Busy People's Diabetic Cookbook

Acknowledgments

My first debt of gratitude is to God. He has richly blessed me with the gifts and talents it takes to put a cookbook together. I’d be a fool to take credit for the creative ideas He gives me. I know it is He who gets all the praise and glory for each and every one of the great and wonderful things that happen through me.

Next, I am deeply grateful to those who helped me successfully create this book. I could not have done it alone. I am forever grateful to each of the following whose significant contributions led to the quality and high standards this cookbook delivers.

Dr. Thomas Knecht, you’re not only an excellent doctor who specializes in diabetes, but you also live with diabetes. That is why you were my choice to write the foreword for this cookbook. I am honored to have your support and contribution to this cookbook. Thank you!

To my family, friends and personal assistants who continue being my taste testers, trying new ideas day in and day out without ever complaining, I give special thanks. Your brutal honesty motivates me to strive for the finest tasting recipes I can produce. Thank you for giving me the pat on the back for new recipes well done and a kick in the pants when you think I should go back to the kitchen and try again.

To Tammi Hancock, the registered dietician with over fifteen years experience who analyzed each and every recipe with perfection, much thanks for your feedback, insight and professional opinion on the recipes. I deeply appreciate all of your hard work each step of the way. Many thanks!

My Literary Agent, Coleen O’ Shea, to whom I am forever grateful, thank you for being a better literary assistant than I could ever have hoped for, dreamed of, or imagined. You are a gem in my treasure chest of life. I will be forever grateful to JoAnna Lund, of Healthy Exchanges Cookbooks for introducing us to each other.

Brenda Crosser, my recipe-tester assistant, gets full credit for her creative ideas that were very good and inspired me to create more.

To Geoff Stone, my editor, who has a sharp eye for detail, thank you for polishing my work so it shines bright, crisp, and clean.

To Larry Stone, my publisher, thank you for keeping the lines of communication open with me. Not all authors are as fortunate as I am to have such a great publisher. I want you to know I appreciate you.

To Bryan Curtis and Laura Troup, thank you for your marketing and publicity work in spreading the word.

Last but not least, I personally want to let you, the reader, know how incredibly grateful I am for letting your friends, family, and coworkers know how much you love using my cookbooks and how delicious the recipes taste. Word of mouth has been selling my Busy People’s cookbooks like hotcakes because of you. Thank you from the bottom of my heart!

May God bless you always in all ways!

Foreword

I was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes in the 1970s when I was in college. My mom, who was a nurse, and my dad, who had no medical background (but was a brilliant guy), visited me for a weekend, saw that I was very sick, and said, Tom, see a doctor! I did and was directly admitted to the hospital.

This was before blood glucose testing, and I was first trained to use tablets to test glucose in urine. In retrospect, what a waste of time and resources! I was given instruction in diet, which at the time emphasized more a relationship to blood sugar than to overall health—the dark ages in diabetes management!

Things have come a long way since then. I actually have had the opportunity to live many of the advances that let us manage diabetes as successfully as we can today. I now use multiple meters, stationed in key locations (kitchen, office, briefcase, wife’s purse, clinic, and others) that give me the blood glucose result in five to fifteen seconds (depending on the meter) using a tiny drop of blood. As an aggressive type 1 who wants excellent control with minimal serious hypoglycemia, I average about ten tests per day every day, and even more under certain circumstances.

You have this book in your hands, so likely you have diabetes or know someone very well who does. Type 1 diabetes (which usually occurs before adulthood) is an autoimmune disorder, which nothing can prevent—you stop producing the insulin that lets you use the food you eat and must inject insulin daily. In type 2 diabetes, you still make insulin to some degree, but for various reasons it isn't adequate. The cause of this type of diabetes is multifactorial and still somewhat elusive, but can be influenced by how you eat and exercise and by other factors. Type 2 once occurred primarily in adults, but is now increasingly being seen in children. You may be able to control type 2 diabetes with diet alone or with oral medications, and, in some cases, insulin is required.

The word diabetes actually has its root in honeyed urine first described in an ancient Hindu document from about 400 B.C. In 1922, the discovery of insulin was the single largest revolution in the timeline of diabetes in human medicine. (For one of the finest pieces of writing ever on the subject, turn to Michael Bliss’ outstanding book, The Discovery of Insulin.) The march forward in diabetes therapy and management continued with the availability in the 1950s of the first oral medications for type 2 diabetes. Scientific and medical progress has continued, with the dawn of home blood glucose monitoring in the late 1970s (with tremendous refinement since then), to most recently newer categories of oral therapies for type 2 diabetes and to bioengineered insulins.

