May Meat Up


#41

Battling at work with management and resourcing cuts. This WoE is holding me well through the stress.

Last night I ate a nice steak. Pan fried with a smear of butter as the cut had some nice fat on it. Cattleman’s steak is a cut I can easily cope with. Hot pan and I watch for the browning of the surface and flip. I do like a rare steak these days. In these battle times. With some salt to my personal taste and rain water from the house tank.

For dessert I ate some fat sardines from a can. Surf’n’Turf happened naturally again.

As part of my plan I try to see the sunset each night. The autumn sunsets are beautiful and I ‘bathe’ and do some deep breathing as I take in all the light waves. ( :yum: a bit of local ‘wild game’ in the shot).


#42

For reasons, I lost my comment, oh well, I rewrite it in super short, good for you.

Yesterday was good! A bit over a pound of meat (including the subpar fish. still easy enough to eat), some eggs and dairy, more than usual on a good day but my meat was too lean, they had to help. Wonderful macros, protein is at the minimum (130-140g), fat is around 100g? No food obsession (some baking obsession though, leftover from the weekend, it’s good carnivore biscuit works and I have quark now as I have found it is a good “flour” in them along with some grated cheese but I can’t use much, I don’t like that)… I am pleased.
But want more enjoyable food today. I have green ham again but it is fattier than usual now, I wanted to take a shot when it was raw but forgot. It’s in the oven now, I want crunchy fat layers again! Harder to do with this cut (5% fat in the database. but mine has some decent fat layer on it, definitely way fattier, still not pork chuck level, most probably, anyway, very lean pork with fat layer isn’t the same as marbled meat with fat layers or big veins. I am partial to pork chuck but you know that already), pork shoulder is what shines there, I need to get some soon… I am not afraid of the fattiness anymore as I can trim it and use those pieces when I fry up some leaner pork and it loses much of the fat anyway. If I want to lose it even more, there is the airy fryer. Last time it lost too much there, I will be careful next time.

Nice sunny day again. Still not too hot. We need rain though.


(Karen) #43

Food today smoked salmon omelette some cheddar and buffalo wings and just eatem a small tin of tuna.
Picked up some reduced stuff from lidl today … salmon, hake, sausages and pork fillet oh and more eggs :blush:


#44

Simple day for me. Mostly green ham roast :smiley: It was a bit fatty, yes but it lost lard too… I had some cream but egg whites too… So today was lean and satiating and I ate less than what is normally possible for me. I just stop at some point, still not very satiated but okay and I just am fine afterwards… Great.

More than a pound of pork for today, very little egg and not much dairy either.

No photo of my pork as I was hungry when my food got ready and jumped it. But it was a pretty roast with glorious fat layer on top! Juicy and everything. I enjoyed it. My egg white and cream milk was quite nice too and I have a new coffee that tastes good! Even black but if I have cream, I won’t go without…

I had my biscuits too as I made another batch. They were pretty but I need to learn to make better pics (but what’s new?).

They ended up soft but I didn’t mind much as they tasted very good! Maybe garlic isn’t the best flavor for them… But still good! I just aim for perfection sometimes especially when my food joy is involved. Egg, quark, sour cream and grated Grana Padano, just like yesterday. Lovely stuff, I keep it even in its soft state, it makes carnivore-ish more sustainable. But I still want to make crunchy ones.


(Geoffrey) #45

Six eggs scrambled with a half pound of venison breakfast sausage.


#46

After 2 pretty low-cal carnivore-ish days (I always have tiny extras but really, really little. I don’t even eat the mini strawberries we have in impressive numbers now. numbers, not weight, they are tiny and adorable. Alvaro appreciates this as he eats them all up) I am still okay! It’s so cool, I obviously am interested in cooking and eating but outside of my 2 meals I am mostly fine and even if I am a bit hungry, I don’t go wild at all. Just drink another creamy coffee that doesn’t help with my hunger the slightest but still, makes the waiting more pleasant… I may break my coffee drinking record today but I got this tasty new coffee and the bag of cream has to be consumed… So I postponed my coffee quitting efforts. I am pleased with my eating, let it be enough for now.

