I’ve been labouring under the pretence that Scotch eggs originated in Scotland for nigh on three decades. It came as a revelation to learn that they are not Scottish. Apparently, no self-respecting Scot would call anything but whisky Scotch. The true history of the Scotch egg is hard to pin down as there are conflicting accounts as to its true origin. One account suggests it originated in Whitby in Yorkshire, another North Africa. Still another states it was an Indian import in the early 19^th century.

I for one have my money on the simultaneous invention hypothesis. Just as Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace independently came up with the theory of evolution by making good use of the facts laid bare before them; I think as long as there’s been eggs, meat and human hands to wrap in close proximity to each other, something akin to a Scotch egg would always have been brought into existence by humans.

Regardless of where they originated, they are the perfect summer snack to enjoy anywhere being both transportable and hearty.

If you want, you can jump straight to the recipe. However, I have included more guidance notes under the subheadings below for those of you who want to know more.

I first came across the idea of replacing breadcrumbs with crushed pork scratchings in Cara Comini’s The 30-Day Carnivore Meal Plan. And it’s Comini’s recipe that I have adapted below.

Whole or powdered fennel seeds

I mostly use my mortar and pestle because it makes me feel like an apothecarist concocting a potion, however, another reason to use one is if you want to intensify the flavour of fennel in your Scotch eggs.

Most big supermarkets stock fennel seeds but not fennel seed powder. That’s where a mortar and pestle comes in. When making Scotch eggs for this recipe, I experimented with whole fennel seeds and fennel seed powder, and I liked the results of both.

A benefit of grinding your own seeds is that it increases their surface area, which means you can use less seeds for the same level of flavour. A drawback is that it is a bit of a faff grinding your own, but again, this burden is lessened by getting to feel like an old-timey witch preparing a hex.

A note on eggs

Firstly, I suggest using soft-boiled eggs. To me, there is nothing more visually pleasing then cutting open a Scotch egg and seeing the bright, vibrant yolk ooze out. However, others recoil at that runny viscosity and prefer hardboiled. Ultimately, it is a matter of personal preference. Once wrapped in pork and placed into an oven, the centre of the eggs won’t continue to cook all that much, so that is something to consider whilst boiling them.

If you prefer hardboiled eggs and you are short on time, it might be an idea to buy fresh, boiled eggs from the supermarket. I know Tesco sell them.

Using a wire rack & what to do if you don’t have one

The reason you want to cook your Scotch eggs on a wire rack is to prevent the bottoms from going soggy. Another benefit of the wire rack is that your Scotch eggs cook more evenly without the need to turn them over, and you don’t have to open the oven door whilst they are cooking which could cause the temperature to drop.

If you don’t have a wire rack, you can place the Scotch eggs on a baking tray and turn them halfway through baking to prevent soggy bottoms all round.

Leave the mince-wrapped eggs to bind

After wrapping the mince around the eggs, you want to leave them alone for well over an hour. This is so the mince binds together. Normally egg is used as a binding agent, but in this instance, our binding agent is time. Unless the mince is given time to sit in its new shape for a little while, and if it’s put into the oven too quickly after the ball is formed, you run the risk of having your Scotch eggs fall apart at the seams. And you want your culinary creations to have some stronger nerves.

Which pork scratchings to use and how to process

Ideally, you’d want to make your own pork scratchings from scratch. A lot of scratchings sold in supermarkets are made with rusk, meaning they aren’t gluten-free, contain dextrose, which is another name for sugar, and might negatively impact the gut microbiome, and contain flavour enhancers such as monosodium glutamate (MSG). Large amounts of MSG has been linked to toxic effects including central nervous system (CNS) disorder, obesity, and reproductive issues.

With that being said, I used Mr. Porky Crispy Pork Strips for this recipe and it is guilty of all of the above. My only defence is that once blended in a food processor, the Crispy Strips form a perfect breadcrumb-esque powder, and I was looking for ways to save time. The Original Scratchings from the same brand also taste nice, but due to a higher fat content, don’t make as good a breadcrumbs substitute. You also need to be careful not to overprocess pork scratchings with a higher fat content otherwise you’ll be left with a sort of pork scratching butter, which is as delicious as it sounds, but it’s very hard to coat the balls in.

If possible, the processed scratchings should resemble dry, powdered breadcrumbs – these will adhere better to the mince.

