Spinach Scramble

This is my default breakfast. When I don’t want to think about what to eat and I’m in a place where I’m eating well, I throw this together and it’s delicious and filling every time and packed with nutrients. It also comes in at under 300 calories. When I’m not in a place where I’m eating well, I eat cheese. Lots of cheese.

Place a skillet over medium heat. Add a teaspoon of olive oil, ¼ cup chopped onion, and 3 large sliced mushrooms. Mist veggies with cooking spray as needed to get a good sauté.  Cook until onions are translucent and mushrooms are nicely browned.

Add two large handfuls of spinach to the pan. This will look like an insane amount of greens, but don’t worry, it will cook down.

 

Then you can feel good about yourself and your nutritional superiority all day long. Stir the spinach constantly.

When the spinach has wilted, add two beaten eggs. If you’re lazy like me, you’ll just crack two eggs right into the pan and whip them up with your spatula as they cook. Keep the eggs moving until they're cooked and scrambled. There should be just enough egg to give you a shot of protein and sort of stick everything together.

Salt and pepper to taste and serve with your favorite salsa. I like to pour Pace all over the top of my scramble. So good. And your house will have that wonderful sautéed onion smell for a couple of hours.

Cut-and-Paste Recipe

Spinach Scramble

www.biteuponbite.com

1 tsp olive oil

Cooking spray

¼ cup chopped onion
3 large mushrooms
2 cups baby spinach
2 large eggs
Salt and pepper
Salsa

Place a skillet over medium heat. Add a teaspoon of olive oil, chopped onion, and mushrooms. Mist veggies with cooking spray as needed to get a good sauté.  Cook until onions are translucent and mushrooms are nicely browned.

Add two large handfuls of spinach to the pan. Toss and stir to cook down the spinach.

When spinach has wilted, add two beaten eggs and stir until egg is cooked. Salt and pepper to taste and serve with your favorite salsa.

Simple Stir Fry

I love a simple stir fry to eat over sticky rice... or brown rice if I'm behaving myself.

I start by heating 2 T olive oil in my large skillet, and turn the heat on to medium.

Then I add 1 T minced garlic and a half a large onion, sliced into little spears.


Then I add 1 lb boneless skinless chicken breast sliced into thin strips. I like to use kitchen shears to slice it right into the pan, into the cooking oil, onions, and garlic.

Next I add 1/2 C soy sauce, and 1-2 T shredded fresh ginger. Hint: I peel my fresh ginger, and then freeze it. It shreds fine while it's frozen, and that way you never have the temptation of using powdered ginger for any Asian recipe. TRUST ME... it is not the same thing. Kathryn originally told me that... and she is right. Listen to her. Your food will taste SO much better.


I prepare the vegetables while the chicken is cooking all the way through.

When chicken is done, I begin adding vegetables and mixing them into the stir fry, starting with the vegetables that take longest to cook. Some veggies that I'd love to add, but that weren't in my fridge at the moment were: broccoli, cauliflower, bean sprouts, and mushrooms.

I added: 1/2 lb baby carrots, sliced into spears by slicing them lengthwise in quarters,

1/2 a head of green cabbage, chopped,

four stalks celery, thinly sliced at an angle,

and one bell pepper, sliced into thin spears.


I mixed and fried the whole mixture until the veggies were a little less done than I would like them. Very al dente, bordering on crispy.

I've noticed that the heat in the stir fry always keeps cooking the vegetables after I remove the pan from the heat, so try not to over-cook.

I served this over Calrose sticky rice with chow mein noodles on top.

And while I loved it, my kids were not enamored of the big veggie pieces. So like the sucker Ii am, I ran some of the stir fry through my little food chopper, and mixed it in with the rice.

You should have seen how they snarfed those veggies down once the texture was no longer an issue.