[…]
Alvaro says weather forecast promises rain! :slight_smile:
And we had dinner. It’s so different now, he goes to eat dinner and I look at the clock, wow, it’s dinnertime already? I feel nothing but when I start to put my food together after my smallish dinner, I start to feel I need more. But it’s the loveliest informative, not annoying little hunger. Nice.

I couldn’t eat all my lean pork at dinner (I ate all the visible fat for lunch and this cut really don’t have much of the non-visible kind… juicy but super lean) despite using the leftover rabbit sauce. I just took out almost all mushroom as I didn’t want it. So today was lowish meat. I plan some liver+lean pork meatballs tomorrow.

My pre-tracking (just wrote in some big number for cream) shows similar macros to yesterday and Monday. Things go so well. I don’t get huge enjoyment from my lean meat but it’s nice enough and I don’t feel I must eat super tasty meals right now. I got enough food joy lately, I cook and plan future meals and that’s fun… It’s enough.


(Judy Thompson) #47

Nice shopping day today. The restaurant had a special a of sirloin again. They stopped serving steak a couple years ago so it’s nice to see it come back.


Also found two of FrankoBear’s faces while shopping - biltong and halloumi cheese, bought both to try.

We left early this morning for a pedicure appointment so got home before 1 and went right into naptime!


(Karen) #48

Food pics for yesterday


Also had a small bit of cheddar, a small tin of tuna and 4 rsshers of bacon.

Here is how garden looks with blooms coming through and the planting out last couple pf days…looking forward to it continuing to bloom. The Maple is now looking quite lush after two icy winters…


Even the fake flowers around the boa and weeds look nice!
And 1 cheeky face 20240516_082833


#49

Lil Freddy looks like having the time of his life! He probably does especially that his life had nothing else this far :smiley: But it must be good anyway. I am glad he is all well :slight_smile: Baby Buddha or something, with that smile…

I should shot my flowers too, I have a lot. Too bad I can’t show how wonderfully fragrant my pink roses are. They are just the best. My red roses have no smell, they are just pretty.

Sigh. I am not fully pleased. Last night I ate again. I wasn’t really hungry but when my body counts the protein and it’s below 130g at midnight, it’s a serious urge to eat more. So I finished my lean pork with the sauce (how much better it was this time… I often have this at night), ate another slice from the lean pork without sauce (still wonderful), something still was missing so had a bite of cheese… And made me stop here. Still no overeating, I don’t do that with lean pork, not even when I eat a lot of cream (well, 130g. I could go so much higher if I tried… but I don’t need that) but I had a 3MAD with night eating and my protein is too high in average. Maybe I will try a fat fast day on Friday! I plan to do one at some point anyway and Friday sounds good as I run out of my lean pork. Today already will be low fresh meat but I have eggs, cheese, processed meats and some chicken liver (well that’s fresh meat but organ so it’s not in that group for me). I have chicken in the freezer too but I don’t fancy chicken and it boosts my protein intake every time anyway and I fight for the opposite effect. Tentatively. Oh but I may eat a little tinned fish as well, it’s pizza day (for Alvaro. and for me as far as making the dough and baking goes. it’s too much unnecessary work to make one for me too) and 3 cheese pizza isn’t valid, it always must be 4 with blue cheese as one and we don’t have it now so I add the usual tinned fish. With all the sugary sauce, hopefully he can handle it. I only want the pieces. My plan to make some nice sauce for some avalable pure fish and use that is still just a plan but it must be realized as I really don’t want to use this, just get the otherwise good flavor somehow. It has not a ton of sugar but I am against any, it’s too sweet (if one wants to eat the fish alone and of course I do. Alvaro’s pizza is fine for Alvaro, most of the sauce doesn’t even come from the tin) and the amount of sauce itself is excessive. I want fish. With a teeny tiny added sugar free sauce sticking to it. I don’t even like to use it for him, he is against sugar too and if we can avoid it, we should. I am aware a tiny amount probably won’t make a noticeable change in our health, we eat plenty of natural sugars and those are similar, some are the same in the end but I still tend to be intolerant when it comes to added sugar since the day I dropped it ages ago.

