today's meal

Let me take you through today's linner—lunch and dinner. It was hot dogs with "carnivore" buns plus two salads bought from my basement grocery. I also had a strawberry yogurt and, mea culpa, a couple mouthfuls of Nutella. Yes, I went off the chain.

I made the hot-dog buns using the little bun pans I had bought long ago. The carnivore-bread recipe I used is the same one I've used before (see here for recipe); it's extremely simple, but one of the ingredients—heavy-cream powder—is a bit esoteric for me. I hadn't even heard of such a powder until a few months ago. There are other, similar powders, too: "regular" milk powder, goat's-milk powder, butter powder, etc.

The recipe I use calls for only three ingredients: heavy-cream powder, eggs, and baking powder (lead-free if possible). I added a fourth ingredient: cream of tartar, itself another kind of powder. Cream of tartar is incorporated into baked, fluffy dishes (e.g., soufflés) as a way to keep the dishes firm and prevent collapse. I'll save you the suspense and say that the addition of a half-teaspoon of cream of tartar seemed to do nothing to help my carnivore bread, but look at the pics below, and you be the judge.

Here's what one of my little hot-dog pans looks like. It's meant for buns made of real bread. Since I knew how much my eggy mixture would balloon up during baking, I decided to create tiny sarcophagi by doubling up the pans to contain the bread's rise and create geometric—not craggy—buns. The first few pictures show the concept.

one of the tiny pans

mini-sarcophagus

mini-sarcophagus, different angle

I'm reminded of Spock's funerary photon-torpedo housing/coffin in Star Treks II and III.

Not cocaine! Heavy-cream powder, baking powder, and cream of tartar.

uh-oh

Anyone who cooks will tell you that the above picture doesn't show a good thing. If your eggs float in water, they're probably bad. Ideally, eggs should sink in water. I went ahead and cracked mine open anyway, and they smelled and looked okay enough, but I suspect that eating raw dough made from those eggs would not have been a good idea.

the eggy mixture, a.k.a. protobread

I laid out 100 g of the mix into each little pan.

I should've used a piping bag to make everything neater.

There was extra dough, which I decided to bake as well as a separate Brötchen (a roll, but literally a "breadlet").

After 15 minutes from a cold start... dammit, ignore the dirty oven!

sarcophagi, opened, with disappointingly thin buns

The yellow from the eggs makes this vaguely reminiscent of cornbread.

And now, since I have corn extract, I have an idea.

a good one up close

the breadlet

another decent one

cut open and cooling

While the breadlets were all limp upon exiting the oven, as they cooled, they got firmer.

a bit of egg white that betrays the bread's pedigree

dill pickles, chopped into a kind of relish

I know, relishes usually have some liquid in them, but I was fine with the above.

my meal and my Coke Zero

I garnished these hot dogs (pack of six) with sriracha, mustard, and "relish." Sunday's dogs will be chili dogs, and I've got some el-cheapo cheese for that. Instead of a salad, I might also make a tomato soup tomorrow. I bought some passata, and I have plenty of heavy cream.

store-bought salad

The above double salad, a pretty standard serving for me, comes out to about 500 calories, and the few grams of carbs come from the bizarre addition of frosted corn flakes. When I measure my blood sugar a few hours after having such a salad, though, there's no blood-sugar spike. The corn flakes are there for texture and don't add much nutritionally.

Normally, I buy two matching salads so I don't have to worry about conflicting salad dressings when I combine the salads into my large, metal bowl. This time around, though, I had one salad with chicken and "Oriental" dressing, and another salad with mashed Korean sweet squash (called dan hobak in Korean, kabocha in Japanese) and a balsamic dressing. So I chose balsamic this time around and, knowing that a single packet of dressing for two salads would not be enough, I made a few teaspoons of balsamic-vinegar dressing myself: olive-oil base, half that weight in balsamic vinegar, black pepper, garlic, and a wee bit of my dwindling supply of BochaSweet instead of sugar. Stir that up, and while it's not quite an emulsion, it's good enough to toss into the salad. Had I wanted an emulsion, I could have added a pinch of xanthan gum, which is a minimally processed ingredient used to make emulsions (like the "Italian" dressing at the grocery that sits in its bottle and never seems to split).

So—that was the meal that improved my mood and my outlook. 

Looking forward to chili dawgs!