Body Spirit Saturdays (on a Monday) and Zevia Gelatin Recipe

This past week it hit me, this is for life. The low carb diet has to be for life and there isn't going to be any going back to the way I was eating before. Maybe I'll be able to up my number of carbs later on (I’d like to get to where I can have 75 a day or so—that would seem like such a luxury), but I’ll have to see later. But yeah, this is it. I’m in for the long haul. Once I stepped over the line into mild type 2 diabetes, that was the nail on the coffin lid of my love affair with starch and sugar.

So this week, I decided to really do my research. As you know, I’m currently eating between 30-50 carbs a day. I try to keep it around 40. The thing I miss the most is eating more fruit. I love the taste, the lightness of fruit, and I stare at the produce counters this season, salivating over the peaches and nectarines and watermelon and all good tasting yummies. But fruit has carbs, and while I’ve been eating a lot of berries this year (low carb but pricey), I have had to forego the usual cavalcade of fruit that used to pass by my plate.

But now, yes, this is for life. So I began researching the vegetables I actually like or tolerate well. One is squash. Now, yes, winter squash does have carbs, but I realized I can have a cup of butternut or acorn squash cubes (raw, before cooking), for 14 grams of carb. Add that to a steak or some chicken and a cucumber-tomato salad and it makes what was a boring meal into something that actually FEELS like a meal. With the salad giving you, at the most, 3-4 grams carb, and the meat at zero, your dinner has 17-18 grams of carb.  Craving spaghetti? 2 cups of spaghetti squash will give you 16 grams net carb. Add a meaty-tomato sauce for about 4-5 grams of carb, and you’ve got a spaghetti dinner. And, on a rare occasion, a 7” ear of yellow corn—15 grams of carb—can become a nice change of pace.

And an added bonus. I’ve never been terribly crazy about plain squash, but this weekend I made acorn squash with chicken and a salad for dinner. And that squash tasted SO good to me.

But back to the fruit. Yes, I miss fruit. So I thought about what tastes fruity. And came back to a childhood favorite—Jell-o. But sugar free Jell-o is made with aspartame and—while I will use some Splenda—I will not bring aspartame into the house. So I thought about it and then remembered the Knox gelatin I used to use to make dessert without sugar, by using fruit juice. And then I thought about the Zevia soda we drink and thought, why can’t I do the same using that? So I tried. And my first attempt was pretty good. I’m going to experiment with some different ingredients, add some concentrated raspberry tea (not black tea) to  the mix, try it with Blue Sky sugar-free Root Beer for a fun change, but here’s my first attempt. And it’s gone, so I can’t take a picture of it, but that kind of says it was good enough for me to snarf down.

Sugar Free Cherry-Lemon Gelatin

2 packets Knox unsweetened gelatin

4 cups Zevia black cherry soda (1 cup needs to be very cold)
1/8 cup Splenda (or you can use Z-sweet)
½ tsp lemon extract
2 tbsp lemon juice
 
Pour 3 cups of the Zevia in a saucepan and begin to heat.
Add gelatin to 1 cup ice cold Zevia in bowl. Stir with whisk.
Add in Splenda, lemon extract, and lemon juice. Keep whisking while the rest of the Zevia heats.
Pour hot (not boiling) Zevia into the bowl and continue to whisk until everything is dissolved. Whisk for about 2 minutes.
Place in refrigerator and chill till set. Makes 4 cups.
Carbs: effectively 0.

Hope you enjoy this as much as I did. It’s lighter on taste than most gelatin, but it has a rather delicate flavor and oddly enough, reminds me of the rose petal jelly I used to make.

Yasmine