We are on a mission in the Riley house to eat healthier. One of the first things that had to go was fried foods (we’ll mourn later). Since one of my favorite meals to make is fish tacos (batter fried of course) I decided tonight to make a few revisions to the meal to healthify it. First to change was the sauce. No more mayonnaise or sour cream. Instead I blended up an avocado with jalapeno, cilantro, lime, onion, and a tablespoon of white vinegar (plus a teensy bit of water and salt).
The next big step was to skip over using beer batter, and to grill the lightly seasoned fish. Of course since the grill was already hot it was perfect to toss the tortillas on allowing for warm soft tortillas without frying them in oil.
While the fish is cooking toss up some cabbage salsa (cilantro, tomato, cabbage, sweet onion, and lime).
Aww, the fish is done (its tilapia by the way).
There you have it, fish tacos healthified. Nothing fried or saturated in fats.
Last night for the fun of it we decided to make dinner as a family. Of course whats funner than letting the little (and not so little) ones put together their own pizza. There’s nothing like flour and cheese all over the place to make the kiddos happy. However pizza is hardly healthy eating. In an attempt to make it a bit lower in carbs and lower fat I picked up light mozzarella cheese and substituted steak tomatoes for the crust. Wow, talk about delicious. I am not even a tomato lover but these babies were to die for. Meanwhile I saved about 400 calories and over 70g of carbs with this simple substitution and it took only about 5 minutes to assemble. Let me know what you think if you give it a whirl.
No Crust Pizza
Ingredients:
Large tomato
Pepperoni
Marinara Sauce of your choice
Mozzarella cheese
Italian seasonings
Directions:
Cut tomato in approximately 1/4 inch slices.
Smooth 2T of marinara sauce atop the tomato slices.
Top with grated mozzarella and pepperoni and finish with sprinkles of garlic salt and basil.
Bake for 8 minutes at 400 degrees or 12 minutes under the broiler set on high.
As pictured here 2 Slices made with Ragu traditional sauce & reduced fat mozzarella (1.5 oz):
Calories 226; Fat 13; Carbs 8.85; Fiber 2; Protein 17; Weight Watchers Points Plus: 5.5
I have been making a major concentrated effort lately to keep up on housework over the weekends (something I am generally not very good at). That way when I get calls to sub during the week I don’t end up overwhelmed or living in chaos. Today however I chose not to take a job since I have a temperamental head cold. With the laundry, shopping, and meal planning done I had nothing to do but sit around and get better. A couple of hours doing nothing was indeed great but pretty soon Julianna and I started looking at each other like “what’s the fun in this?” So I decided to try my hand at a No Knead Bread recipe, with a three year old assistant of course. The simplicity of this might I add was amazing, but it takes all of 8 minutes including clean up to put together, the rest is waiting (and Julianna was not a happy camper about the “no kneading” part). As you can imagine that didn’t put a dent in my day so off to the next project, Homemade Pasta. I looked the recipe up just to see if I had the right ingredients and to my surprise it only takes egg and flour, done!
Please don’t ask why I decided making homemade noodles sounded entertaining. My brain was considering it something like this, “I think I’ll spend a bunch of time and make a mess for lunch, sounds fun!”. However since I rarely turn back once I set my mind on something, here is how my pasta making adventure went.
First of all I didn’t want too much pasta so I started with a 1/2 cup of flour and 1 egg (oh and a sizable amount of flour on the counter which as it would turn out added way too much to my dough making it extremely tough and landed it in the garbage). On to attempt two. Even though the recipe said 1 egg per cup of flour and I was cutting it in half I decided I had better add no more than a heaping quarter cup of flour after failed experiment one. That with the “lightly floured” surface was precisely the right combination. Five minutes of kneading then five more minutes of rolling it flat as flat can be later and it was time to cut the pasta (which was I might say rather exciting to be doing since I wasn’t entirely sure I was ever going to end up with anything that resembled real pasta). Pizza roller in hand…
From beginning to end it took about 30 minutes to make about 2 cups of cooked pasta and really didn’t make the big mess I was expecting (plus it only took 3 minutes to cook). The final touch was to toss it with butter, garlic, basil, and Parmesan cheese. Oh and the littlest food critic of the house gave it two thumbs up.
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