Three Bean Shirataki e Fagioli

I saw Rachael Ray make a three bean pasta e fagioli soup that looked doable, even though I didn’t have all the exact ingredients. I had been looking for a way to use some leftover carrots & green beans, and also some new shirataki noodles. I had never tried those noodles before, bought them just because of their low-carb status, but was worried that they might smell/taste really weird because of the packaging and the instructions. So I figured if I put them in a soup with a bunch of other stuff, maybe I wouldn’t notice. I roughly followed the recipe, with a few omissions and changes.

• Pam cooking spray
• half bag of shredded carrots
• 2 tsp garlic
• salt and pepper
• 1 (15-ounce) can cannellini beans
• 1 (15-ounce) can chick peas
• leftover green beans from a Taiwanese restaurant (sautéed in sesame and garlic I think)
• 3 tablespoons tomato sauce
• 1 can vegetable broth
• 3 cups water
• 1 bag angel hair shirataki noodles, cut into small pieces
• 1 small lemon, zested and juiced

For some reason, I was surprised that I liked it. Before I ate it, I was concerned that I might have spent too much time on making soup again. 30 minutes was a long time compared to the 2 minutes it would have taken to open a can of soup and microwave it. It was worth it though. It was even better the next day.

Turkey Meatball Curry

I made turkey meatball curry yesterday. I roughly followed Aarti Sequeira’s meatball curry recipe, but with a few changes. She didn’t make hers with turkey or with curry powder. She said that there wasn’t really such a thing as pre-mixed “curry powder” when she was growing up, but she would use a variety of spices. I happened to have curry powder, so I didn’t use her whole variety. She also said to use full-fat coconut milk because it really made all the difference. Since I don’t eat enough meatball curry to know the difference, I didn’t use the full fat milk.

Meatballs:
• 1 pound ground turkey
• 2 tsp diced jalapeno from a can
• 2 tsp minced ginger
• 1 tsp salt

Curry:
• Pam cooking spray
• 5 tsp garlic
• 1 tsp ginger
• 2 teaspoons curry powder
• 1/2 teaspoon cayenne pepper
• 2 handfuls of cherry tomatoes, quartered
• 1 (14-ounce can) low-fat coconut milk
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1/2 cup water
• juice of 1 tiny lemon

I ended up cooking it a bit longer than recommended, since the sauce was still thin enough that it didn’t seem like it would matter. I stepped away from the stove for a few minutes and when I came back, the sauce had kinda disappeared. It was still terrific anyway. I served it over brown rice. The picture didn’t do it justice, but I took it during the “leftovers” phase.

Pesto and Artichoke Pizza

That “30 Minute Meals” show should have been called “30 Ingredient Meals.” I watched the show a bunch of times in the past, but I had never made any of Rachael Ray’s food. The meals might have been fast, but they were always packed with ingredients I didn’t have. A few days ago I saw her make the recipe for tre colore pesto with too much stuff in it, so there was no way I was going to make it. Then I decided that I didn’t really have to do it the way she said. Why did pesto always have to be basil & pine nuts… plus all the extra stuff she added to make this particular one? I had jar of marinated artichoke hearts, so I was inspired to make my own version of pesto and artichoke pizza.

I made the “pesto” out of a leftover salad from a restaurant, and a snack pack of mixed nuts. I normally wouldn’t have even bothered to bring home half a restaurant salad, but the waiter accidentally gave me the large size that I didn’t order. And this “heart healthy” snack pack of nuts was burning a hole on the shelf because I didn’t actually like the variety.

• 2 cups leftover mixed greens with roma tomatoes, carrots, cucumbers, raisins, sunflower seeds, egg, and croutons (considered removing the raisins, but ended up leaving them)
• 1/4 cup olive oil
• 1/4 cup mixed nuts
• 1 tsp juice from one of those plastic limes
• 1 tsp garlic
• small/random amount of salt & pepper

I threw all the ingredients into the blender. Then I spread the blended mixture on half a spinach lavash flatbread, grated 1 babybel light cheese wheel over it, and put on some sliced artichokes and cherry tomatoes. I put it in the toaster oven for a bit (not sure of the time… I just set it to the picture of the dark toast). It was excellent. The only thing that made it lower fat was the light cheese, but with all the oil & nuts & croutons & egg… I don’t think I could really call it 100% good for me. I would choose it any day over a boring ol salad though.

