Cooking

I like food. That’s kind of the problem.

I like big flavors, ridiculous sauces, crispy edges, interesting spices, and dinners that don’t feel like something I’m eating because I’m supposed to. These days, most of what I cook is low-carb and high-protein. I’m trying to lose weight, but I’m not particularly interested in spending that time eating boring food.

So the question became: How do I make the food I actually want to eat work within those goals?

Turns out, that’s a pretty fun problem to solve.

I Didn’t Always Eat This Way

Low-carb cooking definitely isn’t where I started. I like pizza. I like Mexican food. I like pasta, bread, and plenty of other things that don’t exactly cooperate with what I’m trying to accomplish now. I also like making food myself, which means I have years’ worth of pictures of homemade pizzas and other decidedly-not-low-carb experiments to prove it.

There are traditions involved, too. Every October, Margaritas Mexican Restaurant has Two Pound Taco Month, which is exactly the sort of completely unnecessary annual food event I can get behind. Eating differently now doesn’t somehow erase the fact that I enjoy that stuff—or mean I’m never going to eat it again.

The point of going low-carb, for me, isn’t to pretend those foods suddenly stopped being good. It’s figuring out what I liked about them in the first place: the seasoning, the richness, the textures, the sauces, the ridiculous combinations, and bringing as much of that as possible into the way I cook now.

I’m not trying to learn how to tolerate diet food. I’m trying to learn how to make the food I love work better for me.

Low Carb Doesn’t Have to Mean Boring

A piece of grilled chicken and some steamed broccoli technically checks a lot of boxes. It also makes me sad just thinking about eating it every night.

So I’ve been experimenting with Mediterranean, Thai, Cajun, Mexican and Asian-inspired dishes, along with seafood, burgers, wings, homemade seasoning blends, cream sauces and whatever else sounds good. Sometimes that means replacing an ingredient, sometimes it means changing the proportions, and sometimes the original dish was already pretty close.

The goal isn’t to reproduce a high-carb dish perfectly. The goal is to make something I’d genuinely want to eat again.

A Lot of This Is Experimentation

I don’t have culinary training. I have a kitchen, an increasingly absurd collection of spices, a willingness to experiment, and apparently no objection to turning dinner into a small engineering project.

Recipes tend to evolve while I’m making them. I’ll change the seasoning, add something that wasn’t in the original plan, decide the sauce needs more acidity, measure what actually went into the pan, weigh the finished portions, and figure out the macros afterward. If it works, I want to remember exactly what I did. That’s what this section of the site is for.

What You’ll Find Here

🍳 Recipes

The meals that worked well enough that I actually want to remember how I made them.

🌶️ Seasonings

Homemade blends, spice combinations and the flavors that eventually earn a permanent bottle in the cabinet.

📊 Macros

What actually went into the meal, what I actually ate, and a realistic estimate of the nutritional numbers.

Most of it will be low-carb. A lot of it will be high-protein. Some of it will be keto-friendly.

But that’s not really the test for whether something belongs here. The test is much simpler: Was it good? If the answer is yes, I’ll document it.

If the plate gets licked clean, it probably gets a post.

Latest From the Kitchen

Recipes, experiments and things that turned out considerably better than they had any right to.

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