When eating low carb, you’ll be cutting out ‘white’ things like flour, potatoes, and rice.  Luckily nature offers some other more low carb friendly substitutes.  Anytime I see a recipe calling for pasta, rice or potatoes, I just swap it out with the following:

Pasta – Instead of pasta, made with nutritionally worthless bleached and VERY high carb white flour, I use ZUCCHINI noodles instead.  Using a OXO Good Grips Julienne Peeler, it’s incredibly fast and easy to make spaghetti noodles with zucchini.  Just start at the top and with gentle and consistent pressure slide down the length of the zucchini.  About 1 zucchini per person for a large portion.  Boil some water, throw in some salt and blanche the zucchini noodles for 30 sec – 1 minute.  Top with alfredo sauce or a low carb tomato sauce.

Potatoes – The low carb substitute for potatoes is CAULIFLOWER.  I’ve swapped out potatoes with cauliflower time and time again and it’s worked really well.  Cauliflower is pretty much a blank canvas and take spices well.  Baked or roasted cauliflower is delicious.  Although I’ve never tried it, I’d imagine deep fried cauliflower would be good to.  French Flower Fries?

Rice – Instead of rice, try CHOPPED CAULIFLOWER.  The ever versatile cauliflower makes for a pretty good rice substitute.  If you have a food processor (or even those little ones), you can throw some raw cauliflower in and pulse it a few times then stir fry it or try blanching in salted water until you get a softer consistency.   You could also just chop it finely with a knife.  And then top with butter, or make a stir fried rice to go with a beef and broccoli combo for some low carb Chinese.

Anyone else have any suggestions?  I’d love to hear them

This entry was posted on Friday, March 2nd, 2012 at 4:39 pm and is filed under Low Carb. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.