our new normal

I thought I'd better post a 6 months on update in our low fructose experiment. It really is our new normal.

Our shopping habits are established.

We know what we prefer when we eat out - I must admit we haven't attempted Thai food - it seems the one thing which might just be too hard.

Giggi asks for a ham and cheese sandwich or a green apple if he's hungry (not a biscuit, cake, chocolate etc.)

I've become an expert at home ice cream making.

My cake of choice if we're having visitors or if I need to bring something elsewhere is David Gillespie's butter cake with a handful or two of frozen blueberries.

I might eat too many croissants...

I'm not sure what else I have to report. I'll get back to you in another 6 months or so... But I can't see us ever going back.

my birthday ice cream

There are a bunch of great low fructose cake recipes out there. I've made a couple of cakes from The Sweet Poison Quit Plan and they've all been good.

For my birthday this year, however, I made this delicious ice cream and as my gift to you, I thought I'd share my recipe.

my choc mint ice cream

Ingredients:
1 cup milk
1 cup mint leaves (tightly packed), you can use more :-)
1 cup dextrose
2 cups thickened cream
1 tbsp vanilla
30g chopped 85% Green & Black's chocolate

Method:
Heat the milk in a saucepan until it's steaming. Take it off the heat and add the mint leaves. Leave them for half an hour and then blend using a stick blender.
Add the sugar and mix further to dissolve. Stir in the cream and vanilla.
Put in the fridge for as long as you can, and then even in the freezer for an hour to make it as cold as you can.
Churn in an ice cream maker until it's almost overflowing (if you're using a 1.5L machine). Add the chopped up chocolate a couple of minutes before it's finished.
You might still need to stick it in the freezer for a couple of hours - depends on how soft you like it.

In other good news a fair few ice cream cones fall below 4g of sugar/100g, unfortunately it's not the waffle cones.

Enjoy :-)

veggie patch inspiration

We've been the recipient of some lovely veggie patch produce recently. Very kind. I'm loving it. So now searching The Cook's Companion by Stephanie Alexander for some good ideas. Seriously the best asset for the Australian cook. We went back to an old favourite for the zucchini. And everyone loved it (though we had to leave the tomato off for the two little ones). I only have access to a less recent copy at the moment so it didn't have the zucchini slice recipe that I normally use, but you can also find it here, I just added the slices of tomato. So yum. BTW so filling - perfect for staving off any sugar cravings.

We've also been enjoying some beetroot. Although these were a bit fibrous, I think we let them go too far. The interesting thing is that you can use the young leaves as salad leaves. But I was tempted to leave them as table decoration. They are so pretty and tint the water a lovely pink. 

For our beetroot salad I used roasted beetroot, mixed salad leaves, blanched asparagus, roasted pine nuts, perino tomatoes, goats cheese and my new favourite dressing. I also served it with roast beef.

But can I go on about my new favourite dressing? Yes I can. I was recently was given a beautiful bottle of roasted walnut oil from the Loire Valley. So I searched for some dressing recipes since walnuts go fabulously with beets so I loosely adapted this one found here. Seeing as I'm loathe to add another speciality vinegar to my vinegar collection, my recipe is as follows:

Walnut Oil Dressing
1/4 cup walnut oil
2 tbsp white wine vinegar
1 tsp seeded mustard

Whisk together. Yum.

Finally, we're trying this one tonight so I'll have to report back. But this sounds fantastic. A gratin recipe using the stalks of your silver beet. It also has cream and blue cheese so it's bound to be delish. This is another Cook's Companion recipe. And it makes good use of the bits I don't use so much anyway. I made a silver beet and ricotta pie with the leaves. Here's something to try with the stalks. Brilliant.

Actually one more thing. This evening we're trying mint ice cream with a bunch of fresh mint leaves from the back yard. The mixture is cooling as we speak and should be ready for churning tonight. Mmmmm.

an adventure in fructose

After having been off the sweet stuff for 7 weeks or so I was intrigued to see what would happen when we went out for a degustation menu for my sister-in-law's birthday. It's the first meal we haven't been in control of for all that time. Anyway, I was interested to see how far we've come.

We ate at Matteo's. The food was beautiful. It included a lot of asian fusion dishes. Our favourites were the kingfisher sashimi and the tea smoked duck. Fortunately no one item was too substantial but there was a fair few fructose laden ingredients in the savoury courses (watermelon, hoisin sauce, plum relish etc). 

