Recipes for healthy eating
 

Ok guys & gals I need a little help with some recipes. As a few of you know I had a serious heart attack a few years back with one of the major contributing factors being High cholesterol. In an effort to stick around a few extra years I've been trying to eat a lot better and have been doing so/so at it. Problem is I'm a single dad raising 3 kids who are hard to please, food wise.

13 y/o daughter loves her steaks and desserts
10 y/o son will pretty much eat anything that doesn't bite him first.
5 y/o son is very picky eater, but loves his fruits and PB&J sandwiches.

I also have a very limited budget, as mom don't pay support, so I need stuff that pretty inexpensive and is good as leftovers or recipes that can be sized for 1-4 people. I prefer simple recipes to make, but I am an excellent cook so not afraid of tough complicated cooking. But really the expense is my biggest concerns, along with stuff that the kids will like.

I tend to make a lot of Chicken, and try to cut back on the fried foods & red meat, but frankly I've run out of ideas. We also eat a lot of Rice and such.

So please trow me some good recipes with some variety & help me out here. Lots of rep & gratitude for good stuff.

veggies my 11 yr old will eat.

acorn squash halved and baked for around an hour hour 15 cut side down for 30-40 min. put in baking dish with 1/4 inch of water. turn over and fill with butter and brown suger, drizzle with maple syrup, change oven tobroil and take out when browned a little.

easy peas and carrots
cut carrots pretty fine along and a shallot(orsome onion. or two cook in a little butter till shallots turn opaque, then add a little water and cook till carrots are to prefered softness. dump some frozen peas in and cook till warm

squash and broccoli
steam both. stir in bowl with some olive oil minced garlic and italian seasoning.

glazed carrots
boil carrots till prefered softness. drain and add brown sugar butter and honey.

steamed carrots broccoli or cauliflower

corn on the cob in the microwave
put corn in baking dish add water, sugar and butter to baking dish, cook 5min or so till corn is ready

baked sweet potato. add cinnamon butter and brownsuger as topping

black eyed peas with chopped garlic onion jalepeno and bell peppers. boiled for 45min to hour.

i've got a great italianveggie stew for the crockpot if your interested. its easy, and damn good.

not sure thats all healthy, but there are veggies invloved

This, seriously. The website is awesome, and we've had a subscription for years. Really great magazine.

Create an RSS feed with your favorite cooking sites such as Cookinglight.com as suggested. There's a load of cooking sites, allrecipes.com is one of my favorites.

Anyways, with the RSS feeds, you can usually customize them to the recipes you want and with the feeds set, you will then be fed recipes in your RSS reader of choice. I set mine to receive 'em daily.

allrecipes.com is the bomb. I love the feature where you can put in the ingredients you have and it spits out recipes.

Thanks man, I appreciate that. I'll look into doing this.

To take care of everyone's taste for steak I'd suggest going to strictly sirloin. You put a good rub on that and cook it right, you won't ever have a complaint in the house.

As far as I know it's the leanest steak out there. I make a damn fine London Broil too. It's all in the seasoning. I use a fair amount of flavored salts, but depending on the rest of your diet for the day it's still manageable.

I don't have the recipe available right now, but I can post it later or you can just find one- I make a turkey meatloaf that's pretty healthy, not very expensive and my kids will generally eat it, especially if you put ketchup on it. I substitute plain oatmeal for breadcrumbs, use egg white instead of the whole egg. You could also use a low fat % ground beef if you don't like turkey.
Below is a dish I make that my kids will eat. You can tweak the ingredients to budget or taste, or health level. For instance, you could leave out the spinach if you don't want to pay for a whole bag of spinach leaves, use low sodium broth, and you could substitute ground turkey for beef if you want to stay away from red meat. The orzo is good because it can act as a sort of substitute for rice. It's inexpensive and helps make the dish go further.
1 lb ground beef
1 large onion, chopped
3 garlic cloves
2 14 1/2 oz cans diced tomatoes (the ones with basil,oregano & garlic)
1 14 1/2 oz can beef broth
1 6 oz can tomato paste
3/4 cup uncooked orzo
1 tsp Italian seasoning
2 cups fresh spinach

Cook beef, onion & garlic in soup pot until meat isn't pink, drain
Stir in tomatoes, broth, tomato paste, orzo and Italian seasoning. Bring to boil. Reduce heat, cover and simmer for 15-20 minutes until orzo is tender. Add spinach, cook for a minute or two until spinach wilts.

