Tuesday, January 8, 2013

What I've Been Cooking Up Lately

Skinnytaste's Stuffed Pepper Soup:
  • This recipe was amazing!!  I made it New Years Day, and it was the perfect snowy day comfort food.  And it made a HUGE pot - fed the two of us for dinner and leftovers for 3 days!  
  • Very low cal - the calories listed included 1/2 cup rice per serving!  Also low in fat and high in protein.  I love that.  Can't beat a recipe that is low cal AND filling.
  • Definitely putting this one into my rotation of healthy recipes.
Skillet Lasagna I found on Pinterest:
  • I grew up on hearty Italian food, and lasagna might be one of my favorites.  I mean, who can say no to that pile of noodley-cheesey-carby goodness??
  • Using part skim ricotta and part skim mozzarella cheese keeps this recipe reasonably low in calories, which is amazing.  And it still tastes great!  I thought there was NO WAY 1/2 cup mozzarella cheese would be enough, so I added more (oops), and it was almost TOO cheesy (what?!).  Half a cup definitely would have been enough.
  • I've used Skinnytaste's banana bread recipe before and loved it.  Bananas were reduced at the grocery store last week, so I bought a whole bunch (haha see what I did there?), but I also wanted something grab & go for breakfasts in the morning - so I decided to convert this recipe into muffins!
  • They turned out great - made about 21 big muffins that freeze great - I just take a couple out of the freezer each night and let them thaw on the counter for breakfast the next morning.  And only about 140 calories each.  Love it!
  • SO GOOD.  This was my first time using cauliflower as a stand in for potatoes, and I will definitely do it again.  I mean, you can tell it's cauliflower, but this dish is so creamy and cheesy and good that I didn't even mind that it wasn't potatoey.  
  • And since it calls for reduced fat cream cheese, low fat sour cream, and reduced fat cheddar cheese, it's not quite the caloric bomb that twice baked potatoes are.  AND it still has bacon in it!  WIN.
  • I tried this recipe out as a grab-and-go breakfast option, too.  They were good, but didn't turn out exactly as I had expected.  I think it was because I didn't follow the directions quite right - I just patted the biscuit dough out with my hands and then smooshed it into the muffin tin, then I put the crumbled bacon in the bottom, then egg, then cheese.  Well, when I opened the oven to take them out, there was egg and cheese EVERYWHERE - well at least, all over the muffin pan.  I managed to salvage it by just cutting them apart after they cooled, and they still tasted good.  But I wonder if there's a trick to putting the bacon on the top, if it somehow keeps the egg mixture in the biscuit?  
  • I also thought that using a whole biscuit for each cup as a little much - too much bread for me.  I think next time I try something like this, I might cut each biscuit in half and hopefully they won't puff up as much and not push so much of the egg mixture out too.
  • A great breakfast option for less than 150 calories.

What have you been cooking up lately?

No comments:

Post a Comment