Cut-and-Paste Recipe

1-2 T olive oil
1 T minced garlic
1/2 large onion, sliced into spears
1/2 C soy sauce
1-2 T finely grated fresh ginger
1 lb boneless skinless chicken breast, thinly sliced
1/2 lb baby carrots, sliced into spears
4 large stalks celery, sliced on an angle
1/2 head green cabbage, diced
1 bell pepper, sliced in spears
(optional: replace any of these veggies with others. Just remember to add the ones that cook slowest first.)

Add ingredients in order listed to large skillet over medium heat. Pause until the chicken breast is cooked through. Then add vegetables one at a time, stopping cooking when the veggies are still partially crisp. Serve over sticky rice or brown rice, and top with chow mein noodles or slivered toasted almonds.

Veggie Enriched Homemade Spaghetti Sauce

Sneaking up more veggies on my kids is part of my job as a mom. I do it with glee and satisfaction. What they don't know might help them. This is my motto when it comes what I like to call: Stealth Veggies.

It's also a good way to keep your budget reasonable while feeding you children nutritious food. I almost NEVER make a pasta sauce without a healthy serving of stealth veggies. I use my amazing little food chopper to make this possible. The vegetables are cut up so finely, that they blend right in with the consistency of the ground meat in my spaghetti sauce, and my little picky eaters never know the difference.

The start of this sauce may be different today than other days for me, and for you as well.

I start off with about a pound of ground meat, 1 medium finely chopped onion, and 2-4 C of finely chopped assorted veggies. Favorites for spaghetti sauce are carrots, zucchini, and occasionally bell peppers.

Now, this time, I had some gorgeous Italian chicken sausage as my meat, and it is so lean that you'll see I had to add 1-2 T olive oil to help it all sauté without sticking. If you're using 93% lean ground beef, I'd just add the meat and the veggies and sauté without oil, and without rinsing and draining. If you have any higher fat content on your meat, I'd cook the onions and ground beef together, then drain the fat, and then add the other veggies, or your sauce will be really greasy and high in fat.

Anyway, I sautéed the sausage and veggies together until the sausage was cooked through. You can see how adding in the chopped veggies can really expand your meat. The finished sauce was about four quarts. Enough to feed our family of four for four different meals. This sauce freezes really well.


When the meat was cooked, I added 2 15 oz cans of diced tomatoes. I puréed both in the blender, since my kids aren't big fans of chunks of cooked tomatoes. Sometimes I purée one, and leave the other for more texture.

This is the point when I realized my error in starting in the large skillet, and transferred to my 6 quart stock pot. Too much sauce!

After adding the tomatoes, I began adding spices.
3 bay leaves
1 T Italian seasoning
1/2 T oregano
2 T sugar
1 T beef bouillon, or 3 cubes
1 T of minced garlic

Seriously, the giant canister of minced garlic... one of my best culinary friends.

I allowed the whole thing to simmer for about 30-45 more minutes, getting nice and thick, and wonderful, before adding 8 oz of fresh quartered mushrooms right near the end. These are optional, but so delicious. If your family can handle the chunky texture, I also love to throw in some more coarsely cubed or diced or sliced zucchini at this point.

I then added 2 cans of tomato paste and 2 cans of water, and 1 large can or bottle of pre-prepared spaghetti sauce. I use Hunts, because it is the cheapest.

And voila!


Serve over whole wheat spaghetti, top with parmesan cheese, and enjoy!

Cut And Paste Recipe

Veggie Enriched Homemade Spaghetti Sauce

1 lb very lean ground meat
1 medium finely chopped onion
2-4 C finely chopped veggies (carrots, zucchini, peppers, mushrooms)
1-2 T olive oil if meat is nearly fat free
2 15 oz cans diced tomatoes
3 bay leaves
1 T Italian seasoning
1/2 T oregano
2 T sugar
1 T beef bouillon, or 3 cubes
1 T of minced garlic
8 oz mushrooms, quartered
2 cans tomato paste
2 cans water
1 large can pre-prepared spaghetti sauce

Sauté meat, onions, veggies, and oil until meat is cooked through. Add 2 15 oz cans diced tomatoes (puréed if preferred). Add all spices. Simmer 30-45 minutes, stirring occasionally until water is reduced, and sauce is thickened. Add mushrooms. Add tomato paste, water, and spaghetti sauce, simmering and stirring until well combined. Serve over whole wheat pasta and enjoy.

