Healthy Cooking Time! Last week Jordan and I decided to try a healthier meal ( especially after our last blog entry of Chicken Fried Steak). We tried a few recipes from Tosca Reno's Eat Clean Cook Book. The trip to the grocery store was quite eventful. I lost sight of the "healthy eating" plan, and was obsessed with buying girl scout cookies outside. Jordan wishes she had taken a picture of me holding six boxes of girl scout cookies, my sunglasses falling off my head, and getting stuck in my hair, and one dollar bills flying all around me in the parking lot. Nonetheless, we made it home and cooked a healthy meal for our men! This week we made:

Herb and Garlic Roasted Baby Potatoes
Chicken Picadillo
Beef and Walnut Stir Fry
Orange Almond Cake

Herb and Garlic Roasted Potatoes
These potatoes were extremely easy to make. If you need a simple healthy potato recipe this recipe take very little prep time. With that being said, it calls for cippolini onions. These were available at our local grocery store, but we had to search a little bit. They were hidden below the regular onions. This recipe was not something that "wowed" us by any means. It was exactly what you expect out of herb and garlic roasted potatoes. On a scale of one to ten (keeping in mind that our rating is based on healthy food), we would rate this dish a five.


Chicken Picadillo
Yay!! We found a new favorite HEALTHY meal to cook! Our entire table LOVED this dish. We served it with Uncle Ben's brown rice (surprisingly, I wasn't completed turned off with brown rice.. it was quite good). This recipe is not difficult to make at all. It requires a lot of chopping and dicing. You have to bake the chicken breasts prior to starting the meal. When we read the ingredients, we were not too keen on having raisins in a chicken dish. Jordan and I both agree that the raisins complimented the dish perfectly ( who would have thought?!) All the ingredients are easily available. The flavors and spices came together perfectly. Chicken Picadillo is originally a cuban dish. If you ask Imran, he would probably say to add in a little more red chili powder! On our "healthy" scale of one to ten, we would rate this dish an eight.




Beef and Walnut Stir Fry
This dish was a good way to get some veggies incorporated into our meal. The beef lacked a little extra flavor. If I was to remake it, I would double to amount of orange juice and soy sauce added at the end, and possibly marinate the beef stir fry pieces in some lemon juice and salt before cooking it. This meal would require an intermediate level cook, as you need to have worked with beef before to make sure it is cooked through properly. When you go to your local butcher, ask them to cut the beef tenderloin for you in stir fry strips. This will save you the hassle of doing it yourself. The ingredients were easy to find at our local grocery store, and we made sure to get fresh veggies. Though this dish was not as flavorful as the chicken picadillo, I would not discount it completely. On a scale one to ten, we would rate this dish a 6.


Orange Almond Cake

NO! NO! NO! This cake was all wrong. When making the cake, Jordan kept saying "These ingredients just don't make sense". I don't care what diet you are on, DO NOT MAKE THIS CAKE. The skill level required is intermediate. We were able to find all the ingredients at our grocery store with a little help from our friendly Publix grocer. Unfortunately, we were not happy with the texture of the cake. There was a strange after taste. Imran only had one bite, and just gave me a look. On a scale of one to ten, this cake gets a three.

Overall, we enjoyed our healthy meal at home. We were able to prepare the entire meal in 90 minutes. Tosca Reno's cookbook is written very well. The directions were easy to follow and you do not have to flip pages back and forth too much. We almost made it the whole evening without eating any junk, but as soon as the Oscars started we opened four of my six boxes of girl scout cookies!