side dishes | Annie's Kitchen Therapy

If you need a healthy, easy to prepare side dish try this:

Buy a bag of fresh string beans (haricot verts if you’re fancy) snip off the stem side (top of picture below):

After snipping and cleaning, submerge the string beans into rapidly boiling, salted water and cook for 7-8 minutes (we like ours on the crunchy side but if you don’t, just cook longer). When done cooking, blanch the string beans by dumping into strainer and rinsing with very cold ice water. Blanching the string beans will bring back the bright green color of the string beans

(Science tip: Blanching stops enzyme actions which would otherwise cause loss of flavor, color and texture.)

Place blanched string beans in serving dish, drizzle with a little EVOO, season with kosher salt, pepper and diced red onion (or whatever spices you like) and serve!

We needed a quick low carb dinner after a long day, followed by a walk to the beach to see a gorgeous sunset. We wound up making zucchini fritters and BLTs on lettuce wraps. Delicious and low carb.

I never made the zucchini fritters before. What I did was grate up two zucchinis using my food processor (you could also use a box grater). I set the grated zucchini in a bowl, salted in and let it sit for an hour (the salt draws out the water). I then squeezed handfuls of the zucchini to get any residual water out and placed back in a dry bowl. I added seasoning (salt, pepper, minced garlic and 1/2 packet of Sazon – I’d love to add some parmesan to this, but the husband…), one egg and enough almond flour to bind the mixture. I pan fried the fritters, but you could also bake in the oven. They came out great. You can serve with a little tzatziki or even ranch dip on the side.