Recipes of the Week

I look cross-eyed in this one, but my hair is just fantastic.  So, let's go with it.

We've been continuing to go to the gym, and Matt has shifted into half weight lifting and half cardio.  It's fun to watch him lift weights, and I think I will eventually ask him to show me how to lift correctly.  I'm always scared that I will end up hurting myself.

I've been working on healthier versions of recipes.  Most things can be made healthier by simply making them yourself, instead of using a prepackaged item (like a sauce).  You end up cutting out a lot of added salt and sugars.

This week some things that we ate include the following:

Turkey Sloppy Joe's
   
Ingredients

1 lb Turkey
1/2 of a meduim onion, diced
1/2 of a green bell pepper, diced
3/4c ketchup
1/8 c or 2 T of brown sugar
1/8 c or 2 T of apple cider vinegar
1/8 c or 2 T of mustard
1/2 tsp Worcestershire sauce
Salt/Pepper
Olive Oil

Dice up your vegetables.  Heat a skillet to medium with about a tablespoon of olive oil.  Saute the vegetables for about 3 minutes, then add in your turkey and use the spatula to roughly separate it.  Brown the turkey and use a whisk to break it up into smaller bits.  Combine the ketchup, brown sugar, vinegar, mustard, Worcestershire sauce, salt, and pepper and whisk it until it has a even consistency and texture.  Add the mixture into the skillet, and evenly coat the turkey.  Put a lid over it and turn the heat down to medium low.  Serve on buns.  

 So, I actually grabbed this recipe off of a pinterest slow-cooker list.  I halved it and decided to make it in a skillet instead, because honestly I can't imagine it being better out of the slow cooker.  Also, any time a slow-cooker recipe says to brown the meat in a skillet first I often wonder why bother with the slow cooker at all. You're just adding 4 hours to a recipe that should take 10 minutes.   But, seriously, that slow cooker list is the bomb.  It's especially useful when you have no idea what you want for dinner.  It's a good idea list.

Matt loved these.  He said that he didn't miss the canned sauce and that now he wants to learn to make our own barbecue sauce.  So we'll probably do that in the weeks to come.  We just ate these with chips, but normally Matt wants celery and carrot sticks with sloppy joes.

Chicken cooked in Tomato Sauce

Ingredients
1 lb chicken breast
1 large can of crushed tomatoes
1 can of fire roasted tomatoes
1 can of tomato sauce
2 T chili powder

Add all ingredient to slow cooker.  Cook for 4 hours on High, stirring occasionally.  

So, there's not a whole lot to this recipe.  It's a slow cooker one from that list, but I added crushed tomatoes instead, because I prefer them.  I actually added my chicken frozen, and it still completed in 4 hours, so I was pretty impressed with it.   I normally don't trust the slow cooker to cook anything, but it was my birthday, so I just started it and let it go.     We ate this with mustard dill potatoes and sauteed asparagus.

Mustard Dill Potatoes

Ingredients
4-5 medium to large yellow potatoes roughly chopped
3 T mustard, or enough to coat
1/2 T olive oil
1-2T dill weed
Salt and Pepper

Chop yellow potatoes into 1/2 inch cubes (or whatever you want).  Toss around in a  bowl with remaining ingredients then bake at 400 for 40 minutes.  Turn over once during baking process.  

I'm only including this because it's kind of became a signature dish around our house.  We discovered dill weed a couple months ago when we were first making tzatziki sauce.  Ever since then Matt has added it to a lot of different recipes.  This is by far the most successful.   The estimations on ingredients are probably not very precise, because we kind of do it by eye every time, but they are really yummy.  Also, I should mention that it seems like a lot of mustard when you first put them in the oven, but the potatoes end up absorbing all of it.  They are really great.  Really.