hard to believe this is keto

I'm sure the pics below don't look like anything more than a hot mess, so let me break them down for you. I recently saw a video on how to make keto fried chicken, and I immediately saw applications to fish and shrimp. If you look carefully at the first image below, you might initially think it's just a jumbled lump of nothing, but look closer—you'll see it's divided into big lumps on the right and smaller lumps on the left: fish (R) and shrimp (L).

Our building's grocery store recently underwent a few days' renovation, meaning it was frustratingly closed for much of the week about two weeks ago. When it opened back up, some of the shelves were higher and stacked closer together, and much of the frontal space that had been taken up by cash registers was now open, and most of the checkout devices were now of the self-service sort, with only one staff-manned cash register left for the really old-school people. With the expansion of navigable space came an expansion in the variety of stocked items: more types of cheeses, for example (including, incredibly, a French mimolette that I haven't seen in years). Unfortunately, other items suffered, and there is now less of a variety of those things. Relevant to me and to this story is whitefish: no more cod fillets, just wimpy little, off-white flounder filets (flounder = 가자미/gajami) that don't taste like much even after seasoning. Also: no more large, tailless frozen shrimp. Oh, there's tailless shrimp, but it's all popcorn-sized, and that's what you see below. I want my big shrimp back.

The breading process came courtesy of that video on keto fried chicken. I couldn't use flour, of course; the recipe called for whey protein, baking powder, and salt; I added some egg-yolk and egg-white powder, plus some "pork panko" (fine-ground pork rind) and Old Bay. Shrimp and flounder don't take long to fry up, which is fortunate because the breading (I also had to make a homemade buttermilk bath) browned very quickly in the hot oil. The lady in the video comparatively tested several types of breading, with this one yielding the best results for large pieces of chicken. This was my first time using keto breading, so everything came out looking rough, lumpy, and indistinguishable from everything else. But the taste isn't half bad. It's missing the satisfyingly bready taste and texture of regular batter, but I'll use this recipe again, maybe on some fried clams (the local Costco does, in fact, sell large packages of littlenecks).

I made a dipping sauce from avocado mayo, sour cream, milk, dill, garlic powder, onion powder, and a teeny bit of harissa powder; that was a good counterpoint to the fried food. In all, this was a most imperfect dish, but a good start. I'll try this a few more times and get everything right, so it could be that future photos of the food will look better.

shrimp and flounder

another angle, but no better looking

dipping sauce, front and center

I also tried my hand at jicama fries to use up my leftover jicama:

baked jicama fries, with Old Bay seasoning, looking greasy

flaccid

I'd had high hopes for the jicama fries, but even after some severe baking of one batch, and severe deep-frying of another, the fries came out generally limp, lackluster, and soggy. I guess jicama retains a lot of its water, and its fibrous nature makes it stubborn about giving the water up. At some point, I'm going to try making jicama "apple" pie again, without lemon juice given what happened last time, but aside from that, I won't use jicama for much else other than as a raw, crunchy component in a fresh salad. 

Jicama tastes pretty good when raw, and once you get past the peeling of the tough skin, the entirety of its flesh is edible. There's no core, and there are no seeds. It's a root, like a carrot. As people say: it's like a fibrous cross between a potato and an apple. When I boiled my chopped jicama to make it into fries, I saw there was absolutely no starch buildup as would happen with potatoes, which must be why the keto crowd has taken to this low-carb vegetable. My conclusion, from the limited experiments I've done, is to mess with the root as little as possible, i.e., go paleo with it. Like sex: best when raw.