Like many people these days, I eschew carbs, or at least simple carbs.
(Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Those are the ones generally found in white foods – pasta, potatoes, and rice, for example. I also avoid corn since it packs a carbohydrate punch. Which brings us to our Foodie Friday Fun this week.
One of my favorite dishes is shrimp and grits. For the non-Southerners among you, grits are ground hominy which is corn treated with alkali. They may be the official food of Georgia but they’re definitely not on my diet. The dish was one of the things I truly missed when I changed my diet. The combination of the cheese-infused grits and spiced shrimp, bacon, peppers and shallots is high on my list of great dishes. But since there was no way to make the dish without a forbidden food, all I could savor were the memories.
A dear friend, knowing of my gastronomic dismay, sent along a recipe called “low-carb shrimp and grits.” Mentally, I dismissed it immediately, think it an oxymoron. However, there were no grits in the dish. Instead, equal amounts of boiling water and almond flour are mixed together with a pinch of salt, simmered until thick, and enriched with cheese. The end result were far better than I had anticipated, almost indistinguishable from the corn-based version. Which leads to our business thought today.
Too often we forget that there is usually another way. When our solution to a problem doesn’t work, we neglect to get outside of our own narrow thinking to formulate others. We make decisions in a vacuum, failing to gather and organize the information that relates to the questions at hand. I knew there were many types of nut flours (did you know, for example, macadamia nut flour makes great vegan icing in lieu of buttercream?) but didn’t even consider them as a possible course of action.
We need to get data, to organize information, and to be creative, brainstorming every weird solution to surface another way to solve the problem if the way we see in the moment just won’t work. The results just might be as delicious as what you wanted in the first place.
Consult Keith 