Quick, Easy and Healthy Recipes
« Previous Articles2 healthy breakfast recipes you MUST try
I found these two scrumptious healthy breakfast recipes from New York Times Fitness & Nutrition and I could not resist sharing them with my readers.
I’m warning you right now, the blueberry pancake recipe will make you cry of joy! This is such a perfect Sunday morning breakfast. I also think you’ll really like the healthy muffins!
Continue reading: 2 healthy breakfast recipes you MUST try »
Homemade salad dressing recipes are so easy to make
I don’t like the taste of bottle salad dressings because I always find there is a strong artificial taste to them. I also find they often contain sugar and I try to avoid adding unnecessary sugar to my diet as much as possible.
I challenge you to read the ingredients on a bottle of store bought salad dressing and you’ll see. I think the only place I’d attempt to buy a bottle salad dressing might be Whole Foods Market.
I learned how to prepare homemade salad dressing from my Parisian-ex-husband at the very beginning of our marriage because he was quite adamant that he would NEVER-EVER-EVER eat a store bought salad dressing. Because he’s French, he always insisted on using a whisk or fork to emulsify the Dijon mustard and the oil, but I’m not the best with the whisk and just like when I have to prepare a Béchamel sauce, I’ve found a short cut to preparing the perfect homemade salad dressing.
I collect my old jam jars and put all my ingredients inside the jar and shake! It literally takes me five minutes to prepare a homemade salad dressing recipe and I know EXACTLY which ingredients are part of the mix.
Continue reading: Homemade salad dressing recipes are so easy to make »
Chicken and silver beet pasta recipe from Donna Hay
I came across this delicious chicken and beet pasta from Donna Hay and I wanted to share it with you!
I don’t eat pork chops or pork loins … it’s just not something I’ve ever really enjoyed (I don’t know why), but French-, Italian- and Spanish-cured pork meats and sausages rock my world!
When I saw that Donna Hay had added chorizo sausages to a recipe, I knew I just had to try it.
I’ve made other pasta dishes with chorizo before, but I had not tried this combination.
I’ll be honest, I don’t eat silver beet (Swiss chard) as often as I should, so this past recipe forced me to buy it and eat it. I suspect you could replace the silver beet with spinach, but that would change the taste a bit.
Continue reading: Chicken and silver beet pasta recipe from Donna Hay »
Healthy baked chicken strip recipe
If you’ve read my bio, then you know that I proudly state that I can cook chicken 1,000 ways … and I truly mean it. I love chicken and I always have.
When it comes to chicken, there are two types of fans: white meat lovers and dark meat lovers. I have eaten chicken, quail, duck, turkey, Cornish Hen and other poultry and I have to say that regardless of the type of bird, I seem to love dark meat the most.
I really enjoy white meat if I’m in the mood for a mayo and chicken sandwich, but when I’m eating chicken … I prefer the dark meat.
I will admit that chicken strips are my weakness when it comes to white meat and I refuse to eat any of the fried ones you get at a restaurant or bar more than a couple times per year … and when I do eat them, I’ll just have a few strips and not an entire plate (let’s face it … they are not the healthiest because we’re talking about battered chicken deep-fried in hydrogenated fats).
When I found this incredibly delicious healthy variation from Fitness Anywhere, the makers of the TRX Suspension Training (you’re going to love my soon-to-come review on the TRX Suspension cables because this is as close to military fitness as you’ll get! I will be training with one of the top trainers and I just cannot contain myself!), I was in heaven!
Continue reading: Healthy baked chicken strip recipe »
Healthy Italian food recipes!
Because of the recession, many people are shunning chi-chi French cuisine and all those complicated fusion dishes in favour of simple, comforting Italian fare. The trend is so popular there were articles about it in the New York Times and a number of financial papers. A while ago, I even wrote that business people in wealthy countries like Switzerland were meeting clients at Italian restaurants for meetings and opting for Italian eateries for lunch.
>>> If you missed that post, you can still read it here: Italian food is popular again!
I love everything Italian, so I get quite upset when I hear people say Italian cuisine is fattening because of the pasta. What many North Americans don’t understand is that Italians from Italy do not eat the same size portions of pasta that are served in restaurants on this side of the Atlantic. If you’ve ever travelled to Italy, you probably noticed many Italians eat a small portion of pasta twice a day, and Italian women are as slim and as sexy as ever!
As much as I love French food, my passion for Italian cooking is just as strong. The two cuisines differ in many ways and I think that’s why I like them equally so much.
Continue reading: Healthy Italian food recipes! »
18 Great Tomato Recipes!
What would Italian, Portuguese, Spanish or Greek cuisine be without tomatoes? Europeans who eats a Mediterranean diet consume several kilograms of tomatoes each year.
Tomatoes are not only tasty and delicious, but they contain loads of healthy benefits: they are a good source of fibre, vitamin K, potassium, manganese, folic acid, folate, mangnesium, copper, vitamin E, niacin, vitamin B6, phoaphorus and thiamin; they give you 32 per cent of your daily vitamin C and 25 per cent of your daily vitamin A; they are high in antioxidants (lycopene), which helps your body fight free radicals and they have a lot of water. All of which makes me wonder: Why aren’t more people eating tomatoes?
It’s worth pointing out that genetically-created tomatoes that you can buy at any time of the year, are inferior in taste and freshness. In my opinion, if you buy tomatoes in the middle of December, you aren’t getting the real thing. I limit my tomato buying to the months of July, August and September, when markets and grocery stores are bursting at the seams with locally-grown, sweet ripe fresh tomatoes.
Once the season is over, I turn to canned organic tomatoes which I can buy all year round (they make wonderful sauces). I rarely eat fresh tomatoes during the fall and especially during the winter, because I know they aren’t in season. I’ve bought tomatoes grown in Mexico, Central America and even South America during winter months in the hopes of finding something that tastes as fresh as what I find during the summer, but I’ve always been gravely disappointed because they are picked way too early. Having eaten locally-grown tomatoes in Costa Rica during December, it’s clear the distance they have to travel when they are shipped to North American kills the goodness and the taste. The ones I ate were red, juicy, sweet and delicious.
Continue reading: 18 Great Tomato Recipes! »
10 salmon recipes that won’t disappoint
Luckily for those who love salmon as much as I do, it’s one of those super-healthy fish that is low in mercury!
Salmon is packed with omega 3 fatty acids and there are soooooooo many delicious recipes you can make with salmon. Honestly, you’d have to try REALLY hard to turn salmon into an unhealthy dish and I truly don’t know why you’d bother.
When it comes to choosing my salmon, I’ll have to admit that I have a thing for wild pacific salmon and if I can get my hands on Sockeye or Coho salmon, I will shamelessly stuff my face because salmon from the west coast doesn’t taste the same as salmon from the east coast.
Continue reading: 10 salmon recipes that won’t disappoint »
Taco Bell Frutista Freeze is a mirage of fruit juice!
Have you seen those sexy adverts for the Taco Bell Frutista Freeze? They feature that Rupert Holmes “Escape” (The Pina Colada Song) tune from the 70s!
Doesn’t the drink look soooooooooo refreshing and tasty? Imagine that on a hot summer day???
Well, don’t kid yourself, that drink is loaded with stuff and you won’t even find a trace of fruit juice in it.
In fact, at the end of the advert, you hear a voice quickly say: “the Taco Bell Frutista Freeze contains no fruit juice”!
The reality is that most of those drinks served up in fast food restaurants are LOADED with high-fructose corn syrup that you want to minimize (if not eliminate altogether from your diet)!
Continue reading: Taco Bell Frutista Freeze is a mirage of fruit juice! »
