New Recipes: The Good, The Bad, and the Yummy

For some reason I've been delaying creating this post. It could just be my laziness in my first week on summer vacation or maybe the fact that I knew how large the post would need to be. As promised, I spent my day on Sunday cooking up a bunch of recipes to keep as meals/snacks for the week in preparation for my 30 day challenge. Speaking of my 30 day challenge, all is going well food-wise but on Monday and Tuesday I ended up slurping down some Gatorade after my workouts. I really want this to be a true whole 30 so I've decided to push it back two days so today is day 1 (only water from here on out!) and my weigh in won't be until the 29th.

stocked for the week :)

brought to you by some of my new favorite Trader Joe's items

I'll keep it short and simple:

MORE Cherry Balls

Thanks to my new cherry pitter (what a gruesome tool :P), I made 4 more batches where I added cocoa powder, cinnamon, vanilla, and a cinnamon/vanilla mix. I also cut down on the coconut for all batches so it was just about equal to the chopped walnuts. The vanilla ones were difficult to work with because I was adding in a liquid instead of a powder, but they turned out to be my favorite taste-wise (think cherry vanilla soda). I definitely added too much cocoa and cinnamon because those batches turned out overloaded with those flavors... this is why I need recipes :) But the cocoa ones are good, like a chocolate covered cherry.

Sun Dried Tomato Chicken Bake (from Everyday Paleo)
This recipe was so easy and delicious, it will definitely become a regular in the future.
1) Place boneless skinless chicken breast in a large glass baking dish.
2) Sprinkle with basil, salt, and pepper and mix well.
3) Sprinkle sliced garlic on top (I just spread on come crushed garlic), and spread the sun dried tomatoes and the olive oil that's in the jar over the entire dish (see TJ's sun dried tomatoes above).

4) Seal tightly with tin foil and bake for 20 minutes.
5) Remove the tin foil and bake for another 15 minutes.

Simple, flavorful chicken! My first thought was that it reminded me of pizza.. yum.

Macaroni and Not Cheese

I made a couple changes to this recipe:
- spaghetti squash instead of pasta
- walnuts instead of cashews
- no nutritional yeast
- added a piece of cooked chicken sausage before baking

Not the prettiest dish, and it tastes more like a creamy tomato sauce then a cheese sauce, but it's still a good spaghetti squash topping. I wonder if cashews and nutritional yeast make all the difference...

how mine turned out

how this blogger's turned out

I used half of the spaghetti squash for this recipe, and made the diced tomato & zucchini sauce to save with the other half.

Hamburger and Butternut Squash Curry (from this blogger)
- 1 lb of lean ground beef (I used ground turkey breast from good ole Trader Joe's)
- 1 small butternut squash - peeled, seeded, and cubed
- 1 jar Trader Joe's curry simmer sauce (see picture above - all Paleo ingredients!)
- 1/2 can of unsweetened coconut milk

making some use of the crock pot

Brown meat and place in crock pot on low with butternut squash and curry simmer sauce. Cook on low for 6 hours and add coconut milk before serving.

getting ready to be put in the fridge

Can it get any easier?! Okay, so it's also not the prettiest dish, but it's the taste that matters! After a couple hours, the butternut squash melts in to make it sweet and even more flavorful. This has been really useful as a nice hearty snack so far this week.

Breakfast

I've been experimenting with different omelet recipes, mostly from The Paleo Recipe Book. I made a zucchini quiche - It turned out very thin because I scaled down the recipe from serving 6 to serving 1 and didn't have a smaller container to bake it in.

A banana omelet - Here is photographic evidence of the eggs before I added the baked banana pieces on top.. the most perfect omelet I've ever cooked!

A cinnamon and apple omelet (well, more of my usual eggy mess) - my favorite so far! Who knew warm fruit and eggs tasted so good together?

 

Heading out for a CrossFit workout in a couple hours.. I'll let you know how it goes!