Adventures of a healthy-ish pseudo-foodie

Um, I didn't even TRY to make it round. Who needs round pancakes. Yeah. I'm pretty excited to have discovered  Oh She Glows , and I intend to try several more of her recipes in the near future. This one is my latest effort in finding more protein-filled breakfasts that don't involve eggs. I've made chickpea-based breakfasts only in the context of Indian food before, and it was really hard to resist throwing some turmeric and cumin in the batter, but I was determined to try something new. I did cave at the end when I served it with yogurt and Indian mango pickle, but it just seemed like the best option at the time. And it was indeed delicious. We enjoyed these quite a bit, and they're SO versatile. I will definitely be experimenting with different flavors in the batter, different toppings, and maybe even a different cooking method (muffins?) so I can easily pre-make and freeze a big batch for weekday breakfasts. The batter gets frothy if you let ...

Mmmmm grainy mustard. I considered centering this post around the marinade rather than the sandwich. It is the best tempeh marinade ever. The flavors are balanced and it's completely versatile for different kinds of recipes, as opposed to my usual rut of Asian-themed marinades for tofu and tempeh. Any time I want flavorful tempeh for a non-Asian recipe, this is the marinade I use. The beginning of beautiful things. The rest of the recipe is flexible. Of course you'll want sauerkraut, but I've varied the rest of the ingredients and I've never gone wrong. Thousand Island or mustard - both good. Onions or no onions - both good. Rye bread or sourdough bread or Ezekiel bread or Sarah Lee 45 calorie wheat bread - all good. Swiss or provolone - both good. I even tried cheddar once in a pinch, and it was perfectly acceptable. My original inspiration was from  this recipe . Her sauce with the cannellini beans sounds great, but I've  never gone to the eff...

So many different kinds of goodness on one plate. This recipe is so simple that I almost don't count it as a recipe. It's really just assembling a bunch of components and throwing them into a plate. But I love it so much that it deserves to be catalogued here. Here are my salad components of choice: 1) Romaine lettuce - chopped 2) Avocados - sliced 3) Cheddar cheese - shredded 4) Cilantro - chopped 5) Pickled jalapenos - chopped finely 6) Chips - sliced tortillas with baking spray and sea salt, baked at 350 for 20 minutes 7) Green salsa - Trader Joe's has a delicious one 8) Chipotle yogurt - chipotle in adobo mixed into plain yogurt 9) Black beans - canned black beans, simmered with a bit of green salsa 10) Chicken - rotisserie chicken, shredded and simmered with salsa and a bit of water It's a lot of steps, but they're all easy. And one head of lettuce, one avocado, and one can of beans leave us enough leftovers for lunch the ne...

Parsley would work, too, for those cilantro-haters out there. Thanks to Pinterest, I am finally out of my rut of always going Indian with my lentils. I came across  this recipe , which I was excited about because I had a jar of harissa in the fridge. I pretty much followed the recipe except for adding carrots (because I had some). I also thought I was being original by adding cilantro, but now that I look back at the recipe, I see that there's cilantro in her picture too. It must have been in my subconscious. Perhaps my harissa is spicier than the harissa in the recipe, because if I had added the full amount, it would have caused us physical pain. I ended up with half the amount. (Well, the same amount, but I doubled the rest of the recipe.) It was still very spicy, but perfect over rice with yogurt. I did not have spinach on hand, but I feel like spinach belongs in this recipe. I will add it next time. The Recipe: 1 tb olive oil 1 red onion, chopped 2 c ca...

Chocolate and cherries will get me through the rest of this cold, rainy February. In the midst of the low-carb/gluten-free/paleo craze, I've been thinking that all of these cookie recipes with almond meal look really good. I decided to go all out and try some cookies that have 100% almond meal, no flour. I wasn't sure what the texture would be, but my standards for texture in my baked goods have been significantly lowered since that three-year stretch around middle school when I enjoyed inventing fat-free cake recipes (with green food coloring, usually), so I decided to give it a go. It turns out they have great texture! I actually like the texture better than ordinary cookies. They're really hearty and rich. I love for my cookies to have a little bit of a bite to them, rather than dissolving in my mouth and making me instantly want another one. I felt really satisfied after two of these.  I pretty much followed  this recipe  and just added dried cherries, ...

They smell good, too. I'd never had tilapia cakes before, but I figured if it works for crab and salmon, it would work with tilapia too. And it does! I've made these twice now, and we love them. For flavor inspiration, I turned to the things I usually put in tuna salad: mustard, capers, lemon, yogurt, onions, and celery. Except that I use shallot instead of onion because it is positively delicious in things like this. I bake the tilapia with a casual sprinkling of salt, pepper, and olive oil over the top. It's hard to mess up the cooking of the fish here. By the time the cakes are done, no one will know if your original tilapia was overdone. Or underdone, as long as you can flake it apart sufficiently. Easy. Line the dish with foil for less mess later... unless you flake the cooked fish in the same dish and end up poking holes in the foil and letting the fish juices coat it anyway. Oops. The Mixture. I like to serve these over a bed of spinach, wi...

It was SO hard to take this photo before digging in. Snow days definitely bring out the "ish" in "healthy-ish." But they taste so good. I got hooked on rarebit sauce during college. We used to get it at this Welsh pub where they served it with homemade potato chips. Heaven. Since I had a baking bug today, soft pretzels seemed like a good accompaniment. I turned to Alton brown for both recipes:  pretzels  and  rarebit sauce .  The pretzels are outstanding. They're done the REAL way: boiled, then baked. It brought me back to my bagel-shop-managing days. It's a process, but it wasn't difficult and it really didn't take as much time as I thought it would. It's worth it if you can spare a couple of hours. Alton Brown's instructions are great and I followed them exactly, so I won't regurgitate them here. In confidence that his recipe will never disappear from the internet, I say  read Alton Brown's original recipe  if you wan...