Vegetarian Chili

Wow. I had never made chili before, had never even been a big chili eater. To be quite honest, the only chili I had every tried was in 7th grade when I would get a Frito Pie on Fridays (looking back now just the thought of it gives me heartburn!) needless to say it was the canned kind which was anything but delicious.

And so when I came across a recipe for vegetarian chili in my new Eat-Clean Diet Cookbook it wasn't the word chili that aroused my appeal, rather it was the FOUR different kinds of beans in the recipe. I'm a bean fanatic, I love them all, they're delicious. And so I though, four kinds of beans, this has to be good! And it was.

I tweaked the recipe only very slightly around what I had in the pantry and so my recipe looked something like this (I ended up only using 3 kinds of beans, but it came out amazing!):

1 medium yellow onion, chopped
4-5 cloves of garlic, minced
1 red bell pepper, chopped
1 carrot, chopped

3 teaspoons salt, or to taste
Ground black pepper to taste
2 tablespoons ground cumin
3 tablespoons chili powder
1 tablespoon oregano

Juice of one lime

1 can crushed tomato
1 can black beans
1 can pinto beans
1 can kidney beans
1 can corn kernels

1 box low sodium chicken broth (or vegetable broth) 32 fl oz

4 squares dark chocolate (at least 75%)

Saute all the vegetables in a little olive oil until soft, add the seasonings. Then add the rest of the ingredients and let simmer at least 20 minutes and longer if you want it to thicken. Seriously, it's that simple.

Make sure you rinse the beans and corn before adding it to the pot since that will seriously lessen the amount of sodium (by at least 50%!) in the final recipe.

Moroccan Chicken, with lentils, corn bread and glazed carrots

I randomly decided to make cornbread:

Recipe (I halved this, you can easily double it to make a regular yielding recipe):

1/2 cup cornmeal
1/2 cup whole wheat flour
1 tsp. baking soda
1/2 cup milk
1 egg
1/2 tsp salt

Carrots glazed with butter and sugar!

1 lb carrots sliced any way you like
3 tablespoons butter
2 tablespoons sugar
Salt and pepper to taste

Melt the butter and sugar over medium heat, add the carrots and saute for 1-2 minutes. Add enough water to cover the carrots just half way (Make sure you don't add too much water otherwise the carrots will cook before all the water can evaporate!). The goal is to cook the carrots and have the water evaporate so that the sugar-butter glaze concentrates and covers the carrots. Takes maybe 5-10 minutes.


Moroccan chicken! Three chicken breasts, bone in.

2 tsp. cumin seed
1 tsp. garam masala
1 tsp. cinnamon
1/2 tsp. cloves
3 tsp. salt
1 tsp. mustard powder




Lentils:

Saute 1 onion, chopped, and 3 cloves of garlic, minced. Add the lentils and saute for 1-2 minutes. Add enough water to cover the lentils 2 inches. Salt to taste. Keep adding water depending on the consistency you're looking for. I wanted a thick consistency because it was being used as a base for the chicken. You can easily make it thinner to eat with rice. Or add some celery, carrots and make a lentil soup! You can definitely add some cumin or other spices, I added a little chipotle powder to add a pop.

Oatmeal chocolate chip cookies -- the best?

Firstly, this clearly does not fall into my healthy eating, no white flour, no white sugar, get away from added sugar life style that I'm aiming for. BUT... my sister is pulling her hair out searching the house for cookies, so I offered to make her some. I figure she can take them back to Austin with her and maybe I'll take some in to work with me on Monday.

I found this recipe on a fellow food blog:
(makes 4 dozen):

1 cup butter - unsalted
1 cup white sugar
1 cup brown sugar
2 cups all purpose flour (I use Eagle Mills All Purpose Unbleached Flour with Ultragrain OR Whole Wheat Pastry Flour)
2 1/2 cups oats
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp baking powder
2 eggs
2 tblsp milk
2 tsp vanilla
2 cups chocolate chips

Preheat over to 350F

Cream butter with sugars.





Add eggs and vanilla, milk.

Stir in flour, baking soda, baking powder, oats and chocolate chips.

Drop by spoonfuls on baking sheets (I use small ice cream scoops).



Bake for 10-13 minutes.

But are they the best oatmeal chocolate chip cookies I've ever had?...

The flavor is delicious, nothing beats a butter cookie. They're extremely sweet, which after straying away from regularly eating sugary foods I think they're too sweet (of course I could still eat the whole batch!). Something weird happened which also happened the last time I made oatmeal chocolate chip cookies -- they deflated after coming out of the oven in a really weird way. The only theory that I can come up to for an explanation is either old baking soda or old baking powder. I'll have to play around with that. The flavor is still great though. Oatmeal chocolate chips, no matter from where, are the best cookie, hands down. YUM!

