Main Dish Recipes

Low-Carb Lesson #52: Chicken Fried Steak With Cream Gravy, Smashed Cauliflower (Faux Mashed Potatoes) & Down Home Green Beans.

Now, while I eat more chicken than anything else, I love steak. In general, I'm too cheap to buy steak at full price, so I keep an eagle eye on the "used meat bin" at the grocery store and always snap up any good steaks that I find there. I've never gotten a bad piece of meat from the "used meat bin," but I do make certain that I either cook the meat immediately or put it into the freezer as soon as I get home.

In the United States eggs are traditionally a breakfast food, but I like eggs just about anytime. And I like eggs just cooked just about any way you can think of: scrambled, deviled, fried, poached, hard-boiled ... any way but raw. Eggs are quick, they're easy, they're cheap, and they always seem like comfort food to me. Eggs for dinner are particularly good when you're crunched for time or for when the food budget for the week is shot.

Since I didn't want to spend an inordinate amount of time in the kitchen, our meals revolved around some type of meat on the grill, deviled eggs, a vegetable relish plate with dip, and a fruit plate. I made the deviled eggs, the vegetable relish plate, and the fruit plate up at the beginning of the week and replenished them daily as we ate all of certain items. So when dinnertime rolled around each day, I simply had to turn on the grill to cook the meat and bring out the various plates of side dishes.

My mother, rest her soul, had a phobia about pork. She was absolutely certain that if she did not incinerate it until it looked like an old, discarded boot we would all get trichinosis and die. So she did what she was supposed to do - PROTECTED HER FAMILY - and happily cremated pork throughout her life.

We moved into a new home last month (finally!), and my husband bought a new grill to celebrate the occasion. It's a mammoth thing, all stainless steel and shiny, and looks something like a not-so-miniature aircraft carrier. This is a "manly man's" grill, huge and professional-looking, containing all the bells and whistles. The problem is, my husband can't cook.

Low Carb Cooking 101 Tonight’s simple menu features very simple salmon fillets, one of my husband’s favorites. (He likes fish more than he does beef.) And even though salmon season isn’t quite here, salmon still tastes good, especially when it’s grilled or broiled. When salmon season does roll around in …

This is a quick meal to put together - assuming that you remember to thaw the chicken breasts. If you forget, go to Plan B and prepare something else. I've found that chicken breasts thawed in the microwave tend to come out tough and dry. Chicken breasts are expensive; it's not worth ruining them to stick to your original pan. Put them in the refrigerator to thaw and fix something else.

Low Carb Cooking 101 I love soup, and I love shellfish. What better way to combine the two than in a hearty shellfish bisque? Serve it up with a tangy salad and some low carb muffins and you’ve got a meal fit for Neptune. It might even calm to Sea …

Since we are coming to the end of the gardening season (at least for those of you up north), I thought I'd base tonight's meal on bounty from the garden.

I promised my husband fish a few days ago, so tonight we're having Italian Fish Fillets. I find that it takes more fish than beef to fill me up and make me feel completely satisfied, so I always count on one half pound of fish per person. That doesn't mean that my family of four always polishes off two pounds of fish, but to my way of thinking it's better to have too much (and have leftovers for lunch the next day) than it is to have too little.