OR we need other pizza recipes. I almost always make a fishy one, there is the 4 cheese.pizza but we really rare have blue cheeses… And sometimes he gets a mushroom one, very rarely. We don’t like meat except fish on the pizza, maybe ham. We don’t like sunny side ups on it. We are super choosy. I only liked vegetarian pizza (with fish and ham being a potential exception) and now I don’t like vegs. Hence my avoidance of pizza despite liking crunchy things BUT my pizza is soft and Alvaro’s pizza tastes like flour to me (anyway, it’s eggless. ew). No problem except the stupid tinned fish is ruined. Still very low-carb but I don’t accept I must eat something I don’t want and don’t enjoy just to get the nice flavors in the sauce and the tender fish itself.
So after my biscuit phase I will try to make fish in lovely sauces! Mostly Asian style ones as that style fish is what we normally use as it is the best tasting one. But I will experiment with easier things too.
Fish is tricky. Mom disliked it so I never ate it at home and then I cooked vegetarian for decades… I have no experience. I like tasty fish and it just needs frying. The cheap tasteless one where I enjoy the tender flesh, the ease of its eating (if it’s not super boring) and the variety in my protein options, well that requires work and spices and who knows that. I surely don’t so I start from scratch (and memories about the tinned fish). It’s unavoidable to add some plants but it;s still okay for us as it will be way less than in the tin with the very generous amount of non-fish items and I completely omit the added sugar. It will be much better.
I doubt it’s possible to make something tasty from tasteless fish on carnivore, even spices have their limits but if you have ideas, tell me please. But whatever I do, it will be much better than the tinned stuff, ingredient wise, I mean, our favs are really tasty if we ignore the sugar and I cling to that tastiness level. Buying some better, more expensive fish is easy and even tastier with just salt but that’s not for pizza or fish with sauce and I really like the idea of sauces now. It adds flavor, fat and moist. And variety. I very rarely eat things with sauce and I am sure it would help with some of my meat options. Only the fattier ones are great alone. Stew is meat with sauce too but a rather simple one, even when I add sour cream. But quite fabulous. Too bad the only lean meat it really works well with is rabbit (even there, a fat rabbit is much better). Pork stew recipes may say green ham is fine (it’s either that or pork shoulder. quite odd as the latter has 4-5 times as much fat, green ham is very lean while pork shoulder is super fatty to me) but I disagree, it’s way too lean for a good stew. Added fat just doesn’t help enough, the fat must be in the meat. It’s not BAD with leaner pork, green ham is a great cut even when it’s really lean, not good for frying then but the roasts are juicy and lovely, last time I used less than 2 hours so it wasn’t tender, it had a little bite and it was fun… But lean pork stew isn’t nearly as great and my nostalgic stew memories are filled with lovely, fatty pork. Rabbit is different and IDK how fatty beef shank is (great for stews, I have read and indeed. the one who wrote we must use shank in beef stew and shoulder in pork has my taste. these are all for Hungarian stews, of course, very little water, paprika, optional sour cream for a really thick sauce. sour cream is a vital part in one kind of chicken stew but it can be used for any. at least the meaty ones. we have plenty of vegetarian “stews” though they probably don’t translate to stew in English but we use the same word in Hungarian) but that (beef shank stew) works wonderfully. So the fat level and the greatness don’t have a strong correlation but it’s still a noticeable one, fatty meats tend to work better. I don’t think we need to go as far as pork shoulder though, maybe after trimming… But normal people 1. don’t care about overeating fat like crazy, apparently while I do 2. they eat it with carbs while I eat my stews alone, most of the time (I can use some eggs, sponge cakes if the stew is too rich but if it’s overly fatty, it can’t help enough. not like I don’t LOVE overly fatty… but see point 1. and sometimes I don’t, I have trained myself into loving green ham in bigger amount quite successfully).

