Lunch A-Jar

If there is such a thing as "trends" for lunches, then the lunch-in-a-jar is the hottest trend right.  Being the food blog and cooking magazine fiend that I am, I started to see these meals in a jar pop up on several sites/articles these past couple of months, and so if you are like me, then this trend is not breaking news.  However, I'm here to report that I've had and enjoyed several lunch-in-a-jar's and this trend has staying power!  I'll admit, I was first lured into the idea just based on the aesthetics (the layered look in the jars is so colorful and interesting) but after a week's worth of test tests I was hooked.  The big 32oz mason jars were big enough to build a delicious, layered, and filling (and super healthy!!) salads.  I did one full week of basic "create your own adventure" salads and then another week of more involved "out of the box" salads from a Clean Eating article.   The blog, Lunch Box Bunch, started it all for me has a great tutorial and good ingredient ideas for the make your own salads.  And true to what the blogger attests too; I made 4 salads on a Sunday night and they stayed fresh all the way through my last one on Thursday.  As the CE salads, they were also really good, however I have a couple notes about each one and my biggest gripe with them is that they took a lot of dishes and prep to make.  And CE also advises only eating them 1 day in advance of making the salads.  So, they might not be perfect for work week lunches, but they would make excellent picnic lunches or to take camping, hiking, or on a flight if you need a healthy to-go lunch option.

Here's a pic of my build-a-salads:

Notes about the CE Salads: I thought Asian Stir Fry Noodle Salad the ingredients were really tasty, but the dressing just needed a little something.  I guess it depends on your taste, so if you make it just taste test it and see if you think it needs more soy sauce, maybe some ginger, siracha for spice, maple syrup or teriyaki sauce.  Depends on what you gravitate more, I thought it could use more spice and soy sauce to add a little more spice and salty flavor.  For the Moroccan Chicken and Carrot Salad, this was my favorite of the three CE salads that I tried, but I would caution that if you aren't a big mint or parsley fan or like your herbs to be more subtle, then I would either finely chop the mint/parsely leaves or omit them altogether. and maybe replace with mixed greens. The dressing also needs a pinch more salt, but again taste test it for yourself because you might like things less salty than I do! And for the Tri-Color Pasta Salad with Tuna, I liked this one a lot and it could really be made with chicken, tuna, tofu, tempeh, or whatever.  The sun-dried tomato dressing is good with lots of balsamic vinegar flavor.  I also put goat cheese on this instead of mozzarella cheese.

http://i1263.photobucket.com/albums/ii623/hope_friedman/AsianStirFryNoodleSalad.jpg

http://i1263.photobucket.com/albums/ii623/hope_friedman/MoroccanChickenandCarrotSalad.jpg

http://i1263.photobucket.com/albums/ii623/hope_friedman/tri-colorpastasaladwithtuna.jpg

Vaca-tovation

Vaca-tovation: the act of going on vacation, stuffing yourself with delicious foods and drink and then coming home with new motivation to eat healthy again.  

Sorry for the long hiatus folks, but to tell you the truth, I haven't been all that motivated or inspired in the kitchen lately.  So we've been having a lot of throw-together dinners consisting of a lot of salads, vegetables, grilling out, and pulling out whatever we froze 4 months ago.  It's also been extremely hot here for the past few weeks, consistently at triple digit temperatures; and call me crazy but slaving over a hot oven or a stove for 30-45 mins after I get home from work just hasn't sounded appealing.  HOWEVER, this post is about "vaca-tovation" and that's just how I feel now.  Went on a wonderful trip to Hawaii with my husband and our good friends and had a completely glutinous week of good food and tropical drinks and now I'm back home and newly motivated to get my eating back on track.  This is one of the upsides to getting back from vacation, so embrace it!  In the past 6 weeks of not blogging, I did manage to make a few recipes that I thought were post-worthy.  So I'm happy to share and maybe help some of you become vaca-tovated after your summer trips.   

The first recipe, "Shrimp and Corn Cakes with Heirloom Tomato Salsa" is from Cooking Light magazines' June Issue and I made this for a dinner with a girl friend.  It was really good and really filling.  I did find heirloom tomatoes and the salsa turned out delicious and fresh tasting, but I'm sure it would taste just as good with regular on-the-vine tomatoes or Roma tomatoes.  This also made for an easy lunch the next day.  I thought it was a nice twist on a traditional crab cake type of recipe without as much fat and calories.  

