Super-Easy (But Still Awesome) Low-Carb Meals

A couple of months ago I decided to stop overdosing on carbohydrates.  I’m not really on a low-carb diet per se, but I did cut my daily carb intake to around 90 grams.  Low-carb diets start around 20 grams and work their way up a bit from there over time, and I don’t think 90 grams would be considered particularly low by true low-carbers -- but it’s far lower than the 300+ grams consumed by people on the SAD diet (Standard American Diet), which heretofore included me.

About half of my carb drop came from giving up sweetened iced tea, of which I used to drink about 60 fl oz each day (I now drink water instead).  The other half came from switching my meals from primarily Stouffer’s frozen dinners (which are delicious and there are tons of varieties of them, but they’re mostly pasta-based) to primarily real whole food that I cook myself.  But cooking meals and doing dishes is a pain in the butt, which now consumes a couple hours out of each day for me.

Recently I hit upon a good solution: Bertolli Frozen Meals.  There are over a dozen varieties including beef, chicken, shrimp, and pork, with various vegetables, and you just dump the bag into a skillet and cook for 12 minutes or so.  Most of them do contain pasta, but here’s the thing: the way they’re packaged, each ingredient is separately pre-cooked before being frozen and then put into the bag, including little blocks of frozen sauce.  So since the sauce isn’t all over everything, it’s super easy to just pick out the pasta and chuck it before cooking, thereby removing 95% of the carbs.  What’s left is a nice and healthy meal of meat, fat, and vegetables.

Of course I won’t be replacing all my meals with these, but they do provide a nice way to have a good meal without all the hassle of preparing something from scratch.