Eating healthy is a lot easier if I have healthy food on hand. Here are my top 10, healthy kitchen staples.
Tag Archives | healthy
Power Breakfast – Egg and Veggie Stir Fry
I don’t understand people who say they’re not breakfast people. How can you not be a breakfast person? After not eating since dinner, doing a workout, taking the kids to school, and having to do a very picky 4-year-old’s hair, I’m starving. Breakfast time is pretty much the best time of day. So I don’t want to waste this fabulous meal on a sugary, processed cereal. I want something healthy and delicious that will give me the energy to make it through the rest of the day. This hearty stir fry is the key.
Start by heating up some avocado oil in a large skillet. I use avocado oil because it performs great at high temperatures and is good for you. Brown the onion and garlic first. Add in the pepper, zucchini, mushrooms, cauliflower and saute until the veggies are tender but still have a bit of crunch. Make sure to season your veggies with plenty of salt and pepper.
Add the halved cherry tomatoes last and cook them until they are slightly shriveled and have released some of their juices.
Because I’m lazy and don’t want to dirty extra dishes, I just push the cooked veggies to the side before adding the eggs. I like to keep the two separate for a while so I still have distinct pieces of veggies and eggs. If you just toss the eggs in and mix it all together, it’s a bit mushy and just not as good.
Once the eggs are cooked, stir it all together for a bit.
This recipe is easy to customize. Add any seasonings or vegetables you like. Leave out any you don’t like. Even add leftover chicken or sausage. Either way, I’m sure this recipe will make anyone a breakfast person. If not, go ahead and make it for lunch.
Healthy Italian Side Salad
I eat green salad at least once a day. So the other night when I set out a green salad for dinner, my four year old threw her head back, groaned and shouted to the heavens with arms outstretched, “Why do we always have to have salad?!” Since I don’t want my daughter to decide she hates vegetable because she’s sick of salad, I decided we needed another fresh veggie side dish. This is even easier to make than a green salad and has an ingredient that makes everything better: CHEESE!
Chop your tomatoes, cucumbers and cheese to roughly the same size. This makes it easier to taste all the flavors of the salad.
I like to use an organic Italian salad dressing mix which I make with olive oil and apple cider vinegar, but use what you like best (balsamic tastes great also). Just make sure it doesn’t have added sugars or bad hydrogenated oils (canola oil, vegetable oil, etc).
Just mix everything together and serve.
Ten Healthy Changes You Can Make Today
“A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” You don’t have to go from krispy kreme to kale overnight. Here are some small, simple steps to get you started on your own personal health journey. Adopt all 10 or start with one at a time. No matter what, any healthy change you […]
Healthy Mulligatawny
Whenever my daughter and I are having one of those rough days where we butt heads and can’t agree on anything, we need something to help us unwind and have fun together. For us, that’s an episode of Pioneer Woman on the Food Network. It doesn’t always stop the fighting, but for half an hour, we agree on something. Sometimes, that’s priceless.
A few weeks ago, we watched her make Mulligatawny soup. It looked amazing, but had a few ingredients I’m not okay with including in a week night dinner. I came up with a healthy variation which our whole family loves.
The entire dish comes together in one pan which is my kind of meal. It cooks really fast but is packed full of flavor.
Start by cooking the chicken. Then add the onion and garlic and cook it all together.
Add the curry, broth and coconut milk and cook just to heat it up. Then add the chopped apple and cook for another five minutes. This will cook the apple but keep it from getting mushy.
Top each serving with some chopped peanuts. This adds more great flavor and crunch.
I love this dish because it’s a great,warm soup for winter but the freshness from the apple makes it great for any time of year.
How to Eat Cheap and Healthy on Vacation
Vacations open the door to a lot of spending and eating foods we wouldn’t normally allow. While it’s fun to get ice cream on trips, there are some things you can do to keep your family eating healthy without spending a ton of money.
Healthy Orange Cherry Breakfast Scones
Growing up, there was a Village Inn about two miles from our house. Sometimes on Saturday mornings, my BFF and I would walk there for breakfast, indulge in a sweet breakfast pastry (aka pie) and then walk back to my house. We felt like we were so healthy, walking the four miles it took to make the round trip. Little did we know, we were packing on enough sugar and bad carbs to require us to walk about 50 miles to break even.