The next recipe, "Hoisin-Glazed Salmon Burgers with Pickled Cucumbers", also from Cooking Lights' June issue,  is definitely going to be a make again recipe.  Jon and I loved the sweet and salty taste of the burgers and the pickled cucumbers added a lot of flavor and got me thinking about pickling more of my own stuff!  We just paired this with some sweet potato fries.  This may even be a good burger recipe to make ahead freeze to use for our nights when we just want something quick.  I'll give it a try and let you know!

The following couple of recipes are two summer treat recipes that I thought were really nutritionally dense without breaking the calorie/fat bank.  As a side note, for the "Peach Cobbler", from Clean Eatings' June issue, I just used normal sugar instead of evaporated cane juice and I used arrowroot powder instead of potato starch.  Arrowroot and potato starch powders are just thickening agents, so you can use corn starch as well. 

The "5-Ingredient Almond Date Bars" was an online recipe find off of the site Ohsheglows.com and I actually ended up making the bars in a pan and then freezing them for about 4 hours and then cut them into bars and kept them in the refrigerator.  They were way too soft to try and cut after first assembling them!  And just a side-note about dates: they are packed with fiber and other great nutritional benefits as well as being extremely sweet.  I've started replacing sugar with dates in my smoothies or chopped up over oatmeal.  Give them a try!

http://i1263.photobucket.com/albums/ii623/hope_friedman/ShrimpandCornCakes.jpg

http://i1263.photobucket.com/albums/ii623/hope_friedman/HoisinSalmonBurgers.jpg

http://i1263.photobucket.com/albums/ii623/hope_friedman/AlmondDateSquares.jpg

http://i1263.photobucket.com/albums/ii623/hope_friedman/PeachCobbler.jpg

As Advertised

Working full-time again leaves me with little patience to make dinners that take more than an 45 minutes to make, so when I come across recipes that claim they are "super fast" or "30 minute meals" I get excited.  However, maybe, I'm just slow at cooking but often I find these recipes are not usually as quick as their claims.  If you've had similar experiences with these so-called quick weekday meals, then you will be pleased to know that the recipe I'm posting today is completely as advertised!  As a slow cook, I think I was able to make this recipe and get it on the table in about 18 minutes!  It was also super tasty, filling, and made great lunch leftovers the next day.  One of the things that shaved a couple minutes off this recipe time was that I used pre-shredded cabbage (the kind you can buy for cole slaws).  The only cooking you are doing with this recipe is grilling the steak and we used our barbecue which cooked the steak perfectly with just a little salt and pepper and a couple sprays of cooking spray.  There's no overnight marinading or added fuss, which I liked and appreciated on a busy weeknight when I really want to just eat and be done with dinner...and get the glass of wine and couch-relaxing part of the evening! This recipe comes from my monthly issue of Cooking Light and had lots of fresh flavor for a relatively simple meal.  We just ate the salad, but if you wanted to add a little something on the side or even added the salad you could make wonton crisps.  Purchase a package of wonton wrappers, and brush with egg whites and sprinkle with salt, sesame seeds and if you like spice, a little cayenne pepper.  Bake on a foiled lined baking sheet at 375 for 10minutes or until lightly brown.

http://i1263.photobucket.com/albums/ii623/hope_friedman/ThaiSteakSalad.jpg

Impressive, no. Delicious, yes!

So, this week included just a couple old-favorites and two new recipes to try.  On Sunday, I started the week off with my no-fail, easy-peasy slow cooker chili -- 2 cans chili beans, 1 can black beans, 1 can diced tomatoes, 1 can mild diced green chiles, 1 diced red bell pepper, 1 diced yellow onion, 1/2 cup broth or water, and a bag of meatless crumbles or some cooked, ground turkey or lean beef.  Throw in a crockpot with some of your favorite spices, I do some cumin, cayenne pepper, dash of cinnamon and some salt to taste; heat on low for 4-5 hours.  It's simple and we had this for leftovers twice this week.  Another night, I came home from work late to a lovely, spaghetti and meat sauce dinner prepared by my wonderful husband!

