Winner, winner, chicken dinner!

To finish out the week of meals, I’m going to talk about dinner.  I am a meal-planner.  The advantages of meal-planning, from my perspective, include not having to go to the grocery store as often, saving time, avoiding food waste, and not having to figure out dinner while hungry, which often leads to bad choices.

Most weeks, I roast a chicken.  It takes a little longer than some meals, but then I have the glories of leftovers.  The carcass goes into the stock pot with water, herbs, carrots, celery, and onion to make broth.  That broth and some of the meat can become chicken soup with rice or noodles, or, even better, tortilla soup.  Some of the meat can go in sandwiches or salad or pot pie or pasta.  It’s efficient, tasty, and reasonably healthy.

Here is how I do it:

1 whole chicken

About 2 tablespoons salt

About 2 tablespoons Penzey’s Mural of Flavor (or other dried herbs of choice)

Early in the day or the night before, rinse the chicken and remove giblets (save them for the stock pot!).  Mix the salt and herbs in a small bowl and rub them all over the chicken in a roasting pan.  Put the chicken, uncovered, in the fridge until time to cook.

Preheat oven to 450.  Roast the chicken for 30 minutes.  Turn the heat down to 350 and roast the chicken for about an hour more, until meat thermometer registers 165.  If you have time, let it rest a bit before carving, but nothing bad will happen if you carve immediately.

To make broth:

1 chicken carcass

Chicken giblets

3-4 carrots, roughly chopped

3-4 celery ribs with leaves, roughly chopped

1 onion, roughly chopped

Herbs:  rosemary, thyme, sage, oregano, parsley, etc.

Remove most of meat from chicken carcass and save for other uses.  Put carcass in large stock pot with remaining ingredients.  Cover with water.  Bring to a boil.  Reduce heat, cover, and simmer for at least an hour (longer is better; I tend to start the process before doing the dinner dishes and let it simmer until bedtime.).  Strain the broth, discarding solids, and refrigerate.

Lunch Monitor

Yesterday I wrote about smoothies for breakfast.  Today, naturally, I want to talk about lunch.

Those of us who work have, essentially, two choices (three if we work somewhere fancy with a dedicated cafeteria)—pack a lunch or eat out.  Both of those choices have advantages and pitfalls.

Packing a lunch requires some planning.  The easiest option, if we have a microwave available, is to bring some of whatever was left over from dinner.  The second-easiest is to repurpose some of that dinner:  last night’s roast chicken becomes today’s sandwich or salad topping, chili becomes burrito filling, roast veggies mix with leftover rice and some dressing.  In some cases, we might want to plan specific lunches and shop accordingly.  I occasionally decide to deal with my challenges in eating leafy greens by declaring salad week.  Packed lunches tend to be cheaper.  We have control over our portion sizes.  We also know about the ingredients and preparation techniques, so we are not surprised to find added sugars or fats hiding between the lettuce leaves.  The challenges of packed lunches are often about non-food issues:  wanting to be social, needing to be away from the desk, finding a good place to picnic, feeling bored with leftovers.

Eating out, on the other hand, offers a plethora of choices.  Most of us have an incredible array of cuisines available to us within walking or easy driving distance.  Restaurants, however, are not generally focused on the healthiest choices, but the tastiest.  “Crispy,” I read somewhere, is the menu descriptive word most likely to appeal to diners, and it is usually about fries rather than lettuce.  Most of the time, restaurant meals have more salt, fat, and sugar than what we would use making those dishes at home and the portions can be really large.  When we eat lunch out, we have to use a fair amount of self-control to choose wisely for our health.

Either way, we need to remember that we are the boss of our food choices.  We can prioritize vegetables and fruits and other whole foods.

Right now, my garden is giving me tons of cherry tomatoes.  I’ve been eating a lot of caprese salad, which I make like this:

Toss together:

About 20 cherry tomatoes, halved

About 10 ciliegene-sized fresh mozzarella balls, halved

½ avocado, diced

2 sprigs basil, chopped

Drizzle of extra virgin olive oil

Salt to taste

Smooth(ie) Move

It took a long time to convince me that smoothies were food.  In fact, I had to Jedi-mind-trick myself by putting my smoothie in a bowl and eating it with a spoon like cereal so that I felt like I was actually having real breakfast.  Now I have one almost every day for breakfast.  It is a good way to get in some nutrients that I would struggle to get in other meals.  This recipe is an adaptation of one from the book The 10-Day Detox Diet by Mark Hyman.  It’s vegan, contains no added sugar, and actually tastes good.  The recipe makes two—I drink one right away and save the other in a mason jar for the next morning, but sharing is also an option!

In a blender, combine:

2 cups almond milk (Coconut water also works and I have also used a combination of almond milk and the last of a can of coconut milk leftover from another recipe)

1 cup frozen blueberries (or other berries, fresh or frozen)

1 banana

½ avocado

About 1Tbsp almond butter (I don’t measure)

About 1 Tbsp coconut oil (again, I don’t measure)

1 handful almonds (Brazil nuts add even more nutrition, but I don’t always have them on hand)

2 Tbsp raw pumpkin seeds

2 Tbsp chia seeds

2 Tbsp flax seeds

2 Tbsp hemp seed hearts

My current blender has a “Frozen Drink” button that works well, but blending until fairly smooth on high also works.  This is a pretty thick smoothie, which is probably why I like it.