I have tried to like Awfully Posh Pork Crackling as its only two ingredients are salt and pork rinds: the rinds are fried in pork fat, not in vegetable oil which is a huge plus in my book. However, despite how good the product is in theory, every time I’ve tried a packet, to me, it tastes like the inside of a bin.

Ingredients

Base recipe ingredients:

5 boiled eggs
500 g minced pork
1 tsp. ground rock salt
70 g pork scratchings

Optional flavourings per 100g meat:

Sage & Fennel

⅛ tsp. ground, dried fennel seeds
¼ – ½ tsp. dried sage

Sage & Onion

⅛ tsp. onion granules (sometimes also called onion powder)
¼ – ½ tsp. dried sage

Chilli Flakes et al

⅛ tsp. chilli flakes
⅛ tsp. dried sage
⅛ tsp. whole, dried fennel seeds
⅛ tsp. dried oregano

1. Peel cooked eggs and place them on a rack to airdry. A dry exterior means the pork mince will stick better to the egg. If you are short on time, you can dry the eggs with clean kitchen towel.
2. In a glass mixing bowl, add broken-apart pork mince and salt. Gently mix the salt through making sure it’s evenly distributed but be mindful that too much mixing can make the meat tough.
3. If you want to add flavourings, separate out the mixture into roughly 100 g portions. Add flavourings. If you want plain Scotch eggs, skip this step.
4. If you’ve already separated out the meat and flavourings into 100 g portions, roughly split each portion into half i.e. 50 g. If you didn’t add flavourings, measure out 50 g portions of the pork-salt mix using a set of kitchen scales until you have ten.
5. Instead of immediately making a patty with each 50 g portion, it’s easier to take the mince and lightly form it into a ball, and then pat it down into a patty that roughly fits into the palm of your hand.
6. Make a second patty with another portion of minced pork mix.
7. Put the first patty into the palm of your hand, and then take a peeled, boiled egg and place it on top.
8. Then on top of the egg, place the second patty. If the patty is flavoured, make sure to match it with its twin patty of the same flavouring – unless you want to purposefully make a Scotch egg that’s two different flavours.
9. Softly press the two patties together around the egg, making sure you can no longer see the white of the egg by pressing together all seams.

10. Repeat with the remaining eggs and pork mix – you should make four more.
11. Allow the pork-covered eggs to sit for over an hour. This is so the mince binds together and the seams don’t split open in the oven.

12. As they sit, make the ‘breadcrumb’ coating by placing the pork scratchings into a food processor and pulse them until fine crumbs are made. If you don’t have a food processor, putting them into a heavy-duty sandwich bag and then crushing them with a rolling pin will work just as well.
13. Preheat the oven to 200 degrees C
14. Place the pork scratching breadcrumbs into a shallow dish and roll the pork-covered eggs in the powdery crumbs. Make sure to firmly but carefully press the crumbs into the pork with your hands so that the whole of the outside has a coating.

15. Place the Scotch eggs onto a wire rack and bake in the oven for 22 – 25 minutes.
16. Serve hot or cold. They will keep for a few days in the fridge.

Why Carnivore?

I want to first outline the general motivations behind people who try the carnivore diet (carnivore). I also want to tell you about my own personal reasons and what led me to one day have a whole chicken in my salad crisper.

All-meat diets are fast emerging as the new frontier for (nuritional) medicine. There may not have been a recorded population in human history that has sustained itself on an all-meat diet before, but that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be done and may even be beneficial in certain circumstances. Foods from plants are losing their top spot as the best way to get in vital nutrients and minerals. In fact, these foods are by definition ‘low quality’, as they are calorically-deficient and partly undigestible (they contain fibre). As well as only being partly digestible, the body struggles harder to utilise the nutrients contained therein as they are less bioavailable. Bio-availability meaning the ease in which the body is able to access or absorb and use vitamins and minerals from foods for biological functions. At the other end of the spectrum, food from animals, once maligned, are beginning to take centre stage as high quality foods: meaning they are calorically- and nutrient-dense. You can get every single macro- and micronutrient you need from an all-meat diet whereas the same cannot be said for a vegan one. 