But before the industrial revolution of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, type 2 diabetes was essentially unknown. Since then type 2 diabetes has grown to the point that many more people have it than type 1 diabetes: from 1997 to 2000 alone, the rate of diabetes jumped 25 percent. Why? Partly because we are eating more refined sugar, refined flour, and highly saturated fat—at home and while eating out. (Check out the book Fast Food Nation: the Dark Side of the All-American Meal, by Eric Schlosser.) We’ve also become largely sedentary, another contributing factor. (Some of the recipes in this book call for refined, all-purpose flour because of the ease of availability. Although it is okay in moderation, the better way is to use whole wheat flour, which can be purchased at most large grocery stores or at specialty stores. You can substitute whole wheat flour for any recipe in this book.)

Both types of diabetes share the risk of serious complications: eye disease and blindness, kidney failure, and nerve damage that can cause severe pain and can contribute to the risk of amputation of the feet. These are the microvascular chronic complications of diabetes, and you can help lessen the risk by controlling your diabetes (through careful meal planning, among other things) and by controlling high blood pressure. People with type 2 diabetes also are at particularly high risk for macrovascular complications such as heart disease and heart attack, stroke, and hardening of the arteries to the kidneys and to the legs (which increases the risk of amputations). These problems are influenced by many factors: high cholesterol, diabetes, high blood pressure, smoking, metabolic factors, genetics, and others. These risks are very real, and every day that you do not take charge of your diabetes and these other risk factors increases the chances of these serious complications.

The good news is that better diabetes control in both types of diabetes can dramatically lessen if not eliminate the risk of complications. I am living proof that diabetes can be successfully managed. (And cutting calories, losing weight, eating less fat and more fiber, and getting regular exercise can play a vital role in avoiding type 2 diabetes altogether). I have seen treatment of type 2 diabetes come from using one category of oral agent and/or the older insulins, to now having four categories of oral agents that may be used in combination and/or the new insulin analogs, as well as aggressive management of their blood pressure and cholesterol. Throughout all this nothing-short-of-amazing progress, as a society, we have become more obese, less active, and more stretched for time. Bottom line, progress has not been across the board, and as a society we have regressed in some vitally important ways. We’ve come full circle to once again needing to strongly incorporate diet and exercise into our lifestyles.

So diet does matter—for both types of diabetes—and the book you hold in your hands can make eating well completely painless. Dawn Hall has put together a collection of more than two hundred tasty and easy-to-prepare healthy recipes, none with more than seven ingredients, that take only thirty minutes or less to prepare—and will appeal to the entire family. Your life is busy, and it may always seem easier to sit on the couch with take-out food or microwave snacks. But with only a little effort and planning, you can have a kitchen well-stocked with healthy foods, and can prepare tasty, healthful meals every day.

Your doctor can supply you with tools to help manage your diabetes. But only you can make the life commitment to living healthy, and can help yourself, friends, and family to value your health above most other things. Medicines alone are not enough: It is up to you to take control of your diabetes—and your life! This book is an excellent step in the right direction.

Thomas P. Knecht, MD, PhD, FACP

Division of Endocrinology

University of Utah School of Medicine

2004

To help you take control of your diabetes, it is my privilege and honor to share a special family recipe, one of my all-time favorites, from my mom. Admittedly it takes longer than a half hour to bake (about 35 minutes) and has more than seven ingredients—so it doesn't quite meet the criteria for this cookbook—but in this case I think the extra time and added ingredients are worth the additional effort. I know you are going to love it every bit as much as I do!

Peg Knecht’s Healthy Gingerbread

3 cups whole wheat flour

¾ cup sugar

1 cup Splenda Granular

4 teaspoons ground ginger

4 teaspoons baking soda

5 egg whites

¾ cup molasses

½ cup (1 stick) reduced-fat margarine, melted*

1 cup boiling water

½ cup no-sugar-added natural applesauce

■ Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

■ Spray a 9 × 13-inch glass casserole dish with nonfat cooking spray.

■ In large mixing bowl stir together the flour, sugar, Splenda, ginger, and baking soda until well mixed.

■ Beat the egg whites in a large mixing bowl with an electric mixer on high speed until stiff peaks form.

■ Add the molasses, melted margarine, applesauce, and boiling water to the beaten egg whites. Continue beating on medium-high speed with the mixer until well blended.

■ Slowly add the dry ingredients and mix with the mixer on medium speed until well combined.

■ Pour the batter into the prepared glass casserole dish.

■ Bake for 35 minutes or until a toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean. This tastes best fresh and hot from the oven.

*Note: To help with cholesterol use Smart Balance Light with no trans fat.