As for the new recipes we tried this week; I made a "Chicken Spring Rolls" recipe from Clean Eating and discovered that making spring rolls is not so easy!  The rolls were delicious, but my rolling skills with the rice paper left a lot to be desired and left us with a pretty messy dinner.  Of course the recipe makes it look so easy, but I just couldn't get my rolls to be as tightly wrapped as they always are at Asian restaurants when we have them.  I have to also preface that the rice wrappers I bought are the kind that are hard and brittle and then you soak them to soften.  So trying to wrap the rolls as the paper was still softening might have been the problem.  I might try buying egg-roll wrappers next time and baking these.  All-in-all, they were really good and filling.  We had this recipe with peanut dipping sauce and cucumber salad.  The other recipe I tried my hand at was from one of my favorite cookbooks, Rebar, Modern Food Cookbook; and I made the "Tempeh Tacos".  Tempeh is becoming more and more one of my weekly standards now as I'm loving all the recipes I've made with it.  It marinades and cooks great, and really adds a nice crispy, dense texture to your dish.  I'm sure this recipe would also be great with tofu, meatless crumbles, or any type of meat.  After you make the accompanying salsas, this recipe comes together super quick and we had plenty of salsa left to enjoy with some sweet potato chips!

http://i1263.photobucket.com/albums/ii623/hope_friedman/chickenmangospringrolls.jpg

http://i1263.photobucket.com/albums/ii623/hope_friedman/tempehtacos.jpg

http://i1263.photobucket.com/albums/ii623/hope_friedman/freshcuttomatosalsa.jpg

Sunday Recipe Dump

I knew this would happen...I could see it coming from a mile away...I knew I would get busy and the first thing to fall to the wayside would be this blog.  I'd be one of those bloggers who have all the gusto and intentions of being diligent about this project and then after a couple months become one of the hundreds of thousands of people who suck up domain names and space on the internet with their abandoned blogs. However, all excuses for my hiatus aside, I'm happy to say I'm busy because I got a full-time job again and now I'm getting back into my Sunday meal-planning routine.  When I'm working, I know that there is no task I hate more than the after-work grocery stop because I know don't have what I need to pull something together for dinner.  So the best defensive against this is an offensive Sunday dinner plan.  I take a few hours on Sunday mornings to plow through my latest recipe magazines, favorite cookbooks and old favorites and pull out 3-4 recipes to make that week, make a list and head to the grocery store.  For our little family of two, 3-4 dinner recipes will feed us for a whole week with leftovers for a couple other dinner nights and lunches.  Getting into this habit has been monumental for us because without it, I'm usually a cranky person when I feel like I'm constantly scrambling on what to make and making more than couple trips to a grocery store in a week.  Jon is also tasked with making dinner one night a week and I let him know that if he doesn't get his request in by the Sunday list, he's on his own for getting supplies!

Anyways, why am I telling you all of this?  Because this blog entry is my recipe dump on what I made and planned for last week and I'm considering adding blog-writing to the usual Sunday meal-planning commitment.  So, ta-da!! Welcome to my Sunday. The recipes I'm sharing come from my Cooking Light, Clean Eating subscriptions and one from a random SELF magazine that I received in the mail.  All the recipes were fairly easy and quick to pull together on a weeknight.  The "Thai Turkey Lettuce Wraps", from SELF, were spicy and deliciously messy.  My recommendation for the "Thai Chicken Soup", Cooking Light, (yeah, it was a Thai kind of week) is get the pre-cooked rotisserie chicken; the soup was good but needed that extra flavor from the roasted chicken.  The "Chicken in Parchment", Cleaning Eating was very simple and if you can find the parchment packets, opt for that, but I loved how pretty it all looked.  The "Crispy Salmon with Carrot-Ginger Vinaigrette", Cooking Light, is going to be a new standard!  I loved the carrot-ginger dressing and we had it on shrimp later in the week.  Alright, so now I'm off to plan our meals for this week!

http://i1263.photobucket.com/albums/ii623/hope_friedman/ThaiTurkeyLettuceWraps.jpg

http://i1263.photobucket.com/albums/ii623/hope_friedman/ThaiChickenSoup.jpg

http://i1263.photobucket.com/albums/ii623/hope_friedman/ChickeninParchmentwithVegetables.jpg

http://i1263.photobucket.com/albums/ii623/hope_friedman/CrispySalmonwithCarrot-GingerVinaigrette.jpg