These facts give way to the theory behind carnivore: that eating only meat may be a supercharged way of healing bodies from physical illnesses, as well as physical and mental trauma. This theory is currently being clinically practised and researched. Drs. Belinda Lennerz and David Ludwig of Harvard University are studying self-reported carnivores in order to shed new light on nutrition as a medical intervention. The study will be the largest of its kind to date. In Hungry, The International Center for Medical Nutritional Intervention (Paleomedicina) have detailed a case study where they’ve administered their paleolithic ketogenic diet (PKD) protocol to a patient with a glioblastoma multiforme. He has been progression- and symptom-free for 36 months. 

Given all this, I thought to myself: surely a diet as powerful as this one could do one or two things to benefit me. You can’t argue with a diet that has literally halted the progression of a brain tumour. I’ve been on the classical ketogenic diet (keto) for over a year now, but I believed that carnivore could help me improve or elevate physical and mental issues that keto had already done a lot to improve.

Symptoms I was looking to improve: 

Days 1 – 3 Plain Sailing

The current lockdown we are facing due to a global pandemic has had the bizarre and unforeseen silver-lining of letting me begin my carnivore diet in earnest. I had embarked on this diet primarily to help me break my addictive tendencies towards food. 

Keto acts as a good set of training wheels for people new to low-carbohydrate diets as it takes out the most adverse foods like grains, beans and legumes. On the one hand, we scare people off by telling them they have to avoid carb-laden pizza, but then on the other, we reel them back in with erythritol-sweetened mudcakes. Keto, with its lashings of cream, roast ‘swede’ potatoes and fathead garlic bread, make it a safe refuge for a food addict like me. There came a point, however, where my every waking minute was dominated by thoughts of food. I needed to break my addiction to it.  

A few days into carnivore, I was struck by a sobering thought: recovery is very, very boring. However, this boredom towards delectable cuts of meat did not last. On carnivore, you aren’t eating hyperpalatable foods that have been engineered by food scientists to excite us to an artificial extreme – by lighting up the dopamine neural pathways in our brains. When we are eating these foods day in and day out, our threshold for what is delicious is artificially high. But when these foods are removed, the threshold comes down and a new, healthier level for what we deem palatable is established. It sounds counterintuitive, but by removing the sugary foods that excite you the most from your diet, you’ll likely be more satisfied by your diet overall, given time. Carnivore is helpful in this instance because by default it eliminates these foods. However, I did not have that revelation by Day 3. Does eating only meat get boring? To that I say, I can’t imagine my body getting tired of something it evolutionarily evolved to need, my mind on the other hand, is more fickle. 

On Day 3, something special happened. The ‘magic’ of carnivore that people describe happened to me. In the evening just before bed, I felt a sense and calm and inner peace that I hadn’t experienced in years. It was like my brain was being given a warm hug. Furthermore, during the day, I work in bid and proposal management so I am constantly proofreading and editing documents. Normally after a hard day’s work, I often feel like I don’t have the energy to read for personal pleasure. But on Day 3, I had more reserves left in the tank than normal and was able to read for hours before bed. The memory of the third day was what got me through the next stage, which can only be described as hell. 

Days 4 – 10 To Hell and Back 

During the next week and a bit of carnivore, my body and bowels turned against me. I can confirm that the prevalent reports from fellow carnivores of loose bowel movements during the transition phrase are true. I didn’t necessarily need to use the bathroom more frequently, but when I did – I won’t elaborate. 

One of the theories that tries to explain why our toilets receive such an onslaught, poses that the issue is caused by a rapid change in our gut microbiome. A 2014 study by L.A. David and C.F. Maurice titled ‘Diet Rapidly and Reproducibly Alters the Human Gut Microbiome’ had a group of people on the standard American-type diet either change to a plant-based or animal-based diet, and then measured their levels of gut microbes. Whilst there was no change in the diversity of microbes in both groups, the total numbers of certain strains changed drastically all in the space of one day. The hypothesis posed by some carnivores – not the study – is that when you eat plant food and fibre, there will be complementary microbes housed in the gut that will process the digestible and undigestible matter. Therefore, not consuming any fibre has a knock-on effect on these microbes. If we stop consuming the matter they process, they become redundant, and our body – being adaptable and responsive – subsequently flushes these hanger-ons from our system. 

Around this time my appetite also took a nosedive. On some days I only managed to eat one, relatively small meal. Even when I was physically hungry, mentally I didn’t want to eat the food I had served myself. I was behaving like a picky toddler because I had allowed myself to act like one. I had coddled myself and given into every craving for an artificially-sweetened, low-carb baked good. I had focused more on my tastebuds than on my health. I was having to detox from my keto junk food and the change was hard. But I had been through a similar transition before when I’d rid my diet of bread, pasta and potatoes. I knew when to be hard on myself and when to be gentle in order to stay on course, because I knew there was another side to this, and I was determined to get there. 

