keto fajitas

I fried up some shrimp, skirt steak, and peppers, and I made some keto tortillas. I brought along the last of my chimichurri and offered up the spread to the rest of the crew as a way to get rid of my leftovers from last week's chili. 

The keto-tortilla recipe still holds up. Good enough for government work. The recipe makes four small, 50-gram tortillas or three larger, 67-gram ones. Despite being made with almond flour, the tortillas contain enough xanthan gum in them to keep them flexible. It's bizarre watching them cook on the skillet: the almond flour turns white just as masa does when you're making corn tortillas. Crazy. One major difference, though, is that masa puffs and bubbles up a lot whereas the keto mixture bubbles only the tiniest bit.

My coworker brought his own food even though I'd told him today was another luncheon day, so he shared some of his food from home with me:

Rice is not very keto, I know.

If the guacamole looks a bit rough, it's probably because of how I stored it. The guac was in a container with a lot of leftover room, so there was a good bit of oxidation. It tastes just fine, but it looks as if it just got out of prison.

No strips of pan-fried onion because fuck onions.

The peppers were a combination of sweet red bell pepper (called paprika on the Korean package*) and mild Korean chili pepper since my grocery was out of regular green bell peppers. I stir-fried the thin slices quickly in my pan because I'm always paranoid about smoke and fire alarms. Barely 60 seconds' worth of stir-frying was enough to get the peppers to that perfect consistency: still crunchy but a little seared and softened.

The meat, when I finished pan-frying it, smelled awesome thanks to a fairly standard combination of spices and seasonings: chipotle, garlic powder, salt, pepper, oregano, harissa, cumin, and dried onion flakes. Both the shrimp and the beef were seasoned the same way, and everything went well with my chimichurri, which I've come to think of as God's steak sauce.

Below is my boss's plate. He was bizarrely proud of his plating skills, so he wanted me to take this picture just to show off his food:

There's barely enough left over from today's lunch for me to eat all the rest of the leftovers as a modest dinner. I'll have to use regular tortillas for that meal (I ate all my keto ones), but sometimes, sacrifices must be made.

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*Is the powder that Americans call paprika made from regular old red bell peppers? Well, different sources say different things. Wikipedia says paprika comes from long, mild red peppers called Capsicum annuum. Other sources say paprika is one name for a bell pepper, and Capsicum annuum is actually an omnibus label for several subspecies of pepper that vary in shape and spiciness but all fall under the same species.