If you are as busy as I tend to be, you might not get home until relatively late in the evening either, which means that your last meal of the day might be uncomfortably close to when you go to bed.

For myself, it’s not uncommon for me to get home at 7:30 or 8:00 in the evening and then have to start cooking.

One of the types of dishes that I like to eat on the evenings I do get home later is a 1-dish salad since they are quick to put together and don’t sit heavily in my stomach.

Here’s a delicious recipe from an eBook I got over at Prograde Nutrition that’s pretty good:

Roasted Red Pepper Chicken and Avocado Salad

Ingredients:

• 1 medium ripe avocado, peeled, pitted and sliced
• 1 tsp. lemon juice
• 1 bag (10 oz.) torn romaine lettuce (about 10 cups)
• 2 cups shredded cooked chicken
• 1 medium tomato, cut into wedges
• 1 small cucumber, sliced
• 1/4 of a medium Vidalia or Walla Walla onion, chopped
• ½ cup Red Pepper
• ½ cup Light or Fat-free Italian Dressing
• ¼ cup Parmesan Cheese

Directions:

1. Toss avocados with lemon juice in large salad bowl.
2. Add lettuce, chicken, tomatoes, cucumbers and onions; mix lightly.
3. Add dressing; toss to coat.
4. Sprinkle with parmesan cheese.
5. Serve immediately.

So, it’s a relatively straightforward recipe, although I’ll admit I didn’t follow it exactly.

First, I rarely measure things when I cook, I just throw things into a bowl or onto plates until I have enough food for what I expect I’ll want to eat.

I also don’t buy bags of romaine lettuce…I just get whatevers available at the farm stand or farmer’s market (if they’re open) or else whatever’s on sale from local farmers at the grocery store.

Second, for the cooked chicken, I just grilled it with a light coating of olive oil and then sliced it rather than shredding it, but that’s just because it takes less time. I imagine if I wanted to make this vegetarian and/or didn’t want to spend the time grilling the chicken that it would taste just as well by throwing some black beans or edamame on the salad.

Does that sound good to you?

If so, you might want to check out the recipe book I got it from. They have 197 recipes that are all supposed to be quick, tasty and healthy. I haven’t gotten too far into it yet, but the ebook is only $4.95 and the couple that I have tried have been good.

Check it out here: http://runtowin.getprograde.com/prograderecipebook.html

Eat Well,
    – Blaine

Of course, that just meant we had to try to recreate the dish at home. (I will state, by the way, that despite her always saying how much she dislikes eggplant, she always enjoys the dishes I make with it, so I think the statement is unfounded.)

Imam was originally a Turkish dish that was adopted by the Greeks. The full name is actually Ιμάμ Μπαϊλντί (Imam Baildi or Imam Bayildi), and there are a few stories about a fainting priest that gives it its name. Some say he fainted when he saw how much olive oil was used, and others claim he fainted at the wonderful taste.

Either way, our Imam didn’t taste like what we had in Greece. It tasted very good, and I’ll make it again, but wasn’t exactly the same thing. I cooked it the same way I always try something new…we found a few recipes online, I read them over, and then I went and tried what I could to see what would come out based on the general trends in the different recipes.

Here is how I prepared it:

Ingredients

• 2 Eggplants
• 2 Tomatoes
• 3 Cloves of Garlin
• 1 Onion
• A little Salt
• A fair bit of Oregano & Thyme
• More Olive Oil than anybody should consume in one sitting

Procedure

1. Chop the stems off of the eggplants, cut in half lengthwise, and slice a flat spot onto the rounded (skin) side of each half. Slit the eggplant lengthwise without breaking the skin on the bottom. Sprinkle the flesh side of the eggplant in salt and put them aside in a colander to let the juices drain out a bit.
2. Pre-heat the oven to 350 degrees (approximately – I put ours at 400 which is probably about 350 in other ovens.) Chop the garlic, tomatoes and onion. Preheat some olive oil in a skillet.
3. After the eggplants have been sitting aside for 15-20 minutes (longer if you plan ahead, 30 minutes is how long I usually leave the eggplant to drain but I was hungry tonight) put them in the skillet flesh side down until they are a golden brown, which should take 4 or 5 minutes. Put them aside on a paper towel to drain.
4. Put some more olive oil in the skillet, and add the onions, then the garlic, then the tomatoes. Don’t let them burn, stir regularly, and mix in the seasonings. Stir regularly but otherwise keep it covered. Get a baking dish prepared and cover the bottom with water – our 9×13 dish needed 1/3 to 1/2 of a cup.
5. Put the eggplant in the baking dish skin side down, add a little more olive oil, and then coat with the tomato/garlic sauce. Cover and bake for 45 or 50 minutes.

• Time Required: ~20-25 minutes
• Cooking Time: ~15 minutes
• Ingredients:
  1. Swordfish Steak(s)
  2. Olive Oil
  3. Salt & Pepper
  4. Fresh Parsley
  5. Lemon (or Lemon Juice)

Preparation is simple. Just wash off the swordfish with running water, pat it dry with a paper towel, and then salt & pepper each side. Start heating up some olive oil in a frying pan over medium-high (more towards the medium end.)

