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. 😉