 Today, on Tasty Solutions for Diabetes, host Kelly Coffine and Lola Kunico prepare a complete dinner, including an entree, salad, and dessert. We continue our visit with Skip and Maria, two people highly determined to manage their diabetes with the advice of experts from Harvard Medical School. Tasty recipes, important medical information, and more today on Tasty Solutions for Diabetes. Hey Coffine, food consultant and home economist. Hello, and I'm Lola Kunico, certified diabetes educator. Today, we're going to make a complete meal, including an entree, a dessert, and a salad. Yes, we're going to start out with a red pepper tostada, then we'll follow it with a spinach and berry salad, and then a delicious creamberry trifle for dessert. Can't wait! Tasty Solutions for Diabetes uses three main concepts for its recipes and menus. Concept number one, eat a variety of nutritious foods. Eat foods packed with vitamins and minerals, as opposed to foods that contain mostly fats, sugars, and starches. Foods that are nutrition superstards include leafy green vegetables, fruits, whole grains, beans, lean meats, nuts, and low-fat dairy products. Concept number two, balance high carb foods with lower carb foods. Foods are made up of three energy nutrients, carbohydrates or carbs for short, proteins and fats. Each of these play an important role in maintaining a healthy body, so it's not a good idea to cut out any of these nutrients completely. But eating carbohydrates makes our blood sugar or blood glucose levels go up. A person who does not have diabetes will release insulin to keep the blood sugar from going too high. Unfortunately, people with diabetes have to help their bodies keep blood sugar at a healthy level, because their bodies don't produce or properly use insulin. So it's important to control your carbohydrate intake. The key is to choose some foods higher in carbs and some foods lower in carbs at each meal. Usually about half and half is a good balance. The third concept we need to emphasize is portion size. In today's super-sized world, huge portion sizes have become the norm. A key to calorie and carbohydrate control is to eat reasonable portions. For each recipe, we'll show what a reasonable portion size looks like for the recipe and other items on the menu. Now, back to the kitchen. Lola, this first tasty recipe is a tostada. She said that right. I know, I did. Good, huh? But what we've done, traditional tostadas, they take the corn tortilla and deep fry them. It's a lot. My mind used to fly them in large. Yeah, exactly. But to lighten it up a little bit, what we've done is just bake it in the oven. Bake your corn tortillas in the oven for about 8 to 10 minutes at 350 degrees until they're nice and brown and crisp, as you can see. We can do this for chips and salsa. So it's really a great way to stuff your mouth while you're talking. I'm always good. Anyways, while she's eating, each tortilla for two of them contains 17 grams of carbohydrates, which is not too bad. When a flour tortilla can go from 21 to 35. We're going to make a really fun little sauce to go with this to add even more flavor to the tostada. Then we're going to combine a prepared salsa from the grocery store with a low-fat prepared salad dressing and just create a really fun sauce to add more flavor to the tostada itself. And then you can add any type of vegetable you want with it. We're going to do this red bell pepper that we've sliced a couple of red bell peppers and that adds a really nice sweet flavor to it. Right. Let's get started. Let's go ahead and start with the meat. The lower-fat red meat. Right. And I like to start with a cast iron skillet only because it seems to cook up better. And I like to season it. I'd like to season it with a little olive oil and then some garlic. So to that, we'll add our sirloin. And this is just about 12 to 14 ounces of a thin sirloin. You can use a sirloin steak that you can just find in your meat section of your grocery store. Anyway, what we're going to do is we're just going to continue to add the sirloin and you want it on a medium-high heat because we really want to cook it quick and fast and we almost want to char it to a certain point. And then once all the juices cook away, we're going to add our red bell peppers, which are beautiful. So we'll add those as the meat continues to cook. Do you want more in there? Just put about half of that in there. All right, so we got it on a medium-high heat and we're just going to let it cook and cook and you can see all the juices are starting to form. And we're just going to let those cook out and char just a tiny bit and then we'll add our red bell pepper. How about a little bit of seasoning? Yeah, you know, just a little bit of salt and that's obviously a personal preference. You could use a seasoned salt. You could use a garlic salt. Using herbs and spices instead of salt is a very good idea. Like what type of herbs would you use? You can use oregano. You can use crushed red peppers. It depends on what kind of flavor you want. Sure. Okay, so you can see now how all the juices have cooked away. So now we're getting into the charring tender part. It's exactly the stage of cooking the sirloin and we're going to add our red bell pepper strips. And this is really beautiful. And you can add as many as you want. You know, I think that makes these tostadas just go that much further. So this is about, this is two nice size red bell peppers. Okay, so now we're going to build our tostadas. And the first thing we're going to do is we're going to make our sauce. Okay. Okay, so just a prepared salsa. It's about a quarter cup. Or if you're like me, you always have fresh salsa. Right, and you can do it with fresh salsa as well. And then to that we're just going to add a quarter cup of a low fat salad dressing, which this one happens to be ranch. And it's the done