Low Sugar Low Carb Diabetic Lemon Cheesecake

My sister, her partner and their one-year-old came to stay for new year which was lovely (especially fun introducing my niece and my cat to each other – I think it went fairly well!). I wanted to make a nice dessert for new year’s eve but of course am a bit limited now I have gestational diabetes (sorry to keep harping on about that – but it’s relevant to this recipe!).

 

Sweetener is a god-send when you can’t eat sugar – though I know there are people who avoid artificial sweeteners and have health concerns, so it’s not something I use often but as I did want to make an actual dessert that others would enjoy as well, it came in very handy.

 

I can also eat dairy products like cream, soft cheese, yogurt etc, so quickly decided on making a cheesecake. I prefer no-bake cheesecakes for the taste and texture, but a lot of them involve using condensed milk (I don’t know if you can get an unsweetened one but I figured it probably wasn’t possible to get sugar-free) and some cheesecakes involve raw egg. I made mine very simply, using a tub of Quark (curd cheese that is a bit like cream cheese only thicker, and doesn’t really have much of a flavour) mixed with soft cheese, lemon juice and sweetener – it tasted really good.

 

 

I’d read on a gestational diabetes diet sheet that I could have a couple of light digestive biscuits or rich tea biscuits (which struck me as odd as they do contain carbs and sugar) but I wasn’t going to look a gift horse in the mouth. I crushed up some digestives with a rolling pin in a plastic bag (the biscuits were in a plastic freezer bag, that is – not the rolling pin) and mixed with some melted butter and pressed into the base of a loose-bottomed cake tin. I then spooned the cheese topping on top and decided not to decorate it as most of the things I could think of involved sugar!

I left the cheesecake in the fridge for a day until we wanted to eat it – it really was the easiest thing to make and tasted really good. My sister was surprised that I could have it, even after I told her what was in it, but I had a reasonably-sized portion after a dinner of chicken and vegetables, and got a blood sugar reading that was perfectly within range. So this is a dessert I can recommend!

 

Slimming World Linguine with Crab and Chilli

This dish reminds me of something I would order in an Italian restaurant or better still, eat while on holiday somewhere sunny, ideally with a view of the ocean. It's actually based on a Slimming World recipe for the rather more prosaically named 'crab noodles' and is really quick to throw together.

Cook some linguine or spaghetti according to pack instructions; when is cooked, drain, and add some tinned crab (a small tin will do 1-2 people depending on how generous you want to be with the crab), a few dried red chilli flakes or a pinch of fresh chopped red chilli, some finely chopped red onion, a squeeze of lime juice, and the grated zest of the lime, and some fresh parsley on top. Serve with broccoli or a salad on the side. Delicious!

Slimming World Coronation Chicken Jacket Potato

One of my favourite lunches for when I am at home is a jacket potato. I hardly ever do them at weekends, because I just don't get out of bed organised in time, plus my husband isn't that keen on them, but often do one if I have a day off or am working from home. They are ideal for "wfh" lunches as you can put the potato in the oven, come back to it an hour later and just slater some butter onto it, grate over some cheese and you're done.

Of course, there are loads of more interesting jacket potato fillings than cheese (though if you haven't tried grated cheese and chopped tinned hotdogs, put that on your meal plan now!). I recently made coronation chicken as a filler, from the Slimming World 100 Extra Easy Days book. It's a good way to use up leftover cooked chicken as well, if you have some left over from a roast or another meal.

You could also use Quorn chicken-style pieces or a similar meat-free alternative to make this a vegetarian recipe.

Adjust the quantities you need to taste - the chicken depending on how many people this is for, the red pepper and spring onion to personal taste (I don't like red pepper that much) and the same with the fromage frais and mayo - some people like their baked potato fillings quite 'wet' for want of a better word than others.

Simply mix together some cooked chicken pieces, some diced red pepper, diced mango, lime juice and zest, chopped spring onion and chopped fresh coriander. Season and mix in mango chutney, a little bit of curry powder, some fat free natural fromage frais and some extra light mayonnaise. Stir everything together and spoon into your jacket potato.

