Happy 2011!

The next dish we decided to try was Warm Shrimp Salad with Green Beans and Chiles on page 102. This was really excellent - the green beans are lower in carbs than the more traditional white beans, the hazelnuts in the salad added a nice crunch, and anything is better with some chiles! The hardest part was finding quality, frozen, wild caught shrimp. Next time I'll try the Asian market...

Here is my first post on my new project blog, Low Carb Italian Grill.

I will be using Mario Batali's Italian Grill for recipes and ideas. I won't be doing a completely faithful re-do of each recipe, a la Julie & Julia. For recipes with a higher carb ingredient that can be substituted, I will do so, for example I made Citronette with lemon instead of orange, and added a bit of artificial sweetener to combat the added acidity.

I will skip those recipes which are based on a high carb ingredient, i.e., the entire Pizza and Flatbreads chapter, and the Prosciutto with Grilled and Fresh Figs.

No, we are not crazy. We love pizza, and all kinds of other high carb foods, but in the spirit of prevention and long life, we are now for the most part a low carb household. This means that the majority of the foods we eat consist of some protein in the form of meat, seafood, poultry or eggs, and the remaining bulk of the foods are vegetables, whether salads or cooked vegetable side dishes. This is one of the reasons why Italian Grill lends itself so well to the low carb diet.

We use a Big Green Egg as our grill/smoker. It has many benefits to the common gas or charcoal grill: uses lump charcoal, can cook efficiently at very high or very low temperatures, and is very forgiving if you leave something on too long. The one disadvantage I can see is that there is no way to spit roast, although I'm not sure the result will be very different in the BGE by just turning the food on all sides.

For our first meal, we selected Grilled Lamb Chops Scottadita, and Asparagus wrapped in Prosciutto with Lemon Citronette (pages 177 and 30 respectively, if you'd like to follow along). They were both wonderful, and a green salad with romaine and radicchio with Lemon Citronette finished the meal.