Pizza toast

I was craving pizza and just happened to get all the pizza toppings together except for actual pizza base. This is bread slices spread with tomato paste, topped with bacon etc and sprinkled with cheese.

A good old fashioned fry up

There are few things better than fried sausages, bacon and tomatoes. It was probably on this basis that the Atkins Diet became so popular. Lots of protein makes you feel full very quickly and gives you the macronutrients you need to build muscle. In my case I used kanga bangas and shortcut bacon. That's about as low fat as you can get as well as being low carb and high protein. Yes, I am starting to hear voices of people telling me, "no, good fats are good for you, why are you trying to avoid them?" But the fact is that this food is fried in oil. And no particular macronutrient provides the silver bullet to weight loss, whether it's protein, fat or carbohydrates.

Grill'd Bunless Burgers

At Grill'd, there's a bunless option. It sounds like bad value 'cause you're paying the same price and not getting the bun. However, it turns out the bunless option is just as filling as with the bread (especially if you also want chips), since the bun is not a filling component of the meal anyway.

This is the bacon and cheese burger. The great thing about having the sauce on the side instead of inside a sandwich is that you can have as much or as little as you want (and it's a LOT of sauce, but having worked in a fast food restaurant myself I know they actually put that amount in the burgers!! This is especially a concern with a high fat sauce like aioli).

The zucchini chips sound like a good alternative to potato, but with the batter they put on the zucchini, they are actually almost as high in kilojoules as their potato counterparts and don't even taste as good (waaaay to salty, and kind of slimy tasting if the batter falls off).

In conclusion, even though restaurant bun-free burgers are better than I expected, the ones I made at home were just as good. I have mayonnaise, mustard, ketchup etc at home that need to be used up too!

Bread free hamburger

I wanted to make a low carb version of one of my favourite meals: The hamburger. This is one of my attempts, accompanied by oven baked potatoes (which I unfortunately left in the oven for too long without oil, which meant overly dry though slightly crispy potatoes and a ruined baking pan). The egg and burger pattie were both cooked in the microwave. You could say I was trying to make this low in fat, but really my aim was to reduce the calories by as much as possible (since fat as the highest density of calories).

This is a high fat version I created for my dad and brother while I stayed in Bateman's Bay. The bacon is streaky and has been fried to a crisp on the stove, as has the egg and pattie. The whole thing is covered in wholesome seedy mustard.

Somehow everything tastes better when fried in cold pressed extra virgin olive oil. Maybe I should compromise and have this instead of wasting my time with eating low fat things 3/4 of the time and chocolate 1/4 of time.

Waffles and bacon

Americans love adding waffles and bacon to everything. In fact, the only things missing from here are maple syrup and peanut butter, or perhaps maple syrup flavoured peanut butter. Or maple-flavoured bacon. In any case, these are Nanna's waffles, which are the lowest carb brand of waffles available (each waffle being something like 40 calories). They are extremely easy to prepare (I either toast them or heat them in the microwave, it depends on wether I want crunchy or pancake-soft).

Salad with crispy bacon mustard dressing

Since I happened to have bacon, mustard, garlic, vinegar and French dressing, "Supercook," a website that collates various recipes from various websites based on ingredients used, showed me the recipe for this dressing. It was rather amazing and I needed suprisingly little to flavour the salad.

A simple leftovers meal

In order to save time, I made these bacon and egg cups by filling a muffin tin with bacon, cracking and egg into each one, and baking. I am serving one of my bacon and egg cups with a small tin of beetroot and some leftover gluten free spinach gnocchi.

This is another meal from yesterday that uses the bacon and egg cups. Only in this case, I have smeared Kraft cheese spread on top of the bacon and egg cups and used rice that I precooked a stored away in the freezer for later use.

Hamburger Donburi

Yet again, I felt like burger with rice as a substitute for bread. The only thing that's missing here is the mayonnaise, but I figured that enough flavour came from everything else.