Smoothie revolution

So after reading and hearing absolutely everywhere that smoothies are the ultimate health/diet/weight loss tool (I already knew this, it just took a few more books, magazines and news reports to hammer it into my head), I'm making a smoothie for lunch (I ate a HUGE breakfast). I'll also be bringing my blender with me back to Austin so I can make smoothies for breakfast before work.

What's in the smoothie for today? Well, I'm just kind of rummaging through my fruit basket and refrigerator and so far this is what I have:

2 pears, cored and cubed
1 medium banana
2 cups cantaloupe, seeded, peeled and cubed
1 15-oz. can sliced peaches in their natural juice, no sugar added
1/4 cup flax seeds
1/4 cup wheat germ
1 cup no salt added 1% fat cottage cheese
ice cubes



According to Nutrition Data this entire recipe has 1160 calories, 24g of fat with only 4g being saturated, 203 g of carbs including 39g of fiber and 124g of sugar, 60g of protein, 235% vitamin A, 269% vitamin C!

To eat in place of lunch my guess is this yields 3-4 servings. However, if you're planning on drinking this along with something else it could yield 5-6 servings.

I've never made this recipe before, but I'll let you know how it comes out, hopefully deliciously since it'll be my lunch for the day!

If you're making the recipe for 4 servings, each serving has

290 calories
6g fat, 1g saturated
51g carbs, 10g fiber, 31g sugar
15g protein

62% calories from carbohydrates
18% from fat
20% from protein



I like the look at that break down, nicely balanced. Usually I like to add soy milk to my smoothies and protein powder, however, here at my parent's house they don't have protein powder. That made me think what I could use to boost the protein since otherwise I'd have a carb-packed smoothie which would spike my blood sugar too quickly. Cottage cheese has a higher protein content than soy milk or yogurt per cup serving so I thought - bingo! The wheat germ and flaxseed add nice amounts of healthy fats, extra protein, fiber, not to mention countless other great things such as folic acid, vitamin E, omega-3s and more!

Much of that fiber comes from the fruit itself, the skin of the pears, the banana, the cantaloupe. They all have a nice amount of fiber in them. Sure, the sugar content is high, but it's all natural sugars from fruit and you get SO many benefits from all the other nutrients in the fruit that it's not like eating a piece of cake with 31g of sugar in it where you get absolutely no benefits.

So enjoy!

The verdict?

I think next time I'd definitely put only 1/2 a banana. Bananas have a way of overpowering every other flavor. You can't even taste the pear or cantaloupe and you can barely taste the peaches. Also, the flavor of cottage cheese is quite potent. If that bothers you I'd use 1/2 cup cottage cheese and 1/2 cup milk, that not only will lessen the flavor of cottage cheese but also make the smoothie less thick. After a lot of ice cubes the consistency was thin enough for me and the cottage cheese flavor was pretty much gone. It was nicely sweet, but the banana was still the dominant flavor.

It's been a while...

I've been re-inspired by all the food blogs I've been browsing. I especially like Smitten Kitchen (www.smittenkitchen.com). The pictures are beautiful. And so I'm going to try start blogging again. I'm posting pictures of the cakes I made for Christmas, even though it was ages ago. One is a Buche de Noel. A simple sponge cake soaked in a rum sugar simple rolled in bittersweet ganache and covered in ganache. Decorated with meringue mushrooms. And the second is Sachertorte (my first attempt at one). The first recipe is from the Williams Sonoma Desserts book. The second... I can't remember! I think I just browsed through my mother's books and found one which looked reasonable.





More recently I tried making some refried black beans! There's a place here called Trudy's at which I had my first tast of refried black beans. They were amazing! So I figured I could probably do it at home, so I looked up a recipe online and tried it for myself.

Two cans of black beans, rinsed and drain
Half an onion chopped
2-3 cloves of garlic minced
2 cups of water
A few bay leaves
Cumin to taste

Process the beans and water. Saute the onion and garlic and add the beans. Add the cumin, salt and pepper to taste and the bay leaves. Stir constantly over medium heat until it has thickened to your desired consistency! When I made it I didn't have cumin and I think that's what was missing! The original recipe I found had cumin though.

Also two days ago I tried the Chicken Miso Soup from a new recipe book I bought The Eat-Clean Diet Cookbook. Monday I'm going to try the Vegetarian Chili.

I'll try keep up!