Coat both sides of the swordfish in olive oil before putting it in the pan. For those of you who are real enterprising, you can coat the fish over the pan and use what drizzles off as the olive oil you heat in the first place. Just put the swordfish on a plate next to the stove while you wait for the oil to heat up.

Once the oil is heated, make a note of the time and put the sword fish into the pan. Cover and let it cook for 5 minutes, then turn the fish and let it cook another 5 minutes. Turn the swordfish one more time, and if it is beginning to flake then you can turn the heat down, but you’ll want it to cook for another 5 minutes. That’s 15 minutes total, turning twice.

After the swordfish first goes onto the frying pan, start up a smaller amount of olive oil in a little pan. Crush some garlic and mix it in over high heat with the olive oil to allow it to cook a bit.

Wash and chop some parsley (removing the stems) and mix that in with the garlic and olive oil. This will take about 10 minutes total or a little less, so if the garlic is starting to brown then turn the heat down. Mix in some lemon juice (fresh squeezed is best but poured works fine.)

Once the fish is done cooking (it will flake easily with a fork) then put it on your plate and drizzle your lemon juice mixture over it. Use any excess on whatever vegetables or starch you decide to cook along with it.

This is a relatively quick recipe that keeps you busy the entire time you are cooking, so I recommend serving it alongside of items that don’t require much attention once you begin them and that take more than 20 minutes to cook. Egg noodles would work, but rice is better, and the acorn squash (which takes about an hour to cook) was excellent. I’d bet that asparagus would also be great, but it isn’t in season right now.

You’ll note that I don’t have any measurements included. Just eyeball it. I rarely measure anything unless I’m making dough.

(Photo Credit: Spring Dew)

My trusty How to Cook Everything book didn’t actually contain anything for barramundi, so I had to improvise. I did all right, because the following recipe is not only fast, but it is very tasty!

1. Set a frying pan to heating with a bit of extra virgin olive oil in it and then prepare any grain or vegetable you want to eat with your fish. They’ll take longer to cook than the fish will.
2. Wash the fish and then pat dry with paper towels.
3. Score the top of the fish 2 or 3 times with a knife without cutting all the way through the filet. I’ve found with other fish that it helps the meat cook more evenly.
4. Season with a little crushed pepper and salt. Don’t overdo it.
5. Being careful not to splash yourself, set the fillets in the heated frying pan.
6. After a few minutes, flip the fillets over.
7. After a few more minutes, the barramundi flesh should flake a bit and it should be cooked through if you separate a fillet into halves.

That’s it, very easy. The entire meal took all of about 12 minutes to prepare and cook, including side dishes. If you were reheating left overs for side dishes, it would probably only take 7 or 8 minutes total.

For those that are interested, barramundi tastes a bit like sea bass but is a river fish. The fish tends to be hermaphroditic, and will usually begin life as a male and then become a female after a spawning season. The barramundi is typically 11-15 pounds, but can grow to be up to 2 meters in length and about 130 pounds. Because of their life cycle, the larger fish are almost always female.

(Photo & Info Credit: Wikipedia)

Table of contents for Food (January)

1. Make Your Own Protein Bars
2. Add Quinoa To Your Diet
3. 50 Recipes for Protein Shakes
4. Two Easy Chicken Recipes

In a continuing collaboration with Scott over at Straight to the Bar, we wrote about food and recipes for the month of January. I’d like to finish the month up by offering a few of my favorite chicken recipes.

Chicken is a great source of protein because it contains all of the essential amino acids in the correct proportions required by the human body for optimum growth of lean tissue. If you have a local butcher or farm, it might be worth investigating the possibility of purchasing your chicken through them rather than getting prepackaged chicken at the grocery store.

In my experience, buying chicken from the farm or the butcher yields a bird that has not been injected with water to make it appear plumper (or to add to the weight before purchase!) I prefer the taste of fresher chicken, although it cooks faster and can become dried out easier if you aren’t careful while you are cooking.

Here are 2 of my favorite chicken recipes, which are both quick and easy to prepare. I recommend warming up a good loaf of bread to serve alongside of either meal.

Chicken & Caper Linguine

The first dish I would like to describe is a chicken and caper dish. You can substitute scallops or shrimp for the chicken pretty easily. I have not had much luck substituting with tofu and haven’t bothered continuing to try.

Ingredients:

• 1 large or 2 small boneless skinless chicken breasts
• Extra Virgin Olive Oil (EVOO)
• Linguine
• 1 or 2 cloves of garlic
• Spices to taste (I like pepper and basil)
• Capers

Heat up a small amount of olive oil in a skillet and start a pasta pot full of water to boil. While the oil is heating up, cut the chicken into short strips or cubes and then add it to the frying pan. Chop or mince the garlic and let that cook along with the chicken. The chicken should be cooked through around the same time as the water begins boiling.