The transition was hard because that is the nature of transition. I was asking a lot from my body. I can only imagine that it’s even harder for people who have never been in ketosis before as their body is switching over it’s metabolic pathways from burning sugar to burning fat for the first time. I went from consuming plants and fibre, the way I had done all my life, to stopping abruptly. My body had to overhaul the way it had worked previously, and that’s hard. But by the end of the second week, we were back in business. 

Between days 8 – 10, my hunger started to return. I had put trust in my body that it would adapt and come out the other side stronger, and it did. By day 10, I looked forward to every meal. I was excited to eat. I was enjoying the deliciousness and richness of the high-quality food I was eating. 

Days 10 – 28 Fine Tuning

During the second half of my experiment, I stumbled across a baseline. My baseline meals were (and still are) baked salmon, roasted chicken with added goose fat and pan-seared chicken liver. I felt good on these foods. 

In the later stages, carnivore became a proper elimination diet. When you are only eating animal protein, animal fat and salt it becomes easy to pinpoint certain food sensitivities. I was gutted to discover that eggs and me weren’t for better or for worse. Before carnivore, I would have described myself as an egg person; every morning I would have two, sunny-side up eggs fried in goose fat for breakfast. Sadly, no longer mi amor. During the first couple of days, I was eating a lot of eggs and a topical rash appeared on my chest. From time to time, I have suffered from this rash – it always appears in the exact same location – but I had always thought it was related to eating too much dairy and sugar. Yet here I was, zero-dairy and zero-carb, but I was as rashy as ever. For the first time, I was confronted with the reality that diets are a lot harder to get right than I had previously imagined. 

I subsequently extracted only one thing out of my diet: eggs. The rash began to heal. I waited for the rash to completely heal and for me to get back to my healthy baseline. Then, the only thing I added back in was eggs. And lo and behold, the rash came back within half a day. To me, it was pretty conclusive that the eggs were sadly the culprit.

If that wasn’t enough to rock my insulated, lockdown world, more revelations were coming thick and fast. I noticed that beef was triggering some anxiety. Within the online carnivore community, ruminants are stressed due to the higher nutritional content of their meat. I wanted to follow not just a carnivore diet, but the optimum one. So I tried, I really tried to get in beef ribeyes and minced beef. But as I ate these foods, I noticed I was having heart palpitations. More to the point, within a couple of hours to half a day after eating beef, I was suffering from a mental fragility that I’d never related back to food before now. I didn’t think my mood was impacted to such an extreme by the food I ate. I was anxious, paranoid and imagining slights that didn’t exist all within hours of eating beef. 

I knew what I had to do. I had to test beef like I had tested the eggs. I got myself back to my baseline for five days or so, then I would reintroduce beef. Every time I did, it would make my heart race, within a few hours I would be panicky and then later zapped of energy. A similar thing was also happening with lamb in terms of the heart palpitations. Pork was also just passing straight through my system. I was physically happy on my fish and poultry, but I felt bad mentally as these food items are often looked on in the community as lower quality when compared to meat from ruminants. That was, until I had an appointment with Dr Georgia Ede. 

Days 29 – 30 The Doctor Will See You

Dr Georgia Ede is a Harvard-trained, board-certified psychiatrist who uses nutritional interventions in her work to help people with mental health conditions. My first ever appointment with her coincided with me nearing the end of my challenge. I related my difficulties back to her: the heart palpitations, the anxiety and how I wasn’t getting on with pork or eggs. I felt in equal parts neurotic and self-indulgent. But I needn’t have, as finally I had come across someone as fixated as me on the minutiae of what we put in our mouths and the resulting problems. I wanted to throw my hands up in the air and ask ‘What gives!’ I had thought one of the benefits of an all-meat diet was its simplicity: just eat meat and drink water. But I was finding it difficult to master. Dr Ede said that she’d worked with hundreds of people on all-meat diets, and she’d spotted an emerging pattern. If carnivores are a subgroup of society, then there is a further sub-group within this group that seems to struggle to tolerate beef and pork. She said that what truly lay behind the intolerance to beef and pork could either be an intolerance to a protein found in both, or where beef was concerned, it could be an intolerance to histamines. 