I'm sharing this with a new blog challenge, Desert Island Dish. Jacket potatoes would be one of my desert island desires but the theme for this challenge this month is actually fruit - there could well be mango growing on my desert island anyway but if not I'd like to have some! The challenge is hosted by the Good Egg Foodie.

 

I'm also sending this to One Potato, Two Potato - a new link-up for potato recipes, hosted by Family Friends Food.

 

WeightWatchers Curried Fish Pie

Fish pie is a comforting family staple and is usually topped with mashed potato or puff pastry. The former is carb-heavy and the latter high in fat, so using filo pastry is a much lighter option.

I adapted a recipe in an old WeightWatchers magazine to make this, which tasted really good and made a nice change from the usual kind of fish pie. The WeightWatchers recipe had 6.5 syns per serving and I don't think my changes will have affected that.

To serve 2 you need:

175g white fish like cod or haddock, cut into cubes
1/2 tsp ground turmeric
75ml double cream (the WeightWatchers recipe calls for less than 55% fat double cream)
100g cooked and peeled prawns
1/2 tbsp. mild curry powder
zest of 1/2 a lime
4 x 15g sheets filo pastry
low fat cooking spray (I use Fry Light)

Preheat oven to 180C. Place the cubed fish and prawns in the bottom of an ovenproof dish and mix with the cream, curry powder and lime zest.

Cut each sheet of filo pastry in half to make 8 squares. Spray one side of the pastry with cooking spray and crumble up each piece of pastry and sit it on top of the pie dish until it is covered. Once you have used all the pastry, spray over them all with cooking spray.

Bake in the oven for 25 minutes until golden brown.

 

Slimming World adapted Cheesy Broccoli and Cauliflower Bake

This broccoli and cauliflower bake can either be served as a side dish or as a main meal; it's a low-fat Slimming World recipe that is pretty filling and can be made in a large casserole dish to feed the whole family.

The recipe uses broccoli but I decided to make this with both broccoli and cauliflower and it worked really well - if you were having this as the main part of your meal, I think just having broccoli on its own would be a bit boring. I don't like cherry tomatoes so instead used tinned tomatoes.

 To serve 4, you need:
250g cauliflower florets
250g broccoli florets
200g cherry tomatoes, halved and quartered, or 200g tin chopped tomatoes
2 eggs, beaten
200g fat-free cottage cheese with onion and chives
3 garlic cloves, peeled and crushed
salt, pepper
4 tbsp. finely chopped parsley
110g reduced fat Cheddar, grated

This recipe has 4 syns per serving if you are following Slimming World's plan.

Preheat oven to 220C. Cook the cauliflower and broccoli in a pan of lightly salted water and drain.

Mix the broccoli, cauliflower, spring onions and tomato in a large ovenproof dish. In a separate bowl, whisk the eggs with the cottage cheese and garlic. Season and add the parsley.

Pour over the vegetables and fold together. Sprinkle the cheese on top and bake in the oven for 15-20 minutes.

Spiralized Courgette and Carrot with Tuna and Lemon

This is a simple dinner I threw together after work one evening. Using a spiralizer really transforms vegetables - I don't even like courgette normally and certainly wouldn't eat a plateful of it but this meal tasted delicious and was really healthy.

I began by spiralizing a courgette and a carrot, and frying them in a pan with a little water until the vegetables had softened. I opened a tin of tuna - which I ended up sharing with the cat - and stirred it in along with some lemon juice, oil and dill. Toss the whole thing together in the pan to warm through and serve.

Slimming World Creamy Coriander and Minted Chicken

This recipe comes from the Slimming World All In One cookbook. To me it tasted a lot like a curry, but perhaps a little bit different; I really liked the addition of fresh mint but my fiancé said afterwards it was nice but would have been better without the mint!

The recipe is Free on Extra Easy or Original and 9.5 syns on Green.

It does look like you need a lot of ingredients but a lot of them are store cupboard staples - if you like to cook from scratch you probably already have, or will easily use up, things like coriander, cumin, turmeric and chilli powder.