Maybe a big piece is just substitution.

I feel like being able to teach them to enjoy whole grains instead of complex carbs (e.g. whole grain Cheerios instead of regular. I bought these Kashii whole grain honey puffs and they were just as good as "Smacks". Whole wheat bagels or bread) Replacing a lot of the fatty meats with turkey--in certain cases, it tastes almost as good as beef or pork or ham. It might up your grocery bill just slightly, but it helps you to cook a lot of the same things they enjoyed, have it taste fairly close to the real thing, but at a much better health value.

Well, good on you, but...you certainly don't need to go to this extreme to be fit and healthy.

Consistantly elevating your heart rate through exercise (your choice of which) 4 times a week for 40 minutes each and eating fewer calories than you burn will do the trick.

You need to handle your liver and detox it. That's the organ that manufactures cholesterol. Then switch to whole grains including rice, whole grain pasta and eat more fish....including the oily fishes. Take fish liver oil and Niacin as well as B Complex from good whole supplements. Drink lots of water. Then you can have some read meat and dessert once in a while. You might look into the books on how to eat for your metabolic type. A diet too high in white refined carbs also leads to heart problems.

Garbage Soup
 

Save all your veggie cuttings and left over scraps by putting in the freezer in a container. Include bones and meats. When you have enough put in a stock pot, add a touch of vinegar to leech calcium from any bones, add seasonings to your tastes, cover with broth bring to a boil and simmer for 2 hours. In the last hour add brown rice or orzo pasta and Himalaya salt to taste. It's a great soup and easy to make. No effort at all.

Souper Chicken

Serve with some kind of salad, fresh fruit is good

2 C brown rice, raw
4 C chicken bouillion....cicken broth can be substituted if you're lazy
1 C mushrooms, whole or sliced
6 chicken breast halves, skinned/boneless
1 pkg dry onion soup

In a large non-stick casserole pan, combine rice, chicken boullion, and mushrooms.

Place chicken breasts on top of the previous mixture and sprinkle the onion soup over the top.

Cover with foil and bake at 350 for 1 1/2 hours.

Serves 6.

* sometimes I add other frozen mixed vegetables. Cauliflower is also good in this dish. The onion soup flavors the chicken very well.

Calories per serving about 384

baked or panfried fish is an easy one. i like to marinate some tilapia in lemon juice for bout an hour. bread it in some flour with a little cayan pepper to taste. put enough olive oil in the pan to cover the bottom. cook on both sides over medium heat for bout 3 min. the sauce is a one part sour cream 1 part guacamole. its damn good.

Blanche sugar-snap peas in boiling water (or the microwave) and toss with a little bit of sesame oil. Add a few sliced mushrooms and toss to soak up any remaining sesame oil. Finger food for kids and I bet they'll like it (put out a towel to wipe sesame-oiled fingers, or make them use forks, whatever). Snap peas too expensive? Grow your own, blanche and freeze them in half-lb ziplock batches. Grow snow-peas too. I usually plant mine starting the last part of feb and more small batches on thru March.

grow your own

Oatmeal. Old fashioned or steel cut. Every day. Add a pinch of fresh-ground flax-seed (grind in an old whirlybird coffee grinder - the stuff goes rancid pretty quick after it's ground, so I just grind a little every few days). This will drop your cholesterol in about a month. Feed the kids oatmeal every day, get 'em off boxed cereal asap. Put a smiley face on their bowl w/raisins or honey. I don't care if cold cereal is 'easy' and 'cheap', it's not cheap if it batters their pancreas every day until it gives out. A huge percentage of this country is diabetic/pre-diabetic. I blame cold cereal and white bread.

Soak a bag of beans overnight and cook them or (unsoaked) split peas every week, flavor with a little bit of ham or bacon for the last half-hour, but add about 4 tablespoons of olive oil to the beanpot. When the beans are done I add an onion or two that I cooked in olive oil with curry powder, a few serrano chiles, ginger, mustard seeds and cumin seed, lots of garlic. IF this is too spicy for the kids, just spice up your share. The curry and spices will also help w/your cholesterol. And I love this stuff.