Coincidentally, the list of symptoms I had been struggling with – namely the heart palpitations –  matched perfectly with the symptoms of histamine intolerance. Great, I thought. Another problem to add to the pile. All foods contain histamine, so when it comes to histamine intolerance, the name of the game is to hone in on low-histamine foods. The foods highest in histamines are ones that have been aged, cured, canned or smoked. It’s near-impossible to find fresh beef steaks; the ones I had been buying from my local supermarket, had been aged for 21 days. But whether it’s the protein or histamines in beef that I don’t get on with, I am dropping beef from my repriotiere of meals for now. And similarly, lamb in on probation unless I can source it fresh.

The main takeaway from the appointment was that despite my journey so far, I was only just beginning to figure my diet and health out. I was told that most people only begin to see changes at the 3 month mark, and even then, it’s the start of the change. The 30-day challenge is a good method to get people’s toes wet. But for the next 2 months, I’m taking the plunge. 

My findings

With reference to the table at the start, here were my key findings: 

* Seeing as there are many iterations of the carnivore diet or the paleolithic ketogenic diet currently being practised, I thought I would map out the protocol I followed. I was originally incorporating the benign herbs thyme and oregano, as well as cracked black pepper. However, I quickly dispensed with those items wanting to narrow the variables in my experiment to as few as possible. I excluded tea, coffee, all spices and dairy from the outset for the same reason. I also began my 30 days by eating pork and eggs, only to subsequently drop them later to the relief of my stomach and digestive system. I have also now dropped beef and lamb. For the majority of the time, I was consuming the muscle meat and offal from cows, lambs, chickens, ducks, fish and seafood. I was also adding in additional fats like goose fat, duck fat and beef drippings. I didn’t track my macronutrients or calorie count, other than making sure I was hitting a fat to protein ratio of 1:1 in grams. 

Originally, I tried to follow the protocol that Paleomedicina ‘prescribes’, but found a 2:1 fat to protein ratio in grams was too hard to maintain for a novice such as myself. It wasn’t sustainable: I was drinking rendered beef drippings by the mugful in a desperate attempt to get enough fat in. At Paleomedicina, their recommendation to patients is 35 grams of additional fat with every 100 grams of meat. Their diet also requires the consumption of 400 grams of liver each week and a further 250 grams of other offal, whether that be from the brain, bone marrow or heart. I only averaged around 30 – 50 grams of chicken liver a day. I ate only when I was hungry which resulted in me generally needing to eat twice a day – in the morning, and again in the early evening.

** Dr Georgia Ede is a Harvard-trained, board-certified psychiatrist who uses nutritional interventions in her work to help people with mental health conditions.

At first, the penny hadn’t dropped that the fact meat and seafood contained little to no carbohydrates, was not merely helpful in plugging the calorie void that removing carbohydrates had left, but because they should be included in a healthy diet on their own terms. When anything too-carbohydrate laden was ‘dangerous’ for me with insulin resistance, I was eating meat and seafood because I saw these things as ‘benign’, as neither hindering my healing, but not especially helping it either. I think there were two main reasons for that: the first, is that it’s macro-nutrients that are stressed in communities following the classical ketogenic diet, as long as you are avoiding carbs, and getting in enough protein and fat, the sources of these macro-nutrients don’t really matter. The second, is that when it comes to getting in enough vitamins and minerals, its fruit and vegetables that have the biggest PR- and marketing-machine behind them. To the point where, people think that vegetables and fruit are the only way to get in key micro-nutrients, when more often than not, they are outclassed by the more bio-available nutrients in animal muscle and organ meats. Bio-availability meaning the ease in which the body is able to access or absorb and use vitamins and minerals for biological functions. 

Maria Emmerich and Craig Emmerich in ‘The Carnivore Cookbook’ go to great lengths to turn the tide of mainstream thinking and to uphold meat and seafood as the most nutrient-dense foods on the planet. Beef outranks apples, blueberries and the ‘super-food’ kale gram for gram in Vitamin D, Vitamin E, Zinc, Magnesium, Potassium and 6 other vitamins and minerals*. They quite rightfully point out that instead of encouraging children to eat all their veggies, maybe we should be encouraging them to finish their steaks.

