Hi.  My name is Mark and this is my cooking blog.

I get asked a lot for my recipes, so I decided to start this cooking blog.  What you’ll find here will be my recipes and my variations on others’ recipes, my cooking tips and who knows what else. 

I should say up front that I’m lactose intolerant (check out my lactose intolerance site www.nowhey.org) and I also try to live a low-carb lifestyle.  So the recipes you’ll find here will generally be devoid of milk and milk products and try, wherever possible, to be low in carbs.

I hope you enjoy the site and the recipes.

Mark

This my recipe for beef sukiyaki.  I make it in the crock pot.  Most sukiyaki is made very quickly on the stove top or at the table, but this version came about because I tried a stove top version but used cross rib steak for the beef and it was just too tough.  To salvage the leftovers I put the whole thing into the crock pot and let it simmer all day.  The beef was very tender and now I just make it this way.  You can certainly make this recipe on the stove top, just substitute very tender beef and simmer everything in the broth for about 30 minutes. (more…)

I was at a party and along with the usual carrot, celery and jicama sticks there were these interesting looking purple/red sticks.  Some of the party-goers thought they were simply dyed jicama, but they were immediately identifiable to me as raw beet sticks.  They had a really interesting flavor, and they didn’t bleed when you held them.  Some people though they had seen them at Trader Joe’s but I decided to try and make my own. (more…)

This was inspired by the salad dressing they use at a local Japanese restaurant.  Some places have a dressing that resembles thousand island, but this dressing is nothing like it.  It’s chunky and spicy from ginger and garlic, and it’s very healthy having almost no fat and being very low in carbs.

(more…)

This is one of my (and my daughter’s) favorite soups at a Chinese restaurant. The first time I made it, my daughter asked what restaurant I brought it home from. You can make this the easy way – with a can of creamed corn – or my preferred way where you cream your own tastier corn. It doesn’t take that long to make (either way) and tastes great. This should feed about 4 people.

(more…)

If, like me, you like your Ahi lightly seared (and rare on the inside) with a tasty sauce, you’ll like this dish.  I created the marinade out of my head one day.  Serve it with a salad and some Asian vegetables or rice if you’re not watching the carbs. 

(more…)

This recipe makes a very rich tasting but light textured chocolate mousse that is almost sin free.  People can’t believe it’s zero carb, has no milk products, zero cholesterol and very low in fat (about 10 grams per serving).  This recipe was adapted from several of Alice Medritch’s excellent chocolate mousse recipes. If you’re a fan of chocolate desserts, you need to get her books Bittersweet and Chocolate and the Art of Low Fat Desserts. I combined the basic mousse recipes from Bittersweet with some of the low fat ideas from the other book. I modified the basic mousse recipes to make them easier to make and to eliminate the carbs (they were already lactose-free).

(more…)

This is a recipe that was derived from “Lamb Cacciatore” that I learned at the Viking Home Chef cooking series I took.  When we hear “cacciatore” we usually think of  “chicken cacciatore” which uses a tomato based sauce.  “Cacciatore” means “hunter style” and in some parts of the world (most notably Germany and that region) “hunter style” means a mushroom sauce.  The recipe I learned used a dark beef-based sauce but didn’t have any mushrooms.  Adding the mushrooms and adapting it for the slow cooker are my contributions.

(more…)