Sometimes when I’m meeting friends for lunch, they’ll ask: “Where can you eat?” I appreciate their thoughtfulness about my low-carb eating habits, but the truth is that I can eat just about anywhere. It’s actually not too difficult to de-carb menu items at restaurants. Here are some quick & easy tricks for eating out and modifying meals at home. After all, I’m already cooking for five monkey boys; I don’t have time to make a separate dinner for myself!

The first trick is simply to axe the bread. For example, I fixed hamburgers on the grill tonight for dinner. Ground beef is exceptionally low-carb (as in, zero, unless you add fillers for bonding, which I didn’t). Instead of putting my burger on a bun, I tore it into chunks and tossed it with some green leaf lettuce, shredded cheese & picante sauce. It was scrumptious, and I didn’t feel like I missed out on anything!

I happen to like salads, anyway, so that’s a fairly sensible choice for me whenever I eat out. I just axe the croutons and tomatoes. I don’t dislike tomatoes, but they’re aren’t a gotta-have food for me, and they are naturally pretty high in sugar, so I cut them. Ironically, picante sauce is pretty low in carbs. Ketchup, on the other hand, is loaded with high fructose corn syrup and is a low-carber’s disaster zone. Picante sauce makes a great salad dressing substitute, if there aren’t any low-carb options on the menu. It adds a real kick to the salad and just enough moisture without making the salad soggy.

Whether you are interested in low-carb or not, I encourage you to try the picante sauce substitute for either salad dressing or ketchup. Let me know what you think!