Feeding the active writer.

I grew up to enjoy good food.  For most of my life, however, living at the edge of poverty, if not flat out in poverty, has meant that the only way I could eat good food is if I cooked it myself using very basic ingredients.

Now, money isn't so much of a problem.  Oh, I still can't afford to eat out every day or anything like that but I don't have to watch every penny when I shop for food and can get a little fancier with the ingredients.  No, these days the problem is time.  Who has time to do fancy cooking?

Oh, that and the fact that I'm on a special diet (low carb . . . really low carb) because I'm diabetic and trying to treat mostly with diet.

Two things help resolve this issue:  my slow cooker and my oven.

So here's what I do.  On the weekends (I still have a five day a week "day job" so weekends) I'll roast up a pork loin.  I'll season it different ways to give me some variety--garlic one time; a "rib rub" another; sage, thyme, and oregano a third, and so on.  That roast is my breakfast for the week.  Every morning I carve of a slice or two and heat it up along with a bread substitute (low carb tortillas or flax-meal muffins), and I'm good to go.

Next, I cook up an entree item in the slow cooker, a ragu or a stew or maybe a shredded meat.  I've got a lot of recipes that I use for this.  Once it's cooled, I divide it up into zipper storage bags and freeze them.  I'll take one of these packages with me to work every day, add some frozen vegetables that I keep in the freezer at work, and heat up a nice, low carb lunch.  By keeping a variety of vegetables I can mix them up to add a little variety to my lunches.  Also, while I make the lunches in batches, by keeping several different things in the freezer at any given time I can have something different each time.

For suppers, I pull out the stops.  It can be a roast or it can be another one of those slow-cooker items.  Keep this one in the refrigerator and I'm good for the week.

The main thing is what to do with leftovers.  By the end of the week the breakfast roast and whatever I have for supper is getting a bit old.  However, I don't let it go to waste.  I wrap up leftover roast in aluminum foil and toss it into the deep freezer.  In the event we ever get snowed in or some other emergency arises, well, there we are with some emergency food.  Ragus, stews, and the like that I'd made for supper, I bag and they go into the set for lunches.

And that's how I keep myself fed with a variety of tasty foods without having to spend either a lot of money or a lot of time.

And here's a recipe to enjoy:

Zero Carb Flax Bread

Ingredients
2 cups flax seed
1 tablespoon baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
5 eggs

5 tablespoons flax oil, coconut oil, or olive oil
1/2 cup water

Directions
Mix all dry ingredients then add the wet. Whisk together and bake at 350 for about 30 minutes. This recipe can also be made into muffins: divide batter into muffin pans and bake for about 10-15 minutes.

If you like a sweeter bread you can add a bit of the sweetener of your choice, stevia and sucralose work well for this (provided you tolerate them well).