[Gizmoto]

I have tried many diets, but all left me hungry and feeling deprived 'cause I couldn't eat the foods I love. Then I saw online where there are people who are eating 300 calories every 3 hours and eating 5 times per day. 5X sounds like a lot but not really when you consider many people eat 3 meals and 2 snacks. Well, eating that often solves the hunger problem, also solves the problem of reduced metabolism.

That took me on a journey to find 300 or less calorie recipes. There are lots of those, but it's like the recipes makes 8 servings, so you eat 1/8. That will never happen. If I cook it and it serves 4, I eat 4. So now I was looking for 300 calorie single-serving recipes. I found a few of those, but all contained foods I don't like or weird ingredients. That is when I realized the only solution was to make my own recipes, so that's what I did. The foods I dearly love are pasta, especially spaghetti, chili, soup and occasionally something sweet. I also hate to cook so I make all the recipes in a mug, except for the pasta, which overflows when cooked in the microwave.

I only 'invented' a few recipes, so I did a search here for mug recipes, but the word 'mug' is too short, so I got no hits. Most of the mug recipes online are for chocolate mug cake, so that's one recipe I don't need. There are so many recipes on this site, I'm sure there is at least one thread with mug recipes here, can anyone steer me to it or them? I'd greatly appreciate it.

[Esofia]

Have you tried hunting for microwave recipes in general, without the mug since that tends to lead to cake recipes? There are also ready meals you can microwave which may be around 300 cal, which might give you some ideas.

What are your likes and dislikes?

If I had to make a pasta sauce in the microwave, I'd probably do it in the bowl I'm going to eat out of, for a start, and put a splatter screen lid on top. I might cut up a red pepper, add a bit of water and perhaps a touch of pesto, nuke that, and then add flaked almonds (I'm vegan). You can also cut up a tomato or two and throw that in there, and cheese is easy to work with in this situation.

Making large portions and freezing the leftovers - have you tried doing this when you are not at all hungry, and immediately portioning it out and freezing it?