To serve 4, you need:
low calorie cooking spray, eg Fry Light
2 onions, peeled, halved and thinly sliced
2 cloves (I left these out)
2 garlic cloves, peeled and crushed (I used garlic puree)
2 cardamom pods
2cm piece root ginger, peeled and grated (I used ground ginger for convenience)
1 cinnamon stick (I snapped mine into two pieces)
1 bay leaf
1 tsp ground coriander
1 tsp cumin
1 tsp turmeric
1 tsp chilli powder
700g skinless and boneless chicken breasts, cut into 2cm pieces
salt, pepper
4 ripe tomatoes, roughly chopped (neither of us eats whole tomatoes and I didn't think it was worth opening a tin of tomatoes so I left this out, which I'm sure did change the flavour of the finished dish but I preferred it this way)
200ml chicken stock
large handful of fresh coriander, chopped
small handful of fresh mint, chopped
100g fat free natural fromage frais

Spray a wok or large frying pan with the oil and add the onion, cloves, garlic and cardamom to the pan, stir-frying for a few minutes. Then add the other spices including the cinnamon stick and bay leaf and cook for a few minutes.

Add the chicken and cook for about 10 minutes. Stir in the tomatoes stock and simmer for 5-7 mins until the chicken is cooked through.

To serve, stir in the fromage frais, fresh coriander and mint.

Spiralized Salmon and Broccoli Balls with Carrot Pineapple Rice

This recipe comes from Ali Maffucci's book Inspiralized, and takes a bit of preparation but the cooking time itself is minimal - and more importantly, it tastes amazing. If you've only spiralized courgette or butternut squash and used it instead of pasta so far, you are really missing out - there are so many ways you can use your spiralizer, but you could also make this recipe even if you don't have one.

I don't want to repeat the entire recipe as I'm sure Ali would appreciate it if you bought the book but I'm going to describe what I did. The recipe consist of three elements - salmon and broccoli balls, which I thought would be like fishcakes minus the potato but actually were quite different; homemade teriyaki sauce; and carrot 'rice' cooked with spring onion and pineapple.

I started by making the salmon balls. Preheat the oven, and pulse some broccoli in a food processor. Add a piece of salmon, some garlic and ginger and onion or shallot and pulse again. Turn the food processor off, and scoop the mixture into balls. Place on a foil-lined baking sheet and bake in the oven for 15 minutes.

Meanwhile make the teriyaki sauce by mixing soy sauce, mirin, honey, garlic and ginger.

After the salmon balls have baked for 15 minutes, drizzle over a couple of spoonfuls of the teriyaki sauce and bake for another 10 minutes.

Meanwhile spiralize some carrots -you need to choose quite thick ones otherwise it's tricky. I used three carrots; once they are spiralized, wash out the bowl of the food processor and pulse the carrots until you have a rice-like consistency.

In a small pan, heat a little coconut oil and fry some chopped spring onion, garlic and ginger. Add the carrot rice, some chopped pineapple and a little teriyaki sauce and stir fry for a few minutes. Serve the salmon and broccoli balls on top of the carrot. This was a delicious meal and I felt very healthy!

I'm entering this in Spiralizer Saturday, the blog challenge I run for all things spiralized. If you have any good recipes, link them up here!

I'm also sending this to Extra Veg, hosted by Helen at Fuss Free Flavours.

Spiralizer Saturday: Prawn Mooli Stir-Fry

This week my spiralized meal was based on a recipe from the Inspiralized cookery book by Ali Maffucci, which is a brilliant book (and website) if you are just getting started with a spiralizer. It was called Prawn Daikon Pho, a daikon being a type of radish, sometimes known as a winter radish or an Oriental radish. I'd never heard of it, let alone seen one in the supermarket, but I did remember seeing something called a mooli that was also from the radish family. From internet research I've decided that daikon and mooli are either the same thing or at least closely related!

If you have any spiralizer recipes you want to share, please add them to the linky at the bottom of this post!

I don't really like radishes as I find them too peppery so was a bit dubious about whether I would like mooli (and let's just say I'm not exactly known for liking new vegetables) - but I loved it! That may have had something to do with the sauce in this stir-fry but I am keen to try the mooli again (I used half of it in this recipe) in something else.

The Inspiralized recipe also includes jalapeno peppers but I don't like spicy food; I also left out the spring onions, onion, and whole coriander leaves - and instead added fresh dill which I had from another recipe. Ali's recipe is also a Pho which is more of a soup - I find eating those very messy so made it a much drier stir-fry. It tasted really good and was very healthy - I was having a bad day thinking about how much weight I need to lose so this made me feel a bit better!