Sauce freezes well, as long as you don't mix it with noodles. Cook fresh noodles, and thaw out sauce, and serve.

Green Drink Smoothie

This recipe is one of my favorites, a green drink smoothie I make to pump my kids and myself full of vegetables. They’ll eagerly drink three handfuls of spinach when it’s pureed into this mixture but ask them to eat four leaves by themselves and they’ll act like their life is over.

Green Drink

2 heaping handfuls of fruit of your choosing
About one pound of fresh spinach
2 Cups fruit juice
1 Cup water

Throw your fruit in a blender. Stuff in as much spinach as you can. Pour your liquid over top. Blend until creamy and green.

I like to use at least one frozen fruit, my favorite being one banana and a huge handful of strawberries. For fruit juice, I just use whatever I have available. For this recipe I used frozen strawberries, a banana, a bag of spinach and Dole pineapple/peach/mango juice.

Does your two-year-old ever hang from the fridge and scream, "HELP ME DO THIS GREEN DRINK!" while begging for a cup of pureed spinach? Mine does. Delish!

Tiny Salad™

There’s something about the word “salad” that my kids totally hate. I think it must be the “L” in the middle. “L”s are for losers. For a while I tricked them by calling it “leaves and sauce” and they would happily dip their leaves and munch away, one or two leaves per meal, leaving behind any other stuff that happened to stow away on the leaves, stuff like tomatoes and cukes. For a long time I thought they’d grow to love it but it’s been years and if anything they’ve grown more salaphobic.

Recently my friend Jill sent me a link to Cynthia Lair’s cooking blog, Cookus Interruptus. I was excited to check it out because Cynthia Lair is the author of my current favorite cook book, Feeding the Whole Family: Cooking with Whole Foods.

If you’re trying to make healthy food choices for your family, I beseech you to go out today and buy this book. It is a wealth of information and great recipes. It’s where I learned to cook all kinds of crazy grains and vegetables and a lot of normal ones too in new ways. She’s a teacher at Bastyr University and writes on a very down-to-earth level with a glossary of cooking terms and ingredients in the back of her book that explains what certain sauces and spices look like and where you’d typically find them in the grocery store. LOVE. IT.

But I love her new blog even more. Who knew that she was a great chef, teacher, writer and comedian?

Seriously the site is awesome. It’s an instructional cooking video blog with humor, great information and fabulous simple recipes. Dan and I have whiled away many minutes (the videos are short) watching Cynthia and her crazy improv comedian “family members” cook up delicious nutritious whole foods, even some of my favorite recipes from her book.

After watching one video about picky eaters, I became inspired to invent what I like to call Tiny Salad™. It involves dirtying every small bowl in the house but it’s worth it for the amount of vegetables it causes my kids to consume of their own free will and choice.

I fill each bowl with a different salad topping chopped very finely, grated carrots, tiny minced tomatoes, minced squash, minced cucumbers, finely shredded lettuce or spinach, minced apple chunks, whatever I have in the produce drawer. I put little bowls full of “sauce” on the table with spoons in each bowl and let the kids build their own salads. It’s okay. You can say it. It sounds like a glorified salad bar. But it’s not because there’s no sneeze glass, it’s arranged in a bunch, not a line and you can dish your plate while sitting down.

The kids love it and make really fun creative salads and — GET THIS — eat them!

Check out Cynthia’s blog. I know you’ll like it. Because everyone thinks and feels exactly like me. Because I am a right type of person with a great knowledgeable rightness about me.

Oh, and Beth recently wrote about something similar to Tiny Salad™ called "Fun Bites" but she doesn't put a trademark symbol after the title so you probably don't want to click over there and read about it.