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.

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.

Kangaroo, potato and apple stew

This was originally intended to be a pork, potato and apple stew. This was inspired from a recipe I saw on an app in my iPad (I'll try to find out what it was). In all honesty, pork would have been much better. When the apple is cooked, it has a similar texture to the potato (pomme d'terre ring a bell?) and takes on the flavour of the meat while retaining some of its own flavour, which goes into the broth and serves the same function as vinegar in enhancing the meat's flavour.

Kangaroo Burger

It never occurred to me until now that I could eat a normal sized burger and not be hungry afterwards. That is until I realised that kangaroo burger patties are small anyway and only need a small bun (not those large hamburger style buns where you tend to find that there is way too much bread for the meat and you have to use far more sauce for everything to be not too dry). By making the bun smaller, I had enough calories to add a side of vegetables and stay within my 400 calorie range.

Burger rice stack

After perusing many recipes of "stacks," I wished to create my own version that was low fat and did not involve bread. This resulted. The only problem that resulted was that it crumbled apart the moment I commenced eating it...

For those of you who wanted to know how I moulded the rice: I simply pressed the rice that was cooked according to instructions into a small bowl. After a few minutes (or seconds), I upended the bowl onto the plate like you would with a freshly baked cake.

Low carb Meat Stew

This is basically a beef and potato stew with kangaroo and swede as low carb substitutes. I used one of those kangaroo roasts (which was annoying because it had all those cords holding it together in to a roast shape. What a pity) with the beef stock and fried onions, and stuck it all in a slow cooker for 8 hours. The result was just as filling as the beef and potato counterpart at a fraction of the calories. Gram for gram, swede is almost half the calories of potato and tastes almost the same, especially when both potato and swede are already so heavily flavoured with the meat of the stew. Kangaroo is also one of the most lean meats available. It is as lean as chicken breast and a million times more flavoursome.