Jun

25

The Toothpick Breakfast

Filed Under Eating Healthy, Healthy Habits, Healthy Meal Ideas | 2 Comments

Every once in a while, I like to share a healthy meal idea with you.  Today, it’s breakfast time.

What You Need

  • One small cucumber
  • Some Cheese.  Any kind will work.  I’m partial to pepper jack.
  • A handful of blueberries

Preparations

This is an ultra simple breakfast.  Just slice up the cucumbers and the cheese.  Stick one on top of the other and you’re done.  The blueberries are great either between bites of cucumber and cheese or afterwards.

Calories

What calories?  Well ok, that’s not quite true.  Depending on the amount of cheese you use, this meal could have a few hundred calories in it.  So be careful not to overdo the cheese.  The cucumber has almost nothing.  Blueberries do have some calories in them but relatively few.  Using my portions, I get about 300 calories in a breakfast like this.

Nutrition

This is an amazing meal in terms of nutrient.  Zero emptry carbs, good amount of protein and fiber, plus the blueberries are a great source of antioxidants.  It’s hard to find a better way to start your day.

Cost

Most expansive part of this breakfast is usually the blueberries.  However, if you keep that part under control, you’ll probably spend around $3 each time you eat this meal.

Time

Preparation time is about 1 minute.

Small Editorial

When I told a friend about this, he said “wait, that’s not a breakfast, that’s an appetizer.”  Folks, there’s no rule that says what you can or cannot eat on a given part of the day.  There’s nothing that says you can’t have an egg for dinner and there’s nothing that says an appetizer can’t be breakfast.

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What a great day to start the day.  I feel full, it tasted wonderful (those blueberries were amazing!) and I got a good start to a very nutritious day.  Now I’m going to go take a short walk to the post office.

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Mar

26

Healthy Meal Ideas - Chili Lunch!

Filed Under Eating Healthy, Healthy Meal Ideas | 7 Comments

I 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 healthy, easy and cheap meals.  The healthy part is obvious, but I’m also trying to show people that healthy eating doesn’t have to mean spending a lot of time or money.

One of the emails I got contained a meal idea from another Trader Joe’s shopper and I thought I would use that for this next post.  So thank you Joe R. for your email and here’s Joe’s chili recipe.

The Ingredients

  • One can of Trader Joe’s chili.  I buy the vegetarian kind but feel free to substitute a brand with some meat if you want.  Try to stay away from the all meat kinds.
  • One bell pepper.  Joe recommended the green kind for this but I’m still a secret fan of the yellow peppers.  Recipe works fine either way.
  • One half cucumber.
  • One quarter large onion.

Preparation

Slice up all the vegetables into small pieces. By small I mean no larger than a 1/4 inch.  Dump everything into a pot with the chili and stir thoroughly.  Now heat the whole thing up until the chili starts bubbling a bit.  Keep stirring as you heat it up to make sure everything is getting warm.  Note, I tried to heat this up with a microwave and it didn’t come up quite as good but still very tasty.

That’s it, once the whole thing is warm, put it in a bowl and eat.

Total Preparation TimeFrom beginning to end, this took about 15 minutes. Most of that time was spent heating.  If you use the microwave you can turn this into a 10 minute meal.

Total Cost

Can of chili is anywhere from $1 to $3 depending on type and where you buy it.  Vegetables cost another $2 or so at the local produce store.  So total cost is somewhere around $3.

Calories

Calories for this meal are around 450 with the chili contributing most of that.  The can of chili had around 350 calories.  Nutrient mix was great with the chili having 14g of fiber and 16g of protein.  Add in the veggies and you have a well balanced meal.

What Didn’t We Do?

Notice a few things about this meal.

  • No dinner roll - No need for bread.  It’s nothing more than empty calories.
  • No dressing - Instead of eating the vegetables as a separate salad which needs dressing, we mixed them into the main course.
  • Less meat - I picked a vegetarian chili, but you could have done one that contained some meat.  Just stay away from the all meat brands.
  • No sodas - As usual, we didn’t choose to add any drinks to our meal other than water.

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Ok, canned chili doesn’t sound like a healthy meal but when you toss in some veggies, it’s actually not that bad.  Would it have been better if I had made the whole thing from scratch?  Sure, but I don’t have time for that so this was the next best thing.

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Mar

19

Healthy Dinner Choices, Burgers and a Salad

Filed Under Eating Healthy, Healthy Habits, Healthy Meal Ideas | 3 Comments

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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