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Loaded Joetato

October 8, 2010 5 Comments

When I first graduated college and entered “the real world” cooking was not exactly my forte. Typically, I’d pick one to two meals for the workweek, purchase all the ingredients on Sunday, and then eat the same thing for dinner for the next five days. Can we say blasé?

Add this lack of knowledge in the cooking-for-one field to my pure disgust for all things raw-meat and you end up with a meal plan that looks something like this:

Spaghetti with red sauce and garlic bread
Chicken quesadillas (using pre-cooked rotisserie chicken, of course)
Ravioli with red sauce and garlic bread
Egg salad
Macaroni and cheese (and garlic bread if I was feelin festive)
Ice cream
Anddddd repeat.

After a few months of this monotony, I started to branch out…. to every local restaurant within walking distance that is. The food was FABULOUS, and the weight gain was… well… FLABULOUS.

Fast-forward a few years. I started to realize that Olive Garden take-out wasn’t the best option for my wallet. And while the Chop House in Cleveland has THEE MOST AMAZING MASHED POTATOES and Fat Fish Blue has fried pickles with hot sauce that rock my friggin socks off, these weren’t the best options for dinner every night of the week.

Dangit.

I love multi-purpose ingredients, but I HATE eating the same foods day in and day out. So how the heck do you eat healthy delicious meals but avoid having to eat the same foods over and over and over again? This is about the time I started batch-cooking basic ingredients to have on hand throughout the week to toss into whatever random concoctions I decided to make each night after work. Additionally, I changed my approach to grocery shopping. Rather than buying ingredients for a specific recipe (that undoubtedly made 6+ servings), I simply started purchasing fresh produce and ingredients that LOOKED tasty and then worked on incorporating those things I really liked into as many different concoctions as I could.

And I FORCED myself to get over my repulsion for raw meat. At first I handled all raw meat with two sets of tongs… Even this method led to sporadic dry heaving… Can you picture forming a hamburger with two sets of tongs?! Trust me… it ain’t easy.

In my house, Sundays are for cooking. Every Sunday, I cook up breakfast for the entire workweek, wash and chop veggies, batch-cook chicken breasts or turkey sausage, and roast up some veggies. Not only does this make healthy eating during the week super easy, but it also cuts down on my work-week cooking time.

Hallelujah.

So where does this lovely story take us? It takes us to a Loaded Joetato. Feast your eyes on this puppy:

This Loaded Joetato consisted of my leftover healthified sloppy joes atop 1 medium sized potato topped off with some fat free sour cream and chopped onion leftover from my chicken quesadilla and some roasted broccoli leftover from my Sunday cookfest.

Ohhhhh Joe.

Recipes

Healthified Slop Sloppy Joes

October 7, 2010 3 Comments

Sloppy joes are a fall food staple in my family, and I have been craving a big fat sloppy joe since the start of football season! This was my first attempt at making a healthified version of the sloptastic treat:

Looks pretty good, eh? To start things off, I sprayed a skillet with cooking spray and tossed in:

1/3 cup chopped white onion

Once the onions started to soften, I added:

8 ounces 99% lean ground turkey
S&P

I cooked the turkey til it was no longer pink. I don’t know about you, but I’m not exactly a fan of rare poultry… bleck!

Nice and brown:

Next I added:

1/4 cup water
1/2 cup Reduced Sugar Ketchup
1 tsp mustard
1 tsp Worcestershire sauce
1/4 tsp salt
1/4 tsp garlic powder
1/4 tsp onion powder

Once everything was combined, I popped a lid on and let the joes simmer for about 25 minutes on very low heat. Then I spooned half the mix on to a Pepperidge Farm 7 grain deli flat and topped with some chopped raw onion.

A thing of beauty:

Ohhhhh yesssss….

That is one happy joe.

These sloppy joes were super easy to throw together and pretty tasty — I think the only change I’ll make for next time is to use the ORGANIC Heinz Ketchup instead of the reduced sugar version (which oddly has this crazy sweet taste that I am NOT a fan of).

I’m still craving a good old-fashioned Manwich sloppy joe… so I’m sure those will be making an appearance on an upcoming Sunday game day menu 🙂

Stats on the sloppy joseph: 256 calories, 27g carbs, 3g fat, 35g protein, 6g fiber

What I ate

Cheeseless Quesadilla?

October 6, 2010 6 Comments

What do you call a cheeseless quesadilla?

Is it just a dilla? What about a cheeseless quesadilla with beans? A habadilla?

