I’m getting spoiled. For the past several weeks, with the exception of when I was out of town, my almost-12yo has brought me breakfast in bed on Saturday mornings. (*Note to parents of girls: He’ll be available for marriage in just another decade or so! 😉 )

Seriously, though, he’s a keeper. Since I seldom eat bread products anymore, my breakfasts are usually protein-oriented. His favorite breakfast creation is what he dubs “The Inside of a Hot Pocket,” where he tears up a few slices of ham or turkey lunch meat, adds some shredded cheese, microwaves it until it’s hot & melted and serves it with a fork. It’s like a ham & cheese Hot Pocket without the pocket! 🙂

Last Saturday, he brought me a leftover grilled hamburger patty topped with melted Colby Jack shreds. It might not have been my first choice in breakfast meats, but the intention was so thoughtful, on his part.

Next, I just need to teach him how to make coffee so that I can enjoy my luxurious breakfasts with something other than a glass of ice water. 😉  Teeheehee

Wednesdays are crazy. Kidzone (our kids’ church activities) begins at 6pm, which means there is barely a half-hour to get home, eat dinner and go. Did I mention that Wednesdays are insane? All of the boys enjoy helping out in the kitchen, but the older two have taken a particular liking to cooking, and I have let them help more & more over the past year. They’ve proven themselves pretty well with basic cooking techniques, safety, etc. (we’re still working on the clean-up part!) that I thought I’d experiment a bit this semester and give them some more freedom in the kitchen.

Wednesdays are now their day to fix dinner. We plan ahead (usually a week at a time, posted on a white board on the fridge but subject to change), so I know what they are planning to cook. We started last week with a very simple soup dinner. Open the cans, add water, microwave = viola! It was a big hit, especially with No. 5 who is limited to mush right now. For today, they decided to fix a breakfast supper. No. 1 was in charge of toasting waffles, and No. 2 fried up some eggs. One slightly burned fingertip later from getting too close to the skillet, but they managed to present a very yummy dinner that their three younger brothers raved about.

Even with the burned finger, I was proud of him for knowing exactly what to do. He ran it under cold water, then put an ice pack on it. I had to finish his eggs, which dug into our limited time, but it all worked out ok. I was pleased that I could trust them to get dinner started, at least. They are good lil’ chefs-in-the-making, and I look forward to planning more meals with them in the weeks to come!

As a low-carber, I am leery of sauces. Even the savory ones tend to be chock-full of sugar. When it comes to bbq and other meat dishes, then, I like to use dry seasonings. Dry seasonings are flavorful and have nominal (if any) carbs.

For bbq, I like to use either a pre-mixed bbq seasoning blend or just good ol’ salt & pepper. We had burgers on the grill for dinner last night, and one of my sous chefs (the 10yo) wanted to help, so I let him salt & pepper the patties after I put them on the grill. One of the patties got way too much salt, so we had a little lesson in proper sprinkling technique. 😉

One of my favorite meat dishes is wings. I love — nay, LOVE!! — wings. I especially love lemon pepper and traditional “medium” flavor wings. Wing sauce is another tricky purchase, because some brands have a lot of sugar. I just read the labels. I haven’t been able to duplicate Wingstop’s fantabulous lemon pepper wings yet, but each attempt is a little better than the one before.

I’m not quite a grill meister yet, but I am enjoying the learning process (ie, the eating part!). We have had 43 consecutive triple-digit days in Central Texas — not exactly the kind of record we’re keen on breaking, but we did it, nonetheless. Sweltering Texas summers are all the more reason not to turn on the oven!

Tonight’s dinner was grilled hamburgers, and I’ll chalk it up as a success, considering that the rave review was “Omigoshthisissogood!” I grilled asparagus last week (in a veggie basket, though a couple of pieces still fell through), and it was yummy. Besides the actual grill, I’m also learning how to use the smoker. Talk about yummy! I’ve fixed ribs, chicken leg quarters and a whole chicken that turned out delicious.

