Healthy Meal Ideas

Here are a few healthy-ish things we have been eating over the past couple of weeks that have been really yummy:

• Pasta with pesto sauce, cannelini beans, and red peppers (follow the link and reference Sunday night's supper)
• Pita sandwiches (whole wheat pita pockets with lunch meat¹, cheese, spinach, tomato, avocado, salt, and pepper)--for a second course, we each had a sandwich made with just the veggies, which was completely delicious in a whole different way.
• Wraps (whole wheat tortillas with many of the same fillers as the pitas, but we also like to add cottage cheese and a light vinaigrette² dressing to our wraps)
• Chicken marinated in balsamic vinegar and seasonings. Actually I think we ended up using the chicken in some more pita sandwiches, because they were just so yummy. But we have had this chicken on its own before, and it tastes really good by itself.
• White chicken chili³
• Salad bar (romaine and/or spinach, tomatoes, ham¹, cheese, avocado, red pepper, broccoli, salt and pepper, light dressing)--this was really just an attempt to use up all the veggies in our fridge before they went bad, but ended up being really yummy and I think we'll make it a weekly event.

Many of these meals incorporated a lot of veggies already, but we had steamed zucchini⁴ with the pesto pasta, and steamed broccoli⁵ with the balsamic chicken. The corn bread we had with the chili wasn't quite as healthy...but very yummy... :) We also had canned peaches and pears with the salad, and probably should have had more fruits with the other dinners (we are trying to eat apples and other fruits with our lunches). Of course, we also had nights where we ate spaghetti with garlic bread, grilled cheese and tomato soup, and cookie dough. So, like I said before, we are changing the way we eat, but...not to an extreme. :)

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1. Lunch meat is not a universally healthy thing, but if you read labels, you can find some that is better than others. When we compared all brands at our local grocery store, we found the Buddig Deli Cuts and the Land O'Frost DeliShaved meats to have the fewest sugars and other unnatural ingredients.
2. We used a Kraft light balsamic vinaigrette dressing. I prefer the "light" dressings over the fat-free dressings, because the light dressings have very little fat or sugar, and often the fat-free dressings compensate for the lack of fat by adding a lot of sugar.
3. My mother-in-law's recipe:

In crockpot combine:
3 15-oz cans great northern beans
2 1/2 cups chopped cooked chicken (or canned)
1 cup chopped onion
1 tsp. garlic powder
2 tsp. ground cumin
2 cans chicken broth
Cook on low 8 to 10 hours or high 4 to 5 hours. Thicken with flour/water paste if desired. Serve with grated cheese.

4. I steamed the zucchini with a little bit of chicken bouillon, which added a lot of flavor but not a lot of fat (probably too much salt, if you're worried about that...)
5. I steamed the broccoli with lemon juice, salt and pepper.