Diet friendly sandwich thins
At 63 my body doesn't shed calories as quickly as when I was younger (whose does??LOL), so after my recent visit to the doctor I was informed that I need to shed 30#. Why? Because was 45 pounds overweight and I'm pre-diabetic. Blood sugar was 146 and my blood pressure was iffy even with Lisinopril. The weight loss is supposed to help correct both of those issues.
So, under the guidance of the nutritionist & diabetes counselor in the office, I've been given a program of 1500-1700 calories per day to achieve this goal. Today is day 13, and I've already lost 14# by eating 6 times per day. I can eat anything I want, as long as it's "healthy" foods. Being a bread guy, I consider bread to be a "healthy" food the way I make it, but I also know that the carb's will kill a diet in a heartbeat. So for lunch every day I have a turkey sandwich on a 145-150 calorie sandwich thin (depending on the bread formula), with lettuce, tomato, mustard & zero calorie dill pickles. Very satisfying and only 255 of the 400 calorie lunch allocation. But I wanted to get out a few more calories from the sandwich and still enjoy the flavor of the bread.
Soooooo, I experimented yesterday and made a half recipe of my party rye bread, and instead of portioning out 2.3 oz. of dough per thin, I made them 1.75 oz....about a 25% reduction.This would also bring the calories down from 151 to 113 calories (about 64 calories per ounce of dough), and it also gave me 16 thins instead of 12 thins for the batch. But I wasn't sure how they would hold up being rolled to the customary 4" diameter, and I had to watch the bake time because they could get overdone easily. As it turned out, 12 minutes at 390F was perfect. Even better, when cooled I was able to slice them in half, and they have excellent structure to them. I just made a sandwich for lunch, and it all held together just fine from the first bite to the last. Now to figure how to eat up those extra 38 calories that are left over....
Here is what the original looks like, folowed by the thinner size.