One thing low-carbers hear a lot is that we don’t eat enough vegetables.  The USDA’s food pyramid recommends 3-5 servings of vegetables a day, but they also recommend 6-11 servings of grain, so they’re insane.  And since they define a  “serving” of vegetables as a half-cup of cooked veggies or a full cup of raw, most high-carb eaters I know don’t come close to that.  (Remember, corn and potatoes are not vegetables; they’re in the grain category.  Neither is ketchup.)

I don’t worry about my vegetable intake, since most of my ancestors went months without seeing a vegetable, and when they did run across one it was a small fibrous thing compared to what we grow today.  But I do like a lot of vegetables, and they help add variety when you’re no longer choosing between mashing, frying, baking, scalloping, or Frenching your potatoes at every meal.  As much as  I like meat and eggs, they do get boring after a while by themselves.  Here’s a picture of my lunch yesterday:

Meatballs and Green Beans

That’s a half-pound (before cooking) of green beans, amounting to at least three servings, and it’s only 8.5 carbs!  I had that for lunch and at least one serving of summer squash at supper, so I had over four servings of vegetables and still came in at 25 carbs for the day.  Some other vegetables are even lower in carbs than green beans, so they’re basically unlimited: broccoli, radishes, lettuce.  Low-carbers can eat lots of vegetables if they want to.

We also harvested our carrots yesterday, and I’m so proud—they’re the best carrots I’ve ever grown!  I think the key was thinning:  most years I’ve been too tender-hearted to thin them as much as they need, so they’re crowded and don’t develop well.  This year I mercilessly thinned them down to one every few inches like the packet said.  They were still crowded somewhat by the cabbages next to them, but some did well anyway.  Here’s a bad picture of them right after digging them and cutting the tops off.

Dirty Carrots

And here are a few after scrubbing.

Scrubbed Carrots

We grew two varieties, so that’s why some are short and fat (Short and Sweet variety) and others are longer and thinner (Danvers).  Carrots are a bit too high in carbs to eat many as a side dish, so these will be going into chicken stock.  For now they’re all in a bag in the freezer, ready to be added to the next batch of stock we make.