Chef Ward Alper aka ‘The Decadent Diabetic’ and I believe that diabetes doesn’t have to dim your dazzle especially when it comes to entertaining.

Together we’re hoping to encourage you to enjoy life without compromising your diabetes health.

Coming together with friends and family to share meals helps build healthy relationships and promotes good overall health. But why not make the most of the meal and let silver screen legend, Ginger Rogers inspire you to experiment with spices like ginger to your meals.

Fresh ginger is good for so many things. When buying ginger look for full, plump roots that are juicy and not dried out on the ends at all.

It’s been famously stated that silver screen legend, Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did, except backwards and in high heels!

That’s also a fairly accurate description of what life’s like for people with diabetes – they do what everyone else does while managing their blood sugars!

Ginger Rogers is quite simply one of the greatest talents that Hollywood has ever seen.  She was an actress and singer and dancer–a triple threat before people even really knew what that meant.  Not only could she do it all, she did it all so well…the result of a strong work ethic and sheer raw talent.  As an actress, she had tremendous range; she was a natural with comedy, but she could also bring a tear to your eye as she did in dramas like her Oscar-winning performance in Kitty Foyle (1940).  And as a singer, she recorded several songs that were hits at the time and continue to be standards today.  But it is for her grace as a dancer that she is perhaps best known, especially for her 10 movies with Fred Astaire.  It is important to remember she had already made a name for herself on the stage and in 20 films before their first one together, but their coupling created an image so iconic they are still known all over the world.

Roasted Ginger Shrimp in Remoulade Sauce Recipe by The Decadent Diabetic

Ingredients for Shrimp Preparation

10 RAW shrimp (16-21 size) pealed and cleaned

½ tsp. ground ginger

1 TBSP. canola oil

1 tsp. soy sauce

Ingredients for Dipping Sauce:

½ cup Mayonnaise with olive oil

1 tsp. – Dijon mustard

1 tsp. coarse grained mustard

1 tsp. white wine or cider vinegar

Directions

Preheat oven to 425° F.

Combine shrimp, ginger, oil, and soy sauce. Roast in the oven for 5-6 minutes. Allow to cool.

Mix mayonnaise, mustards and vinegar together until smooth. Place into a small dish and surround with the shrimp.

Servings: 2

Carbohydrates: 3 grams per serving

When Chef Ward Alper was first diagnosed with type 2 diabetes he thought it was the end of eating as he knew it.  For the first weeks Chef Ward says he faced a tin of tuna or a slab of meat and a salad and got bored very fast. He left the table unhappy and unsatisfied. Then it dawned on him that there were plenty of foods out there that he could still eat, and even more to be created, his eyes, and his world, opened up and he came up with the motto – “Take back my life and my table”. Chef Ward has been working in the restaurant kitchen since he was 8 years old. He shares recipes and more at his blog, The Decadent Diabetic, encouraging fellow ‘divabetics’ to expand their choices.

Our ‘divabetic’ entertaining inspiration, Ginger Rogers starred with Fred Astaire in the 1935 musical, “Roberta”. It was an adaptation of a 1933 Broadway musical of the same name, which in turn was based on the novel Gowns by Roberta by Alice Duer Miller.

The film’s famous songs included “Yesterdays“, “Let’s Begin” (with altered lyrics), and “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes“, “I’ll Be Hard to Handle“, “I Won’t Dance” and “Lovely to Look At”