Bacon Quesadilla

After enjoying Quick-Clean Cuisine Bacon and Eggs, you should find yourself with extra bacon the next morning, although the first few times you make the bacon you could find yourself eating it all rather than putting a couple of pieces in a Ziplock Baggie for overnight storage in your refrigerator.

Let's assume you, or you and your guest, didn't eat all of the bacon you prepared yesterday, and hoepfully you also still have some of the grated cheese leftover from that 2 1/2 pound bag of Mexican Cheese from Costco (or in your early stages of Q-C C, 8 ounce name-brand bag of grated cheese from Target or Ralph's).  As long as you added flour tortillas (or Mission Carb Balance flour tortillas if you want to go all Atkins Diet on your ass) to your shopping list, you can enjoy another Quick-Clean breakfast. 

The first time I saw someone order a cheese quesadilla for a child at a Mexican restaurant, I thought it was a good way for parents to enjoy a spicy meal while the kid played with her relatively non-messy food.  Eventually, like most parents, I tasted the parts left behind by my own kids and learned it was pretty tasty.

I notice that many adults now order quesadillas for themselves, which seems like such a joke when you consider the restaurant mark-up and the ease of assembly at home.

So, just in case you have been amazed by the intricate production of making a quesadilla, here it goes:

Take the tortilla and lay it on a plate the same shape as the tortilla (presumably round).  Put some grated cheese on the tortilla and fold it over.  Microwave for about 30 seconds, and you have a cheese quesadilla.

To make a bacon quesadilla, crumble your leftover bacon in with the grated cheese before folding the tortilla and then microwave it.  With the low carb tortilla, this makes an excellent Atkins-friendly meal with Quick-Cleanup.

The possibilities for variations are endless.  Adding leftover hot sauce from your last Taco Bell take-out, and you have a spicy quesadilla.  Any extra meat you have laying around makes a pretty good addition to the quesadilla that's nutritious and easy cleanup.

As you will begin to infer, Quick-Clean Cuisine cooking tends to be low carb and not particularly worried about fat.  That is based on my belief that fat and cholesterol in the diet are not nearly as fattening as sugar.  I use the Atkins Diet way of looking at carbs, which is that dietary fiber and even alcohol doesn't count as carbs, as long as you don't overdo the alcohol or cheat with other carbs.  You'll find that keeping your carb count under 80 a day (or even 40 for that matter) isn't that difficult if you shop right, and that will result in maintaining weight.  Below 40 carbs a day on a consistent basis should lead to weight loss regardless of how much protein and fat you eat.  Check out Atkins.com for more info on how to count carbs.

Using a regular tortilla costs 1/4 to 1/2 as much as a low carb tortilla, and it only adds about 20 extra carbs.  Over the course of a day, adding regular bread here and there easily puts you over 80 carbs, but having a regular tortilla here or a dinner roll there won't blow it up.  Then again, even one oatmeal cookie, no matter how nutritious it may seem, will...especially if, like me, you eat a half dozen cookies after tasting one.