I love food. I love cooking. I love baking. This makes being a diabetic tricky. Luckily more and more cookbooks and cooking websites are responding to customer demand: Tell us how healthy this recipe is!
This is not a sponsored post. I’m not being paid to write about cool stuff that makes my life easier.
I’d collected cookbooks before I was a diabetic. My copy of Bernard Clayton’s New Complete Book of Breads is well-thumbed, which is a polite way of saying I should probably replace it in the next year or so, and maybe save up to buy the hardcover edition rather than the paperback. I have two Greek cookbooks that I value highly: one of them was put together by a church ladies’ society, which is a great cookbook for everyday cooking. I have Shirley Corriher’s CookWise, which pleases my geeky heart.
Unfortunately, most of my pre-diabetic-days cookbooks lack one important piece of data: the carbohydrate count per serving. Every diabetic educator will explain that knowing the carb count is important because a diabetic should be careful about how many carbohydrates they eat at meals or a snack, because that’s a great way to keep control of your blood sugars. At the start of my diabetic education, I was given a several-page list of common foods and how they ranked in terms of carbs, or as I put it “can eat, shouldn’t eat too often, and say goodbye to.” My diabetic educator praised my current dietary habits–I didn’t really eat fast food, mostly avoided junk food, etc.–and encouraged me to check out the American Diabetes Association website for more tips.
The ADA website is indeed great, and it includes a meal planning section that includes diabetic cookbook recommendations and recipes. But I wanted more variety. I wanted to cook meals that were diabetic friendly, but didn’t make me feel like I could only eat at the Diabetic Table for People Who Can’t Eat Whatever They Want.
Enter Jenn Segal and Once Upon a Chef.
Jenn Segal started out as a chef, then switched to being a stay-at-home mom. Luckily, she never gave up her love of cooking, and she started blogging recipes she developed for the home kitchen, mostly adaptations of recipes she’d made in her culinary career. Best of all, she includes nutritional information for just about every recipe. (Some of the older ones lack this info.) It’s true that I can’t make every recipe she has, but that was never going to be the case anyway. I’m not classically trained, and I don’t want to be. I just want to make good food that won’t send me into a diabetic coma.
Since then, I’ve been inspired to look beyond the ADA recipes. Diabetes Forecast and other cooking websites also include nutritional information for their recipes, which saves me from studying the ingredients and trying to guess which recipes are safe. I can enjoy cooking again. I still need to be careful about what I eat or what I cook, but I can enjoy delicious healthy dishes.
Rachel
I'm a writer, a knitter/spinner/weaver, a young stroke survivor, and a type 2 diabetic.
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