Meatless Monday

This seems to happen about every couple of weeks.  I start to get the feeling that Jon and I have been eating nothing but meat, meat and more meat and I get the itch to dive into my vegan cookbooks and get us out of a meat-eatin rut.  Eating vegan about once or twice a week for a whole day is a goal or compromise between Jon and I and I vouch for it for a few reasons:  1. I feel that most vegan recipes get us more veggies in our meals than normally as a side dish to meat and the recipes as a whole are usually packed with lots of protein, fiber and un-refined carbohydrates.  2. vegan recipes are just interesting, unique ways to cook and eat different foods and 3. this is just the environmentally-conscious person in me, but eating meatless even one day a week can have a positive effect on our environment and lessen the enormous drain on our resources that it takes to manufacture meat production.  If you are interested here is a good article: http://www.vegansa.com/veganism-and-the-environment.php

So, for these reason this is why I'm sharing two recipes today from one of my favorite vegan cookbooks, The Vegan Table,by Colleen Patrick-Goudreau.  The first is a delicious and messy version of the typical Middle Eastern shawarma or kabob.  In discussing this recipe with my other "occasional vegan" friend, Amy, we both agreed that we are loving tempeh the more we cook with it.  If you've never cooked with tempeh, then it's definitely an adventure, but worth it!  I find mine at Whole Foods and I like the flax kind.  Tempeh is basically a protein in the form of consolidated grains and soy.  It's low-fat, tons of protein and when marinaded and pan-fried, gets nice and crispy.  For the "Carmelized Tempeh Shawarmas" recipe the tempeh does a great job replacing meat and the soy sauce and maple syrup sauce give it a nice sweet and salty taste.  I ended up pan frying the tempeh with sliced onions for this recipe so that both ingredients got caramelized.  And just as a side note, I sliced my tempeh pretty thin.  The other recipe is a veggie-packed white bean dish with great flavor such as sun-dried tomato and sage.  We had this as a main course with some garlic bread and it was really filling!

http://i1263.photobucket.com/albums/ii623/hope_friedman/CarmelizedTempehShawarmas.jpg

http://i1263.photobucket.com/albums/ii623/hope_friedman/TuscanWhiteBeanswithSun-DriedTomatoes.jpg

Edible Containers

As a general rule, I usually like all food where the container is edible.  Some beloved examples of this are: soup in a bread bowl, corn dogs, brie wrapped in puff pastry, ice cream in a waffle cone...you get the point. However, it seems more often than not, edible containers tend push food into the "not so healthy" category rather then the healthy.  So when I find a recipe that is not only healthy, but also includes an edible container, I get pretty excited!  The recipe I am sharing comes from last month's issue of Clean Eating and comes from famous chef, Guy Fieri.  This is a recipe for stuffed acorn squash, which is not particularly in season this time of year, but you should be able to find it at any grocery store.  The squash is roasted with a light drizzle of olive oil and then stuffed lean, ground turkey and veggies.   Jon and I found this recipe to be very filling and so far, it's been really easy to re-heat and eat as left-overs.  It's also turned out to be very pretty looking, so I could see this being a good pot-luck dish to bring to someone's house!  Or alternatively, I think this recipe could be pre-made and frozen until thawed, heated and broiled with the ricotta.

As a note on the dairy in this recipe:  I replaced the ricotta in the recipe with a dollop of mashed potato, to cut out the dairy.  I also sautéed the veggies in olive oil rather than butter and used about 1/2 the oil the recipe suggests.  I say suggest because I've found that a lot of times when it comes to oil in recipes that call to sauté something, that this is really a taste preference and it's a good opportunity to cut down on fat if you'd like.  Now, I do caution, that this comes with trial and error.  You don't want to skimp too much, so I'd also suggest, making enough recipes to know what the difference between 4 tbsp vs. 2 tbsp of oil tastes like, for example.  Broth and water can also be good alternates added to cover the reduction in oil.

http://i1263.photobucket.com/albums/ii623/hope_friedman/StuffedAcornSquash-1.jpg