The big kicker was the dessert of course. Apart from a minimal amount of ice cream and cake that I've made we haven't really indulged in much dessert the last 2 months. And certainly no fructose laden desserts. So I was a little nervous about the dessert course. Here's what was on the menu:

Sorry mood lighting made photography difficult, but et voila, the dessert:

Well it was delicious and more so because we don't eat this food all the time. It really was a treat. I loved the ice cream (it reminded me a little of Maggie Beer's burnt fig jam, honeycomb and caramel ice cream) and the berry tartlet was beautiful too. The most interesting thing was that I just could not eat the chocolate ganache. IT WAS TOO SWEET. I guess white chocolate was always going to be a shock after eating 100% cocoa chocolate. But I don't think I've ever turned dessert away for being too sweet.

The other issue I was concerned about was that I'd be starving the next day or have huge sweet cravings. But everything was completely normal. Now I don't think this means that I could do this more often. But it was nice to know that on a really one off special occasion I could cope. 

one month on - still fructose free

Well we survived the holiday period largely fructose-free. I think the Easter egg craziness might be the only time of year that is harder but we haven't felt deprived at all.

I meant to say earlier but I followed through and got rid of all our pantry and fridge items which didn't fall inside the 4g of sugar/100g of food guideline. It helped that we were moving and I didn't want to pack things I wasn't planning on using any longer anyway. We have moved in with my mother-in-law but fortunately she doesn't like a lot of sweet food anyway so it shouldn't be too hard.

We have started eating a bit more fruit. You can eat 1-2 pieces of fruit a day on the plan, so we're not going overboard. And we're trying to stick to the recommended fruit such as berries, kiwi, pears and citrus.

The other good thing is that with a good supply of dextrose we have started making sweet treats which pass the low fructose test. In particular we've tried a few recipes from the Sweet Poison Quit Plan. So far I've whipped up some ice cream, a butter cake and some vanilla egg custard. Yummo. I can also recommend the frozen mango yogurt from Jamie Oliver's 30 Minute Meals, just substitute glucose syrup for the honey - although you'd probably go through your day's allowance of fruit in one go.

We have also enjoyed a fair few croissants - our new bakery treat of choice. Now just to make sure that it remains a sometimes food.

Giggi's 'artistic' fuzzy shot of a friend and I at Max Brenner's. Fortunately my husband was on the ball and ordered our coffees and croissants without the molten chocolate slathered all over them.

I'm surprised that 3 cafes we've visited in the last 10 days have supplied a small sweet treat gratis with the coffee. But I've been even more surprised by how well Giggi has coped with me turning them down. I think it's great that we've started this journey while we still have quite a bit of control over what he eats. Hopefully it will make it easier when he has more freedom in this area. Perhaps he won't have the taste for it and certainly he'll understand more of why we're doing what we're doing.

Which is:
    1) have healthy weights
    2) go back to normal appetites not subverted by fructose
    3) the prevention or mitigation of diseases such as diabetes, hyperglycemia, high cholesterol etc.

Happy New Year to you all. Here's to a happy and healthy 2012. Let me know if you're planning on joining us on this fructose-free but fulfilling ride.

adventures in fructose-free treats: icecream

It's been great hanging out with some others on this fructose-free journey and picking up their tips and tricks. The main message for me is that it seems to be more difficult the second time, so best to stick with the program. The other thing is that croissants make excellent sugar free treats (as long as you don't buy those ones from the supermarket that you stick in the oven - it has to be the super buttery flaky ones... I think I can hack it).

In the spirit of the boxing day sales we picked up an ice cream maker. I wasn't sure which one to get since Choice hasn't done a review (and seeing as it makes their top 20 of least used, most re-gifted gifts, I'm not sure they're going to do a review any time soon). So, we just waltzed into DJs picked their most popular model which also was on sale and we're giving it a go.

Tah-Dah...

We chose The Sweet Poison Quit Plan chocolate ice cream recipe. Super easy. No eggs even. And I'm loving using all my mum's retro baking accessories.

I also inherited my sister-in-law's dextrose stash as they move overseas next week. It looks a little like caster sugar but is less sweet, weighs less and is squidgy like brown sugar. It takes a bit of getting used to. But here goes.

Now here we get to amateur hour. I hadn't realised that you need to freeze the ice cream maker's mixing bowl for 12+ hour before you can make any ice cream. Oops. So the ice cream mixture went into the fridge to be cooled which isn't a disaster and we ended up putting on the churner at 8am this morning.

Giggi waiting patiently for the churning to occur:

Churning under way:

Final product after a couple of hours in the freezer, with some blueberries and grated 99% Lindt:

The verdict pretty good first effort. Probably could have done with another churn as I didn't leave the freezer bucket in long enough to begin with. But yummy! Here's to our first ice cream this month!