Sweet and Sour Chicken

I must confess,  I made this for dinner the other night and didn't think it would turn out so I didn't bother taking pictures until after it was complete. I tasted it and ended up kicking myself for not taking the step by step photos of the recipe. Lesson learned and things turned out okay since  I ended up liking it so much, I made it again the next day minus the quinoa for my lunch and took the pictures then.

I must note that this recipe has arrowroot powder which is a thickening agent. It is not listed in the PINK method book as an accepted item, I however did ask Cynthia about it when I used it in this alfredo recipe and she said that it was fine to use as a thickening agent.

Sweet and Sour Chicken
2 tbsp tomato paste, no added sugar
1 tbsp Bragg's Aminos or low sodium soy sauce
1/2 tsp arrowroot powder
1/4 cup white vinegar
1.4 cup water
1-2 medjool dates pitted
8 ounces boneless skinless chicken breasts cut into chunks
2 cups assorted vegetables chopped (I used mushrooms, zucchini, peppers, onions, carrots)

Method
Start by browning your chicken until cooked through

While your chicken is cooking make your sweet and sour sauce.

Add the tomato paste, Bragg's, Vinegar, Arrowroot powder, water and dates to your blender and blend until smooth.

Note: You may want to chop your dates first, I added my pitted dates whole into the blender and they didn't chop very well. Everything worked out once I cooked the sauce because the dates just kind of dissolved when heated.

Once the chicken is cooked add your vegetables and saute until they are soft.

When the vegetables are soft, Pour your sauce into the pan and let cook until it thickens. It shouldn't take very long.

Taste your sauce, I ended up adding just a dash more Bragg's to mine but I didn't want you all to try it and get overwhelmed by the taste so you be the judge.

Note: this picture was my husband's meal,  it has pineapple added, I don't think pineapple is PINK approved , at least it isn't listed as a slow fruit,  so just leave it out and you should be sitting PINK

Serve over quinoa or brown rice.

Enjoy

Pumpkin Spice Quinoa Granola

I have been on a quinoa kick lately. I have been buying quinoa in the bulk section at the grocery store lately and it is so cheap, something like $3.50 a pound. A pound of quinoa goes a long way so it is very economical which is a plus because health food can be expensive. I was researching quinoa recipes the other day and it said that a lot of people eat it at breakfast as a hot cereal, like oatmeal which has intrigued me but I have yet to try it. I also found lots of recipes for homemade granola that use quinoa but many of them have lots of sugar, syrup, dried fruit, nuts, and tons of oil. It got me thinking, I wonder if I could make it without the oil, fruit, nuts etc. which would make it more PINK friendly. I worked off a basic recipe that was close to being PINK friendly which can be found at Clean Eating Chelsey and tweaked it to make it my own and more PINK friendly.

So where does this fit into the PINK meal plan? I ate this for breakfast and counted it as my slow carb. For the protein I added in some greek yogurt. I also counted 1/3 cup as  a serving of slow carb because in the PINK method book it states that 1/2 cup cooked quinoa is a serving, When it bakes down and crunches up, it does shrink a bit so that was my best estimate as to how much a serving is. I approximate I will get 5- 1/3 cup servings from this recipe.

Pumpkin Spice Quinoa Granola
3/4 cup quinoa
1/2 cup quinoa flakes (could sub old fashion oats)
4 medjool dates chopped into a paste
1/2 cup pumpkin puree
3 tbsp chia seeds (could use flax seeds or leave them out)
1/4 almond milk
2 tsp vanilla
1 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp pumpkin pie spice
2 cups water

Method

Start by cooking your quinoa in the water along with the cinnamon and pumpkin pie spice. It will take about 15 minutes for the quinoa to soften and the liquid to be absorbed/evaporate.

While the quinoa is cooking, pit your dates and chop them into a paste using your blender or food processor. If you don't have dates, you could use stevia, they are really only there to add sweetness.

Add your pumpkin puree to your dates, if you don't have pumpkin, I bet smashed bananas would work well also.

