Vegetables and Flavored Mayo – Your Secret Weapon
One of the challenges of reducing carbs in the standard diet is often we replace carbs with protein, and even worse, low-fat protein! If your protein is modest and carbs are low, then most of the rest of the calories you need will come from fat. How to get more healthy fat into your diet? Think about using flavored mayo on your veggies.
Mark Sisson http://www.marksdailyapple.com and other primal enthusiasts advocate having a big salad each day. This gives you lots of veggies and fat from the salad dressing. Wonderful advice! If only I liked salads that much. But I don’t, and neither does BH.
I have been posting recipes for different vegetables dishes that have cheese in them which has plenty of yummy fat. But not everyone eats cheese and sometimes I just do not want to work that hard for dinner.
Lately I have been playing with flavored mayonnaise. This is an incredibly easy way to make a fatty sauce that not only perks up your veggies, but the fat helps your body absorb the fat soluble vitamins in those veggies (like A and E). It can also be a way to make a creamy salad dressing. Instead of having lots of bottles of different dressings, use a mayonnaise base and add whatever flavors you feel like that day.
As a base, I use the healthiest mayonnaise I can find. I like the Primal Kitchens mayonnaise because it is made from avocado oil and there is no added sugar. The other avocado oil mayo’s I have found (so far) have sugar or other sweeteners in them. Primal Kitchens offers plain mayo and they are starting to distribute flavored mayo as well.
So assume you pick up a jar of some flavored mayo that you like. Now what? What I do for one serving is mix 1 Tablespoon mayo with 1/4 teaspoon hot water and whisk until it is well blended. The hot water takes the chill off the cold mayo and thins it a bit to be more of a sauce. If you want a thinner sauce, try maybe another 1/4 teaspoon hot water. It does not take much!
If you have plain mayo, then think about flavors you like and mix those into the mayonnaise. There are a lot of recipes for flavored mayo online. Unfortunately, they tend to be in 1/2 cup sizes, which is far more flavored mayo than I need for a particular dinner. Unless dinner is a big salad, then I need that larger amount for dressing!
Start with a 1 Tablespoon serving of your plain mayonnaise. Add flavoring in really small amounts until you get a taste you like. If it is too thick, add hot water 1/4 teaspoon at a time.
Tonight I did 1 Tablespoon of plain mayo, 1/2 teaspoon lime juice, and 1/16 teaspoon (half of a 1/8 teaspoon measuring spoon) of sweet curry powder. Very yummy over asparagus.
Try 1 Tablespoon of plain mayo, 1/4 teaspoon hot water, and 1/16 teaspoon dill to serve over steamed carrots.
1 Tablespoon plain mayo, 1/2 teaspoon lemon juice, blend and serve over broccoli. Try adding 1/16 teaspoon garlic powder (makes it more like aoli) to this and serve over green beans.
Food Gypsy has a great post with 50 ideas for flavored mayo here: http://www.foodgypsy.ca/all-recipes/50-flavours-of-mayonnaise/
That should provide plenty of ideas to get your creativity flowing different sauces you can make from mayonnaise.
If you want a smaller amount of flavored mayo remember that 1/2 cup of mayo = 8 Tablespoons of mayo. 1 Tablespoon = 3 teaspoons. And if you want to use the sauce for a salad dressing, you may need to thin it a bit so it pours nicely. I would use water for that purpose, putting in very small amounts at a time until you get the consistency you want.
If you want to end up with about 2 Tablespoons of sauce from a 1/2 cup recipe, you have to reduce the other ingredients to 1/4 of the original amount. But do not stress about it! This is not like making a cake; all the amounts are to your taste anyway. Pesto Mayo has 1/2 cup mayo and 1 Tablespoon of pesto. So if you want to make Pesto Mayo, and you want 2 Tablespoons of sauce, take 2 tablespoons of mayo and stir in a bit less than a teaspoon of pesto. (If you want to be exact use 3/4 teaspoon of pesto, which is a bit less than one teaspoon. So unless you really want to, do not bother measuring out 3/4 teaspoon). Or maybe you really like pesto so you put in a whole teaspoon of pesto or even a bit more.
This is so easy to play around with. Start with small amounts of mayonnaise. If you hate the sauce you have only wasted 1 or 2 Tablespoons of mayo. Have fun with it!
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