Egg Mug

For a few days in a row, I made egg mugs for lunch at work. I didn’t really have the ingredients to make any of Lisa Lillian’s specific recipes, but I was roughly inspired to use whatever I had.

• 3/4 cup eggbeaters
• handful frozen broccoli
• handful frozen peas
• leftover diced chili peppers from a can (couple teaspoons?)
• a few cherry tomatoes, halved
• 1 mini babybel light cheese wheel

I just put the eggbeaters in a huge mug, put the mug in the microwave, heated for 1 minute, stirred it up, put the frozen veggies and cheese in the mug too, heated for another 30 seconds & stirred. I can’t remember exactly how many times I heated & stirred… but when it got super fluffy & looked like the eggs were cooked… then I stopped heating, threw in the tomatoes, added some salt/pepper, and ate it. I forgot to take a picture, but it looked exactly like you’d expect eggs & veggies & cheese to look in a mug. Tasted just like eggs & vegetables, but I should have bought a can of hotter chili peppers. I recall that I complained about the peppers in a few past recipes as well.

Sauteed Cabbage and Pears

I was watching Melissa D’Arabian, and she said exactly what I was thinking. She said if you have leftover cabbage, about a week old, and you’re thinking that you might throw it away… make this instead. So I did. I roughly made her sauteed cabbage and apples recipe, with a few twists. I didn’t have apples, but I had a can of pear halves. I didn’t remember seeing any fennel seeds on the show, but I did recall brown sugar. And I didn’t have any wine, so I went with seasoned rice vinegar.

• 1 small leftover head green cabbage
• 1 pear, canned
• 1 Tbsp I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter
• 1 Tbsp brown sugar
• 1/4 cup seasoned rice vinegar

It tasted really intriguing. I thought it was missing something though, and & didn’t belong in a bowl all by itself. What it was missing was a greasy bratwurst, but I refrained. Instead, I rode my bike to Wienerschnitzel and got a turkey dog to eat with it. It was really tasty. Since I candied up the cabbage with the butter, sugar, & fruit… the most redeeming part of the meal might have been the 6 mile roundtrip bike ride to get the turkey dog. Considering that I was going to throw away the cabbage, at least this recipe convinced me to eat my veggies instead.

Quinoa Tabbouleh

I made Aarti Sequeira’s quinoa tabbouleh yesterday. I basically followed the recipe, but I only had enough ingredients to make half of it, plus I did swap out a few herbs & spices.

• 1/4 cup quinoa
• 1/2 cup vegetable broth
• juice of 1/2 a lemon
• 1 tsp olive oil
• 1/2 tsp of yesterday’s leftover garam masala, cumin, salt and pepper mix
• 1/4 tsp dill
• 1/2 pint cherry tomatoes, halved
• 1/2 cucumber, chopped

I didn’t know what tabbouleh was supposed to taste like because the only one I tried in the past was also one that I made. This version was really good, in my opinion. It was better than the one I made before. I think the improvement was due to the vegetable broth (I just used water in the past), and the garam masala spice mix (I just used the dill previously).

Sweet Potato Fries and Carrot Burgers

I made Aarti Sequeira’s sweet potato fries from the Burger Station episode. I followed the recipe, but with 2 exceptions: I cut the recipe in half, and I used Pam instead of olive oil (I saw Marcela Valladolid use Pam to make some spicy tortilla chips on a different show). It was hard to find garam masala, so I had to use some weird pre-packaged chicken tikka masala spice pack. Also, I had never bought a sweet potato before so I didn’t really know how to tell if it was a good one... they all seemed deformed, hard, and odd.