Even with the knowledge I have now, I still have that taste for delicious pastries branded in my brain. Luckily, there’s a much healthier way to indulge.
These scones are sweetened only with dried fruit, cinnamon and orange zest; and made with a combination of almond flour and coconut flour. This keeps the protein high and the processed carbs low. These scones have less than 5 grams of sugar each.
This easily comes together in a food processor. This is my ancient food processor my grandma found at a garage sale for $10. It’s one of my favorite tools and even though it’s death will mean I get to buy a newer model, I hope this one lasts forever.
Combine everything but the cherries in a food processor. Let everything process until the dough forms a ball.
Add the dried cherries and process again. These are the only dried cherries I’ve found without added sugar. This is one of my pet peeves. Fruit is so full of natural sugars, why do we feel the need to sweeten them. I found these at Walmart of all places.
I like to let the cherries process for a bit to break them into small pieces. This distributes the sweetness throughout the scone. If you like bigger chunks of cherry, mix these in with a spoon.
I bake these in my awesome scone pan, but you can pat this in a round disk and cut into eight triangles, cut them into squares, or roll this out and cut them with a circular biscuit cutter.
These bake quickly so you don’t have to wait long. Rather than top these with frosting, we just drizzle melted coconut butter over the top. The kids think I’m the cool mom giving them frosting for breakfast. They’re such lucky kids.
No Sugar BBQ Sauce
BBQ sauce makes any meat better. Pour it over chicken, that’s all you need for a great dinner. Pour it over a pork roast and, voila; pulled pork. Smear it on hamburgers and they’re suddenly the best hamburgers ever. My daughter 
uses BBQ sauce like most kids use ketchup, so we go through a lot of it in our house. While I’m totally okay with adding strange things to food to get kids to eat them, I’m not okay with the sugar content of most condiments. This is especially true for BBQ sauce. When we made the change to a healthier lifestyle, I knew we couldn’t give up BBQ sauce. That’s when I began the quest to make a no-sugar BBQ sauce. Not only did I succeed, but my husband says this is the best BBQ sauce I’ve ever made and my daughter gave it her stamp of approval.
First let’s look at a typical bottled BBQ sauce. The sauce we bought before we made our own, contains 32 grams of sugar in 1/4 C with high fructose corn syrup being the first ingredient. That is crazy. My BBQ sauce has less than 3 grams of sugar in 1/4 C and tastes delicious.
This is also an easy recipe. I didn’t want a recipe that required a lot of sauteing, dish washing and vegetable chopping, so I made it simple. Just throw all the ingredients in a bowl and whisk them together. Yes there are a lot of ingredients, but they are likely things you have in your pantry. If you don’t like an ingredient, leave it out.
I like to store it in a mason jar (or a washed, glass peanut-butter jar since we have a million of those sitting around) and stick it in the fridge. This will stay good for about a two weeks.
One night we had some left over pork roast and needed a quick dinner. I threw the roast leftovers in a slow cooker with the BBQ sauce and we had dinner. It’s almost too easy.
Grilled Round Steak
When I was 8-years-old, I submitted my picture to a children’s Christian magazine along with interesting facts about me. Many of the other kids included facts like “I love to go camping with my family,” or “I won the third-grade science fair.” My interesting fact was, “My favorite food is steak.” Needless to say, my profile wasn’t as interesting a read as the others, but I still hold to what I said. I love steak! And this is my favorite way to make it. Plus, it’s extremely easy and healthy.
Start by making a simple marinade. Because I don’t want to dirty more dishes than necessary, I mix the marinade in a gallon-size Ziploc bag. In the bag, combine the coconut aminos, Worcestershire sauce, balsamic vinegar, orange zest and garlic. If you haven’t tried coconut aminos yet, you should. It’s basically a healthier version of soy sauce.
Add the round steak to the bag and marinate for at least four hours.
Now cook it on the grill. We cook it for about 5 minutes on one side and six minutes on the other for rare. I personally don’t know any way to eat steak other than rare.
Let the steak rest for about eight minutes and then slice diagonally. This is a fabulous recipe because you don’t need to add any kind of steak sauce. The marinade makes it perfect just as it is.
Weekly Preparation for Healthy Eating
Trying to keep up with life and still have time for a healthy snack or meal is a difficult task. That can all change with some weekly prep. Every Saturday, I get ready for the next week by making sure I have enough healthy, delicious food prepared to grab on the go.