The bonus about grilling is that it requires rather constant attention, which means that Mom gets a few minutes of peace & quiet on the back porch while the boys refrain from killing each other play sweetly inside the house. 😉

P.S. I de-carbed my burger by eating two patties sans bread with blue cheese crumbles and picante sauce. Yum!

My No. 2 monkey boy is a big fan of pie. He claims that it is his favorite food. The other day, he took a poll of his brothers to find out what their favorite kind of pie is. Nos. 3,4 & 5 answered simultaneously, so I don’t remember who said what, but I recall hearing buttermilk, apple and chocolate. No. 1 acted all tweenager/aloof and didn’t answer the question, so No. 2 asked him directly:

“What’s your favorite kind of pie?”

“Pizza. Pizza pie.”

Spoken like a tween, indeed!

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!

I had just opened a new bottle of wine (White Oak 2006 Cabernet Sauvignon, in case you’re curious) last night to sip (from a glass, not the bottle – LOL) while I was fixing dinner, and my 11-1/2-year old Alton Brown, Jr. wannabe came into the kitchen to see what I was cooking.

Ever since he was old enough to start dreaming about what he wants to be when he grows up, he’s said that he wants to be a scientist, but like all of the boys, he also enjoys helping around the kitchen and cooking (not as much as he enjoys eating, but I digress). The Food Network is almost as popular in my house as Cartoon Network.

Anyway, he asked to smell my wine, so I held the bottle out for him to sniff. He got within about two inches of it, wrinkled his nose and waved his hand in front of his face as he backed away. This kiddo has a keen sense of smell (even if he did insult my wine 🙂 ); in fact, he got himself in trouble a while back for saying, “I don’t like this” as soon as he sat down at the table, even before he tasted it. Granted, he still had to try whatever it was that he didn’t think smelled so good, and he quickly learned his lesson not to be rude at dinner.

So, I went back to sipping my wine and stirring the food (I’m coordinated like that, ya know) while he stood there and watched. Then, out of the blue, he said, “I don’t want to be a scientist anymore. I want to be a chef.”

I quickly thought to myself that this could be one of those make-or-break conversations that he remembers for the rest of his life. Would I dare discourage his culinary dreams for fear that he might end up flipping burgers at a fast food joint? I told him that I thought being a chef was a great idea; in fact, he could train well and get his own show on the Food Network so that I could retire, and he could support me. That made him laugh. I suggested that he might consider a double-major: chemistry and nutrition sciences. I told him that way, he would know the science behind the cooking — like Alton Brown! — but he’d still learn all the basics that he would need to become a chef. I did bring up the prospect of gainful employment, too, and I told him that it would be wise to study more than one limited area, so that he could always find a job in chemistry (teaching or in a lab doing research, etc.) if there weren’t any chef jobs open.

He latched onto that idea and started telling me about careers that he’d heard of (“Did you know that people get PAID to taste-test new foods?!?”). I am hopeful that our brief kitchen conversation helped to fertilize the seed in his mind about being a chef but also helped him branch out and consider more options. After all, there’s only one Alton Brown, but he’ll need a successor when he retires. 😉

Sausage can be tricky for low-carbers, because there are so many varieties from which to choose. Breakfast sausage (the kind you buy in the tube and cut into patties) tends to be nominal carbs, if any. Link sausage, on the other hand, varies dramatically. It can be very low (I look for labels that specify gluten-free, because that usually means no/little fillers), but it can also be very high. You just have to read the labels.

One of my favorite sausages — even before I went low-carb — is summer sausage. Like link sausage, you need to check the label, but most of the time, it is very low in carbs. I love it because it is so versatile. I have summer sausage and cheese for dinner at least once a week, particularly if I’m fixing something for the boys that isn’t easily adaptable (like pot pies, etc.). Usually, I can take ingredients from their dinner (like the spaghetti/meat sauce sans noodles) and modify it to make something for myself, but in a pinch, summer sausage and cheese is nomnomnom for a quick & easy dinner.

Since we’ve hit 21 straight days of triple-digit temps here in Central Texas, I thought that a feature on “summer” sausage would be appropriate. 😉 Enjoy!