Spicy Rice Stick Stir-fry

Filed under Real Food, Recipes by on 18 January 2011 at 6:45 am {7 comments}

If I eat a food and I really like it, chances are I’m going to eat tons of it over the next few weeks. My current obsession is rice noodles. I love the silky texture and quick cooking speed.

IMG_6843 I’ve been trying out recipes for the last few weeks attempting to produce Thai-ish stir-fry recipe. I think I’ve finally created one I like. Start to finish, I’d say you can have everything ready in 20 minutes.

  • Ingredients: 
    1 package frozen stir fry vegetables
    1 clove garlic chopped
    3/4 pound of chicken breast
    6.5  ounces rice noodles
    1/4 cup rice wine vinegar
    2T low sodium soy sauce
    1T brown sugar
    1T Sriracha hot chili sauce
    1T peanut butter
  • Process:
    1)     Cut chicken into bite size pieces and cook in a pan with a bit of olive oil and garlic
    2) Boil water, when water is boiling add noodles and cook for five minutes
    3) In sauce pan, whisk together vinegar, soy sauce, brown sugar, chili sauce, and peanut butter
    4) Heat sauce until boiling, lower heat and allow sauce to simmer and reduce. Continue to whisk occasionally.
    5) When chicken has finished cooking, add frozen veggies to pan with a 1/4 cup of water. Cover and simmer.  
    6) After both the veggies and noodles are cooked, add drained noodles and sauce to the vegetable/chicken pan

IMG_6844

IMG_6852

I would say this meal is 6 out of 10 on the spicy scale. If you don’t like spicy food, you should reduce the amount of chili sauce. This is a quick meal to put together. We added some TJ’s pot stickers to round things out.  

Chicken Quesadilla Pie

Filed under Food by on 7 June 2010 at 9:24 pm {6 comments}

Today was nice and cool in New England. A good way to ease into the week. Overall, I love warm weather, but my classroom turns into a little mini-furnace when it’s hot out. The day was pretty good even though I was a little sore from yesterday’s run.

I decided to try a few new recipes this week; my meal planning has been in kind of a rut. But now that I’m thinking about it, this barely counts as new because we eat quesadillas almost every week. My inspiration came from Real Simple. Their recipe is fine, but I changed almost everything to match what I had. I used Cabot 50% reduced fat cheese half cheddar and half jalapeno. I cooked chicken instead of using rotisserie, salsa instead of enchilada sauce, low fat sour cream instead of heavy cream and green pepper instead of zucchini. The very last difference was that I added a layer of black beans and only three layers of tortillas.  I don’t know precisely how many calories I cut out with my changes but I’m guessing quite a few.

IMG_2634

This meal was so good. I cooked the chicken in salsa giving everything a slow cooked flavor. I also love meals that cook for about 20 – 30 minutes, so you can get everything cleaned up before you sit down to eat. This is a great weeknight meal with leftovers and could easily be made vegetarian. If fact, if Jeremy weren’t here, I probably wouldn’t have bothered with chicken.  Considering our love of quesadillas this will definitely go on the keep list.

Balsamic Chicken on Salad

Filed under Food by on 10 May 2010 at 7:54 pm {no comments}

Yesterday, Jeremy and I drove to Rhode Island to surprise my mom for Mother’s Day.  On the way back we made a pilgrimage to Trader Joe’s. Among other things, I got a bag of the Olive Oil Popcorn. Oh my goodness, so good. We went for a jog after we got home and then chilled out watching baseball for the rest of the night.

Today I had a case of the Monday’s; visualizing a favorite dinner helped me make it through the afternoon.

IMG_2156

While we haven’t had it in a while, it’s just  a great, satisfying dinner. Once we start eating it, it magically appears on the menu list every other week.

This dinner is one of the fastest week night meals you can make. It’s enjoyable all year round, but I do prefer it in the summer.

Ingredients:

  • Chicken
  • Garlic (3 Cloves), chopped
  • Balsamic Vinegar
  • Fresh Mozzarella
  • Green Onions
  • Baby Spinach
  • Walnuts (These are key don’t leave them out)

Procedure (can you tell who works in a Bio class two days a week):

  1. Cut the chicken into bite size pieces
  2. Marinate for a few minutes with two cloves of chopped garlic and balsamic vinegar just enough to cover the chicken
  3. Cut mozzarella into bite size pieces
  4. Begin cooking chicken with the balsamic vinegar, cook it slowly
  5. Toast walnuts either in the oven or in a pan (two handfuls is plenty)
  6. Make your own dressing! Do not put a store bought dressing on this salad. You will ruin it! You MUST make your own balsamic vinaigrette. Be creative. Use those herbs.
  7. Toss it everything but the dressing together add dressing, Enjoy!