right light dressing. Yeah. But what I do, I don't really like the flavor. I really taste a lot of the sugar or something that they substituted in there. So additives or something. And so what I do is I buy a regular ranch dressing and I pour out, you know, about a third of the bottle and put water in there, mix it up, and it is wonderful. Oh, that's a good idea. Lower fat. Well, and that's what makes this kind of fun because now we've added a little bit of this ranch and we've added, you know, a lot of our salsa and it just makes a really nice little flavor. And we're going to just put that on the bottom of our baked corn tortilla that we did. Did you say baked? I said baked, not fried. She left the, you left those in there so it'd be hot. No. Oh, yeah. Are you burning your hands? Yeah, a little. Can you tell? Okay. So you can see all we're going to do is we're going to top this. Now, I did a little combination of greens. I noticed there's cilantro in there. Yeah, we did cilantro. It's iceberg cilantro. You can do a romaine. And, you know, it's just one of those where you can just keep on adding. So we're going to pile that high with lots of greens and to garnish it. Now, do we need a lot of cheese, Lola? No. I mean, just color and a little bit of flavor is great. And there you have it. That's your wonderful sirloin red pepper tostada. Today, we continue our visit with Skip Chaffin who says that his wife has been the most supportive in helping him manage his diabetes. Experts Dr. William Polanski and Dr. Richard Jackson from Harvard Medical School say that support from family and friends is important to help manage diabetes effectively. Skip, who in your family has been the most supportive in helping you manage your diabetes? That's something that's very dear to my heart. It turns out to be my wife. She has given me unconditional support. I probably couldn't have done this without her support. You like to think that you have the strength and the power to do this all on your own. Everybody likes to be an individual, rock solid, but you need a little support base. You need a large support base, actually. She was the focal point of that. She went with me to every single meeting that I attended. She helped me decide. She helped prepare the food. When I didn't want to, I learned that I had to eat three times a day. She would get up. And I started getting up as my energy increased, I started getting up earlier and earlier. And she'd be up every morning at five o'clock to make sure I had breakfast before I went to work. Well, you know what Skip just said was so important and it's something that we've heard from so many different people and we've actually seen many research studies as well. The bottom line is when you've got somebody in your life who's rooting for you, it just makes it a whole lot easier to make and maintain all the many positive changes that are really necessary if you're going to manage diabetes effectively. It sounds like Skip's really done that well with Heena's wife and I'm very happy for him. I hope other people hear that and can take action to think about how they can seek out the kind of support they need from their family and friends around them. It sounds like Skip's wife gave him the right kind of support. Many times family members will try to give support in ways that aren't so helpful though. They'll almost be like diabetes police. There's all sorts of different ways in which family members can be problematic and be trying to help and yet not give the kind of support that really is useful. As Rich just mentioned, one of the most problematic types of support is when loved ones, usually spouses or other family members, think that God has deputized them to help the person with diabetes manage it whether they like it or not. That's what we call the problem of the diabetes police. Diabetes policemen, when they're unfortunately nagging their significant other by saying, you should be eating that, maybe you should check your blood sugars, you seem a little low. Boy, they always mean well and they're always coming from a place of love. But that just, for many people, doesn't help when you're starting to feel like you're being nagged a lot which is much more useful is what we saw as Skip was talking about with his wife where somehow the family works together as a team is able to make positive changes in how they may eat or how active they are, how they make those changes together and give each other the kind of tangible and emotional support that really can make all the difference in the world. Your family and friends may feel guilty, afraid or angry about your diabetes. Talk to them to set realistic expectations about your disease to correct misconceptions and to understand each other's feelings. Two important guidelines for family members. Have realistic expectations about blood glucose levels. Avoid blame. Family members need help from you and your healthcare team to understand that you cannot always control blood sugar levels even if you follow your diabetes care plan. Lola, this is a great salad that has lots of fun flavors in it. Right, and we use the bagged spinach, right? Yes. It's very clean. It's clean and they do like this baby spinach, which just makes it so much easier. So what we're going to do is just add some more greens to it. This is just a fresh cilantro that we've minced. Do you want me to add the strawberries? Yeah, and see the strawberries, it's really going to give it not only great color but wonderful flavor and just sort of gives it a unique freshness and a little bit of sweetness. Now to that though, which is really interesting is we're going to add this. The strawberries was about a cup and a half of strawberries. And then how about some red onions? Now it's going to be a sweet and a tangy and sort of a zesty flavor to the salad. I knew she was going to use that word. What