I’ve seen quite a few people start the BSD with the idea that certain categories of foods, mostly veggies and salads, are “freebies” that we can eat without counting calories or carbs. I’m guessing this is a holdover from other diets. The BSD is the first diet I’ve ever done so I had no such notions and weighed and measured everything. Still do, in fact, 180+ pounds later. The truth is there are no freebies. The obvious carbless foods (proper grass-fed/pastured meats, some fish, certain cheeses) can be quite high in calories and plenty of vegetables, including salad stuff, can hide some nasty carb surprises.

Every once in a while, I stumble on a precious treasure of a food that is either carbless or so high in fiber that the carbs net out to zero. I hoard them like Gollum with the One Ring. My OH has come close to losing a finger more than once when he attempted to reach out for a taste.

First is something that has become a daily food for me: broccoli sprouts. The tiny smidgen of carbs they have (1 gram per ounce) are fiber, so zero net. They taste fresh and crisp and since the seed is still attached, can add an unexpected crunch to salads and sandwiches. Nutrionally speaking they are stupid good for you. Superfood and all that. I never make a salad without them anymore, and one of the greatest combinations I know is an egg overeasy topped with sprouts, a few avocado slices and a slice of melted smoked gouda to glue it all together. Add a dollop of whole grain Dijon mustard on top and your palate will reach over the table and slap your mama for not making it for you every day since you were weaned.

Next is something that has caused a wee bit of controversy on another thread (inadvertantly so), and that is seaweed. Sea vegetables in general are nutrional powerhouses, packed full of trace minerals and probiotics. They are also extremely good for the environment because they are sustainable, easily grown and harvested. It’s not just for wrapping high-carb, high-sugar sushi rolls anymore. Last weekend I achieved one of my favorite goals thanks to seaweed: a zero carb day. My total for the day was 12 grams carbs, all 12 of them fiber.

I ate a giant plate of seaweed salad made from alaria (a kind of wakame harvested from the coast of Maine) and a combination of wakame, nori, kombu, agar agar and red akamodok. The alaria comes in wide strips and has a fibrous rib down the middle like kale or chard. You have to cook it in boiling water for 10-15 minutes until it’s cooked to your liking. I like it still on the al dente side so I went with 10 minutes. Longer than that and the rib is softer, but the thinner parts of the leaf get a little slimy.

The mixture, which I bought already combined, only needs to be reconstituted in warm water for a few minutes and drained. Squeeze out any remaining water so it’s as dry as it can be. I chopped the alaria crosswise, mixed all the seaweeds up and tossed them with a dressing of 2 tblsp toasted sesame oil, 2 tbslp rice vinegar, 1 tblsp Tamari soy sauce, and several dashes fish sauce*. A sprinkling of sesame seeds on top for texture and there was much rejoicing. It served four very hungry people.

*Note, be careful to check the ingredients on fish sauce. I had to search far and wide to find a brand that didn’t have added sugars and nonsense. Red Boat is the one that finally came to my rescue. Nothing but anchovies and sea salt.

Last (for now) is a recent find. Well, not recent exactly, but recent in terms of my noticing carb counts. It’s lupini beans. I have experimented with lupin flour but hadn’t been able to find the beans themselves. Today I found a bag of Brami Garlic and Herb Lupini Beans and they were scrumptious. One 50 gram serving, which a very big portion because they are so filling, has 60 calories and 7 grams of carbs, all fiber. I used them as the base of a salad with broccoli sprouts, sauerkraut, chevre and some uncured, unadulterated turkey pepperoni baked in the oven until crispy and then crumbled up like bacon bits on top. It tasted fantastic and was so filling it easily carried me through the 14,000-step walk that followed.

What REAL freebies have you encountered?

I think one of the real eye openers of this diet has been discovering just how many carbs there are in foods once eaten with gay abandon because they were ‘free’. Who ever thought of weighing a lettuce leaf!

As a diabetic in remission I really feel the need to keep my carbs under control. At the moment I am aiming for 50 grams a day, a veritable feast for you Esnecca. I do find it quite difficult to stay very low these days. For those who aren’t really into seaweed I’ve started making wraps out of roasted seaweed sheets. I ‘wrap’ smoked mackerel or salmon pate with cucumber etc. Seaweed wraps are far less messy to make than sushi.

Broccoli sprouts??? What are they? I know in the US you can get some stuff we can’t in the UK or may be named differently. I think we may be approaching kalette season here again. I tried them once but wasn’t impressed. I have seen them roasted and they looked lovely so may try them again when they come into the shops.

