“I have so much energy, I could lift a butter truck!”
~Nora, on why she doesn’t need to eat breakfast.
We’ve been sticking mostly with the tried-and-true recipes lately, but wanted to share some innovations, some of which are Nora’s imaginative re-purposing of recipes.
Snickerdoodle Cereal
The snickerdoodle recipe was a hit, but I made a few big batches and Nora started to get bored with them. One day she was eating snickerdoodles as part of a bigger snack that also included steamed cream, so she dipped her cookies in her “milk.” Eventually, she ended up crumbling a lot of the cookie into the cream and needed a spoon–cereal was born!
It was a happy discovery because we were almost out of the pumpkin cheesecake bars that Nora had been happily eating for breakfast for many weeks. With the snickerdoodle cereal and milk, I could put off more baking for another week.
Because the snickerdoodles are already 3.5:1, adding cream meant that we had to add more carbs or protein to make a 3.5:1 breakfast. Enter another Nora favorite: blueberries! One breakfast consists of 3 snickerdoodles, 5 g (1 tsp) heavy cream mixed with a few tablespoons of water to make “milk,” and 4.5 g blueberries (around 4 very small).
Mac-and-Cheese
As crazy as it sounds, I had a hard time consistently making mac-and-cheese that was the right consistency. But finally, I have mastered it! Nora ate her mac-and-cheese several days per week in the last few weeks because she kept demanding it, and it’s a quick and easy meal when there is a package of Miracle Noodles in the fridge.
I came across Miracle Noodles somewhere near the beginning of starting the ketogenic diet, but they weren’t a big hit right away. They are quite chewy, a little tough for little teeth to easily bite through. I’ve learned that I need to cut them with a kitchen scissors as I weigh them or after they are in the bowl so that they are in smaller bits. They are made of a Japanese root vegetable that is pretty much all fiber (the Ketocalculator has the values per gram, only 0.0028 g carbs per gram noodles). Because they are basically nothing but fiber for the purposes of calculating a meal, it’s great to be able to serve red pepper, avocado, flacker and other nice healthy things on the side.
To make mac-and-cheese, take 12 g to 15 g of shredded cheddar and put it in a small bowl with 1 T to 2 T (15-30 g) of cream and microwave for 30 seconds, then stir until smooth. I’ve got ranges here because the exact amounts don’t matter too much for the outcome, but sometimes I add more or less when I’m balancing a meal for Nora. If she needs more fat with her meal, she gets 2 T of cream in her mac-and-cheese. If she needs more protein, then more cheddar.
Weigh and cut 20 g to 25 g of Miracle Noodles, the vermicelli variety, into a separate small bowl and microwave for 10 seconds, just to warm up. Dump into hot cheese sauce and stir well. Cool and serve.
Anders is thrilled with this development because he has been eating more mac-and-cheese too. He has been put in charge of making it for himself, because he also eats the entire box by himself.
Bacon Pancakes! Making Bacon Pancakes!
This was inspired by a favorite cartoon, Adventure Time! Nora’s bacon is going on to her Keto-Krepes. Except that while I was cooking it, she actually decided that she wanted her bacon in a “pile” instead of in her pancake. So there you have it.
The rest of us had some bacon pancakes. And some piles of bacon. The best of all worlds.
They were totally math, asymptotically to the max!