Sorry, I didn’t want to get carried away again but I like the topic so of course it happened. I need some new recipes, my current set can’t make carnivore sustainable even for a shorter amount (like 1-2 months) as I noticed. And while there are other reasons to go off, getting bored of my carnivore fare is still common in my case and I just don’t accept that, it’s something that surely can be solved. I need more variety.


(Bean) #50

I bought 35 # of beef trim yesterday from a local butcher. It took me a couple of stops to find one who would work with me. I thought the one with locally raised meat would be more helpful, but they staff the front counter with people who don’t know meat well, and the wanted to charge me steak prices for trim from the grind tub.

The other butcher said, “Sure, let me grab some from the freezer, we do this all the time.” and charged me $1.50 a pound. I am something of a regular customer, so maybe that was a factor. Between that and my $1 a pound chicken skin, ketovoire just got a lot less expensive. I’ll try to remember to snap some pictures at dinner. I’m looking forward to some broiled ribeye trim!


#51

Alas, cheap skin and cheap fat can’t help me out financially (and I don’t need to buy fat except butter, crunchy skin is nice though! never saw chicken skin here but cheap chicken skin isn’t really tasty, sadly. still lovely due to the crunch), I need high protein (that isn’t chicken) and that is a bit pricier. Still fine though. One day I will count the price of a good day… $4, maybe? Surely less when I focus on liver but alas, I can’t do that often, too nutritious :frowning: I do love a well made* chicken liver, I could eat it more often :smiling_face_with_three_hearts:

*I mean when it gets good but frying to oblivion is my thing as well. Today I didn’t go that far as it’s not necessary.

But that’s why I don’t buy things like pork belly or ribs, fresh I mean, smoked it’s a different story. It’s so fatty (the ribs have bones as well) and still WAY pricier than my normal cuts with their lovely amount of precious meat? Nope. (Anyway, it’s way too fatty unless I regularly do fat fast days. My last one was many years ago but I plan one for tomorrow :smiley: Exciting. My normal days are so simple now, I need something to spice it up!)

Today will be eggy with low meat (370g. and maybe 60-70g herring but it’s not sure. okay, not THAT low then but my fresh red meat is about 120g). Hopefully I can pull it out today, my body probably missed protein yesterday, not meat specifically (having meat around has its tempting factor though).

Not so sunny day but no rain this far. But forecast says it will arrive today, stay tomorrow and Saturday when we plan to take a lovely cycling with visiting a nearby castle on a hilltop. This is a nice old ruin that always get some work done on it so it’s not just a ruin anymore and the stones are mostly new but I like it and the view is nice :slight_smile: It’s so close (with a very lovely narrow serpentine between the big town where we will do some shopping, pork chuck is on a great sale, did I say that?) and we kept postponing visiting it again. Of course we did it multiple times since we live here. It was even a stop when we did the “Hungary’s castles in 48 hours” motorbike tour.


#52

Baked beef ribs for two nights. Scrambled eggs at 12 o’clock - sound like something you’d say in a fighter jet.

Work is hard. Days are still summery and that’s not good, we need rain.

Interestingly on Tuesday night I had a 3 hour drive to the city and ate about 200g of air-dried raw beef for the stay-awake chewing, as it was a night drive. I was hungry when I arrived at the destination and my only option was 200g of brie cheese. It tasted great and the morphine sent me to sleep nicely.

Next day I woke with sore feet, plantar fasciitis hobbling sore, aching in my knees, and stiffness in my hands and fingers. So, it looks like I have to work on staying clean (no-cheese) carnivore.


#53

That’s so sad :frowning: Cheese tastes wonderful. Well, the good ones but there are so, so many very different good ones. I LOVE cheese now. I still keep the amount low but I made pizza with 3 different kinds so of course I ate a few morsels and they were amazing…

Thankfully there are many wonderful meat options as well. I couldn’t eat only meat and would miss cheese eventually (I can go for a long while without cheese but I would feel I miss out if I never ate any) but still, at least the remaining options can be quite nice. Still so sad :frowning: I want all the lovely options or at least most of them (I need to miss out of seafood and ruminant meat big time and I am not even often sad about it).

