I took a bag out of the freezer yesterday to thaw with the intentions of making healthier brownies, but I ended up making a few other things instead. If you're confused by me saying brownies, just know that avocados make a good replacement for butter in lots of baking recipes! It's just as creamy but a million times better for you.
Avocados are definitely NOT in season right now (middle of January :P) in most of America, but I still have lots of avocado ready for use. "How?" you ask? By freezing it! It was one of the first Pinterest pins I actually tried out. Basically, it involved pitting, peeling, and mashing the avocado up with lemon juice, and then freezing it. And what that really means is that now that avocados are expensive and out of season, I still get to use them! Woot woot!
I took a bag out of the freezer yesterday to thaw with the intentions of making healthier brownies, but I ended up making a few other things instead. If you're confused by me saying brownies, just know that avocados make a good replacement for butter in lots of baking recipes! It's just as creamy but a million times better for you.
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Let me tell you, it's hard coming up with so many different ways to use spinach! Sometimes a little inspiration is required...like today. I found a pin on Pinterest from the Undressed Skeleton blog with a recipe to make Banana Spinach Protein Bars. It sounds seriously crazy, but just like the blog says, you can't even taste the spinach because of all the banana. Honestly, I was really skeptical about that description and about the taste in general, but I've found that I'll really try anything at least once (even if that means I have to suck it up and literally eat all the failure when I'm done).
After following the original recipe, I tweaked it just a little to get a little more, nutrition-wise, out of each bite. I think I added too much banana on accident which made it a bit extra liquidy, so I added more flax seed meal and more protein powder than the recipe originally called for. Also the directions for what kind of vessel to cook them in was pretty ambiguous, so I just guessed on that. My tweaked version of the recipe is below. Small warning: It came out a little dry in the middle, but if you can live with that, go for it! If I make these again, I'd probably add more banana to keep it moist. It's almost like meatloaf is that school lunch or that dinner your mom makes that people just don't really ever want to eat. Even when I was in school, when they tried to feed us meatloaf as the entree for the day, I opted to eat a sandwich instead, hahaha. Now that I'm older, I realize that meatloaf isn't that bad tasting, but it's definitely not always that healthy either. Most meatloaves are made with ground beef and bread or croutons, and then it's topped with a ketchup based glaze or some similar concoction that may or may not include honey, BBQ sauce, sugar, etc. I disapprove, on many fronts. Ground beef: not the best choice. Bread and croutons need some analyzing. Ketchup is a no-no, and so are most of the things they put in those glazes.
My boyfriend's fridge is always a weird mish-mash of random goods and barely any vegetables. That being said, I normally have to find creative ways to make dinner something healthy and palatable. This is where the idea for turkey meatloaf (a.k.a. turkeyloaf) came from. I figured, as far as I knew, you could pretty much throw anything into a meatloaf, call it a meal, and still have it come out tasting alright, hahaha. And so my 7-Ingredient Turkeyloaf was born. I know that food aficionados would tell me that fresh fish is always better than frozen, but come on! Seriously? Fresh, not previously frozen fish are expensive, I definitely don't eat it everyday, and even if I did, I'm not about to make a trip to the grocery store every few days to buy more. SO....my freezer always has frozen fish stored away, and why not? Fish have been found to be a great source of omega-3 fatty acids. It's a good kind of fatty acid our bodies can't produce on it's own, so we need to ingest it from a marine or plant source. Granted, not all fish are raised equal. Different fish have different levels of omega-3 in them, but you always want to pick a fish that is wild caught and NOT FARMED RAISED (if you can)!! Farmed fish, aside from sometimes deplorable living/growth conditions, can be raised using food sources that aren't healthy for us humans. Some farms feed their fish pellets made of other smaller fish and plants that have been collected from polluted waters, meaning that those contaminants can end up in the fish that you eat. In addition to that, since one sick fish could endanger a large group in an enclosed space, fish farmers like to administer antibiotics. That's just more unnatural chemicals added to your diet if you're not careful. Sure there are other pros and cons in the wild vs. farmed fish debate, but if you can, spend the little extra that wild fish will cost you. I think it's worth the price, especially if you aren't eating it ALL the time. There are LOTS of people these days touting the advantages of "green smoothies" and how healthful they are. I'm not really a smoothie kind of girl, normally because I don't find them to be quite filling enough. However, that doesn't stop me from making one every once in a while, and since I have spinach on the brain and a huge bag in the fridge, I decided to throw one of these little smoothies together. For those of you who aren't sold on the idea of green smoothies, or more specifically, the idea of spinach in a smoothie, there are actually a lot of positive aspects to spinach that you should consider! I even did a bunch of the research for you! Hopefully, it's enough to convince some of those non-believers out there that spinach is at least worth a try. I hate carbohydrates because they're the source of "The Pouch" that most women, myself included, have. But it's more the scientific understanding of what carbs do to your body and the resulting flabbiness that I hate....BUT THEY TASTE SO FREAKING GOOD. Gah (T_T) They taste so good and it's so hard for me to say no, especially when sandwiches are involved. Sandwiches are such good vessels for throwing a whole bunch of random stuff together and shoving it into your mouth, hahaha. Every once in a while though, I find gourmet-ish ideas for sandwiches, and I obviously can't help myself. For example, when I stumbled onto a pin for this spinach, avocado, and goat cheese panini, I seriously HAD TO make it! If only as an excuse to bust out the panini press I have. I mostly stuck to the recipe, including making my own pesto, but I didn't make their recipe for pesto because 1) it was too involved, and 2) I wasn't about to go out and buy gross anchovy paste, ick. Pesto is always so flavorful! It's such a great kind of sauce to use for all kinds of things from pastas, salad, sandwiches, and the list goes on. The downside is that it normally contains a lot of oil, a lot of unnecessary oil! It's usually olive oil, which isn't the worst considering what else they could use in the world of oils, but it's not the best for you either, so overdoing and having so much oil it separates is a bit extra.
