I went to the doctor after gaining some covid weight and she told me to eat more protein than carbs at every meal. Here’s the thing, though: I love eating. It is one of the genuine pleasures of being alive and I refuse to give it up, outsource it to a pill that kills your appetite, or replace it with foods that taste like ambition and sadness. So I took it as a challenge to continue eating things I loved while also maintaining that (doctor-prescribed!) balance — more protein than carbs. This turns out to be an interesting problem to solve, and one that AI is really useful for.

For each recipe: I describe what I want to a large language model (LLM) along with the main ingredients I have. It generates a recipe. I make it — often more than once. I figure out what’s actually true versus what the AI optimistically imagined. The results that taste genuinely good — not “good for healthy food,” just good — things I genuinely enjoy eating — make it here.

About the Photos

I use AI to generate the image for each recipe. This is partly for fun, and partly because it gives you a better sense of what the finished dish should actually look like — since my photography skills are, to put it charitably, extremely real. No one’s arranging herbs in the background of my shots. (I am in good company: have you seen Martha Stewart’s actual Instagram?)

The AI images are also their own genre of surreal. The lighting is always perfect. The portions are always generous. A lemon will develop an amorphous growth off one side, or a chickpea will bloat with perfection. A strangely confident shrimp might appear out of nowhere. I love it — both images appear in every post and you can judge for yourself.

About the Peanut Gallery

My husband is skeptical of high-protein diets, AI-generated food, and really most things. He thinks “healthy dessert” is a category invented by people who have never had a real dessert. He eats most of what I make anyway, and his reviews appear throughout the site.

“Hm. That’s pretty good.” — on the carrot cake, which he did not expect to be pretty good

The Peanut Gallery

What’s here

Recipes where protein exceeds carbs, per serving, every time — along with their nutritional info, ingredients, instructions, and a few words from the Peanut Gallery. Everything is pescatarian: no meat, occasional fish.