Healthy Eats-Along 2013

[suereal]

Sometimes when I want a flavored drink, I brew a big pot of some kind of herb tea and make iced tea.  Lemon Zinger and  rooibos are my favo, because  I think they don't need any sweetener.

[MareMare]

I love tea! And coffee! I drink water all day long but need to try to remember sometimes to reach for a calorie free drink instead of munching on something! I'm not sure if I've ever had Lemon Zinger, may have to give it a whirl!

[craftylittlemonkey]

I like tea too but only hot, not so much cold.

I made a beautiful soup today for lunch. Surprise surprise, my kids hate it. Sigh. They are seriously my biggest challenge to eating well. And to keeping to a food budget and any sort of plans at ALL. Everybody likes and dislikes totally different things .

[astrangeone]

I have always been a foodie, apparently.  (As a kid I would try anything once, and I do like veggies more than fruit...)

I always found that kids will eat "cute" food or food that they have made (with your help, of course).  It helps to put a little bit of a new food in front of them.

Ah, what I've learned from babysitting.

I mostly drink a lot of tea, and I've been trying to cut out a lot more "fast food".  Last night, I was pretty much unsuccessful - I ate an entire frozen pepperoni pizza with homemade umami paste on it, and had some grapes as my "greens".

[sweets4ever]

Made these healthy Egg Stackers for breakfast yesterday.  It's like a much tastier version of a McMuffin, I suppose! http://www.craftster.org/forum/index.php?topic=419812.0

Also made stuffed peppers in the slow cooker yesterday for dinner.  I'll get them posted this weekend!  Yum.

[craftylittlemonkey]

Yum! My kids would eat those egg stackers any time! But not the stuffed peppers which is very sad for me because I love them. That's just too much effort to make for a dish that my kids simply would not touch. Le sigh.

I used up all but the very last jar of our home canned tomatoes from last summer and the last of the frozen bell peppers. Made 3 jars of salsa, pasta sauce for dinner, and FIVE jars of chili! Just the veggie base too, not even any beans included in that yet. I froze 4 of them for later meals. The kids hate it, of course, but I make them eat it anyhow. They like it a bit better with sour cream or yogurt and cheese added. I serve it with biscuits from the Joy of Cooking. Dead easy and you can mix in all sorts of different flours and extra ingredients. I tried it with all rice flour once and that was a mistake though, oh man. Crumbly saw dust biscuits, nobody would touch them, lol.

Oh, and I soaked and cooked a HUGE amount of chick peas the other day and had to use them up before they got funky so made an outrageous amount of hummus. I added some fresh ground sesame, sunflower, pumpkin and flax seeds, that's my secret for making it thicker if I've had to add too much water to get it to process smoothly. It is SO much cheaper to make this up yourself, not to mention healthier without all the weird preservatives and flavour enhancers that's in most commercial brands. To make it keep I froze most of it, did you know it freezes well? It does .

[LimeRiot]

What's everyone been cookin' up this week?

We had these veggie pot pies for dinner tonight...
http://www.greenlemonade.com/recipes-juices/healthy-vegetarian-pot-pie-recipe/

I also made these veggie lasagna rolls from Cooking Light this week...
http://www.myrecipes.com/recipe/lasagna-rolls-with-roasted-red-pepper-sauce-10000000604779/

Both were tasty and low in calories !!

As of this morning, I've lost about half the weight I'm hoping to drop. The older I get, the harder it is for these sticky pounds to come off!! I'm happy to be making progress though and I'm feeling really good, which is what matters.

[LimeRiot]

Has anyone tried Miracle Noodles?

http://miraclenoodle.com/

I just got a 6 pack from amazon and they sure look strange!! Apparently they smell really awful at first too??

[suereal]

I've had konnyaku before from Asian groceries.  It didn't smell bad as far as I remember.  It comes like store bought tofu, in a small plastic container and liquid.  Maybe what you got was dried some how?  That would change the smell maybe.  Most of the ones I tried said that it was made of potato starch, though I think it's more of a type of sweet potato (which are what seems to be called yams these days and the orange ones are called sweet potatoes even though they are yams..)  But I don't remember it having any smell..or flavor

[LimeRiot]

What did you make with them, suereal? That sounds just like what I got. These are packed in water and they sort of look like a defrosted ice pack .

They have 0 calories and less than 1g of carbs per serving but I'm a bit skeptical .