Something old into something new: leftover butter chicken pizza!

I’m not a fan of really hot, spicy foods, but I do like the flavour of curry. Hubby and I like to order butter chicken and rice from a nearby Indian restaurant because they make it on the milder side. We always order lots and there’s always leftover. But sometimes after the first few days, it’s easy to get bored with it, like anything else. Sometimes, you just need to find a new presentation to make even the most favourite of take-out more interesting a few days later — especially when the naan bread really isn’t too fresh by the third day and needs a little life put back into it.

So, today for lunch, I got a brainstorm. Pizza only needs a base, a sauce and toppings, right? So naan is similar to pizza crust, butter chicken sauce is like tomato sauce, the chicken is like any meat topping — all that’s needed is some veggie component (my preference) and some cheese. Here’s what I did…

Omelets are low-carbers’ best friends

I will admit that I love a good plate of eggs, bacon and toast. But when you’re trying to cut back on carbs, you might not want to be having the toast component all the time. So why not cut out the middle-man and make an omelet? I know I’ve spoken about omelets before, but I’m going to talk about them again. Sometimes the 2-egg breakfast can be a bit too much, too.

You can have a 1-egg omelet with two strips of low sodium turkey bacon and some veggies and cheese thrown into it and it’s a pretty decent meal. Here’s what I did recently with a 1-egg omelet:

Low-carb adventures: ground chicken meatloaf!

In my low-carb adventures, I’ve been introduced to some new foods and new ways of cooking, but after two solid weeks of really watching what I ate, I was craving comfort foods. One such comfort food from my childhood was meatloaf dinner! I wanted meatloaf, potatoes, corn on the cob, lots of butter, gravy, etc. Well, I came up with a compromise for  some of that heaviness by messing around with some of the components of  that dish. Instead of a whole corn on the cob, I snapped the cobs in half and steamed them, then cut the corn off one of the half-cobs and omitted the butter. Instead of potatoes, I whipped up a homemade vinegar-based coleslaw (no carrots, as I’m not a fan). And for the meatloaf, I used ground chicken instead of ground beef. Here’s what I did:

Low-carb adventures: Asian beef salad

I had actually made this Asian beef recipe for some lettuce wraps but the problem was that I only had Romaine lettuce, which does not  roll up too well. It turned out to be more like Asian beef lettuce tacos! *laughs*

I figured this  would be too messy for my lunch at work the next day, so I made up a green salad and simply topped it off with the flavourful ground beef mixture. Please have a look at the original recipe for the Asian Beef  Lettuce Wraps at the Comfort of Cooking website, but I made a few adjustments along the way for my own tastes and based on what I had on hand. Here’s the recipe for the beef mixture:

An omelet walkthrough…

The finished product!

In case it hasn’t been obvious from my postings, I’m quite the omelet fan. Admittedly, I’ve not had the most success in making an omelet from scratch (that is, using eggs instead of that  egg mixture in a carton stuff) that hasn’t fallen apart on me once I tried to flip it… until recently. I finally figured it out! So I thought I’d run you through a quick walkthrough (true to my gamer nature, yeah) on how  to make an omelet from scratch that doesn’t fall apart on you!

Lazy-man’s omellette for one

I recently picked up a few new frying pans from our local Wal-Mart (my hubby works there, so please no flaming me for shopping at the Evil Corporation (TM)!). One of them was a little mini square non-stick pan:

At first, I wasn’t entirely sure what I was going to use it for, but it was cute and I thought I could at least use it for making grilled cheese sandwiches without wasting a larger pan. Well, next thing I knew, it was my new egg and omellette pan!