Adventures in healthy eating, part 2: Almond meal

I love bread. Anyone who had attempted a low carb diet knows what kind of low carb options there are for bread lovers. With that said, I have heard that there are ways to get around this. I have been buying almond meal at Trader Joe's for a bit now. I use it in place of bread crumbs, and sometimes flour. So far I have made cookies, crackers, cake, and used it to bread chicken, and fish. Jill used it in her meatballs last night, and although they didn't hold together quite as well as the usual ones, they were quite good.

I've also made a wonderful bread-machine bread from a mixture of almond meal, flax meal, and wheat gluten. I found the original recipe here at recipe zaar, but used almond meal in place of the soy flour, and added about 1/4 teaspoon more yeast. Also, I recommend sifting the dry ingredients in an OLD FASHIONED SIFTER only. The almond and flax meals will clog up and ruin the new style ones. Sift as much as you can and dump the unsiftables into the bread machine too for texture. I used the rapid yeast and the rapid setting on my Hitachi bread machine. The results were very good, and add up to about 2 grams net carbs per slice, if you get about 10 slices out of it.