbs. If that works for you, wonderful, I know it works for a lot of folks. It didn’t work for me. I’m purposefully not specifying what I consider low carb. I plan to present a number of dishes all along the spectrum and you will be able to decide what works for you.

So I’ve rambled on for quite a while here but hopefully I’ve given you a better idea of where I plan to take things. As always, comments, questions and concerns are welcome.

And why should you care? I mean, this blog is about low carb vegan food, right?

Well, yes it is and it all does relate. You’ll just have to be a bit patient and all will be revealed, grasshopper. But first, what do we mean by inflammation? You’re familiar with it on your skin, you get a splinter or a cut and then that gets kind of reddish, maybe a little swelled and warm to the touch. That’s inflammation. Not to be confused with infection which is a separate thing. Infection is caused by an external pathogen while inflammation is the result of the body reacting to something irritating the cells.

And it’s not just your skin that can be inflamed. That’s certainly the easiest to see but there are others. Hay fever is a kind of inflammation. As is rheumatoid arthritis, asthma or IBD.

Your heart can be affected as well. Inflammation of the coronary arteries can elevate your risk of heart attack. Dr. Eric Topol, Department Chairman, Cleveland Clinic Heart Center states the new information about inflammation will, “change everything we do in heart disease.”

The risk of stroke is effected as well. Increased inflammation is associated with strokes.

And last but certainly not least, a subject near and dear to me, Type 2 diabetes. Studies have proven that obesity without inflammation does not result in insulin resistance. Now not all Type 2 diabetes are fat, I’m not for instance, but there are a significant number who are, most likely including my father. It stands to reason that their insulin resistance would be improved if their overall level of inflammation could be reduced.

And that brings us full circle. What can we do to reduce the inflammation present in our bodies? It turns out a lot of the low carb, vegan foods we like to eat actually can reduce the levels of inflammation we have. Things like vegetables, healthy fats and whole soy products are beneficial in this area as well as others. Avoiding things like sugars, high GI fruits and processed foods also fit well into a low carb, vegan diet.

And just what might be VeganMoFo? Well, past what you’re thinking, it’s Vegan Month of Food. That pretty much means every weekday during the month of October, I’ll be posting something relating to vegan food. Some of them may be very vaguely related to vegan food but I figure this is a good way to launch LowCarbVegan.com and hold my feet to the fire to get some good content up here.

I’ll look forward to hearing what you, the readers, think and hopefully we can have some fun. Food, cooking and nutrition can be so bleak and depressing; I’d like to think that we can bring some fun to the topic. Hey, gin is vegan and low carb! This has got to be fun, right?

I didn’t really feel much like cooking tonight so I made something simple for lunch tomorrow. This is definitely one of those throw stuff in the pot until you’re happy kind of things. So, no formal recipe. I’m sure when my Indian friends see this they’ll tell me it’s nothing like real korma, but, hey, it tastes good.

I heated some olive oil in a stock pot and then tossed in some chopped tomatoes, onion, green pepper, tempeh and mushrooms. Let that saute for a little bit, about five minutes or until the mushrooms release some of their liquid. Then I added some broccoli I had around along with a can of coconut milk, some water and a tablespoon or so of curry powder. I probably was a bit quick to add the water so it wasn’t as thick as I would have liked. Next time I’ll just add the coconut milk and see if it needs thinning.

I was a little surprised to see that lite coconut milk is actually pretty low in carbs. I always thought it was rather sweet but the can I found only had 2 grams of carbs in the (14 oz) can.