Saturday, May 19, 2012

Home Cooking Math

Articles - Diabetes Articles
Tuesday, 07 December 2010 10:37
Sometimes I wonder if the normal people aka: functioning pancreas type know what lengths we have to go to when we do any home cooking at all.  Do most people SWAG bolus for home cooking?  SWAG for those readers who don't know is "Scientific Wild Ass Guess".  Basically it's winging it.  Looking at some food and humming and hawing and eventually just picking a number out of the air and dosing for it.

I'm also not sure to what lengths other diabetics go to so this is just my experiences.  One thing I make a lot of is soups and stews. 

I love soups so much.  When I started taking my diabetes more seriously I was reluctant to do any home cooking because it was just too confusing and I learned quickly that I'm a shitty guesser.  It's one of those things that frustrates me.  It is a hundred times easier to eat a pre-packaged labeled food than it is to make your own healthy food and I  just couldn't accept that. 

Well here is how I do it.  A photo montage if you will of the calculations, measuring and researching of a Scully soup.  I chose something very easy so as not to make it too confusing.  That and I was really craving split pea soup.  It's one of my favourites.  It really only has 4 ingredients that need to be accounted for.  My version is vegetarian but adjustments could be made otherwise. Anything that can be made in the slowcooker is a winner for me!

First step is finding out how much liquid my slowcooker holds.  I begin by pouring a litre of water in and then measuring it with a ruler (or in my case a tape measure because I don't have a ruler in the house).  My preliminary findings are that for every litre of water it is approximately 3/4" deep.  This will allow me to calculate the total per cup of soup in the end.

Ingredients:
2 large chopped carrots
4 chopped celery stalks
1 medium onion chopped
3 cups green split peas
half a bulb of garlic minced (or more, I like a lot of garlic)
Oregano, thyme, sea salt and lots of ground black pepper
12 cups of water

Next, chopping and weighing separately for each vegetable.  I go to my trusty websites for contents of said vegetables.  My two favourite sites are Nutrition Data and Carb Counter.   These sites list the carbs and fibre per 100g of weight.  I find it much more inaccurate to calculate food by weight.

Finally when the soup is done I stick my tape measure in and determine that I have approximately 3.5" of liquid volume.  I consult my water measurements from the beginning to find there is 17 cups of soup in 3.5".  I then take my total carbs and total fibre and divide it by 17. 

Ergo there are 25g of carbs and 10g of fibre per cup of soup.  Split peas are loaded with fibre.


NOW...  I can enjoy and be confident and comfortable knowing that my blood sugar is not going to take a ride on a rollercoaster.  I save the rest for a week of home made split pea soup for lunch.




It requires a lot more time and patience but it has become second nature for the most part which is a good thing.  It's always about the "new normal".  I love cooking and I prefer to make whatever I can.  Sometimes I forget the lengths I have to go to all in the name of accurate carb counting.  Accurate carb counting means accurate blood sugars.  Accurate blood sugars mean EVERYTHING!
 
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