I made burgers too, but didn’t follow Aarti’s recipe. She was talking all about the marbled fat in her special combo of ground sirloin and ground brisket. So instead of marbled fat burgers, I made veggie burgers. I roughly followed this recipe for carrot burgers, but I swapped some of the ingredients. I made 5 burgers instead of 6, but only because the mixture was so sticky that I was having trouble getting it off of my hands. I served the burgers on honey whole wheat sandwich thins with ketchup and brown mustard.

• 1 cup shredded carrots
• 1/4 cup eggbeaters
• 1/4 cup low-fat mayonnaise
• 1/2 tsp garlic
• 1 1/2 cups uncooked oatmeal
• 2 cups crushed honey nut cheerios

The fries and the burgers were both surprisingly good. The picture didn’t do it justice at all. They were good enough that I had to consider the fact that they might not have been 100% healthy. However, I decided that the point wasn’t whether a sweet potato was any better than a regular potato… the point was that the fries were baked instead of fried. The point wasn’t whether an oatmeal & cereal burger on a bun was high in carbs… the point was that it wasn’t high in fat & cholesterol.

Exploded Oatmeal Red Pepper Muffins

I was thinking about Lisa Lillian’s recipe for doubling the volume of her oatmeal by adding twice as much liquid and cooking it twice as long. I thought that if I had two times the normal amount of oatmeal in the bowl, I might be tempted to add twice as much fruit and sugar. I was also thinking about those garlic biscuits at Red Lobster. Each biscuit is 8 grams of fat and 16 grams of carbs... terrible stats for something so small, of which I would never eat just one. So I decided to explode my oatmeal (1/2 cup of oats, 2 cups of water, and 4 minutes in the microwave) & used it to make my own biscuits, roughly based on a combo of 3 recipes: ginormous oatmeal, baked oatmeal, and red pepper biscuits.

• 2 cups cooked oatmeal
• 1/2 teaspoon crushed red pepper flakes
• 1/2 teaspoon baking powder
• 1 teaspoon garlic
• 3/4 cup Fage Total 0 Greek yogurt
• 1 grated Babybel light cheese wheel

Because the mixture just seemed a bit messy, I used a 12-hole muffin tin instead of a cookie sheet, and put 1/4 cup of the mix into each hole. That was when they became muffins instead of biscuits. I also sprinkled a pinch of garlic salt on the top of each one. I baked the muffins for 40 minutes at 350 degrees (turning half way through because I think my oven is crooked). I let them cool for 10 minutes.

The muffins were disgusting. I threw them away & ate plain yogurt instead.

Spicy Tuna Sandwich Rolls

I had a can of tuna, so I thought of making a tuna sandwich. Unfortunately, I had no bread or mayo (which might have defeated the purpose of low-cholesterol, low-carb, & low-fat recipes anyway). I came up with this idea all by myself. I made my own version of a spicy tuna roll. I used brown rice, cucumber, canned tuna mixed with the leftover bell pepper/avocado/cumin/yogurt dip, and some Taco Bell hot sauce. The seaweed wrappers I had in the fridge didn’t smell good anymore and must have expired, so I didn’t use them. I considered using parchment paper to roll up the filling in just the rice with no wrapper. However, I realized that since I used boil-in-a-bag brown rice, it wouldn’t stick to itself the way normal rice would. So I wrapped the rice, cucumber, and spicy tuna mixture in half a spinach lavash flatbread, then cut it into rolls. Since I ended up using rice and flatbread, I think I made it more carb-a-licious than it would have been with the seaweed wrapper. The rolls tasted pretty much the way you’d expect anything to taste if you dipped it in soy sauce and wasabi. Seriously though, it was okay, but a tuna sandwich would have been better. I ate the rest of the cucumber, but now I have leftover spicy tuna.

Lemony Eggish Faux-Rice Soup

I made some soup last night that was roughly based on Melissa D’Arabian’s lemony egg soup recipe. I stuck to the recipe with three exceptions: no onions, no rice, and fake eggs. Instead of eggs, I used eggbeaters. Instead of rice, I used grated cauliflower. I doubled the amount of “rice” that was listed in the recipe because I didn’t believe that cauliflower would expand or get starchy like real rice. Grating frozen cauliflower was more difficult than I had imagined. However, I really liked it and would do it again.

