How to Roast Frozen Bone-In Chicken Leg Quarters (Bonus Low-Carb, Gluten-Free basting sauce and side dish)

At usually 80 cents a pound, chicken leg quarters are one of the most affordable cuts of meats you can buy at a super market. Also, it's incredibly easy to prepare--neither defrosting the chicken, nor preheating the oven is necessary to make a delicious roast chicken in under an hour and thirty minutes. I can't even remember the number of times I forgot to defrost chicken for dinner. My horrible memory is the only reason this recipe even exists. I guess there's always a silver lining.

Above, I basted my chicken with a mixture of cumin, chili powder, and olive oil, but a simple brush of oil, salt, and pepper works perfectly as well. I served it with Laing--a curry-spiced stewed spinach. The recipe for that is below.

This recipe serves 6, with each serving of a whole bone in chicken leg quarter totaling 2.5 grams of carbs. The entire cooking time is about 1 hour and 20 minutes. The curry-spiced spinach comes at about 1.75 grams of carbs per serving.

Recipe Attempt: Country Gravy using Flax (Low-Carb, Gluten-Free)

This is my first attempt at making gravy with milled flax seed, and I have to say flax worked well as a thickening agent in this particular recipe. The only thing is, this gravy doesn't have quite the same mouth-feel as normal gravy does, and it gave the cauliflower that I paired it with a bit of a "slide-y"(?) consistency. However, the gravy was an excellent sauce for the almond crusted pan fried chicken I made. Overall, I am pretty happy with the result, but not yet satisfied. I will be tweaking around with this recipe sometime in the near future.

In the meanwhile, I decided to put an "Optional add-on's" section below which lists ingredients that I think would elevate the gravy in both texture and taste, but I haven't actually given those options a try yet, so season at your own discretion!

The entire basic recipe is only 1 gram of carbs.

Chicken Chicharrón (Carb-free, Gluten-free)

One of the best things about living with people who eat low-fat, is getting the residual chicken skins they trim from their meat. Usually I chop these fatty bits up and fry them along with my greens or my cauli-rice, but whenever I have something already in the oven, I like to add in a pan of chicken skins, just so I have something to munch on while waiting for other food to cook. A plate of Chicharrón is the very definition of fatty and forbidden, but thankfully for us doing low-carb, it can be a weekly staple.

The Ultimate Comfort Food: Flax Meal Porridge (Low-Carb, Gluten-Free)

It's things like this recipe that make me want to get up early in the morning. I'm usually the kind of person who hits snooze about 5 times before getting up. But whenever there's a box of flax in my fridge and frozen berries in my freezer, I find myself getting too excited for breakfast to hit snooze more than twice. Oh, how I love flax. I love its many different textures, I love how it keeps me full for hours, and I love how a $1.99 box of it can last me an entire month. Most mornings I have flax either as minute-mug cake with ricotta, or as porridge with a side of bacon and eggs. I'll even mix flax into my savory foods and have it for lunch and dinner. One day I plan to erect a monument to flax, but I'm still working on the funding for that project.

This recipe comes to at most 6 grams of carbs per serving. (You could cut all the optional ingredients I added, and it would bring the carb count down. I just wanted to show how versatile the recipe is.)

Chinese Takeout Style Sesame Chicken (Low-Carb, Gluten-Free)

There was a bit of trial and error that went into making this recipe. When I coated the first batch with only egg whites, the chicken come out pretty soggy. It still had a good flavor to it, but there wasn't even a slight crunch to the crust. About halfway through my batch, I decided to add some flax seeds after I recalled using the flax to make chicken tenders a few weeks ago. First I added 1 tablespoon. I fried that batch, and while there was more of a crust, I still wasn't satisfied. So then I decided to in add even more flax to the very last batch, and it actually turned out great. This is closest I've come to making something that tasted like Chinese food takeout. I paired the sesame chicken with pork fried rice and some steamed vegetables. This fried chicken recipe is very versatile; you could experiment by adding different spices or herbs to the batter and by topping it with different sauces. I know I will.

Each serving of low-carb sesame chicken is 3 grams of carbs.

Indian Kababs and Curried Spinach Almond Cake (Low-carb, Gluten-free)

I know--this meal is calorie dense. In fact, it's almost 600 calories for the entire thing. This is actually a meal I ate all the time when I first started keto and wasn't concentrating on my calorie intake as much as I was my carbs. When I was beginning my low-carb journey I needed a bit of leeway to get over the fact that I would be giving up carbs for an indefinite period of time. Now that I've been off of carbs for a few months, I hardly ever feel like eating this heavily anymore. But when the mood strikes for something savory and spicy, these two recipes never fail to hit the spot.

The kebab recipe comes out to 1.75 grams of carbs per serving, while the curried spinach almond cake (a mouthful, I know) comes out to 3 grams of carbs per serving, for a combined total of 4.75 grams of carbs for the entire dinner.

Pad Thai and Pork Fried "Rice" (Low-Carb, Gluten-free)

One of the best feelings you can experience in this world is contentment from eating exactly what you want. That is what I felt when, after weeks of craving, I finally decided to wing my own version of Pad Thai and have it for a laid-back Friday night dinner. So food happy. The fried rice worked great alongside the egg-wrapped noodle-y goodness, with both dishes featuring subtle heat from the peppers as well as bright hints of freshness from the cilantro.

Since I was able to feed four with both recipes, each serving of low-carb Pad Thai came out to 3.25 grams of carbs, while each serving of pork fried cauliflower rice came out to 2.25 grams of carbs, for a total of 5.5 grams of carbs for the entire dinner.

Moussaka (Low Carb, Gluten-Free)

This is a low-carb dish that is impossible to screw up, and I have proof of its relentless perfection: I realized, in the midst of cooking, that I would not have enough eggplant for the two layers. The horror. But you know what--it still turned out delicious. A major part of its success was probably due to the Béchamel sauce's ability to mask any and all imperfections with its creamy, velvety goodness. In the end, the sparse eggplant slices peeking through the topping gave the moussaka a lovely, rustic look. 

I paired the dish with a filipino side called Laing, made with spinach, coconut milk, bacon, and curry powder. I will make a more detailed blog post about sometime in the near future. 

By the way this recipe serves 6, bringing it to about 4.5 grams of carbs per serving.