It's me! Happy New Year! And, please God, may 2007 be better than 2006.

My personal stuff seems to have settled down for the moment, and I miss talking to y'all. So here I am again, making a New Years resolution to get this sucker out regularly. If everything goes to hell in a handbasket again, I may get thrown off-track. But for the moment, just sitting down and writing "Hey, Gang" again feels really, really good.

I hope this finds you all well. No doubt some of you have stayed on track with your low carb way of eating, while others, having fallen by the wayside, are just coming back to it with the New Year. Either way, I hope you're feeling wonderful, and realizing anew just how great the benefits of carbohydrate control are:

Put up in a place where it's easy to see
The cryptic admonishment "TTT."
When you feel how depressingly slowly you climb,
It's well to remember that Thing Take Time.
- Piet Hein

How are those New Years Resolutions coming? I'd like to add one to them for you, if you don't mind: Be patient.

Impatience is the death of most diet and exercise regimens, whether undertaken for New Years, or any other time. All those stupid ads for diets, diet pills, and exercise equipment promise ridiculous results, like "We guarantee you'll lose two dress or pants sizes in 10 days, or your money back!" Of course they know that only a teeny fraction of purchasers will A) follow their instructions to the letter, or B) bother to ship the thing back.

I have to make what is, for a food writer, an embarrassing confession: my favorite fish, far and away, is canned tuna.

Yep, canned tuna, stuff of school lunchroom sandwiches and casseroles made with goopy canned mushroom soup. Love the stuff. Love, love, love the stuff. And I'm not alone. Tuna is the third most commonly purchased foodstuff in the country, after sugar and coffee. Canned tuna is served in more than ninety percent of American households, and accounts for fully twenty percent of all fish and seafood consumed in the US. That's a lot of tuna!

Let's start with the bad: Much canned tuna has dangerously high levels of mercury. This is no joke. Mercury is a neurotoxin, highly poisonous stuff. Even worse, it can cause truly hideous birth defects. If you're pregnant or planning to become pregnant, you should probably shun tuna entirely. And if you've been giving your children tuna several times a week, you need to know that a forty-five pound child eating just one six-ounce can of white tuna per week will be getting more than four times as much mercury as is considered safe. Mercury can cause learning and behavioral problems, and permanent neurological damage. Maybe they'd like egg salad or chicken salad, or even peanut butter?

I came up with these pancakes one lazy Sunday morning when pancakes and bacon just seemed like the thing. They worked out perfectly the very first time; my husband rated them a perfect 10. Four grams of non-fiber carb per pancake may seem a little high, but look at that protein count - one pancake has as much protein as three eggs! Between that, the fiber, and the healthy fats, these suckers will fill you up, and keep you full for hours and hours.

However, since then I have also made these without that 1/4 cup oat flour. They worked out fine, and this drops the carb count to 8 grams, 7 grams of which are fiber - just one gram of usable carb per pancake. So feel free to make this version if you like. The oat-free version is also good for folks who need to stay gluten-free.