Something to ponder…

Quesadillas are one of my favorite fast-fix dinners. I put a lot of random things in my quesadillas, and I’m convinced that you can sandwich pretty much anything in between a tortilla, throw it on the george foreman grille, and have near instant glory in your mouth.

Take this dinner for example. I started off with 1 Tumaro’s low carb tortilla topped, 1/4 cup fat-free refried beans and 2 ounces grilled chicken:

Plus 1/2 a cup of frozen calabacita mixed veggies that I defrosted in the microwave:

5 minutes of quality time with the george:

Naked quesadilla:

Veggies for toppin’

Add 2 tbsp of fat-free sour cream and you have yourself magnificence on a plate!

Stats on the habadilla: 264 calories, 38g carbs, 3g fat, 33g protein, 12g fiber

Mmmmmm beans…… Love them.

Ramblings, Recipes

Mock mac and cheese

October 5, 2010 4 Comments

One of life’s true pleasures is a big ole plate of macaroni and cheese. I’m talking homemade oven-baked cheesy glory. Once fall rolls around, I start to get some serious cravings for comfort food. I’m sure you know what I’m talking about. Comfort foods. The foods that make you feel warm and cuddly from the inside out. The foods that make you want to hug your belly and sway side to side just because they taste so dang good. The foods that you’d like to pour into a giant tub so you could jump in and swaddle yourself in their heavenly gooey warmth…. What.. that’s just me?!

Anyway, tonight I decided to give healthified mac and cheese a go in an attempt to satisfy my comfort food craving. I remember seeing a recipe a while back on the Hungry Girl email blast, and that was the basis for my dinner (though I couldn’t find the email).

The main components of my mac and cheese were Carba Nada pasta and lightly sauced broccoli:

And 1 light French Onion laughing cow wedge:

Carba nada only takes 5 minutes to cook, so this meal was ready for chowing in no time! While the pasta cooked I also threw together a small salad with romaine lettuce, tomato, onion, and some Ken’s Lite Caesar dressing (LOVE that stuff).

All together:

The flavors were a little mild, so I added some red pepper flakes and black pepper on top:

Cheesy goodness:

Not too shabby! If you could get laughing cow in light cheddar that would take this dinner to a whole new level!

Stats on 1 serving mock mac and cheese: 235 calories, 32g carbs, 5g fat, 16g protein, 8g fiber

On a separate note, I’m debating on whether or not to join a gym for the winter. Twice in my life I had succumbed to signing up for a year-long gym membership, and BOTH times I stopped going after only a couple months… yet still had to pay for the entire year. I’m really not big on gyms… but without a gym, I see myself simply not exercising this winter. Any tips for making the gym FUN?

Recipes

Hummus + Spaghetti Squash

September 28, 2010 6 Comments

Sometimes I have foodie visions. This is my term for the moment when a random collaboration of ingredients convene in my brain and its seems as though there is nothing I can do to regain control of my thoughts… except of course, try out the random concoction … all the while hoping it doesn’t make me ralph.

My most recent foodie vision consisted of some of this:

plus

What’s that, you ask? Good question! This lovely dinner concoction consisted of:

2 tbsp Trader Joe’s Original Hummus
2 ounces chopped grilled chicken
1 diced roma tomato
1 baby spaghetti squash
Some red pepper flakes

Repulsed? Don’t go all eggplant on me yet!

First, I baked the spaghetti squash in a 425 degree oven for 25 minutes (since this was just a lil guy). Then I used a fork to scrape out the squash noodles.

Meanwhile, I sprayed a skillet with some cooking spray and tossed in the hummus to get it heating up:

Then I added the tomatoes and chicken:

Once everything was warmed through, I added the spaghetti squash and some red pepper flakes.

Presto!

This was really tasty and simultaneously really weird 😯

Several times during the meal I got a faint reminder of macaroni and cheese which I found even weirder–but that gave me ANOTHER foodie vision I must try sometime soon…. Cheesy spaghetti squash! Stay tuned, folks!

Overall, I like this idea and I’m definitely going to play with it some more. I think wilted spinach would be a really nice addition and maybe a different flavor of hummus….. we shall see… we shall see.

Stats on the spaghetti squash/hummus concoction: 199 calories, 20g carbs, 6g fat, 14g protein, 5g fiber

CALL TO ACTION! Now that the weather is changing, I’ve been craving WARM lunches…. I am bored & I need inspiration for yummy/healthy WARM lunches to bring to work….. Any ideas?

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