Add in the chia seeds and almond milk, vanilla and stir everything together, making sure the date paste is mixed in so there are no large clumps of dates

When the quinoa is done, add it to your pumpkin mixture and stir to combine

Add in your quinoa flakes or oats if you prefer and stir to combine

You should be left with a gooey sticky mess

Spread the quinoa pumpkin mixture out on a cookie sheet that is lined with a sil-pat (silicone baking sheet) or parchment paper

Bake at 350 degrees for 15 minutes

After 15 minutes of cooking, take out of the oven and break up the mixture into clumps using a spatula

Return to the oven for 15 minutes and stir again. Continue this process until the granola has gotten crunchy, mine took about 1 hour or so. As it cooks the granola  will darken. It will also get slightly crunchier as it cools so be sure that you don't over back the granola or else it will have a burnt taste.

Eat with some Greek yogurt or some almond milk, like you would cereal, however this is not an overly sweet granola like some granola . Feel free to add in nuts and dried fruit if you like just be careful because those items up the calories of this granola quickly and dried fruit really does contain a lot of sugar, especially the kind you find in the store. I also am not a PINK expert but I am not sure how PINK friendly those items would be, that is why I left mine fairly plain.

Enjoy!

Spinach Zucchini Quinoa Bake

When thinking about what to make for dinner tonight, I wanted to make something that didn't need a lot of babysitting...I was tired and not feeling great so I decided to make some type of casserole. Usually this means something in the vein of Campbell's chicken and rice casserole. You know the one where you mix rice and cream of something soup, sometimes some cheese in a pan and put chicken breasts of the top and bake. Yeah, I know the cream of something soup is awful but the dish is so easy to make when you don't have a lot of time for prep. Well, it got me thinking, could I somehow replicate the dish and make it PINK friendly?

I thought about the Alfredo sauce that I posted about here, and knew that I could use that as the creamy base to cook the rice in. Then I thought about the rice, did I want to use brown rice? I could but brown rice takes so long to cook I wasn't sure it would fully soften in the oven, so I decided to use quinoa because it cooks quickly like the instant rice you would use in the traditional casserole. I knew I was on to something so I decided to give it a try. I however didn't add the chicken on top, you could  with some seasoning and have an easy meal...I didn't because I was really just experimenting this afternoon when I made this and I didn't want to hassle with the chicken part. I simply baked some chicken in the oven at dinner to go along with the dish.

Spinach Zucchini Quinoa Bake
1 cup quinoa
1/4 onion chopped
1 zucchini shredded or use your saladacco if you have one
1 1/2 cups fresh spinach chopped
1/2 cup chopped mushrooms
1 cup plain almond milk
1 cup water
1 tbsp Dijon mustard
1 tbsp Bragg's Aminos
3 tbsp nutritional yeast
2 tbsp lemon juice
1 tbsp chopped garlic

Method

Chop your onions, mushrooms, spinach and shred your zucchini

(on a side note, as I made zucchini noodles using my saladacco tonight, my kids thought it was so funny that I was getting such long noodles  6+ feet, they said, "Let's pretend we are Lady and the Tramp" so I they stole some of my noodles and spread across the room and proceeded to eat them, until they got closer and closer, you know how it goes. I love that my kids are eating raw zucchini now, before PINK the only way I could get them to eat it was in zucchini bread which is not healthy at all. Okay thanks for humoring me, I just thought the picture was funny and wanted to share.)

Saute your onions, mushrooms, spinach and zucchini in a saute pan with a mist of olive oil.

In a separate bowl, mix your almond milk, water, Dijon, Bragg's, yeast, lemon juice and garlic.

Add your almond milk mixture to the pan along with your quinoa and stir to combine.

When the liquid begins to boil, pour into a casserole dish, mine was about 6 x 9 but an 8x 8 would work or a pie pan. I just wouldn't use a big pan like a 9 x 12, I think the quinoa would be spread to thin and might not cook correctly. At this point you could add your chicken to the top to make it an easy meal.

Cover your dish with foil or a lid if your casserole dish has a lid and bake at 350 degrees for about 30 minutes. You could also skip putting it into a pan and baking and just finish it on the stove top letting it simmer until the quinoa has softened, that is fine. I just wanted to be able to forget about it and not have to watch it like you do on the stove top.

Like I said I didn't add chicken to mine, next time I will. I simply sprinkled some almond meal with a little Mrs. Dash to the top of my chicken and baked in the oven. Serve the casserole along with a salad and dinner is done.

