What did you Eat Today?

The last two posts have been heavy going. This one is about real food, it should be interesting in a different way.

I've been eating a low-carbohydrate diet for perhaps 18 months now. I'm getting better at not falling into the little traps like eating too much fruit, or going to a dance and eating sandwiches, because that's what people usually offer as healthy food. One of the things that's quite surprising, is that cakes and really sweet foods don't have any appeal. Unless you eat one. So take the easy route to success, don't eat even ONE.

One of my early discoveries was the power of a single water biscuit. I can eat up to 50gm of carbohydrate a day. A single water biscuit looks innocent, it contains 3gm of carbs. What harm is there? But that biscuit leaves a taste in the mouth. You want a second and a third. Soon you are binge eating again. Don't do it. Try one quarter of an apple instead. Or better still a single sardine. Just the sardine on it's own, with a little of the oil. You'll feel satisfied and there is no craving that follows.

Typical Breakfast

This is a typical breakfast in our home. Egg, a little bacon, lambs hearts today, but usually some offal meat, and a vegetable, today it's tomato. Followed by tea or coffee. It actually takes very little time to prepare, maybe 10 minutes.

For 25 years (1987 to 2012) we ate home-made muesli and fruit, with low fat milk. There would be a single slice of toast, with margarine, and some peanut butter for me. We thought that was healthy. The toast was removed 10 years ago (2012), when we realised that bread in the diet made us fatter.

I always go past the offal meats in the supermarket. I love liver, or chicken livers and kidneys. Hearts are fine. Beef bones or bacon hocks are a special treat. Offal meats are very dense in nutrition, and contain all the vitamins and minerals that are lacking from the diet of most modern people. So there is a double bonus here. Offal meats are cheap, and the food value is superior.

Don't forget to look for fish offal too. Fish heads and carcasses and fish roe are all delicious.

I think there is a place here for a return of the local butcher. Someone who can give you full fat meat, at a sensible price. If you are Banting, the thing you need most is more fat. We pay extra at the butchers for them to cut the fat off the meat. I want the fat left on, and the price to come down. I imagine buying breakfast chops with lots of wonderful fat, and not paying through the nose for them.

Saturated Coffee - No Craving for Food

Nut and Seed Crackers, Home-made

There's never any need for morning tea. Really there is no need for lunch either, except that it's a habit. So for lunch I eat two of our nut crackers with butter, a lump of cheese, and usually two sardines. If I'm lucky, I can replace the sardines with three muscles.

If we're busy, lunch is often about 2pm, and sometimes it doesn't happen at all. A cup of saturated coffee is a treat, if I'm ever feeling hungry.

I purchased the book, The Real Meal Revolution, as soon as the international edition became available in 2015. There is now a new 2016 edition available. As we've become more familiar with the Banting Diet we are using that book more and more for the excellent recipes it contains.

Here is a list of our favorites:
Nutty Crackers from page 74.
Spicy Bacon nuts from page 84, but that's expensive.
Kale with sliced Chorizo sausage and eggs from page 96.
Nut Granola from page 114.
Beef and Cauli-mash Cottage Pie from page 132.
Not-Butter Chicken from page 162.
Creamy Butter Chicken Curry from page 164.

Anyway, that's how the day goes. There is no supper, but if I work late, after midnight, I'll often eat a couple of those nut crackers. I don't like to drink coffee so late.

Chicken Casserole and lots of Silver Beet from our garden

This diet does cost more. The question is can you do it on $10 per person per day? I'm not sure. But for many people that's an important question. That's why I buy muscles in the shell and steam them myself. They cost $4 a kilogram in the shell and you get about 530gm of cooked muscle for that. That's lunch for three days.

I'm not the cook in our house, and I've never previously filleted a fish, but recently I did. I purchased a trevally weighing 2kg for less that $8. I did manage to get two large fillets off the carcass without making too much of a mess of it. One fillet I ate that night. I pan fried it in butter. I was very pleased.

Whole Fish purchase - Cost cutting

Then I realised I had a large fish head and a carcass. Fish soup. So the following day I made a fish soup stock, and later in the day I converted that into fish soup, adding some muscles, the other fish fillet and lots of vegetables to the stock. It tastes wonderful. I made four 1 litre tubs of fish soup, about four servings in a tub. This was a very successful experiment. I will certainly do that again.

John Stephen Veitch
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