In the end, I had lunch. All the 175g chicken liver (it turned out GREAT! best I ever had and I only used lard and salt, no cream or butter!) and scrambled eggs. And creamy coffees, of course.


(Karen) #54

@FrankoBear i have been over doing the cheese … two nights running i struggled to sleep and am putting it down to the cheddar…too much of :roll_eyes: sometimes i am my own worst enemy!

First meal of the day at 6.15pm! Went dancing this afternoon … had a super time but the motorway part of the journey home has roadworks going on so getting home on a thursday late afternnon/early evening rush hour was just awful. But the reward for keeping cool was a couple of small sirloins followed by tiny bit of cheese, 2 black pudding and 3 slices of topside beef! Nice!

Got my aircon fixed yesterday so the drive was easy… being able to clear the screen of mist is so easy with air con working… the rains finally came today and with it being cooler our hot danced off bodies just created too much of it. Can’t wait to be using it on weekend when it is meant to warm up again … life in the car is once again easy.!

Dancing in Lichfield tomorrow so 8 am looking forward to that already :grinning:


#55

I have restraint (and modest desires), I have a cheesy phase and I eat about 20g cheese a day… I could eat so much more but it’s still nice to have some and I don’t strictly need it… And it’s expensive. Meat is cheaper but meat is cheaper than nearly anything. Well, my meat. And obviously I consider nutrients especially protein, satiation and other things… Who cares how cheap some carbs are if they help me nothing at all and I need to eat the meat in the end anyway? :smiley: But carbs aren’t usually cheap either. It depends though. I like to compare the price of protein sources (I need only protein sources in bigger amounts), well split pea wins (just in that. so boring, I am often bored just to cook it for Alvaro, never liked the stuff) but then come my meats. Wait, there is gluten too. Boring stuff (even when tasty and interesting for some minutes) with impressive macros and super satiating (for its calorie content, not for its protein). But I could only eat meat from these 3 as a regular food, I don’t even need to consider the nutrition value… Meat is just super useful, how could I handle keto without it? (I haven’t even had gluten back then!) Mystery. Lazy me wouldn’t want that time back. Meat makes things sooo much simpler. And I can choose its fat content to some extent… Convenient. And tasty, of course. Nice texture and different for different meats…
But I need to buy it frequently. Oh well. Humans need so much shopping and we do it simpler than most…


#56

My fat fast went well this far. But it’s already 8pm and I feel fine so hopefully it will stay so :slight_smile:
I plan to do one fat fast day every week for the foreseeable future! Finally I have found a way to lower my protein and calorie intake while having a very simple, convenient day now and then, I can almost forget about food for a while… It’s good even financially but that mostly comes with the lower protein intake.
I will bring a photo later if any of them turns out okay. Rainy day, little light, old camera, still the macro lens, long time even on higher ISO… But I had such a tiny plate with all my food on it (except 9ml cream in some of my coffees), 16cm diameter, it’s my smallest normal plate (I mean, we have some cup plates, whatever they are called, I am tired to search)! 200g, it took about 10% of my maximum stomach capacity :smiley: I like when some of my numbers are extreme (not so much when it’s due to extreme overeating but it’s still fun now and then). And it was GOOD! Really easy. I might have been hungry as I liked even the meatless smoked pork scratchings… I still prefer the normal ones with a tiny meat, freshly made from fresh meat.

I could snack on butter :smiling_face_with_three_hearts: More than usual I mean. It was the most meh butter I buy sometimes (I should remember and buy it elsewhere but it is butter, it works in most cases) but still not bad. Just not very very good as the other kind of butters I buy. I should have use those for a really superb fat-fast day!
And the pork belly was very nice albeit a bit too salty. Nothing I can’t handle, though.
Fried egg yolk is just 10/10, hands down.

