Dana Carpender's Low-Carb Gravy Recipe. The holiday season is here! That means lots of big family dinners, flocks of roasted turkeys - and gallons of gravy. This last gives many people pause. I learned this at age twenty one, when a group of young and broke friends bought a couple of whole chickens on sale, and roasted them for a budget dinner party. When the chickens came out of the oven, I said, "Look at those nice drippings. Would anyone like it if I made gravy?"

Here's another in my off-and-on series about specific vitamins and minerals. Since I last covered vitamin B1, aka thiamin, the next logical subject is vitamin B2, called riboflavin.

It wasn't vitamin C. Although it was known for centuries that a lack of fresh food would cause scurvy, and that certain foods, especially citrus fruits, cabbage, and sauerkraut, could prevent it, the factor responsible wasn't identified until a few years after our front-runner.

Autumn is leaf season, deer season, Halloween season, and - Brussels sprouts season! However, Brussels sprouts are one of those vegetables that are often invoked as evidence that vegetables in general are loathsome, nowhere near as tasty as some other categories of foods. I, too, once disliked Brussels sprouts, yet I have come not only to like them, but to love them, and so has my formerly Brussels-sprout-phobic husband.

I have a new dietary discovery that has me more excited than anything since low carb itself. I have, for two weeks, been taking gelatin as a supplement. Just plain gelatin, the stuff you'd find in a box labeled "Knox" or similar at your grocery store. (Gelatin is available from CarbSmart here.)

Let's talk a little about vitamin A. Vitamin A is important stuff, but it's a bit complex. Vitamin A is essential for your health, but because it's a fat soluble vitamin and can be stored in your body, it's possible to get too much. It also comes in a couple of forms, both with their virtues and their drawbacks.

For the last glorious holiday weekend of the summer, a cookout seems mandatory. So call up some friends, throw some (light) beer in the cooler, fire up the barbecue, and let's make an end-of-summer feast that will be filling and memorable without any nutritional regrets. Includes her Low-Carb Salmon Recipe

When I started low carbing in 1995, low fat/high carb mania was still in full swing. Snackwells were selling like crazy, pasta salad and bagels were still "healthy," and I was clearly nuts. (Well, that had been clear for quite a while, but for other reasons.) Even I was worried I might keel over dead in the first six weeks.

Right now, half of you are saying, "Well, of course, duh." My guess is you know the rest of what I'm going to say, so you could go look at LOLCats instead. (Oh, hai!) The rest of you are saying "Ancel Keys? Who the heck is Ancel Keys?" You're the ones who need to read on, because Ancel Keys has profoundly influenced your life, and the lives of everyone you love - or hate, or are indifferent to - and not for the better. Ancel Keys was the teller of one of the most damaging lies in the history of human kind. Ancel Keys is the man who convinced the world that saturated fat is dangerous.

A whole cup of fresh basil leaves has just 11 calories, and about 5 million metric boatloads of flavor. You'll get 2 grams of carbohydrate, but it's virtually all in the form of fiber. And you'll get one gram of protein, but who eats herbs for the protein? You'll also get 33% of your vitamin A, 13% of your vitamin C, 7% each of your folacin, calcium, and iron, 6% of your potassium, and 2% of your niacin and zinc.

Years ago, some furious online detractor of low carb diets threw at me the accusation that I ate "pork rind cake." This is not true. I have never eaten a cake made from pork rinds, and had never heard of such a thing till the accusation was made. And though she subsequently posted a link to a recipe, that is the only time I have ever heard of pork rind cake in my near-decade on a low carb diet.

Writing a column on convenience foods goes against the grain for me - I'm always nagging people to just cook something, will you, for crying out loud?! A little simple, plain cooking is your best defense against bad food, not to mention a sky-high food budget. But I am aware that many people rarely eat anything that takes more preparation than three minutes in the microwave. Even folks who do cook occasionally have days when they just want something fast.