Enjoy!

Vegetarian Pizza

Friday night at our house is pizza night. It all started as a way to bribe my youngest to eat dinner, yes I am not above bribing my children. My youngest is by far my most picky child and was complaining a lot about eating dinner. You know, he kept saying I don't want this, I don't want that. So we struck a deal, if you eat your dinner through out the week without complaining, we can have pizza on Friday nights. It was a plus for me also because it gave me a much needed night off of cooking. At least when I wasn't on PINK, now I cook all the time but cooking for 1 on Friday night is much easier than cooking for 5.

Well, today I got a sweet email from Tricia asking me to please come up with a PINK friendly pizza and I thought since today is pizza day in our house there was no better day to figure out how to have pizza while on PINK. What I came up with isn't exactly like pizza mostly because of the cheese. I made a "cheese sauce" that tasted really good but not like cheese and the texture was nothing like cheese so to call it cheese sauce, really is a misnomer, it really isn't cheese like at all but it did taste good and would be excellent as a dip for raw vegetables. I am working on making a vegan feta cheese that should be ready tomorrow so I will let you know if that helps make it more like pizza. From what I have read, it is really hard to make a vegan cheese that melts like cheese. If you know how, let me know.

First the crust. I can't take credit for this recipe, I found it on another blog called The Spunky Coconut, isn't that a cute name? She posted a recipe for a grain free/dairy free tortilla. I thought that this might be a possibility so I decided to try it. The only thing I did differently is to use all baking soda instead of part soda and part powder because I was out of soda and I didn't bake between parchment paper, instead I used my Silpat baking mat and used my fingers to push form the dough into rounds, it is a little sticky. I also baked my crusts for 15 minutes at 375 degrees so they were a little crunchier like a pizza crust would be.

Almond Quinoa Chia Pizza Crust 
1/4 cup + 2 tbsp. of chia seeds
1/4 cup quinoa flakes
1 cup almond flour
2tbsp. arrowroot powder
1 1/2 baking soda

1 tsp olive oil
2 tsp apple cider vinegar
1/4 cup almond milk
3/4 cup water

Method

Grind the quinoa flakes and chia seed into a powder using a small blender such as a spice grinder or a magic bullet etc.

To the quinoa and chia seed mixture, add the almond meal, arrowroot and baking soda. Stir to combine.

Add the olive oil, apple cider vinegar, almond milk and water to the dry mixture. Mix until fully combined.

Divide the dough into 6 equal parts and spread them on your non-stick baking mat into pizza rounds or whatever shape you want.

Bake for 15 minutes at 350 degrees.

Let cool before you try to remove from the baking mat.

Vegan Cheese Sauce
1 medium red bell pepper
1/4 cup raw cashews
3/4 cup almond milk
1/2 tsp garlic
2 tbsp nutritional yeast
1/2 tsp mustard powder
1/2 tsp sea salt
2 tbsp. arrowroot powder

Method (I got busy cooking and forgot to take most of the pictures along the way, so sorry)

Start by roasting your red bell pepper under a broiler for about 15 minutes, turning every few minutes until it is blackened on all sides.

When it has blackened take it out of the oven and put into a bowl and cover with a plate to cool. It will steam as it cools and the skin will easily peel off. Peel of the skin and take out the seeds from inside the pepper.

Add all the ingredients to a blender and blend until smooth.

Put the sauce mixture into a pan and cook over medium heat for 5 to 10 minutes or until it has thickened.

Pizza Assembly

I used a bit of homemade marinara sauce that I had made previously and smeared it onto the crust.

I then topped with assorted vegetables. I felt that with the nuts and almond milk in the recipe that I had my protein covered but if you feel like adding chicken or Canadian bacon feel free.

Dribble the cheese sauce on top and bake for about 10 minutes at 375 so that the vegetables soften.

Cut and Enjoy!

Note: I wanted to let you know that some of the ingredients are kind of expensive, (ie: quinoa flakes and arrowroot powder) at least to me, I am cheap! I have a pretty stick $700 dollar a month grocery budget that feeds a family of 5, three meals a day and snacks, that is with the exception of pizza Friday. I rationalized the purchase of these two ingredient by telling myself that I could use them for lots of recipes. I just wanted to warn you.