What's for dinner?

This used to be a simple question to answer.
The eating program I am following right now permits me to eat as much meat as I want, only as much vegetables as I have meat, and a bit of cheese for flavoring.  To a lot of people that sounds pretty restrictive, and in some ways it is.  Anything fried is right out, with the exception of chicken wings, because most fried things are either breaded or a starch.  Baking takes attention, because I can't use breading on anything, so I do a lot of things with sauces.  Casseroles are odd without their starch components.  There aren't a lot of "convenience" foods available that don't include some form of breading, so I don't have a lot of ready to cook items in the freezer.
See what's happening here?  I'm being forced to cook mostly fresh foods.  I'm being manipulated into planning my meals.  I'm either going to go out to eat WAY more than I should, or I'm going to exercise my brain and figure out how to get a decent meal at home in under 30 minutes that doesn't involve the word BURGER.
It's not a complaint, exactly.  It's a realization that I've spent far too much of my life relying on those prepackaged foods, those boxes and cans and plastic bags that seem to live forever in my pantry and freezer.
I posted a while back about how much crap/food I removed from the pantry when I did my big purge back in August.  I used to think I had about 2 or 3 months worth of "food" in the house, when all I really had was a metric ton of sugar and starch.  Now I look in the half-empty pantry, and then in my freezer, and realize as long as I can figure out what to do with cans of tomato sauce and chicken breasts or tilapia, I can eat for a couple of months.  Well, I will have to thaw out a turkey and a chicken at some point, but the real point is there IS food in the house.  It just takes planning to make it a meal.
What's for dinner tonight?  I'm trying a Beef "Enchilada" casserole, substituting whole kernel corn for the corn tortillas, and layering it a bit like Shepherd's pie.  (I am allowed to eat corn, but only on the cob or taken off the cob.)  I'm not sure how this is going to come out, but if it works I'll post it.  I know the sauce has some flour in it (after all, I made it) but there are carbs and sugars in other sauces and it would have been the same if I'd bought a can of it, except the can would have been full of other things I don't want.
(After Dinner Note: The casserole was tasty, but there was too much sauce.  It came out more like a baked chili.  Eric and I both agree it needed a starch component, such as rice or pasta, to really fill it out.  Less sauce next time.)

8 months later...

Ok, so I'm not so good at daily, or even weekly updating.  Here's what you missed:
I've been on the eating program for over 8 months now.  I've dropped from a size 26 to a size 16/18.  I've lost 12 inches (that's right, an entire FOOT) from around my waist, bringing me down to about 39/40 inches around the waist.
No, I don't have a more recent photo.  I'll remedy that soon.
The holidays were tough.  I usually spend November and December in the kitchen, baking cookies and making candy to give to people for presents.  This year, I knit 17 hats.  You read correctly, I knitted hats.  I made Cunning Hats for my Sci Fi geek friends and family, I made warm snuggly hats for folks, and I made 1 Smurfy hat for my brother Victor.  It kept my hands busy and kept me from being in the kitchen and I gave people lovely warm things that said "I think of you and want you to be warm."  With the way this winter turned out, it was probably a great thing that I made these hats.  I also made some scarves, some fingerless mitts, and a couple of pairs of socks.
There are many things I have noticed in the last 8 months as I changed my eating habits and thinking about food.

1. I eat almost no fried food at all.  Since I don't eat breaded foods, the only fried foods I have are buffalo wings and mahogany wings (from the local Chinese restaurant.)
2. I eat very little mayonnaise.  If it's not in a salad, I generally don't eat it.
3. I tend to find one or two things at a restaurant and only ever order those when I'm there.  It's just easier to decide before we go what I'm in the mood to eat.  
4. Surprisingly, Cracker Barrel has the most choice of meals for me.
5. Not surprisingly, I don't eat at a lot of Italian places.
6. Pepperoni slices and cottage cheese make a pretty good breakfast.
7. Reuben omelets are awesome!
8. Most restaurants are really good about accommodating your preferences.  Asking for burgers without the bun isn't blinked at most places.  We won't talk about Denny's.
9. I find fish proteins do not stay long with me. That is, I eat fish and about two hours later I'm hungry again.  Beef, pork and chicken tend to have the most staying power, so I eat less often when I have these.
10. Berry-flavored breath strips taste like mentholated cough syrup.  YUCK!
11. I don't have much patience for people who whine about their weight while eating cheesecake for breakfast every day for two weeks.  Especially skinny women who do that.
12. I almost never stop at a drive-thru for food.  I get unsweetened ice tea, but it's virtually impossible to get something to eat on the run that I can eat while driving.  So my fast food consumption is virtually non-existent.
13. I don't enjoy people pushing food on me.  I'll eat my damn vegetables if I want to.  If I am not in the mood for them, BACK OFF!  And no, goddammit, I don't want the damn cookies!  BACK OFF!
14. "Liquid egg substitute" is disgusting.  Eat real eggs.
15. Oh, butter.  How I miss you.  I do use butter in cooking, but I don't actually eat as much as I used to because with the exception of vegetables and Corn on the Cob, my Butter Delivery Vehicles are quite limited.  

So, if you look at what I just wrote, you see there are a lot of little habits that just changed as I got used to my new way of eating.  No fast food, no drive-thru snacking, no fried foods, very little in the way of extra added fats.  I hadn't even realized just how often I was eating during the day (about every 90 minutes) or how much money I was spending on it (about $100 a week for snacks, breakfast and lunches from the drive thru.)

Taken in a list, it's a lot.  Coming to the realization that these things just STOPPED as I learned for myself what my limits were?  That was worth the time it took.