salad « eatingRD.com

February 25, 2009

quick fix

Filed under: Blog,Dinner,Recipes in a Flash — Tags: salad — Kristen :) @ 3:13 am

Some days I wish I could just freeze time, or at least start dinner around 3 so I can have fun and mess around in the kitchen . . . yea right! Since Chris gets home so late from work and class, I wanted to whip something up pretty quickly when I got home. My soon to be mother-in-law gave us a couple boxes of flavored rice and I wanted to try them out. This one is basmati rice with green lentils and it was really good, without any artificial ingredients, just the basics. The other one I tried was couscous with pumpkin and red pepper and I think I like that one even better. I also added some sautéed tofu (teriyaki flavor from Tj’s), leeks and garbanzo beans. Leeks have such an interesting flavor and it’s one of my favorite aromatics. It’s not too hard to prep either, you just have to make sure to clean and rinse out the grit pretty well between the layers before chopping.

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On the side I had my staple salad that I like to have with almost anything! Crispy romaine, champagne pear vinaigrette (from Tj’s), various chopped veggies, herbed goat cheese and some dried fruit.

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I’m saving the last of our roasty walnuts for another recipe to be featured in a bit! Along with the salad I had some steamed broccoli. I haven’t had broccoli in awhile and it was so yummy, just plain and steamed. This dinner was very satisfying even without the ‘meat,’ but I still wanted a little sumthin’ sumthin’ afterwards. I decided on some cuties and a small handful of grapes. These are so filling because of their water content and fiber. Boy, I’m pleasantly full! Hope you had a wonderful dinner!

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January 30, 2009

all the colors of the rainbow

Filed under: Blog,Dinner,Fitness/Health — Tags: quinoa, salad — Kristen :) @ 2:58 am

A good way to gauge the nutrient density of what you eat is to see how many colors are on your plate. The more colors the better! Nutrient density is just a term used to figure out how much calorie bang for your buck your are getting in the foods you eat. For example, a colorful salad has way more nutrients packed into it for not that many calories, while a candy bar is calorie dense, it doesn’t really have that many nutrients. So the salad is more nutrient dense. Pretty easy, right? You want to make the calories you eat the most nutrient dense and give you the biggest bang for your buck. A good way to start eating healthier, without focusing on calorie this, numbers of that, is to simply incorporate more colors into your diet.

We don’t even know all the synergistic properties of fruits and vegetables yet, but eating whole foods is much better than taking a vitamin as an excuse to eat crappy. Although I do take a regular multivitamin every so often to make sure I’m hitting all my bases. All those phytonutrients work together somehow to keep us healthy and help prevent many chronic diseases like cancer. It’s amazing to me how nature and the foods we eat can do this!

My salad I had for dinner tonight was like an explosion of flavors in my mouth! I took romaine salad greens (the greener the better, so iceberg isn’t the best choice), topped it with some marinated vegetables I made from the Splendid Table Cookbook (you have to try this one!), mini heirloom tomatoes from Trader Joe’s (look at the purple one!), some dried fruit and creamy goat cheese. I am a big fan of contrasting flavors and the tangy yet sweet marinated vegetables with a slight crisp, along the sweet and plump tomatoes and the creamy goat cheese just sang!

Then for the main I decided to make the Quinoa Stuffed Bell Peppers I featured on my Happy New Year post. Wow, these were good. If you haven’t tried fontina cheese, I would HIGHLY recommend it. It’s a semi-soft cheese that tastes like buttery toast and melts in your mouth. I also topped them with an aged Parmesan from Trader Joe’s. This is the real stuff. It has such quality flavor that you don’t even need to use that much, which is good because it is 12.99/lb! I only get this stuff every once in awhile, but it is so worth it. And the walnuts! Every few mouthfuls you get a nice toasty crunch inside. I only baked it for 30 minutes covered at 450 this time and the peppers came out nice and soft. Then I added the cheese on top and baked for another 10 minutes. So delicious I ate the whole darn pepper!