I was going to say about the strawberries, they're pretty low in carbs. Most berries are lower in carbs than most fruit. And then there's a couple other things that you can do. Now if you want to add some nuts, then we recommend pecans of course. So the nutritional value, you know more about that than I do obviously. And I know they did a study here at NMSU that proved that pecans do lower your LDL or what I like to call the lousy cholesterol. So the next step to this great salad is we're going to make a fun poppy seed dressing to go along with it. You want to look for the store-bought poppy seed dressing. It's a little easier and it's low-fat, right? This one we found was low-fat and it has a great flavor. You'll find the poppy seeds really in the hole. It's sort of a sweet tangy salad dressing. It works really well with the onions and the strawberries. Exactly. So it's really a nice different type of a salad. But if you can't find that, then of course we're going to make our own. The first thing we're going to do is we've got, we're going to put in olive oil. And is this the regular flavor or light? You know, this is a light virgin olive oil and I think that you want to stick with that. You don't want a real heavy flavor there. That's about a quarter cup. Okay. And then to that we're going to add, this is just a balsamic vinegar. And we'll just start stirring that up. And then of course, Yes, we'll add a little bit of garlic to that. Everything's good with garlic. How much Splenda? Well, and you know what I've got here is, just took two of the packets. So really that amounts to two teaspoons. And she said, everything's good with garlic except her breath. Thank you Lola. But what you can tell here is that we've got, we've got a garlic, we've got the vinegar, the flavor of garlic, we've got vinegar. Now we've sweetened it a little bit. So it really is kind of a dimension of flavors that we're going to experience in our dressing. And this of course is some poppy seeds. This is about two teaspoons of poppy seeds. And we just found that like in this spice area. Yeah. You'll find it right there in the spice section. Is it expensive? You know, poppy seeds are not expensive. And you know, one or two teaspoons goes a long way. So you'll have whatever you buy, you know, the container you'll have for quite a while. Okay. All right. So now what we're going to do is we're going to just put it on our salad. Great. All right. So as you can see, this is just enough for, this will probably serve six to eight people. Okay. And then you want me to put them on top? Sure. As we're mixing. Yeah. No, that's great. It's a good way to add a little more protein and fiber. Heart healthy protein fat. And then we can just, I love to serve salad instead of in a bowl. As you can see, it looks great, but it can look even better. Let's put it on something that we can see, everything that's in there. She loves to show off her food. I'm telling you. The salad by itself without dressing is about 25 calories. But when you add the dressing, it comes out and the nuts, of course, it comes out to about 125, 130 calories. Which still is great for, you know, such a beautiful and flavorful salad. Right. What I like to do is serve salads before, or whenever I go to a restaurant, I really take advantage of having someone else make my salad for me. I try to have the salad before I eat, and that way you start curbing your appetite and drink lots of water between your bites, and that way you do some behavior modification that's going to help you keep the weight off. Every little bit helps. Yeah. Today, we continue our visit with Maria Martos, who tells us how she fits Diabetes Management into her busy day. Experts Dr. William Polanski and Dr. Richard Jackson from Harvard Medical School say that diabetes interacts with a person's daily schedule, much like having a full-time job. Tell me what you do throughout the day, and how do you manage your diabetes on a daily schedule? My daily routine starts when I wake up in the morning. I wake up at 10 minutes until 6 a.m. or 5.30 in the morning, and the first thing I start to do, laundry, around 7 a.m. Then I check my blood sugar, and when my mother wakes up, I measure her blood pressure. I prepare breakfast. I have to watch my mother because she can choke on the food. I watch her until she takes all her medicine. Then I take my medicine. I then make sure to get her ready. I don't like it when visitors come and she is not combed or changed. So I then get her ready. I brush her hair. Then after all that, I will go and check on the store. They're always calling me for this or that. The store you mentioned, you are the owner, right? Yes, our store. If I wake up early enough, I will get ready and go exercise before my mother wakes up. If not, I will exercise in the afternoon. If I'm not at the store during the day, I am always working on my paperwork and organizing. But I have to pay the bills. I have to send our bills. Then I will get ready for lunch. I feed my mother and myself. I don't wait for my husband because he comes at different times of the day. Then after I eat lunch, I go downstairs for another hour or hour and a half. Then I take a nap if I need to. I will then watch TV. I rest a while. Then I go back down to the store to check the situation to see what has been done or what has not been done. After that, it's dinner time. If I have not exercised during the day, I will go and exercise. Wow, we've just heard Maria talking about a special one fitting diabetes into it. It's pretty impressive the number of ways it interacts with your life. It's sort of like having another job. The one where the pay doesn't really come every week. There's maybe a payday down at the end of it. But it's really a lot to add in to what people are doing. How does that affect people? One of the things I'm glad we could hear about