Eat sardines and kippered herring for lunch once or twice a week. Eat more salmon (canned salmon patties are cheap, note that canned salmon is on sale for lent right now. Stock up) Make beef and barley soup, find a recipe online that you like. Cook a lot of broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower, turnips. The brassica family has a plethora of 'protective' ingredients, really ought to eat some of these every day. More sweet potatoes - don't need to fill them with marshmallows, just bake or roast them, cut open and serve hot sprinkled with cinnamon and a pat of butter. They're sweet enough as is for me, but if you need a little honey or real maple syrup...ok. Real sweeteners like honey and maple syrup cost more? Just up front. That forces you to use less. Trust me, cheap sweeteners are not so cheap in the long run. See diabetes info, above.

When in doubt, ask yourself 'would my great grandmother recognize this as food?' If it comes in a box with a pouch of flavoring crapola, no, she would not. If you pour it from a box and cover it with milk, no she would not. If she would have known how to peel it and cook it, you're probably safe to eat it. Since my kin lived on pork, beef, fish they caught, eggs, butter, garden produce, milk, beans, cabbage/kraut and oatmeal and usually lived to be in their 90's, this sorta goes against the 'don't eat any fat, don't eat any meat, live on 'healthy whole grains' mantra that a lot of folks repeat. Listening to those folks may well be the reason the whole damned country is fat and has heart disease.

I love. One issue I cooked just about everything in it....all of it was AWESOME!

I had that subscription for a year and hated it. The food was OK to pretty good, but for me the price was way too high for something that seemed to be 80 percent ads. Especially when a little common sense can turn just about any recipe "healthy".

Really? Weird. I absolutely love that magazine and the food in it.

I know. I think I bought it on your recommendation. :p

Is this healthy?

Ingredients: Filtered Carbonated Water, Organic Erythritol, Organic Dragonfruit Puree, Organic Lemon Juice Concentrate, Natural Flavor, Monk Fruit Juice Concentrate, Organic Lions Mane mushroom extract, Organic cordyceps mushroom extract, Panasonic Ginseng Root Extract, L-Theanine, Organic Caffeine from Green Tea Extract

Looks like some sort of juice concoction with lots of gimmick ingredients. It's not exactly bad or anything, but it looks like some kind of sugary juice energy drink. It's hard to say what is "healthy" and what is "not healthy". It really depends on circumstances and your overall diet as a whole. It's not obviously terrible, like eating a twinkie or takis, but its not like having a plain grilled chicken breast and a plain greens salad either.

If your blood sugar is low and/or you need a quick mental energy boost, then hit it. If your daily caloric budget can afford it, then go for it. I'd steer clear of drinking sugary calories though. Drink water and save the calories for solid food. If you want the, lion's mane, cordyceps, ginseng, theanine, or caffeine, just take the pill or powder for supplements.

Ok can I drink 21 of these a week instead of 21 Red Bulls will it be significantly more healthy lol

Trying to replace energy drinks

Have been taking Lions Mane, Cordyceps and L Tyrosine in pill form. Seems to help but ain't nothing like Caffeine for me

What ever happened to JOhn?

Pretty good poster.

Maybe. If it's a full sugar red bull vs that, then yes. The juice will undoubtedly provide more vitamins and nutrients. A sugar free red bull vs the juice might be a toss up depending on your situation. The health of artificial sweeteners is highly debated, but almost all studies point to it being inert. And the carbonation isn't good for your teeth. But would a sugar free red bull be more or less healthy than a full sugar juice drink? Once again it all depends on your situation. Choose accordingly.


On a side note, I think ideally we'd all mostly eat some kind of grilled meat (lean steak, fish, chicken) and a ton of raw green veggies and fruits with maybe the occasional starchy carb (rice or potatoes) and always drink only water. Not that it has anything to do with your drink, Bwillie, but I'm just saying.

https://www.easypeasyfoodie.com/yellow-split-pea-dhal/

You can add cumin seed and dried chile to suit - I add a 4 oz can or 2 of diced roasted green chile to mine. I usually eat mine as 'soup' but you can serve this over rice or barley and make your $$$ stretch a bit.