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Spinach Chip & Avocado Dip

I made chip & dip as a snack for work today. It was roughly based on Lisa Lillian’s crispy lavash squares with HG hot couple dip recipe. Surprisingly, I used more ingredients than the original recipe. Even though I usually prefer to leave out a bunch of steps, this time I did more because of the spinach lavash flatbread in my fridge. I prefer the whole wheat lavash because it has a weaker flavor, but I didn’t have any. So I cut up half a spinach lavash into squares (half was how much would fit into my toaster oven, or I might have made more). I brushed the squares with low-sodium soy sauce & sprinkled them with garlic salt to mask the spinach flavor. Yes, perhaps it was odd that I added salt to a low-sodium product, but that’s what I did. Then I toasted them until I decided they were done. I didn’t trust my toaster oven so I didn’t use the timer, but I just stared in the window & turned it off when things looked toasty. As the dip, I used the leftover bell pepper/avocado/yogurt/cumin dip from yesterday’s Roast Beef & Chayote Tacos recipe. It was pretty good, but it might have been better if I had mixed in some salsa like she recommended.

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Roast Beef & Chayote Tacos

This one would have totally flown under the radar, if not for my accidental DVR timing. I usually stop recording immediately at the end of the show I wanted to watch, but I happened to set the DVR to record a bit longer & caught a few minutes of the next show. I misunderstood & thought it was all one dish. So now it is. This roast beef and chayote taco recipe is roughly based on Marcela Valladolid’s light tacos and mexican squash with yogurt dip recipes.

I bought some flank steak specifically to make this. However, it was oddly discolored when I took it out of the package. So I used deli style roast beef instead. I mostly followed the directions for the steak, but without onions or cilantro. I cooked the roast beef on the Foreman Grill. Even though sandwich meat comes already cooked & sliced, I had soaked it in beer, so figured I should cook it a bit. I followed the directions for the chayote too, but I just used 1 cup of Fage Total 0 greek yogurt instead of adding some mayo.

I put the roast beef, the squash, and the salsa in the cabbage leaf (I know she said lettuce, but I don’t like lettuce), and then I dunked the tacos in the dip. If I had seen the whole show, maybe I’d have realized how long this would take. Or maybe I’m just slow with all the chopping & blending & whatnot. Seemed like I was making it forever, but done eating it in one second. It was good, but would I make it again? Sure, if I had nothing else to do.

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Stir-Fry

Lisa Lillien makes a lot of interesting stuff. I watch her show sometimes, but I don’t cook many of her recipes. The theme seems to be “guilt free” food for weight loss & whatnot. I had no guilt about eating sausage & pepperoni pizza on a regular basis, so I didn’t really think the show was for me. But now I see that she tracks the stats for carbs, fat, and cholesterol… so I guess I’m actually the target market for it.

I roughly made her spicy thai-style no-cook stir-fry recipe. I didn’t want to go out and buy peanut vinaigrette salad dressing* so I found a recipe for thai peanut sauce, which I mostly followed. I just put a snack pack of peanuts in the blender with 1 Tbsp olive oil, 1 Tbsp sesame oil, 2 Tbsp soy sauce, juice from half a lemon, 1 tsp of garlic, and almost 1 Tbsp of sugar. Then I added the 2 Tbsp seasoned rice vinegar & almost 1 tsp red pepper flakes from the stir-fry recipe to the blender also. I poured that mixture over a bowl of 1 bag broccoli cole slaw, 2 cutup/leftover grilled chicken strips that I got from Jack in the Box yesterday, and 1 cup of frozen peas. I suppose I made it a bit fattier by not using the recommended sauce, but too bad. It tasted excellent, but the peas were still frozen so I had to wait a while before eating it. It might have been even better with a little less sugar & a little more chili pepper flakes.