Therefore, I now not only view meat as a ‘neutral’ way to get in enough calories, fats and proteins, but I now prioritise it as I see it as the easiest and best way to get in essential amino acids, essential fatty acids and micro-nutrients without the drawbacks of other sources. ‘Essential’ in this context means substances that are essential to life, but ones the human body can’t produce itself and needs to get from external sources. For example, dairy might be a great way to get in fat if we are simply viewing it through the lens of macro-nutrients; however, if we view it in terms of optimum health, there are a number of proteins such as casein, which are known to cause inflammation in the human body. 

Armed with this knowledge, I then set about learning more about meat. Growing up, my Dad was a vegan, and my Mum, Sister and I were essentially vegetarian with a hamburger thrown in here and there. Needless to say, I was pretty much starting from zero. I called in reinforcements in the form of Pat Lafrieda’s hardback book: Meat, Everything You Need to Know. Pat Lafrieda is one of America’s most celebrated butchers and the book does a good job of explaining where certain cuts of meat come from in the form of diagrams. To my novice eyes, this book still looks pretty advanced, but it inspired me to make the recipe detailed below. It’s what one would call a ‘coffee book’: large, unwieldy, visually pleasing but slightly impractical. But I was determined not to just enjoy this book for its aestheticism and to do my take on its lamb neck recipe. 

*The others are Magnesium, Phosphorous, Iron, Selenium, Vitamin B6, Vitamin B12 and Niacin. Kale has more Calcium, Vitamin A, Vitamin C and Folate in milligrams per 100 grams than beef; however, the amount in milligrams alone might not be a fair measure as the bio-availability of nutrients from animals is far greater.

Ingredients

4 lamb necks** 
2 tbsp. beef tallow or goose fat 
Some fine sea salt

1. Preheat the oven to 180 degrees C
2. Rub the lamb necks with goose fat – my favoured cooking fat, but you could also use beef tallow – and then lightly sprinkle them with sea salt.

3. Preheat a cast iron skillet on a high-medium heat for a few minutes, until it starts smoking.

4. Add the lamb necks to the skillet and sear them for around 3 to 4 minutes on each side. If the lamb necks are sticking it means they haven’t yet seared: the meat will self-release when it’s done.

5. Place the lamb necks in a casserole dish large enough so they can be laid out in one layer. Add 2 UK cups of water (570 ml) or more so that the necks are just covered in water. Cover with a lid or foil.

6. Slow cook for 3 hours. You want to make sure that the liquid is simmering, not boiling, so increase or decrease the temperature of your oven by around 20 degrees accordingly. 

7. Take the necks out of the oven and leave to rest – I left mine to rest for an hour. Then it’s ready to eat. I served mine in its own juices and kept the rest as some delicious lamb stock.

 **My local butcher doesn’t sell lamb necks so I had to search further afield. I ordered mine from the family farm Gazegill Organics mostly due to their excellent Facebook marketing.

With so few ingredients on a Carnivore Diet to mask a lack of culinary technique, I was forced to hone mine. First on the agenda was learning how to spatchcock a chicken. I have laid out my method below.

Benefits of Spatchcocking 

Now, why would you go to the trouble of removing a chicken’s spine? Primarily for two reasons: 

1. It levels out the bird making it easier to grill as it cooks more evenly.
2. If you are roasting it in an oven, it can halve the cooking time (the bird I used should have taken 1 ½ hours, but instead it took 50 minutes to roast).

Top Tips for Making the Skin Extra Crispy

• Dry brine it overnight – This is where you cover it in sea salt and let it dehydrate for several hours. The greatest enemy to crispiness is moisture. If you don’t have time to dry brine it, you can skip this step. I find the biggest factor in making skin turn crispy is the heat it’s exposed to: the hotter it is, the crispier it will be. However, this has to be balanced against not wanting to dry out the meat.
  
• Cook it on a wire rack – Normally, to crisp up the underside of meat, you would have to drain off it’s fat. However, when it comes to low carb cooking, the name of the game is to get in as much healthy fat as possible; therefore, ‘draining’ it off would be a waste. I place my chicken on a wire rack so the underside doesn’t soak in its own fat whilst cooking. This allows it to be exposed to dry heat so it can crisp up. I then place the wire rack over a casserole dish which collects the fat. I then put the fat into a small serving bowl and use it as a ‘dip’ for the chicken meat. 

