5 days' food

I made a meal calendar, and this week, except for Tuesday, it's American breakfast! I'm varying between pancakes and waffles, with an array of different keto "syrups" to make things slightly more entertaining. I made a double batch of pancakes, but I'll have to make the waffles in the morning. The pancake recipe was new to me, but it tastes better than the one I'd been using previously. I did have to thin out the batter by adding more milk, but the neat thing was that each pancake, when flipped, had a very minimal splatter pattern. I'd had bad luck on that score with the previous batter, and I've suffered from batter splatter with certain "normal" batters as well. This was the first batter to behave itself during the flipping process; I might want to tweak it a bit more—maybe add more butter.

As per my earlier threat, I did indeed also cook up some sausage, bacon, and eggs. There's American cheese at the office, and I can add that if I want. The breakfast-sausage recipe calls for brown sugar; I have brown-sugar Swerve (mostly erythritol), so I was able to keep the sausage patties keto. I was also able to use my newly purchased patty press to make modest little 90-gram rounds. I can now see that the press will be too small for actual hamburger patties: they'll shrink to the size of sliders. If there's one intolerable sin in the burger world, it's having a beef patty that's smaller than the bun. 

Amurrican-style scrambled eggs

They look pretty good.

big ol' pile o' meat: sausage on the bottom, thin and thick-cut bacon on top

pulling back a bit for the wider shot

For years, we've had it beaten into us that dietary fat leads to body fat, but modern experts now say that "low fat" is a misleading label, not to mention a bad priority if you're dieting. The old way insisted that one's diet should be low fat and high carb, which is still suggested by the modern WHO/FAO "food pyramid": it recommends (scroll down to the ridiculous chart) that your diet be 15-30% total fat and 55-75% total carbs. Keto takes the opposite approach, recommending about 70-75% fat, 20-25% protein, and 5% carbs.

True, certain fats can be calorific and unhealthy, especially in combination with carbohydrates, but if you avoid the carbs, you can eat way more dietary fat than originally thought, and it won't clog your arteries. One source memorably talked about the magical thinking involved in the old paradigm: animal and plant fats somehow have to transmogrify into human fat cells in order to clog our blood vessels. How is that even possible? The old idea that Alfredo pasta is a "heart attack on a plate" is true, but not because of the Alfredo sauce: the problem is the pasta. Read Gary Taubes's Why We Get Fat for more on this.*

keto pancake batter before I thinned it out with a bit more milk

the first flip, with minimal splatter

a different pancake, with almost no splatter at all

yet another pancake, again with very little splatter

The stack grows.

Having doubled the recipe, I was able to make eight pancakes. This ladle is the final one.

dinner assembled, but not yet microwaved

By the time I'd made everything, a lot of time had passed, and everything had cooled down, so it was necessary to portion out my dinner—100 g of eggs, 2 sausage patties, 1 strip of thick bacon, 3 strips of thin bacon, and 2 pancakes—then heat everything in my microwave for 3.5 minutes on medium heat (lower heat at a lower temp for a longer time allows the heat to diffuse more thoroughly throughout the food). My keto "syrup" was strawberries with monkfruit sweetener and a teeny bit of "perfected" (lumpless) xanthan gum mixed with butter and spread over a pancake. Here's the "syrup":

Doesn't look very appetizing, but it tasted fine.

after microwaving

a slightly better shot

The strawberries have their own natural sugars, but the carbs are somewhat neutralized by the strawberries' inherent fiber. This is what "net carbs" are all about: total carbs minus fiber. Fiber is a carb, but it's not digested or metabolized: it passes through the system without breaking down into sugar, ideally cleaning your pipes on its way out. Fiber counts as part of your total carbs, so a lot of people subtract it and look at the net-carb figure when calculating their carb budget for the day.

I won't get bored of a week's worth of American breakfast (Monday, then Wednesday through Saturday) even if it's keto. Next week, I'll be sure to prep my meals Friday evening or on Saturday: doing it on Sunday is a bit stressful. This week, I've packed most of my breakfast-for-lunch elements into two large, plastic containers; the "syrups" will be packed in separate little bottles or snap-top boxes.

So let's go have a week. Expect waffle photos in the morning.

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*As a point of comparison, note that 100 g of wheat flour has about 61 grams of net carbs, whereas 100 g of almond flour has about 18 grams of carbs. I used 200 g of almond flour to make eight pancakes; I'll use another 200 g in the morning to make my waffles. A batch of pancakes made from 200 g of almond flour has a total of 36 g of carbs; divided by 8, that's 4.5 g of carbs per pancake, or 9 g of carbs per meal. With, say, 2 tablespoons of strawberries for "syrup," that's another 5 g of carbs. The meats don't add more than a further gram or two of carbs. So most of my carbs will actually come from the smoothie I have for breakfast. That smoothie is very carby, and it'll push me well over the 20-gram carb limit for strict keto, but recall that I'm on the Newcastle diet, not the full-blown keto diet, and it's more about eating healthily while also trying to keep my daily calorie count below 800. I think my breakfast technically takes me over the 800-calorie limit (almond flour has 1.5 to 2 times the calories of wheat flour!), but I'll be walking later in the day, so the math works out.