 

Serves 2
300ml vegetable stock
2 tsp Thai fish sauce
3 tbsp. lime juice
1 tsp ground coriander
1 tsp chopped fresh ginger, or 1/2 tsp ginger puree from a tube
approx. 160g cooked and peeled large prawns
half a mooli or daikon radish, peeled and spiralized
1 large carrot, peeled and spiralized
handful of small broccoli florets
1 tbsp. chopped fresh dill

Heat the stock, fish sauce, lime juice, coriander and ginger in a large wok and add the spiralized mool, carrot and the broccoli. Cook, stirring occasionally, until the vegetables have softened, then add the prawns and heat through. To serve, sprinkle with the chopped dill and a dash of lime juice if desired.

Slimming World Kiwi and Lime Sorbet

 

 

Now that summer and barbecue season is upon us, it's nice to have some summery desserts. I found this recipe in an old Slimming World magazine; it's really easy to make and you don't need an ice cream maker or anything like that - just a blender. It's also much lower calorie than most ice creams and sorbets!

 

To serve 4-6 depending on portion size (you could serve this as a small palette cleanser at the end of a meal) you need:

 

6 kiwis, peeled and chopped

zest and juice of 1 lime

2 tbsp. sweetener eg Splenda

1 tsp ground ginger

The recipe also says to use a piece of stem ginger in syrup, drained and chopped; I didn't have any so left it out. The flavour was still fine and it makes it even lower in calories and syns - the recipe says 3 syns per portion but without the stem ginger I'm not sure it actually has any.

 

 

 

Put all the ingredients into a blender, add 300ml water and blend until smooth.

 

Pour into a shallow container with a lid that can go in the freezer, put the lid on and freeze for about 5 hours or until set.

 

Either return the sorbet to the blender and whiz until smooth, or use a fork to mix around and break up the ice crystals. Then it is ready to serve.

 

 

 I am sharing this with Bloggers Scream for Ice Cream, hosted by Kavey Eats, as the theme this month is sorbets and granitas.

 

 

 

Food Doctor Oriental Chicken

This weekend's Formula 1 Grand Prix takes place in China so in honour of the event - and for my challenge Formula 1 Foods - I wanted to cook something Chinese. I hadn't used my Food Doctor cookery book in a while so took it from the shelf and found a recipe for Oriental Chicken that looked really healthy and quick enough to make for a weeknight dinner. The recipe does suggest you marinade the chicken for half an hour but I didn't due to lack of time, and it tasted fine. I did have a confession to make though, I only realised at the last minute that I didn't have any lime, so I had to use lemon instead!

To serve 2, you need:
2 chicken breasts
half a fresh red chilli, finely chopped
1 clove garlic, crushed
zest and juice of 1 lime
2 tbsp. soy sauce

Preheat the oven to 180C. Mix the marinade ingredients and make some deep cuts in each chicken breast. Place the chicken on a large piece of foil and carefully spoon over the marinade, making sure it gets right into the cuts you have made.

Seal up the foil in a parcel and bake in the oven for 30 minutes. Slice the chicken to serve and spoon over a little of the sauce. This is really good served with green veg and rice.

I'm sending this to Formula 1 Foods, the blog challenge I host, as the theme is China.

Slimming World-style 'Crab' Pate

 

 



It's hard sometimes to find 'syn free' snacks that you can eat on the Slimming World programme if you've had enough fruit and cooked meats - I seem to live off roast chicken pieces at the moment. Someone in my SW group shared this recipe and I loved it - it's a seafood pate that tastes a lot like crab, which you can take into work and dip crudites into.

 

It's very easy to make and you only need three ingredients, which are all syn free: seafood sticks, a small tin of mackerel and some Quark or fat free natural yogurt.

 

 

Place eight seafood sticks, the tinned mackerel and 2 tbsp. of the Quark or yogurt in a food processor and blend until smooth.

 

Spoon out the resulting pate; I've decorated mine with a little chopped up seafood stick, and serve with crudites. This will keep for a few days in the fridge and is really tasty.