Not really like very low carb but last night on Masterchef they made a cauliflower purée mixed with yogurt. An idea maybe?

I really need to get to like aubergine so I will try experimenting with that …. any recipes welcome!

Hello Esnecca!
Your post was really interesting regarding the almost free veggies. I had to google a few as they’re not readily available in the UK. I live a stones throw away from the beach, but never see seaweed, let alone be able to buy it. One thing that is local to me is Samphire, a vegetable that grows on the sea shore, but to obtain that I have to go to the docks to get it direct from the trawlers. The only problem with it is the carbs are double that of spinach. This is my favourite – I could eat a bucket of it, hot and salted.
While googling the seaweed, I discovered that Vine Leaves are almost negligble. Stuffed with a no carb protein they should make a very nice snack. Thanks for the info.

Hi Verano! I use sheets of nori to make wraps too. A lot of the versions of old carby favorites that I now make in salad form (bagel and lox, buffalo chicken tenders, etc.) work like a charm wrapped in nori. A mixture of cream cheese, Worcestershire, tabasco, minced green onion, capers, lemon juice spread all over the sheet filled down the middle with smoked salmon, thin cucumber slices, maybe even a cherry tomato or two if I’m feeling indulgent, then wrapped and sliced with a sharp knife makes a great breakfast, lunch or dinner.

Broccoli sprouts are the very, very beginning of broccoli. They’re not even the plant yet, really, not in any form you’d recognize. They look like clover. Anything at all that grows from seeds (or beans or nuts) starts as a sprout. You don’t have to buy them at the store. All you need is some broccoli seed and a glass mason jar. I have a fancy sprouter which I never use anymore because it’s huge and more trouble than it’s worth. Here are some instructions for a much easier method which is what I do these days: https://www.culturesforhealth.com/learn/sprouting/how-to-sprout-seeds-jar/

That reminds me of another general category of food that is either a freebie or close to it. The baby version of veggies. Grown arugula has a couple of grams of carbs. Baby has none. Same with baby Romaine. Grown broccoli has significantly more than a couple. Sprouts have none.

Hiya bluebell50!

What a shame that seaweed isn’t readily available for you even so close to the shore. I would love to get my hands on some fresh from the ocean. I get mine dried from the health food store where all different kinds line the shelves. You might try Asian markets as well since seaweed is such a popular ingredient in several east Asian cuisines.

I looked up the nutrional info on samphire and wow, that is surprisingly high in carbs and low in fiber for a sea vegetable. It looks lovely, but definitely not a freebie. I wonder if you could have a chat with the guys on the trawlers to see if they know of a source for fresh kelp, red algae, etc. I’d check the shops for the dried stuff first, if I were you. It’s a lot less trouble.

Great idea bout the grape vine leaves. It’s those veiny stalky bits that do the trick, ramping up the fiber to net out the carbs. I’ve filled them with a mixture of ground lamb and dark meat turkey spiced with fresh mint, parsley, oregano and dried cumin, coriander, turmeric, garlic, ginger, salt and pepper. They were fantastic, but boy howdy was it tedious rolling them all up. I only bother for guests now. I just cut to the chase and make the filling as kebabs cooked up on the stove.

That sounds lovely Esnecca. I have a ‘thing’ for cream cheese and smoked salmon at the moment topped with black pepper and a squeeze of lemon juice. Only problem is that I’m spreading it on crispbreads. Your idea sounds far more carb friendly to me.

The vine leaves sound good as well bluebell. I guess you could stuff cabbage leaves too. In fact I may make some stuffed cabbage leaves cooked in the oven in my homemade tomato sauce. Mmmm … always looking for new ideas.

Waitrose do some sprouts which are a mixture of broccoli and alfalfa sprouts, which I love with salads. As you say, they are pretty close to a freebie food carb wise, and definitely add interest to a salad. They are just the sprouted seeds.

Just shy of a freebie but worth mentioning because it was such a revelation is baby corn. You know those little vinegary guys you get in Chinese food and probably pick out? At least that’s why I used to do with them back in the day. Well, now I’d eat them and pick out everything else. A 3 oz serving has 1 net gram of carbohydrate, no sugar. I think it’s because the kernels are miniscule and you eat the whole coblet, unlike with mature corn that is strictly kernels. After so long without even the hint of corn in my diet, this makes me happy.