*Seeing as there are many iterations of the Carnivore Challenge, I thought I would define my version of it. I am eating only beef, lamb, chicken, fish, seafood, offal, salt and the benign herb thyme. I noticed pretty early on in this experiment that I had difficulty tolerating eggs and pork, so I have since dispensed with them, as well as pepper. I am consuming no dairy, no spices and no coffee or tea.

Ingredients

1 free range whole chicken
some sea salt

Special equipment
Oven Model: Beko BA52NEW
Shelf level: 4
Gas Mark: Between 8 and 9 for preheating, turned down to 8 for cooking** 

**The fact the model’s name has NEW in its title is a sweet, sweet irony as my oven has been brought back from the brink 6 times by the landlord, and even when he bought it, it was pre-owned. Needless to say, it’s about ready to cark it. So whereas, Gas Mark 8 would normally be 230 degrees C, it’s probably a lot closer to 200 degrees C. For a gas oven, you should normally use shelf levels 1 and 2 for roasting (those at the bottom), but in my temperamental oven, shelf 4 works better. 

1. Preheat the oven to the temperature laid out previously. However, the correct heat setting varies massively from oven to oven, so it’s important to get ‘in tune’ with yours for best results.
   
2. Sharpen your kitchen knife or you can use a pair of good kitchen shears. The younger the bird, the easier it will be to cut through it.
   
3. Place the bird on a chopping board with its breast touching the board and its parson’s nose facing you. The parson’s nose looks like the chicken’s little tail.
   
4. Cut down either side of the parson’s nose using a knife or shears in order to remove its spine.

5. If you were to turn the bird over, it wouldn’t quite be lying flush with the board, so in order to make it lie flat, you need to make an incision in the breast-bone. Simply cut across the blue line in the picture below.

6. Turn the bird over, skin-side up – I always feel at this point that it looks like a voluptuous woman. You then want to loosen the skin by working your fingers between the skin and the meat until it comes away as depicted below.

7. In order to make the bird really crispy, you can dry brine it overnight. This means putting salt underneath the skin (onto the meat) and on top of the skin. It will dehydrate the skin and the less moisture in the skin, the crispier it will be.

8. I place my chicken on a wire rack breast-side up so the underside doesn’t soak in its own fat whilst cooking, as unless it’s exposed to dry heat, the underside will have difficulty crisping up. I place the chicken and rack over a glass casserole dish to catch the drippings. 

9. I roasted the chicken for 50 minutes, turning the chicken round 180 degrees halfway through its roasting time so that each side will be cooked evenly. 

10. I then let it rest for 15 minutes, and serve it with the chicken drippings that have collected in the casserole as a sort of ‘dip’.

I watched a Netflix documentary on minimalism and then spent subsequent weeks selling half my belongings on eBay. My mechanism for getting rid of things was, if it wasn’t an affirmative ‘yes’ to either of these two questions: 

• Does it have a function and have I used it within the last 6 months? 
• Does it make me happy? 

it was destined for the charity shop or eBay. 

I am talking about this on my food blog because I believe there is a connection between minimalism and keto. Asking these two questions over and over again, really helped me to cut the crap out of my life, as did keto.

I am guilty of over-complicating my food sometimes: going to several shops to track down one ingredient even when I have an adequate substitute at home. The other day I ran myself ragged trying to locate fenugreek seeds on the high street when I already had fenugreek leaves and ground fenugreek at home – I think we can all relate. 

Supermarkets these days are increasingly becoming places of sensory overload: every surface is crammed with more and more stuff that’s only imperceptibly different from what’s next to it. It’s overwhelming. I only realised this when keto set me free from walking down aisle upon aisle. Now, I only go to the meat, dairy and fresh fruit and veg sections, and sometimes to the spice aisle. 

Keto also freed me from this mentality that I needed multiple sides and that I needed my meat with this and that and something else. Now I know that I can just have a meal of roast meat – the only additions being olive oil and salt – and it’s absolutely delicious. 

On that note, here is a recipe for a keto side dish as sometimes I still like the faff. But it’s important to know that you can miss it out for a simpler, less stressful life. I had these dauphinoise courgettes with roasted chicken leg.