* Even if I wanted to buy it, I just wouldn’t. A) I already have salad dressing in the fridge that will take me forever to finish. B) It probably has artificial sweetener, which makes my stomach hurt. C) What if it turns out that I don’t like it… I don’t want to throw it out, but I also don’t want to be stuck with it. I think they should make travel size condiments (like the tiny shampoo at the hotels, or the liquor bottles on airplanes).

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Tortilla

I made this recipe a few times in the past, basically the way it was written, and I liked it. So this time I revised it for what was in the fridge and/or within walking distance. This version of spanish tortilla is roughly based on a Melissa D’Arabian recipe. However, since I’m trying not to eat chorizo or salami, I walked over to Jack in the Box and got some grilled chicken strips. I cut up 2 of the 4 strips (saved 2 for later), and put them in an oven-safe skillet with 1 tsp garlic, 1 tsp diced chili peppers, a handful of frozen broccoli, 1 grated mini babybel light cheese wheel, and 1 cup of eggbeaters. I cooked it 5 minutes longer than the recipe said. I cut it into 4 pieces, ate 2, and saved the other 2 for lunch at work. I don’t mean to brag, but I think this version is even better than the original. It could use a little more chili pepper, but I just realized I didn’t use any salt or pepper.

Double Leftover Soup

I made two soups for lunch today. Well, I made them both earlier in the week… I just ate them both as leftovers today.

The first soup was roughly based on Aarti Sequeira’s cucmber lychee gazpacho recipe. I just went with 4 small cucumbers, the juice of 1 lemon, 2 tsp dill (comes in a tube like toothpaste), 2 tsp garlic (again with the tube), 2 cups plain Fage Total 0 Greek yogurt, threw it all in a blender, and served it cold. I really liked this one. I made it a couple times already.

I can’t remember where I got the stupid idea to make tomato barley soup. I don’t really know what the original ingredients were, but I wrote down: 1 can peeled and diced tomatoes with the juice, handful of cherry tomatoes, 2 1/2 cups water, 1 can vegetable broth, 1 tsp olive oil, 2 teaspoons garlic from the tube, 1/4 cup uncooked barley (I used quinoa because I didn’t have barley), 1 cup chopped carrots. I decided at the last minute that I didn’t want chunks of carrots, so I blended them before putting them in the pot with everything else for 35 minutes. Apparently blended carrots are super frothy when you boil them, so I had to clean up the stovetop when the pot boiled over. The cherry tomatoes exploded during the boiling, too. So when it was done, I was scooping out unappealing tomato skin carcasses from the pot. It tasted like tomato soup and the quinoa tasted pretty much like barley. Wow. That was a lot of work for tomato soup, which is on sale at Food Maxx for like 29 cents right now. I ended up sprinkling in some salt & pepper… along with some leftover pickled carrots from yesterday’s Wrap recipe, since the original carrots escaped from the pot. I guess I actually wanted chunks of carrot after all. It was good by the time I was done, but I probably won’t make it again.

I considered mixing the two soups together, but decided that would be gross.

Wrap

Today I made a wrap for lunch. I spread some Dijon mustard on half a piece of this spinach flatbread/tortilla thing, crumbled up a leftover salmon burger on the tortilla, topped it with some pickled carrots, and then I rolled it up. I had a Tupperware container of cucumbers and cherry tomatoes, so I brought that to work too. I also had some plain Greek yogurt, so I dipped everything in it. Was it good? Eh… it was edible. Would I eat it again? Probably.

The salmon burgers were roughly based on a Melissa d'Arabian salmon cake recipe (before they became leftovers), but I didn’t put any of that junk in there. I used 1 (14-ounce) can salmon, 1/2 teaspoon baking powder, and some eggbeaters (I don’t know how much, cuz I just poured some out of the carton). I also didn’t fry them. I baked at 400 degrees for 10 minutes, flipped them over, did 10 minutes more, then switched to broil for 2 minutes, flipped again and broiled for 3 more minutes.

The pickled carrots were roughly based on Aarti Sequeira's banh-mi vietnamese grilled pork sandwich recipe, but I used half the amount of sugar, didn’t put in any salt, and didn’t make the sandwich.