Yield: 16 servings

Calories: 188 (10% fat); Total Fat: 2 gm; Cholesterol: 0 mg; Carbohydrate: 40 gm; Dietary Fiber: 3 gm; Protein: 4 gm; Sodium: 369 mg Diabetic Exchanges: 1 starch, 1½ other carbohydrate

Introduction

My goal when creating this Busy People’s Diabetic Cookbook was to have recipes with seven or less easy-to-find grocery store ingredients that diabetics and their families would both thoroughly enjoy eating. All Americans will benefit from this style of eating, not just diabetics.

If you are like me and were born watching your weight, I encourage you to start eating the diabetic way. You will be glad you did! Your health will improve and you will lose weight.

About the Ingredients

Some of you may be wondering why I didn’t use only whole grain pastas, mixes, et cetera. In an ideal world we would all eat only whole foods that were grown in a garden full of nutrient-rich soil without any chemicals. The only vegetables and fruits we’d eat would be ones we had just picked from our gardens. Everything would be made from scratch with the freshest of ingredients, and we’d never eat anything that was processed.

However, that is not reality for most of us. For the most part, when it comes to eating, people want things easy. I even go so far as to say the easier the better. When preparing meals we need to take into consideration not only the time of cutting, chopping, peeling, preparing, and cooking the meal, but also the cleanup time afterwards, the shopping beforehand, and last but not least, the expense of the foods we eat.

If your local grocer has a good health food section you can afford, I encourage you, by all means, to buy the whole wheat pastas and cake mixes, fresh fruits and vegetables, et cetera and substitute them in my recipes for the easier-to-find grocery store ingredients. I tell my children this: we can have it all sometimes, but we can’t have it all all the time. It just isn’t realistic. That’s why I have created these diabetic recipes and the menu ideas as I have. The recipes are designed with today’s busy people in mind who want to be able to do all their shopping in one store, as quickly, affordably, and painlessly as possible, with their cooking to follow suit.

About Portion Sizes

When dieting and eating healthy, it is important to remember portion sizes. Eating low-fat foods is a great step in the right direction. However, simply eating these recipes without watching the size of your portions will not be enough. You need to watch portion sizes as well! It is also important to watch your side dishes. It is self-defeating if you eat a small portion of chicken Parmesan and then pig out on a loaf of garlic bread too. The entire consumption of all the foods and beverages you consume make up the balance of your diabetic diet for the day.

I’ve created menu ideas with the recipes that will help guide you in your meal creations. All the recipes are from my Busy People’s cookbooks, and they all are easy and healthy. So, please, I encourage you. If you don’t know about how to eat the diabetic way, read the information enclosed in this book. It is very helpful, informative, and user-friendly.

About Brand Names

Ground Meatless

Morningstar Farms Ground Meatless crumbles are low-fat, cholesterol-free burger crumbles. They are a taste equivalent to ground beef without all the fat. You can use these crumbles like cooked ground beef in all of my recipes. Ground Meatless crumbles are a textured vegetable protein product that contains wheat and soy ingredients. (They are found in the frozen food section of your local grocery store.)

Splenda

Splenda is a calorie-free sugar substitute that tastes like sugar and is made from sugar but without the fattening carbohydrates. I use it in a lot of my recipes.

There are two forms of Splenda: Splenda Granular and Splenda packets. Splenda Granular comes in a box and measures like sugar. Be careful when following my recipes that you use the appropriate type of Splenda. The two different forms measure differently and are not interchangeable.

Support Groups

I have found it quite helpful to have an accountability partner or support group in maintaining a healthy lifestyle with eating. There are many to choose from. Some groups, such as Weight Watchers, you have to pay to join. And there are free support groups, such as Body for Life. Programs with prepackaged foods can also be good.

Overeaters Anonymous is helpful in the accountability department, but I found some groups to be too focused on one area and lacking in other areas. The diabetic support groups at hospitals are wonderful. They cover dietary needs and requirements along with exercise.

Of all the groups, though, I have found the free group First Place to be the most comprehensive for me. It covers the overall well-being of the entire person, including the physical, spiritual, emotional, mental, and psychological. There is accountability, encouragement and support on all levels. You will receive as much or as little support as you desire. You will learn to eat appropriate portion sizes and to eat from all food groups; real food for real people. A healthy amount of exercise is encouraged as well as quiet time with God.

I cannot recommend First Place highly enough! For more information on First Place go to www.Firstplace.org or call 800-727-5223. You will be glad you did!

If you are diabetic, I strongly encourage you to talk with a medical professional who specializes in diabetes to oversee and set up an appropriate eating and lifestyle plan for you.

What You Need to Know about Eating & Diabetes

How food affects your blood glucose

Whether you have type 1 or type 2 diabetes, what, when, and how much you eat all affect your blood glucose. Blood glucose is the main sugar found in the blood