It’s still nowhere near as delicious as grown sweet corn, of course, which is why I plan to puree it in a chowder-like concotion and to make a fake cornbread muffins out of almond and lupin flour. We’ll see how it goes.

Hi Esnecca I really love all your ideas. Not a great lover of corn especially the ones you pick out from Chinese food! I just want to thank you because I have just added fresh coriander to a salad and it was lovely. Without your novel ideas I doubt I’d ever have done that or ring any other changes so please keep posting!

That’s great, Verano! I’m so pleased if I can contribute even in a small way to jazzing up your meals and keeping things fresh. As I always say, bland is the enemy. 😀

Although not free but celeriac has only 9g carb per 100g and 42 calories. Just makes a change from cauliflower mash.

Oh and V, I bet you just love saying ‘a diabetic in remission’ – how far you have come and I have shared your journey. Hopefully I will be saying the same in the next 8months (that will be 2 years on plan).

Thanks for all these posts. I did buy some ‘super sprouts’ from Sainsburys the other day. Very nice but a tad expensive to do regularly.

I nearly always have about 10g of chopped coriander with salad now – makes it so much palatable.

The babycorn idea is excellent – do these grill or steam? I’m trying to streamline cooking at the mo so figuring out what I can cook in the same bowl or on the George Foreman grill (only using that grill because our actual grill has stopped working unfortunately).

I hadn’t thought of it, but now that you’ve brought it to my attention, I bet baby corn would be fantastic grilled. Make sure to rinse and dry them well because you don’t want them dripping in whatever juice is in the can before putting them on the grill surface. GF has top and bottom grilling so keep an eye on them because they’ve already been blanched before canning, I suspect, and won’t need much cooking at all. Just long enough to put some marks on them. Maybe brush them in half a teaspoon of olive oil for flavor before putting them on the sizzler?

You can eat them as they come out of the can, just in case that wasn’t clear. I’ve sliced them and added them to salads, but they’re very mild so they sort of disappear. I preferred it when I gave them a quick stir-fry in a drop of sesame oil before using in the fake lo mein I make with kelp noodles.

Ah ok – see I was just looking online at their values and 3 different supermarkets say different things. Waitrose says it’s 18.7g carbs and 6.3g sugar, Tesco says it’s about 2.7g of carb and 1g of sugar and Sainsburys is somewhere in between.

But that was for fresh. I hadn’t considered canned – I’ll have a look. Thanks

Nowhere does canned by the looks of it 🙁 Tried Tesco, Sainsburys and Waitrose.

I can order online from Ocado but don’t want to sign up to that just to get canned baby cob. Back to the drawing board.

Take it back – looks like Tesco and Morrisons do it. I’ll try to pick some up at the weekend.

I’ve seen different carb counts for different brands of the canned too, Shanshu, so be sure to compare and contrast. The brand carried at my local organic market is 2 grams net carbs. The conventional brand at the regular grocery has 1 net gram. I think the canned ones are blanched or parboiled or pickled in some way, which is why their numbers would be different from the fresh. Good luck on your search. 🙂

I have just discovered a new freebie and it is absolutely scrumtious. Pili nuts. They are high in calories, as most nuts are, because of the high levels of omega-3 fats but the carb count makes up for it and then some. A 28-gram serving has 1 gram carbs, .8 of them fiber, which means .2 grams net! No other nut even comes close to that rock bottom carb count. To top it all off, they are close-your-eyes-and-make-yummy-noises tasty. Buttery, rich and seasoned with a variety of wonderful spice combinations.

I haven’t seen them anywhere in shops. I got them online here: https://www2.netrition.com/pure-traditions-sprouted-pili-nuts.html

These are delicious! Sometimes hard to find though, so it’s great to have a source
this side of the pond. Thanks, Esnecca! For those interested, they are also high
in magnesium as well. Luvtcook?

Netrition has a really good low carb section. I regularly order things from them that I can’t find anywhere else. Have you tried the pili nuts with the turmeric spicing? So, so great.

Thanks, Essie – I’ll keep an eye out for them. Turmeric is a superfood!

People contemplating growing their own sprouts from seed need to be aware that in the UK at least, most packets of seeds to grow in gardens or greenhouses are treated with fungicide and pesticide, or even coated to make sowing easier and are not suitable for sprouting.

I didn’t know that. I always got seeds from the bulk bins at my local organic food store just because they’re labelled “for sprouting” so I figured they’d be good at it. That’s what I get for never attempting to grow any actual vegetables. Key information, thank you.