Ah Labor Day – the switch from summer to fall and a grand weekend for barbecues. And with barbecues come lots of tempting high carb foods. The best way to face this issue is to bring your own low-carb friendly foods (and then watch as people gobble it up and declare it delicious!).

I knew there would be meat at the barbecue today, so I brought sides. Notably, I brought beet cheesecake cupcakes, roasted carrot chip salad, and spicy green beans.

The recipe for the beet cheesecake cupcakes can be found here.

In a desperate, yet successful, attempt to use up everything in the veggie bin, the following two dishes ensued.

Spicy Green Beans

I had garlic and I had green beans. So I typed in ‘garlic green beans’ in Google and came across this recipe. It’s poorly written but essentially you cut up a bunch of garlic, sautee it in butter, throw in the green beans for two minutes with a dash of salt and pepper, then dump in some water to let it simmer down. Then with a dash of cayenne pepper and some chopped pecans, you got yourself a delicious side dish. Ignore their stupid thing about sugar – why would you add sugar to green beans, when you have the natural sweetness of the bean and of the pecans? Yeesh.

Carrot Chip Salad

Leftover from last week’s CSA box was a huge batch of carrots. I don’t normally eat much carrot because they are higher in carbs than most other vegetables (hence why they are so sweet!). I knew there would be a lot of little children at today’s BBQ so I thought it would be fun to make carrot chips.

Quick Google search later, and I found this recipe. In a nutshell, slice up your carrot rounds super thin via a mandoline (link goes to the one I own, which has an ‘extra thin’ option), toss with some coconut oil, salt and cinnamon, then BAKE. I don’t know why the recipe says 10 minutes. Mine were in there 25 and still didn’t get crispy. I diced up about 5 carrots for this experiment.
The sad remains from the salad – I didn’t get a ‘before’ shot – this was all that was left and I ate it for dinner.
Since they didn’t get crispy, and time was running out, I threw it into the MEGA SALAD I made, with all CSA box items.

MEGA SALAD included:

• Huge head of Romaine lettuce
• 5-6 stalks of diced up celery
• 1 cup of orange cherry tomatoes
• 2 pears, diced*
• Bits of raw carrots
• 5 carrots worth of cinnamon roasted rounds
• Chopped pecans
• Olive oil and a light dash of vinegar

The salad turned out awesome.

*Pears are not low carb. For some reason, my CSA put two pears into my ‘veggies only’ box. Figured I might as well use them to feed non-low carbers.