that from Maria is because she represents something that is so very typical for people with diabetes, that when you're living with diabetes and you're trying to take good care of it as we see Maria doing, it is, in fact, just one more job on top of the fact that you probably already have a life and have a lot of other things to do, which is exactly what we've just seen with Maria. The good news is that lots of people like Maria can be successful. They can find some way to take the task of diabetes, which is really all that extra work and fit it into their very busy lives in a way that works for them. But that does take time, does take effort, can seem overwhelming sometimes until you've figured out how to do it. What I like about what Maria has told us, though, is that it's so realistic. It's exactly how the kind of situation so many people face when they first develop diabetes, having to figure out some way to fit this in into what is already, for most people, a busy life, it's already a busy life. According to the American Diabetes Association, it takes about six months after starting a new health plan for it to become a habit. Change is hard, but you can learn a step-by-step approach to help reach your goals by calling 1-800-DIABEDES or going online at www.diabetes.org. Ask for a free copy of ADA's Choose to Live, your Diabetes Survival Guide. One of the biggest challenges I hear from my patients is, what desserts can I eat? So tell us what you're making here. Well, you know, we've created a berry trifle. A berry or a berry? A creamy berry trifle. And it is. It's a wonderful dessert that you can fix throughout the year. It's wonderful in the spring, cool and refreshing in the summer. It's got lots of flavor. It's creamy, and it really is satisfying. You said creamy already. Creamy. Creamy again. So let's get started. Okay. Well, first of all, we're going to start. The base of the recipe is Angel Foodcake. So it's quick and easy. It's just by one that's prepared at the store. It's lower carb and has a little more protein. Yeah, it's with the egg whites. Then we also are going to use, with the non-dairy topping. Go team! Well, in the non-dairy topping, two tablespoons a day is considered a free food by the American Diabetes Association. Along with that, we add strawberries, fresh strawberries. There's about two cups. And then some fresh blueberries and boysenberries. And those are the cheerleaders for the team. There you go. The filling for this trifle is sugar-free pudding. Instant pudding, right? Yeah, it's an instant sugar-free pudding. And today we're going to use vanilla, the flavor of vanilla. And we're going to add a little bit more flavor to it with an almond extract. Alright, so first thing we're going to do is we're going to do two cups of skim milk. And we'll go ahead and get the mixer started because we want to make sure that it's moving as we add our sugar-free pudding. Okay, you can probably turn it up just a little bit. There we go. And you can put it on high, probably for at least a minute or two. Maybe not that high. Okay. So now we're just going to add a teaspoon of extract, and I picked today's almonds, which is going to give your vanilla pudding a different type of a cream flavor. So, now we're going to build it. You ready? Okay. I've selected a this is just a small holiday punch bowl that I use as a trifle dish. So there's a lot of different types of bowls you can use. You can just use a regular bowl that you can't see through, but if you have a glass bowl, this is a beautiful dessert. It probably makes it look like you spent a lot of time. Yes, absolutely. We're going to start with angel food cake. We've cubed it, so we're going to put that on top. Okay. Just probably about a third of it. Okay. And now we'll do a little cream. And you just sprinkle it on there. Sure. Probably on the edges so you can see it. Yeah, a little bit around the edges. Sorry, I didn't make it right. I'm sure. That's fine. You cannot mess up this dessert. And then, of course, we'll use our cream to start with the... Yeah, that looks great. I love cool whip. Well, you know, it's nice because you don't have to worry about the amounts that you use. So this is a good one for this recipe. What I usually tell patients, too, is when you're having pancakes, instead of syrup, use some cool whip on top. Oh, there you go. A little bit of strawberries. Sure. Okay, so let's go ahead and do this first, only because that's really what you'll see. How can we get to do the fun stuff? Well, here, you can do that. All right. Okay. Now, all right, we've got a good little layer there. Let's put some more of our Angel Food Cake. And as you can see, you know, it really is light, but that creamy center just makes you feel like you're having the creamberry trifle. Isn't that beautiful? It is. And it contains for about 3 fourths cup. It contains about 140 calories with about 22 grams of carbs. The perfect dessert for family and friends. For more fun recipes, expert advice on diabetes, or to order a copy of this program, visit our website at www.tastysolutions.com. Well, today we prepared some with our red pepper tostada. Right. And it has about 300 calories with about 15 grams of carbohydrates. And then we paired that with an unusual salad of interesting flavors, our berry spinach salad that has some red onions and some strawberries. I still think they look like purple onions. And then, of course, we finished up with our luscious berry trifle. Right. And this is a little over a cup because Kelly would not stop. This is a Kelly serving. Not a Lola serving. The overall calories is about 600 calories with about 50 grams of carbohydrates. So we invite everyone to just take your time and enjoy and prepare wonderful dinner recipes that are healthy and work for you. Right. And Kelly, don't forget, stay active to help manage your diabetes. Right.