So I liked my day very much. I may use it when it would be not convenient to cook enough meat or when I am bored of meat… And anyway, it has benefits as I wrote above.


(Karen) #57

Had a lovely afternoon dancing at Lichfield today though temperature was back up again so it got quite warm. Rugby dancing tomorrow night… haven’t been there since pre covid so giving it a second go to see how it is…it’s an hours drive but that’s nothing really as it is virtually straight down motorway.

Again it was a late first meal… i ate a packet of roast chicken slices on the way home at 4.30pm then had 2 sirloin steaks followed by a small bit of cheddar.


#58

Forgot to write that we did plenty of shopping (and will do it again tomorrow). I have more flowers and decorative plants now :slight_smile: And much more meat. I never saw this before: duck wing except the meatier part. It was, like, $0.25 per pound? Around that. I thought there is nothing below chicken frame but I was wrong :smiley: I consider it mostly cat food but I probably can get a few bites from the meatier part and I start with making it into a soup, of course as what else would I do with some meaty bones?
There was an unheard of chicken thigh sale so despite having 4 big ones in my freezer, I bought another 4. It was long ago we had chicken so it will happen real soon again…
I bought some usual lean pork and 1kg chicken liver as well. I try to wait before I fry it up but I really enjoyed it last time so I want to have it again. But I can wait some days.

In the end I got a tad hungry and ate some lard (so much tastier than the meh butter… just too salty. I need to think about salt if I want to make fat fast days regularly and of course I do! why I didn’t do it earlier?! it was great. I just hope I won’t ruin all the fat minimalization I did since ~14 years. I loved my 90% fat day, it wasn’t very fatty but it’s low-cal for you… the percentage wasn’t a problem at all) so I had about 108g fat and 23g protein in the end. 99g meat, all processed. 91% fat, I couldn’t do that on vegetarian keto! I had 88% back then and my food wasn’t this great. I easily could go higher…
In another thread I wrote nope, we don’t need to drink cream or use extra fat galore for a high-fat therapeutic keto (if we only need the high fat percentage, without extra rules that enforces that odd style), it’s possibly with mostly just fatty enough meat. I used processed meat today but I probably could do it with fresh meat as well. It’s quite handy that I can buy pork with a very varied fat percentage in calories (I don’t know where it starts, at a few? and goes up to 100) and crunchy fried fat is lovely to me. I envision experiments in the future :slight_smile:

I hope it won’t mess up things. I can’t really have a varied fat percentage while having okay days. It should be super high (90%) or modest (around 60%, maybe a tad more if I do things really right?). And what if I am hooked on very fatty items but must go back to lean days as I do need my protein? Is it really sure I can’t do something in-between? Just because I never could, maybe there is a way? And what if I don’t care about the fattiness of my meat, just eat whatever I fancy and have but pretty much avoid dairy…? Who knows?
I am just wondering, I won’t think too hard about it :slight_smile: I had a surprisingly good week macro wise this far (and it was peaceful too, without any struggles or too many meals, no food boredom either) so I don’t worry about overdoing fat right now.

My plate today:


(Geoffrey) #59

Yesterday was busy and didn’t find time to come here but this is what had yesterday. Paffle burgers.

The today a grilled a couple of lamb steaks that I had dry brining for four days.
Not as fatty as I would have preferred but delicious nonetheless.
IMG_0041
1.4 pounds.


(Karen) #60

Stair running first thing usual exercises then reading in the garden with a coffee. Ran to CrossFit and did a mean pairs workout… 1k run together into split workout of 50 burpee box jump overs into 100 burpee to pull ups into 150 lunges into 1k run…legs are not mine by this point…then ran to daughters house 1.7m from yhe CroddFit box. Then off dancing in Rugby this evening which was awful so we left early! Just as well we got some good dancing thursday and friday afternoons.

Legs won’t belong to me tomorrow!

Food today… cold swedish meatballs picked up from garage while out walking with Sian and Freddie they were very nice and a sirloin steak with a bit of cheddar cheese sorry no pics today.