The original do-it-yourself recipe I found for pesto came from the recipe booklet that came along with my Magic Bullet. I thought, "Sweet! If I make my own, it'll be so much cheaper!!" I was a tad mistaken, given the cost of pine nuts...ridiculous cost for such a small amount of such a little nut...grr. Anyway, even though pine nuts definitely add great flavor and can really make the pesto, after my unfortunate expensive buy of a very tiny container of them, I decided I could use something else or just leave it out. Trust me when I say it still tastes just fine. My mom used to make me pancakes EVERY Saturday morning. It went on for so long that I eventually got sick of it and refused to eat any more pancakes....for years. LOTS of years. Like 10 years, seriously. I only recently started ordering and making pancakes again. Now that I'm on this "change my life and eat healthier" bit, I've been finding a lot of cool healthy pancake recipes, and since buying that ginormous Costco sized bag of spinach the other day, I thought sharing spinach pancakes would be appropriate. I originally found the recipe for these protein packed pancakes on Instagram, but I can't for the life of me remember who I got it from! That being said, I'm just gonna throw out a big thank you into the air for whoever it was. Whenever I buy spinach these days, I always have to make these at least once! This is also usually the recipe I use when the spinach is just starting to wilt/die in the fridge since it has to be blended anyways. I'm always price comparing the things I need/want for my kitchen experiments. In fact, I have a whole memo on my iPhone to help me remember how much certain things cost (regular price) at certain stores or at online sites. That being said, I had just started thinking last week about how much I really needed to have spinach and about how much I miss having it in my fridge, but that buying those bags from Safeway were just not efficient because I always go through them way faster than I ever think I will OR I don't go through them fast enough and they just rot. Either way, it's kind of an inefficient way to buy spinach for myself. And then I went to Costco... I normally don't buy fresh veggies or fruits from Costco for two reasons: 1) how the HELL would I get through all of it?! I don't really throw dinner parties or anything like that, and when I do, there aren't that many people, and it normally ends up being a potluck, meaning there's plenty of food to go around without me making a ginormous portion of my dish; and 2) my previous experience buying fruits in bulk from Costco only proved to me that they aren't as flavorful as the smaller regular grocery store portions. That's when I saw this HUGE 2.5 lb bag of baby spinach (I wanna say it's almost 2 ft. tall). (O_O) I didn't know what to do! I really wanted spinach, I knew I wouldn't run out of this one nearly as fast, but I was afraid of the spinach wilting/dying/rotting before I could use it all (I have a bad track record with that...). And then I noticed the bag was resealable and that I have more time to cook recently, and I was sold. Picked it up, brought it home, and realized that it actually tastes just fine!! (^_^) Good buy, yay! Since I now have this huge bag, I'm pretty much trying to use it as much as I possibly can. Translation: I throw it in everything. Thankfully, it's a very versatile green that goes well with so many different dishes! I've also taken this chance to look up new spinach recipes to try out. Today's feature is a frozen dessert! Just because you're trying to be healthy and be careful of what passes through your mouth, it doesn't mean that you can't go out and enjoy some delicious food. Don't deprive yourself ALL the time, haha. Today I went to dinner at California Pizza Kitchen with my mother to use a gift card we received from my aunty for Christmas. I go to CPK often enough that I decided that going to their website and printing out the nutritional info for their whole menu was important. After a lot of scrutiny, especially after their recent menu change, I've decided on what I believe are some "healthier yet tasty" options. Just to let you know, I only have suggests for appetizers and pizzas. Why else go to CPK if you're not planning on getting a pizza?! Hence, that is the reason I will not be discussing sandwiches or pastas or whatever else....I've never really ordered any of those things. Besides, I've had a look at the nutritional info for all that stuff, and now I'm SURE that I won't be ordering them in the future. Lastly, I guess it's worth stating that although restaurant desserts are usually the most amazing tasting desserts ever, they're also usually NOT healthy or restrained or good for you...and CPK is no exception here. There is no suggestion for a dessert in the hopes that you just won't get one, hahaha. Note: All nutritional info listed is directly from CPK's website. Click on the link above to see it for yourself. |
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