This is an easy and tasty sauce that I used to spruce up tri tip sirloin. This is also an easy way to stick to keto at the end of a long workday when your blood sugar is low and you want to eat ALL the things you see on the way home.

This dinner came together fairly quickly. I bought the tri tip known as the working man’s special at the Pike Place Market. It’s covered in a dry steak sauce seasoning mix. I also picked up some local trumpet mushrooms and broccolini. At the end of Day 3 of the keto experiment, I’m feeling a little spacey and didn’t think to take to take a picture of the pretty mushrooms. But here’s a gorgeous picture of where I bought them.

Here’s how this meal came together. Preheat the oven to 400. Rinse the broccolini, toss it with olive oil, salt and pepper, and pop it into an oven safe pan, I love cast iron, and put it in the oven. Melt a tablespoon of butter and pan fry the tri tip on medium high turning every few minutes while you are doing the rest of the prep. My tri tip was in four 4-5 ounce portions. Meanwhile dice half an onion (or a whole shallot) and a clove or two of garlic, and at least six mushrooms (use any kind). Mix the garlic into the broccolini and after your meat is seared on all sides, pop it on top of the broccolini and place it in the oven.

The pan you seared the steak in will have some nice drippings, sauté the onion in with them and scrape up the caramelized brown bits, add the mushroom and then deglaze with broth. Add heavy cream to thicken. Serve the sauce on the meat and dust the broccolini with Parmesan.

I’m super happy with the meal. My app estimated this as 7 net carbs, 23 grams of fat, and 41 grams of protein.

Overall, I’m doing better at figuring out what to eat, but I’m still struggling with the fat. I feel like I’ve been generous with it and purposely having cream (!) But Day 3 numbers show I’m still short fat and over on protein by a bit. I’m not going to stress about the protein as I’ve been under the last two. I was at 28 of 45 net carbs, 83 of 130 grams of fat and 119 of 113 grams of protein. It’s more natural for me to gravitate towards proteins and low carb veggies and I’m not totally sure how to improve my fat numbers.

After three days, I’m down two pounds, but I’m still up two from where I was at mid December. I feel like that will be gone by Monday. The body scanner on my scale shows that I’m keeping my muscle and losing fat. So that’s awesome.

I feel okay. I’m a bit spacey mentally. I am really sore from yesterday’s workout, so I had to go easy at the gym this morning. I don’t feel like I have the “keto flu,” but I definitely get more spacey when I get hungry in the afternoon and probably need to figure out a snack for that. Any ideas? I’m thinking cheese.