So easy, so quick, so healthy, so delicious! Fresh ginger, onions, and garlic. Turmeric, cumin, cayenne. Sauté in a little oil. Add stock and red lentils. Cook 15 minutes. Top with yogurt and sumac. Yum!
Note: For vegan dish omit yogurt and feta.
Red lentils with ginger, Mediterranean salad, pita
Note: For a vegan dish omit parmesan cheese
This dinner featured a pasta sauce that I made in August from some fully ripe green tomatoes. Our daughter had two Aunt Ruby’s German Green tomato plants at her plot in the community garden and for a while we were awash in green tomatoes. I cooked several of them down with garlic and onion and made this sauce. It started out brilliant green but the cooking turned the color to this khaki green color. But it really tasted of tomatoes fresh from the garden.
I heated the sauce up and John boiled the linguine. We put the linguine into the sauce and cooked it together. Be sure to liberally salt your pasta water. It makes al the difference. We finished our plates with a dusting of Parmesan cheese.
WW points – 12
Linguine with green tomato sauce
I have been on my diet now for a month. Every night you have seen exactly what I eat. I also eat breakfast and lunch and have popcorn as a pre-dinner snack every day. I have lost almost 10.5 pounds. Go, me!
We have been having a lot of easy dinners lately. Probably I just need a breather from all the cooking. However, even though this was just a sandwich and a side I did make both the tuna salad and the cole slaw. I put the tuna salad on rye bread and covered it with an ultra then slice of cheddar cheese. John grilled it in our cast iron frying pan pressing it down so it came out panini-style. The cole slaw was made from cabbage, carrorts, and onions. The dressing consisted mainly of some light mayo, some non-fat plain yogurt, mustard, lemon juice, and celery seed.
WW points -7
Tuna melt, cole slaw and pickles with iced tea
Back at the beginning of the week I made what I called a last salute to summer-fresh vegetables with garbanzo beans and soup pasta. We had quite a bit leftover so during the week John ate it for lunch a couple of times. Yesterday there was about an inch left in the bottom, mostly vegetables.
Also during the week for lunch I made my famous null soup. It’s a soup that has no points on the WW scale back in the days when most foods carried points. I eat it to get filled up. There was maybe an inch of that left too.
Add those two soups together. Add a little vegetable or chicken stock, the three pieces of deli ham moldering in the cold cut drawer, and a teaspoon of harissa and it’s another whole dinner! The combination was more than the sum of its parts.
All-week soup
I got this recipe for oven roasted chicken shawarma from the NYTimes Cooking site. If you have a subscription you can look it up. The chicken is marinated for an hour or so in olive oil, garlic, salt, pepper, cumin, paprika, turmeric, cinnamon and red pepper flakes and then baked on a sheet pan with red onions and I added tomatoes. The recipe calls for chicken thighs but because of my diet I used a chicken breast.
It is shawarma? No idea. I should have sliced it up to look more authentic but I was in a hurry to get dinner on the table. It definitely is tasty, especially the vegetables. I can see doing this recipe with firm white fish or maybe tofu. I served it with parsley, crumbled feta, and pita, plus harissa for some hot spice and some tzatziki to cool it down.
WW- 5 points if you use chicken breast and cut the olive oil down to one teaspoon per person
Oven roasted chicken shawarma with pita, parsley, harissa and tzatziki
Some good grilling from John tonight. After marinating the portobello mushrooms in some of our lo-cal dressing, salt, pepper and olive oil spray, he put them on the grill for about eight minutes on each side. I made broccoli salad with a sweet, celery seed dressing and we were good to go.
Portobello mushroom burger with caramelized onions, tomato slices, feta cheese, and spinach served with broccoli salad
Here are a couple of dinner ideas from the past week.
The first picture is of chicken chili. I used my version (lower in fat) of the Neelys from Food Network’s recipe. One thing that I discovered is that using fat free refried beans makes a great thickener.
Chicken chili
We also had a last fling of summer vegetables. Carrots, celery, onions, zucchini, kale, and tomatoes make this homey stew of garbanzo beans and pasta super inviting.
Vegetable, pasta, and bean stew
I just made something easy for dinner tonight. The bratwursts come from Trader Joe’s and are cooked in a little water and oil until the water evaporates and the sausage browns. The roll is a Cobblestone sausage roll. I cut off the ends and pulled some of the bread out of the center to make it 3 WW points. The sauerkraut is from a can doctored up with caraway seeds and Splenda. I really like Maille’s whole grain mustard with the bratwurst.
Bratwurst in bun with sauerkraut
We were going to make chicken enchiladas but at 7 PM it seemed like too much trouble so we switched to tacos. I pulled some chicken off our large Costco rotisserie chicken and shredded it, sliced cabbage, and got our condiments while John singed the corn tortillas over an open flame. In ten minutes dinner was ready.
(Very pale picture. I need to get some different plates!)
Chicken tacos with cabbage, salsa, and yogurt crema
Apple pie! Soup with a stick of butter in it! Hunks of homemade bread! Yes, I ate it all yesterday but as I used to tell my classes at Weight Watchers, you are not overweight because you ate a piece of birthday cake on your birthday. It is because you eat the cake on all the other days too! Granted since we celebrate both Jewish and Christian holidays I have a few more opportunities than are good for me, but the most important thing is to get right back to eating correctly.
On Monday John sauteed some shrimp and I made rice pilaf and broccoli. This dinner is a solid, healthy dinner. WW points – 7 (we used a little oil and a little light butter) What I ate on Sunday is like how professional athletes look at their losses. First what can I learn from it, and second, forget it.
On to the new week!
Shrimp, rice pilaf, broccoli
Omnivore 