Serves 8

Ingredients

2 tbsp. olive oil
4 small courgettes (600 g)
500 ml double cream (or 250 ml of cream and 250 ml of nut milk)
1 tsp. mixed herbs
2 garlic cloves
50 g parmigiano reggiano

Special equipment: Pie dish (24 ½ cm in diameter x 4 cm deep)

1. Preheat the oven to 180 degrees C.

2. Wash and thinly slice the courgettes into 5mm slices.

3. Heat up the olive oil in a large frying pan on low-medium heat. Cook out the dried herbs for a few seconds before adding the courgettes to the pan. Saute the courgettes until they have just softened and have a little colour. You don’t want to cook them until they lose their cores.

4. At the same time, crush the garlic with the blade of a knife and add them and the cream to a large saucepan on medium heat for a few minutes, until the cream starts to thicken.

5. Remove the garlic from the cream sauce and add the sauce to the courgettes. Stir through for a minute or so, making sure every courgette slice is covered.

6. Separate the courgettes from the sauce.

7. Place the courgettes in the pie dish so that they are stacked up on top of each other. Add the cream sauce over them. Then sprinkle the grated cheese on top.

8. Bake in the oven for 25 to 30 minutes, until the cheese is a golden brown.

My foray into lamb-eating as a child was less than successful. My Mum was a flexitarian growing up and my Dad was a strict vegan, ergo any type of meat in the house was a rarity. Still wanting us to get all of the necessary nutrients into our diet, my Mum would occasionally cook us meat despite her own sheepishness towards it. Unsurprisingly, the fact that my Mum infrequently cooked meat coupled with her paranoia about giving us food poisoning, meant the meat we ate was dry and often incinerated. In fact, if a sausage wasn’t completely black all over, I hesitated to eat it thinking that it was under cooked. 

My first experience with lamb was at a friend’s house. Her Mum had really pushed the boat out by making herb-crusted lamb chops which were completely lost on me as an unsophisticated 10 year-old. I had no idea that meat could be served medium or even medium-rare. When I saw that the chops were still pink in the centre, I thought my friend’s mum had made a mistake. Being incredibly British, I wanted to avoid embarrassing her by not remarking upon it, so I politely ate only the outside of the chop. I now look back on myself and cringe. 

This recipe came about after a trip to the Greek island Skopelos when I visited it last year. It’s claim to fame is that Mamma Mia was filmed there. Despite the first film being released over 10 years ago, all the restaurants, rather endearingly, have curled photographs of the cast and crew eating in their restaurant pinned to the walls. You also can’t eat out without the owner of the establishment wanting you to try his olive oil.

The spice mix I used for this recipe is made by the company Ellh, which I think is difficult to buy if you aren’t on a Greek island. If you find yourself not on one, fear not, you can recreate it with 1 tsp. each of dried oregano, dried thyme, dried spearmint, dried coriander and onion powder.

Serves 4

Ingredients:
4 ½  tbsp. beef tallow/drippings
500 g lamb, minced
a small onion (80 g), finely chopped
50 g almond flour
1 egg
2 tsp. Ellh’s spice mix
½ tsp. dried mint
1 tsp. salt
½ tsp. cracked black pepper

Serve with suggestion: low-carb tzatziki and fresh mint

Special equipment: a cookie cutter 10 cm in diameter

1. Melt a little tallow in a medium frying pan on medium-high heat. Then fry the onion in the pan until lightly browned and sticky. Let cool to one side for a few minutes.

2. Put the lamb, almond flour, egg, herbs, salt and pepper in a bowl – only add the onion once it’s cooled as you’ll then need to mix the burger meat with your hands until the distribution of herbs is consistent.

3. Using the cookie cooker as a guide, cut out 8 squares of grease-proof paper (like in the photo below).

4. To make 8 thin burgers, measure out around 86 g of burger meat and place it in the middle of the cookie cutter on the greaseproof paper square. Then press the meat firmly down until it fills the circle. (My cutter had a wavy edge and a straight edge, I used the straight edge as I wanted my burgers to have a traditional neat edge.)

5. Then leave the newly formed patties to ‘congeal’ in the fridge in an air-tight container. If you miss this bit out, they will fall apart when it comes time to fry them. Leave them for an hour minimum.

6. Melt 1 tbsp. of tallow in the same frying pan that you cooked the onions in on medium-high heat. Place the patties in the pan – two at a time – and fry for a few minutes on each side until they are nicely browned and cooked all the way through. I suggest 1 tbsp. of tallow per 2 patties.

7. Serve with some low carb tzatziki and fresh mint, and enjoy!