One of my favorite things abut this salad is all of the different fork combinations – mozz and chicken, mozz and walnut, walnut and chicken, so many options.

My dressing tonight was a combination of garlic, oregano, and red pepper 

 IMG_2144         IMG_2149

These spoons are from my trip to Zambia, one of the only souvenirs I didn’t give away.

IMG_2158

 

Leftovers will be excellent tomorrow.

Such a Better Spin Class + a Protein Packed Dinner

Filed under Uncategorized by on 26 January 2010 at 9:00 pm {4 comments}

I tried spin again tonight and it was the RPM version. This class was SOOOO much better than the last one. I think it has little to do with it being an Les Mills class and everything to do with the instructor.  Christine was perky, but not obnoxious and more importantly friendly and helpful. She helped my friend and I set up our bikes from the handlebars all the way down to pedals. My ride was so much more comfortable than last time, thanks to her. I will definitely be going back. Comfortable, by the way, does not mean easy. After my long first day of semester 2, pushing through the tension was just what I needed.

Before class, I ate half of a Carrot Cake Cliff bar; but when I got home, I was famished.  Which means, I was really excited to know that there was homemade chicken chili waiting for me. This chili was just spicy enough and so hearty.  It is a protein packed, extremely low fat meal. I felt so full and satisfied after I ate.  The Jiffy corn muffin didn’t hurt anything either.

102_9667

Chicken Chili

102_9669

Ingredients:

  • Crushed Tomatoes, 1 280z can
  • Chicken Breast, no skin, 1.5 – 2 pounds
  • Red Onion, 1 cup, chopped
  • Green Peppers 1 cup, chopped
  • Red Paper Flakes 3 tbsp
  • Chili powder, 3 tbsp
  • Salt, 1 tbsp (to taste, I use kosher salt)
  • Water 1 Cup
  • Dark Red Kidney Beans, 3 15oz can
  • Black Beans 15oz cans
  • Tomato Sauce, 1 15oz can

Steps:

  1. I added the first 8 ingredients in the crock pot this morning and set it on 10 hours (which is my lowest setting).
  2. When I came home, I pulled apart the chicken which took less than two minutes.
  3. Next, I added the beans and tomato sauce.
  4. I restarted the crock pot on med-low for another 2 hours.

I ran the stats on SparkPeople; using their recipe calculator. I estimated six servings, but you might be able to get eight.  At six servings, there are 385 calories, 3 grams of fat, and 26 grams of protein. This chili tastes so good that I was sure there would be far more calories.  This is a great week night meal, and it will be even better tomorrow.

Shepherd’s Pie ?

Filed under Uncategorized by on 12 January 2010 at 8:18 pm {one comment}

Ok, I only sort of made Shepherd’s pie. I did follow the recipe, for the most part, I didn’t have marjoram or evaporated milk, so I made some substitutions.  This recipe came from Weight Watchers New Complete Cookbook.  I liked it overall, my fears were unnecessary, because Hey!this really was just Chicken Pot Pie with potatoes on top instead of biscuits.  This cookbook always uses margarine, which maybe that’s a WW thing. I’ve never been involved with WW, except for this cookbook. I don’t like the taste of margarine; I like butter and that’s what I used. The food tasted great.

 102_9590 

There were lots of veggies (carrots, spinach, corn, spring onions), which were covered in a light sauce or gravy. On top of these wonderfully colorful veggies, you were supposed to spread mashed potatoes. I did it, but I didn’t want to. It went from this beautiful color to something not worthy of being photographed. Using last nights chicken and potatoes made this dish much faster. I love cooking once and eating twice.

All day I’ve wanted pastry. Light Cooking for Two has a pseudo baklava recipe called Phyllo Honey Nut Squares.  Basically, you layer sheets of phyllo with a mixture of honey, spices and then crushed walnuts. AMAZING!

102_9594

I’m really glad this is all the recipe made. Jeremy and I each had two. If there had been more, I almost assuredly would have eaten more. I will definitely be making these again. I’m not really sure why they are called squares, but oh well.

Time for Biggest Loser and generating crap for work.

Page 1 of 212»

Archives

Categories

Follow Me on Pinterest

2013 Reading Challenge

2013 Reading Challenge
Clarice has read 1 book toward her goal of 25 books.
hide

Switch to our mobile site