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Austin Babies
babymillie
member
Share your healthy dinner ideas here!
babymillie
member
HELP! I am out of control.
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Re: Share your healthy dinner ideas here!
I have found lots of good recipes at Skinnytaste and The Gracious Pantry.
We also do a lot of grilling..chicken breast, pork tenderloin, tilapia, lean steaks, bison burgers, etc. We usually do a starch and a veggie with it..or two veggies.
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Just to preface this, I'm a pretty routine-oriented person. So this may seem a little crazy if you don't like routines.
First, I recently read a book called the Sports Nutrition Guidebook. It was recommended by my trainer, and the title would seem somewhat not applicable to regular humans, but it really is a comprehensive nutrition book for regular people. There are sections for athletes but you can just skip over them (as I did). Since reading that book, I incorporate a larger variety of fruits, vegetables, grains, and low-fat dairy into our family's diet. We were just eating too much protein and fat.
Along the lines of my routine, each week, I use the following framework for picking my dinner recipes:
Monday night's dinner = roasted fish and vegetables. I roast these in the oven with a little olive oil, salt and pepper. I normally do it all one one baking sheet, unless the fish that I've chosen will cook too fast, then I do it on separate baking sheets. Here are some combos:
Salmon and asparagus, Steelhead trout and brussel sprouts, Catfish (I normally get the cajun seasoned kind from HEB) and broccoli
This is a really easy, quick dinner on Monday nights, which is normally hectic for me after work. Roast at 500 for 20 minutes.
For the rest of the week's dinners, I choose one of the following types of dinners/recipes:
1 dinner salad with meat and veggies (examples, spinach salad with flank steak and goat cheese, seared ahi tuna salad with mango and avocado)
1 pasta dish with meat and veggies (examples, penne pasta with spinach and feta, spaghetti with turkey meatballs and pasta sauce, add veggies to the sauce, veggie lasagna)
1 sandwich night - this is normally something based off the food we've already eaten, and I'll do a baked regular or sweet potato to go with it. So one week, we did cheesesteak sandwiches with a baked sweet potato, as we had leftover flank steak.
1 pizza night - I love making different kinds of pizzas. Variations I make are your my signature special (cheese, pizza sauce, turkey pepperoni, green peppers, mushrooms, and oliver), a Greek pizza (feta and mozzarella cheese, kalamata olives, spinach, roasted red peppers or sundried tomatoes, artichoke hearts), BBQ chicken pizza (bbq sauce, leftover rotisserie chicken, gouda cheese, onions, topped with cilantro after baking), and my kitchen sink pizza (whatever is in the fridge that I can put on a pizza, which generally tastes better than it sounds if I tell you what it is).
1 "special meal" night - this is when we cook something over the weekend that takes a long time and we normally wouldn't do, but we want to try. Recently we made empanadas, and another time we made a stew. DH likes to cook, so this meal is normally his idea.
1 night out for dinner a week - this is generally Central Market on Friday nights, because we like their cafe food and DD loves the band they have playing there.
Good luck! I've had a lot of luck with recipe ideas on allrecipes.com. Sometimes I actually use their recipe, and sometimes I just get an idea to make something and decide my own ingredients. I think it all depends on your personality and how you like to do things.
I've been making an asian salmon salad a lot lately and we love it. DH requests it at least twice a week. I through a salmon filet with a little bit of salt and pepper in the over to bake then put muselex greens, red bell pepper, cutie orange segments, and almond slices in the bowl. Top with cooked salmon and serve with Kraft toasted sesame dressing. So good. Last night I added rice noodles.
Other meals for the week include:
Tilapia filets with one of the HEB splashes; broiled broccoli, and brown rice.
Stuffed chx breast (stuffed with feta, fresh spinach and artichocke hearts), green beans and cauliflower.
Chicken stir-fry over brown rice.
Turkey spaghetti with salad
and
Broiled salmon with salad and asparagus
Slobina -- wow - you are organized!! thanks for all of the recs. the only "routine" we have right now is weds night pizza from HEB
Austex -- thanks for all of the yummy ideas! DH loves salmon.
I use skinnytaste a lot too. For quick and easy I pick up individually frozen tilapia filets from costco and HEB has them now too. Salt, pepper with some lemon and throw it in the over for about 20 minutes. No need to defrost them. My dinner veggies are always the HEB steam in the bag ones. Five minutes and they're done. They have rice in the frozen section too.
I also love KA's chicken tacos and usually make a double batch and can make different things all week using the meat. I don't use olive oil in it anymore. Yesterday I made my own chipotle burrito bowl. Brown cilantro lime brown rice, KA chicken, lettuce, tomatoes and guacamole. You can also have lettuce wraps instead of tacos. Put some chicken on a baked potato for one of those meal size potatoes. I cook fly's creamy green enchiladas using the left over meat too.
Right now HEB has a meal deal where if you buy 2 thin whole wheat pizza crusts, a can of pizza sauce and a thing of already cooked shredded chicken, you get $4 off your grocery bill. We used that to make pizza the other night and the crust was really good..and low in calories.
I also pinned a recipe for pizza made with a cauliflower pizza crust that looks good.
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