food prep

Mike's arriving Saturday afternoon, and I'll meet him at the airport to guide him to my place. He'll be tired from his trip, and I'm going to see whether he might be interested in eating my weird hybrid of gyros and shawarma. I've had a keto version of American breakfast ready to go for a while (exclusively for me; I'm not forcing this on anyone); below are pics of the unwontedly tasty, low-carb almond-flour pancakes. No bacon or homemade sausage or keto strawberry jelly pictured:

samples, eaten

I'd made a batch of pancakes before this one, but a misprint in the recipe led me, idiot that I am, to add way too much salt to the mix, resulting in some lip-puckeringly bad pancakes. (David, who was a guinea pig for both patches, mentioned the lip pucker as a reaction to the first batch. I sadly agreed. It was horrifically bad. We also agreed the second batch was good—quite good—even for non-keto people.)

Below: material for keto shawarma-gyros. Cottage cheese (minus the liquid found in US cottage cheeses), pickled cucumbers, pan-fried eggplant with lamb seasoning; homemade tzatziki using the rest of Charles's cuke and his Greek yogurt; the rest of Charles's tomatoes (which got used beforehand for a salad the other day; I need to buy more); and a lamb-beef combination (home-ground beef) with that same lamb seasoning.

Closeup:

Maters:

Eggplant:

Tzatziki:

Cukes:

Cottage cheese:

I didn't have any feta, so I seasoned up the cottage cheese with some leftover Middle Eastern-style seasoning. It tasted nothing like feta but was good on its own terms. I may buy some feta tonight just to be sure to have something legit to stick inside the flatbreads.

Ah, yes: I have some keto flatbreads in the office fridge, but I need to make both regular and keto flatbreads for this weekend. To eat on Saturday, I'm fasting today and Friday. Like last week, another trade-off.

Looks like eggs or popcorn.

More food pics are pending once the food is ready to serve. I especially regret not having pics of the sausage and bacon, both of which came out nicely. (David tested the sausage, too, and liked it. He didn't have a chance to test the keto strawberry jelly.)