Potato and egg salad

Components:

• potatoes that I diced, parboiled and fried with spices and oil
• two fried eggs
• pickled onions
• premade salad
• balsamic vinegar

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.

Easy Minestrone

This is the easiest minestrone dish I have ever seen or made. It involves boiling celery, onion, canned tomatoes and diced carrots in stock, then adding easy mac, waiting for that to cook, and finally adding baked beans. This is served with a side of slim noodles fried with leftover onion. This meal great value for calories and delicious.

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.

Pizza omelette

Pizza is without a doubt one of my favourite foods ever. I can turn my nose up at most savoury snacks – chips of every description, nuts, dips. However, the smell of hot mozzarella on freshly baked bread is one of those things that can make the most strict of dieters go weak at the knees with hunger. This is why we do low carb versions of our favourite foods. Here, I am using my microwave omelette maker. All you need to do is beat 3 eggs, pour the mixture into each half, and microwave for 2 minutes. Then you add the toppings (in my case it was cheese, onion, pasta sauce and bottled capsicum), then microwave for another 2 minutes. You can make the omelette fluffier by beating the egg whites until they become frothy and then folding in the beaten egg yolks. You can also choose to use one of those cartons of egg whites they sell at the supermarket instead. Some of these are flavoured with things like spinach and ricotta.

Easy low carb slim Bolognese

530 calories

Ingredients per person (I made 3 servings)

33 g aged cheddar cheese, the icing on the proverbial cake. It's a bit brittle, but packs a ton of umami into the meal.

1/3 jar organic pasta sauce randomly picked up on special at a chemist (due to being close to its best before date, probably. This seems to be the only way shops like this end up selling stock)

A pack of slim pasta, also from the chemist. It seems one of the staff had been considering buying it because she asked me I it was "any good." If you like slightly jelly-like vermicelli, then yes, its fantastic. And it happens to go rather well with tomato based sauces.

1/3 of an extremely huge almost half kilo  onion from one of those 10 kg bags. Diced with the pivot method and a nice, sharp knife. Fried until caramelised with spray oil.

1/3 diced carrot

300 g premium beef mince formed into a pattie with a little flour to bind and spices

Method: cook everything in a microwave for 10 minutes and serve with noodles

Next time I'm substituting the noodles for long, thin slices of carrot (thin enough to bend)

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.