Mar
19
Healthy Dinner Choices, Burgers and a Salad
Filed Under Eating Healthy, Healthy Habits, Healthy Meal Ideas
A few days ago I went out to dinner with some friends. We went to a local pub where the fare consisted of burgers, sandwiches and fries. One of my friends ordered a burger and, to make things a bit healthier, he ordered the side salad instead of fries. Unfortunately, this didn’t make his meal very healthy. The burger consisted of a patty, a large sesame seed bun and lots of dressing. The salad was mostly lettuce with a few croutons and cherry tomatoes and a whole lot more dressing. End result, over a thousand calories, lots of bad fat and carbs and very few good nutrients.
So yesterday, while cooking dinner for my wife and myself, I decided to see if I could take that theme of burger and salad and make it a bit healthier.
Note - I went non vegeterian for this meal. Yes, I do on rare occasions eat meat.
The Ingredients
- 2 buffalo burger patties. These are available at most supermarkets. We bought ours from Trader Joe’s.
- 1 large orange bell pepper (can also use the green variety but I like the taste of the yellow and orange types).
- 2 large tomatoes.
- 1 medium sized avocado.
- 1/2 large cucumber.
- Garlic pepper. You can find this in most supermarkets in the spice area.
Preparation
Salad - Take the tomato, cucumber, avocado and pepper and chop them up into small pieces. By small I mean no larger than a 1/4 inch. Add a bit of garlic pepper and mix throughly.
Burgers - Lay them out on the BBQ, sprinkle with a bit of garlic pepper and let them sit for about 5 minutes on a high flame. After 5 minutes turn over, sprinkle a bit more garlic pepper and let them sit for another 5 minutes. We like our burger medium done. If you them more or less well done feel free to adjust the time on the grill. I use a small, gas powered grill on our balcony. If you don’t have access to that, broiling in an oven is just as good.
That’s it. Take your burgers and your salad and enjoy.
Total Preparation Time
From beginning to end, this took about 20 minutes. Most of that time was spent watching the burgers on the BBQ.
Total Cost
This dinner cost less than 10 dollars. the buffalo burger patties come in packages of 4 for around $8 dollars and we only used up 2. The vegetables were picked up at the local farmer’s market for about $5 total.
Calories
If you’re counting your calories, this meal had about 400 to 500 per person. The buffalo burger patties are relatively low in fat and only had 210 calories each. The vegetables, with the exception of the avocado, are also low in calories but we did eat a lot of it.
What Didn’t We Do?
Notice a few things that were different between that restaurant meal and our dinner.
- No bun - You don’t need a bun to have a good burger. In fact, I find that it detracts from the flavor. Buns are nothing more than refined carbs. Get rid of them.
- No dressing - Neither the burger nor the salad has a lot of creamy dressing. Even those light ranch and other fat free dressings are still packed full of junk you don’t need.
- Healthier meat - Choose meat options that are healthy. Processed beef is the opposite of healthy. The buffalo patties were relatively lean and unprocessed making them a good option.
- Healthy salad - I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, a few leaves of lettuce do not make a good salad. A salad should have good flavor and texture all on its own, without needing croûtons and dressing.
- No sodas - Neither of us decided to add hundreds of empty calories to our meal by tossing in a soda.
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It’s not that hard, expensive or time consuming to make a healthy dinner at home. If even I, the man who can burn water, can do it, so can you.
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Comments
4 Responses to “Healthy Dinner Choices, Burgers and a Salad”
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Sounds great. I might have to give it a go sans the meat.
just a tip from a health food junkie culinary student: try adding some blueberries to your burger meat (if you do make your own patties). They actaully taste beautiful with the meat and add a nice slight sweetness AND have the anti-oxidant health benefits.
[...] got a lot of good feedback from readers about my last healthy meal post so I thought I turn it into an irregular series of sorts and occasionally post up ideas for more [...]
Patty without buns? Does that still qualify as a burger? Shouldn’t this be called “Patties and salad”?