[Mike Nolan]

I tried making peanut butter cookies using almond flour with monkfruit and erythritol (corrected) as the sweetener. Erythritol tends to leave a 'cool' sensation on the tongue and there was kind of an aftertaste as well, which may be from the monkfruit. The texture was off, but that's more easily fixed than taste issues. So I call this one a fail.

I may see what happens if I use allulose, which browns faster than sucrose, so I'll have to watch for that.

[Mike Nolan]

We had fish and broccoli tonight.

We're having our Valentine's Day dinner on Thursday rather than tomorrow due to my dentist appointment and my wife's ballet ticket for tomorrow night; on Thursday it will be lobster and possibly some keto-friendly gnocchi with some kind of sauce, possibly alfredo.

I did get her some flowers today, alstroemerias in purple and white.

[Mike Nolan]

He had a long and productive life, and who of us could ask for more.

[Mike Nolan]

We had taco salads tonight, with some of the left over pork roast as the protein.

[Mike Nolan]

Usher was better than I expected, though I didn't recognize most of the other artists he had on stage with him.

And the game was a good one, though I was hoping the 49ers would win. But Mahomes is a force to be reckoned with late in the game, especially in playoffs.

The commercials weren't particularly exciting, some were silly, none were really great or memorable, the Budweiser clydesdales one was probably the best of the bunch, and they've done better ones in the past. I did like the preview for the movie of Wicked, though. That's one I'm likely to go see.

[Mike Nolan]

Diane's not really into the Super Bowl. She may watch the ads, but even those don't really grab her any more. She's got a massage scheduled at 5:30.

We've got some keto-friendly (more or less) snacks ready, but there's a limit to how much of those I can eat, and I'll probably have a bowl of vegetable beef soup at halftime. (I don't care for most of the acts recently, including Usher.)

[Mike Nolan]

I made the 'tortilla' chips, they're quite good. I used part-skim mozzarella, because that's what I had, and I think that led to them browning more than I expected, so they're probably not quite as crisp as they should be.

But they go pretty well with cheese dip, with sour cream onion dip and even peanut butter! They're also pretty good with nacho cheese sauce and I think they'd be great with salsa.

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[Mike Nolan]

Oh how sad, though not entirely surprising.

[Mike Nolan]

Len, have you tried making a cauliflower pizza crust yet?

[Mike Nolan]

I made a keto-friendly bread today (egg whites, almond flour and coconut flour, mostly), still waiting for it to cool to see how it is.

Followup:

Well, it came out looking more or less like the picture on the recipe, though maybe it could have stood a little longer in the oven. And using pasteurized egg whites is always a bit challenging, they don't whip up quite as high as fresh egg whites.

As to the taste, I've definitely had worse, toasted and with a little margarine and peanut butter it tasted mostly like peanut butter, and it had enough crunch and texture to feel like I was actually eating something close to a sandwich.

The real test is if I can use it for something like cheese toast or a BLT.

For a first try, it was somewhat better than expected, but I think I can improve upon it.

[Mike Nolan]

Leftover night here.

[Mike Nolan]

So far we're just using test strips to check ketones, but I've ordered a ketones breathalyzer, it should be better than the test strips but probably not as accurate as a blood meter.

[Mike Nolan]

Carb-loading in advance of a high-energy output event, like a marathon, is common. Whether it really works is a bit more speculative.

Football players tend to load upon proteins ahead of a game, but steak at 8AM is odd for the rest of us.

[Mike Nolan]

We had cheese souffle with mushroom sauce, both recipes were modified to be keto-friendly, and the result was delicious.

[Mike Nolan]

A lot of what's out there tend to ignore or gloss over the science (that's true for most diet trends), but the ketogenic diet can be traced back to the 1920's, when it was developed as a diet for controlling epilepsy, before the drugs that are mostly used today were developed.

The basic principle is to keep the carbs consumed down while raising the amount of protein and, especially, fat. How low you have to get varies from person to person, generally below 50 carbs/day, though 20-30 is more likely to be successful.

Once the body uses up its reserves of glycogen (about 3 days worth, stored mostly in the liver and also in muscles), it will start converting fat to glycogen for energy. This is called ketogenesis. The trick is to avoid getting your ketones too high, which can turn the blood acidic, and is called ketoacidosis. It can be fatal. But there's a pretty wide range of ketone numbers where you're in ketogenesis before that happens.

There are multiple ways to test your ketones, some are better (or at least more accurate) than others.

Some of the proponents of the keto diet or its offshoots tend to get preachy, telling you to avoid most of the meats and other proteins in stores for reasons that have nothing to do with ketogenisis, eat only organic foods, avoid all gluten, etc.

A cyclical ketogenic diet should be a bit more flexible, allowing some carbs, even (oh, the shame of it all!) wheat. 🙂

Because fats are taste bombs, a ketogenic diet can be very tasty and filling. (Fats also fill you up faster and leave you more satisfied than carbs.)

Tonight, for example, we had a cheese souffle with mushroom sauce, using some almond flour and xanthan gum, cream (watered down), eggs, butter, cheddar cheese and mushrooms. A serving was probably 4-5 carbs (I'm checking it using multiple recipe analysis tools), and it was delicious! By comparison, my traditional souffle recipe (served with canned mushroom soup as a sauce) is more like 30-40 carbs/serving.

Being an engineer by training, I think I'll read some of the scientific papers on ketogenesis as we get further into this, but I don't claim that I'll fully understand them.

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