In a quest to get healthy, I came across the website Eating Well. I have fallen in love. There are so many healthy recipes (nutrition info included) and you can take your pick from Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner, Snacks, Sides and Desserts. The posibilities are endless.
So I rounded up 15 dinner recipes, and a handful of breakfast recipes to try over the next month. Since we only shop for groceries once a month, it seemed like it was going to blow our budget out of the water. Boy was I ever wrong. I mean we spent the same amount that we normally would on processed/boxed foods in the past, but we walked away with two cart fulls of healthy, fresh produced as well as healthy alternatives to our old menu items. SCORE! It's a big undertaking, and I was a bit frazzled in the store because I was unsure where a lot of the items are, but I'm becoming more friendly with my grocery store these days.
You're probably wondering, how I'm going to handle the fresh produce if we are going to be using it for the next month. Well, I prepared the items according to their respective recipe, placed it in a vacuum freezer bag, and voila! The items are already chopped, sliced, and diced for each recipe. I have to merely, pull it out of the freezer and toss it in the pan. Genius!
Anyways, back to my initial point. I plan on writing a review of these yummy recipes and being 100% honest whether I liked it or not. I will also include any tweaks to the recipes that I may do. I also plan on including a picture of the final product, because frankly I'm short handed when it comes to cooking meals, with Adam sleeping during the day, so doing pictures of the prep will be hard. Sit back and enjoy!
You can get the recipe to this dish by clicking on the link above. Let me start off by saying, OMG...definitely a positive spin on the normal taco. Secondly, I honestly think that two of these yummy tacos is too much food for one sitting. However, I am trying to acclimate myself to eating what I need to. I've always eaten too little food, so your wondering how I got fat? Well, when I would eat so little, it would leave me hungry later, so I would chow down on bad food, therefore creating a vicious cycle. But now that I have my proportions in order, I'm doing much better at staying satisfied longer.
Let's get to it shall we? The meat is amazing. Half lean beef, half turkey burger. The spices come together and give it a nice aroma. I opted to use ground chipotle chili rather than chili powder, and I used a tablespoon...way too much spice that was for certain. Although the hubby thought it tasted great with that much spice. Baby girl decided it was too spicy and refused to eat it. We've always eaten shredded iceburg on our tacos, but it calls for romaine. I personally liked the change. Baby girl, hated the romaine. She loves eating iceburg raw, so that was a draw back. But it isn't going to stop me from making it again. It also calls to be topped with diced tomatoes, and chopped red onion. I personally cannot stand onion, if it isn't cooked in with the food. The recipe calls for onion to be cooked with the Lean & Spicy taco meat, which I did, so I didn't put any on top. As for the tomatoes, I put Rotel in the meat, so I didn't want "extra" tomatoes on top either. So it sort of lowered my calorie intake there.
The shell...nom nom nom. I have NEVER in my life eaten a Multi-grain flour tortilla, until today. I will never go back. The recipe calls for plain flour tortillas, but because we buy in bulk, we picked up some sweet healthy alternatives. Let me just say, this picture doesn't depict how huge these shells are. They are sitting on a ten inch plate if that tells you anything. I think in the future I will NOT be putting chili powder or salt on the shells. It was wayyyyyy tooooooo spicy. I will stick to my plain Multi-grain tortillas. I really like putting them in the oven to crisp them up. It's a little tricky, but well worth it. They are much easier to fill than the tiny fried shells. Adam also suggested laying them flat on the oven racks and then breaking them up like chips. Sounds like something we'll have to try.
In the end I give it four out of five apples.
