The FastDay Forum

Hi everyone,
Love looking through the forums, can anyone come up with recipes for Quark? It's very low cal soft cheese and high protein. I make a smoothie with soya milk(can't stand milk) with frozen raspberries , some agave to sweeten, and a dollop of quark, low cal & a high protein smoothie. I find plain low fat yoghurt tastes acidic and leaves a greasy feeling in my mouth, weird quirk of mine. It can be used in sweet recipes and savoury, I just lost my mojo with new ideas.

[Moogie]

If it's lower cal than ricotta then I've got one I can post up for you later

Quark is bland, almost no taste BUT is a useful substitute for other high cal things like sour cream (add a touch of lemon juice), ricotta, cream cheese etc. Unless you don't care what your food tastes like, and I doubt that, just make sure you add things to it such as herbs, garlic, even a bit of fat like sour cream for instance, because as you probably know it has no flavour at all! No point doing 5.2 if the food doesn't taste great!

Thanks Moogie
Look forward to any ideas, I like to use quark as the cals saved can go to a treat whenever I wish , I do like it mixed with sweet chillie sauce, finely chopped spring onions on ryvitas with thinly sliced ham, very tasty.

[Moogie]

I reckon it would work great for my recipe then. Will post it when I'm at my desk tomorrow, sorry I ended up busy tonight!

I must admit I haven't heard of quark before but am very interested if any aussie know where to get it here in oz land I would love to know it would be interesting to experiment with.

[Moogie]

Okay, here goes - I had been saving this one for when I put up the recipe section (very much delayed!) but since Quark would make it even lower cal...

Moogie's Spinach & Ricotta Penne Pasta
Serves 3

This is a recipe I put together (based around a number of other recipes and the ingredients I had to hand!) before I started fasting. I've not tried it for a fast day yet but it all adds up alright - especially with the quark instead of ricotta. You may need to tweak the quantities of nutmeg/garlic a bit, I don't tend to measure the ingredients. I use about half a garlic bulb when I'm cooking for me and hubby (and there's always enough left for a third portion!) and probably a heaped tablespoon of ground nutmeg. Sometimes I chuck in more spinach.

Ingredients:
250g spinach leaves (70 kcal)
25g garlic (30 kcal)
100g white onion (60 kcal)
1x vegetable oxo cube (16 kcal)
1tbsp nutmeg (30 kcal)
100g quark (70 kcal) (originally ricotta, approx. 140 kcal)
75ml single cream (150 kcal) or full fat milk (45 kcal)
1 tbsp olive oil (120 kcal)

Optional extras:
3 rashers back bacon, trimmed of fat (150kcal)
and/or
25g pinenuts (180kcal)

Calories per serving of sauce:
315 kcal if using cream & ricotta + both optional toppings
292 kcal if using cream & quark + both optional toppings
257 kcal if using whole milk & quark + both optional toppings
(less 50 calories if no bacon, less 60 calories if no pinenuts)

You can mix and match a bit to get to the amount of quantities you need!
A standard serving of penne pasta (quills) is 75g dry weight, which comes out at 265 kcal. The meal is pretty filling so you could get away with a smaller portion of pasta to enjoy the higher cal version of the sauce, or cut back on toppings/sauce richness to fill up on pasta. Would probably go nicely with brown pasta because of the nutty flavour.


Method:
Finely chop the onion
Crush the garlic (I use a garlic press)
Finely chop the spinach (this takes a while!)

Fry the onion and garlic in the olive oil for a few minutes then gradually add the spinach. When you've added about half the spinach, crumble in the vegetable oxo and add the nutmeg. Continue to add the spinach, letting it wilt down a little as you add it.

At this point you should probably put your pasta on to boil and if you're doing bacon, get that on the grill so it's nice and crispy.

Add the ricotta/quark and mix in well. It should take on the colour of the nutmeg and go a bit yellowy/brown. Now add the cream/milk so that you can stir the mixture. Leave on a low heat to reduce a little. You may want to add more nutmeg and some seasoning at this point (plenty of black pepper )

While that reduces for a few minutes you can chop your now-crispy bacon into very small pieces, like crumbs. Also a good time to quickly dry-fry your pinenuts to get them nice and toasty.

All ready now!

Serve the spinach sauce over a bowl of pasta and sprinkle your bacon/pinenuts on top.

Yum

Note - you cannot put too much garlic in this! I promise you don't taste it, it just makes the flavour really really rich.

Wow, thanks Moogie, instead of using pasta I am going to use shirataki noodles, which I will flavoured with soy sauce , nutmeg, and seasoned, try out later, will let you know how it goes and what substitutes I use and work out the calories.
Many thanks

[Moogie]

Not sure how well soy would go in that recipe - don't think you need it really as there's so much flavour in the sauce, the pasta is just a base for it. Would love to hear how you get on anyway!