I want to make nice healthy meals, friendly for a picky Grunt and a not so picky three year old. My husband eats the raw veggies, my daughter likes fresh green bean and other veggies cooked. We can count carbohydrates extremely well and can treat my daughters diabetes extremely well. I weighed my self and I am well beyond fat, I am looking to loose weight before I become diabetic. Who knows of quick, easy and healthy meal idea?
I think healthy meat is the hardest for me to make. I get tired of baked chicken.
I like a cookbook from Robin Miller called “Quick Fix Meals”. It has been out for a while so you can probably find it half price or at a library. The idea in the book is to cook a larger portion of a meat (chicken, pork or beef roast or flank steak) as the main recipe and then there are 2 -3 morph recipe options for the leftovers. So, you will cook pork tenderloin (which is really easy - we love it and it only takes about a half hour in the oven) and then use the leftover meat to make pork sloppy joes or an asian stir fry later in the week. Or you can freeze the leftover meat and take it out for a head start later.
She also has side recipes that go with each recipe which are not all low fat. But the main thing is to have most of your plate be veggie sides and only a small part be lean meat. Limit the breads, potatoes, rices and pastas to 1 serving (which is small) each meal.
It is hard to make time but this has helped us.
For starters we changed over to brown everything…past, rice, bread. We eat the Healthy Life bread which is only 8 carbs in stead of 16
I will have to say ditto to a lot of what Hockey Mom said above. Pork tenderloin can be cooked several ways…(walnut crusted is awsome.) If your tired of meat…Whole Foods sales frozen Mai Mai, Tuna and Salmon (if you like salmon) burgers. Slap them on the grill for 4 mins on each side and they are done.
I usually do meat, broiled or pan fried with THIN wipe of olive oil, with rice or potatoes and very litely cooked veggies. Do pasta or a pasta dish with home made sauce twice a week. Pasta dish will either have meatballs, baked ziti or fresh tomato cooked for five minutes with olive oil, garlic, oregano, salt and pepper or pesto. I use Quinoa pasta only for my niece with D, unless we are having the baked ziti. This pasta is much healthier than regular pasta and I can give her 20 grams free so she gets a normal sized dish. For some reason, she goes low with this pasta and does not go high later on, continues to drop. So if trying the Quinoa pasta, watch carefully. Meats are flavored with Badia Mojo marianade, BBQ sauce if pork, and fresh garlic with salt and papper; can also use Adobo, oregano and Italian seasonings. These are the only seasonings my niece will accept. Potatoes can be mashed, she now likes garlic mashed potatoes. Or I cook the potato in skin, let it cool, peel off skin, slice it 1/4 inch slices and pan fry it in a tablespoon of olive oil and serve with low sugar or low carb catsup. She will eat rice white, with pesto and parmesean cheese, or I mix a bit of Carolina yellow saffron rice and corn into her rice. We use Uncle Bens Converted white rice, as this rice has the lowest glycemic index of all rice products. This is pretty much the extent of my repetrar, she will eat NOTHING else… no fish, no sweet potato. She eats a lot of veggies, both raw and lightly steamed. I steam all veggies in the microwave with a small amount of water. Because we are bored with the above, we often have to make her dish as above, and make it another way for the rest of us or make something different, so we often have to cook two suppers. But boring as it is, I can get her meal preparation done in about a half an hour, so quick. Lunch at school, we use 12 grain bread, peanut butter and bananna. I sneak a tablespoon of sweet potato mixed in with her peanut butter. Am now using “Sneaky Chef” ideas to get more protein/veggies she won’t eat in her food. Going to try to sneak in white beans next. P.S. Allrecipes.com and recipezaar.com have tons of ideas and will list nutritional information and I love watching the food TV channel.
Hi Carol, do you have the nutritional information on this recipe? It sounds like something my kids would love, as would the hubby and I. Also, I’d love your bread recipe if you wouldn’t mind sharing. I live in Canada’s Arctic and it is really hard for us to find good bread, and as a family, we love bread with lots of stuff in it, so if you’d like to share, we’d love to have it. Thanks. And Happy Thanksgiving!
Maureen In Inuvik
P.S. Did I mention recipe web sites like allrecipes.com and recipezaar.com? They give nutritiional information, plus in one of them you can list which ingredients you have on hand, and it will pull up dishes using the ingredients. There are even more sites like, this, just can’t remember names offhand. Meal planning sites as well, such as savingdinner.com, lots of them are free, just google “meal planning.” I can’t really utiilize these in cooking for my niece, as she will eat broccoli and rice, but would not touch a broccoli and rice casserole. Healthier to eat the broccoli and rice plain, just boring…