The Keto for One Cookbook by Dana Carpender

Source: Review copy #Netgalley
Publication: Fair Winds Press on 9 May 2019
PP: 176
ISBN-13: 978-1592338689

With Keto For One, get 100 delicious dishes for every meal of the day—perfectly proportioned and macro-balanced.

Single-serve cooking is one of the biggest challenges when trying to adhere to an eating plan. Most recipes are portioned for 4–6 servings, which means you’ll be eating the same thing for a week or trying to adjust recipes and struggling to figure out proper cooking times and fractions of measurements. With keto, you also have the additional challenge of balancing your macronutrients—a few too many carbs or not enough fat and your recipe is no longer in the ketogenic zone.

No more fussing with recipes. No more eating leftovers. No more wasted food (or money!). No more cobbling together snacks and calling it a meal. No more temptation to give into carb-laden, nutrient-void, single-serving convenience foods. Just delicious recipes from “low-carb queen” and best-selling author Dana Carpender. Enjoy delicious keto burgers and smoothies, as well as quick skillet stir-fries and plenty of tasty meals that can be pulled together quickly or ahead of time. 

I chose to read this book because I need to radically improve my nutrition and have now started on a low carb diet. So a recipe book for one person made a lot of sense to me, as variety of tastes is one of the things that really make a difference when you are pursuing a long term weight loss strategy.

The author has written a number of books on this topic and very clearly knows her onions (higher in carbs than you might think).

I enjoyed the common sense explanation at the front of the book which lays out exactly what and why a ketogenic diet is and also contains some useful suggestions for cooking oils and other cooking substances which advance the low carb diet.

The recipes are simple and straightforward and gave me some good ideas to vary the tastes for my palate. Lots of eggs, unsurprisingly, but also making sure to have lots of different flavours and a mix of textures. I found out about mayonnaise with MCT (coconut) oil and how to make chocolate-peanut butter no bakes. Sounds fab, I know, but Dana Carpender is no novice to this style of eating and cooking. Her sweet treats section comes with a stern warning: “the simplest sweet keto treat is a couple of squares of 85 percent dark chocolate—1 ounce (28 g) has 11 grams of carb, 4 of them from fiber, for a net carb count of 7 grams. But you have to be able to quit at 1 ounce. Know thyself.”

Overall, though due to its origins, it is very American in approach, I think this is a really useful recipe book to use in conjunction with your own calorie counting and carb watching regime. I’ll certainly be trying out more of these recipes as I go along.

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