While the linguine is cooking, add the capers and seasonings to the chicken and oil. The oil is going to be a sauce, so you may want to add a small amount more. Once the linguine is done cooking, drain the water and then mix in the chicken and caper sauce.

Total preparation and cooking time: Less than 20 minutes.

If you are cooking with scallops, then you will not need much oil until they are cooked through and will need to drain some of the sea water from them before adding the garlic or capers.

Lemon Pepper Chicken Parm

The second chicken dish that I enjoy cooking is chicken parmesan. I like to make mine taste a little lemony, which provides a nice counterpoint to the red sauce.

Ingredients:

• 1 to 2 boneless skinless chicken breasts
• Spaghetti or Linguine
• Lemon Juice
• Lemon Pepper seasoning
• Pasta Sauce
• Mozzarella Cheese
• Parmesan Cheese (a brick, not the pre-grated junk)
• 1 or 2 carrots
• Bread Crumbs

Preheat the oven to 350° to 375°. Clean the chicken breasts and cut off any extra fat; it isn’t needed to flavor the chicken. Pound it flat using a meat mallet to tenderize the chicken. If you have large chicken breasts, you may want to slice them down the center.

Prepare a bowl with lemon juice (or freshly squeezed lemon) and a paper bag full of bread crumbs and lemon pepper seasoning (or lemon zest and ground pepper.) Coat the chicken with lemon juice and shake inside the bag to coat with bread crumbs. Cook for 18 to 22 minutes.

While the chicken is cooking, peel and chop up a carrot and cook in a small sauce pan with the pasta sauce. I recommend Classico Spicy Red Pepper sauce, but any sauce that is more of a sauce and less a paste will do. Set a pot of water to boil.

About 3 to 5 minutes before the chicken is ready to be taken out, start cooking your pasta. After the chicken has been cooking for 18 to 22 minutes, pull it out and make sure it is cooked through. Coat the top of the chicken with pasta sauce (I recommend leaving the carrots in the sauce and not putting them on the chicken) and further season the sauce on top of the chicken with your lemon pepper or lemon zest and ground pepper. Cover with some grated parmesan and mozzarella cheese and cook for another 3 to 5 minutes. The cheese should be well melted around the same time that the pasta is ready to be drained and served.

Total preparation and cooking time: About 30 minutes

Table of contents for Food (January)

1. Make Your Own Protein Bars
2. Add Quinoa To Your Diet
3. 50 Recipes for Protein Shakes
4. Two Easy Chicken Recipes

In a continuing collaboration with Scott over at Straight to the Bar, we will be writing about food and recipes for the month of January. This week, Scott shares 50 protein shake recipes that you can make at home.

Along with the 50 recipes, he offers some advice for making substitutions and has a list of tips for how to make the shakes. For example, you can add frozen fruit to add flavor and to thicken the shake. Is the shake too thick? Add some water (slowly) to thin it out a little.

If you are tired of just mixing up some protein powder with milk or water and calling it good, then take a look through Scott’s list of 50 recipes and see if there are any there that you already have the ingredients for.

Table of contents for Food (January)

1. Make Your Own Protein Bars
2. Add Quinoa To Your Diet
3. 50 Recipes for Protein Shakes
4. Two Easy Chicken Recipes

In a continuing collaboration with Scott over at Straight to the Bar, we will be writing about food and recipes for the month of January. This week, I would like to recommend that you add quinoa to your diet. It has become a staple in our household over the past few months.

Quinoa is very similar to rice and cous cous, it has similar properties to them, and you can cook and prepare it in the same fashion. It has a slightly nuttier flavor, but tastes quite similar as well. Quinoa is not actually a grain, however, because it does not come from grass. It is also more nutritious and easier to digest than most grains, is high in magnesium and iron and is made up of between 12-18% protein with a balanced set of essential amino acids. It is gluten free and is a good source of dietary fiber and phosphorus. On top of the nutritional value, it cooks very fast and is easy to prepare.

My uncle pays an arm and a leg for single serving boxes of quinoa from a health food store, but my wife and I buy it cheap in our local grocery store. They have it in the bulk organic foods section, where we can get it by the pound.

Before cooking the quinoa, you will probably want to rinse it off due to the high levels of sapponin that coats the outside of the seed. The sapponin gives the quinoa a bitter taste and can be mildly toxic, which prevents birds and insects from bothering with it so that it does not require any unnatural pesticides. Most quinoa sold commercially in North America has been processed to remove the coating of sapponin for you, but it only takes a minute to rinse.

Once it has been rinsed, toss a cup of quinoa into a cup to two cups of water, bring to a boil, and then lower the heat to simmer until the water has been absorbed. Depending upon how much water you use, it can take as little as 10 minutes to completely cook. You can cook it with a little olive oil and basil to have a side dish ready to serve, or you can get a little more exotic and prepare it according to some of the following recipes.

I had never heard of quinoa before last September, when Scott posted a video about a dish made with quinoa:

My wife and I don’t actually eat it as a snack, and we have never followed that recipe perfectly. We just throw whatever we have available together and make a salad, which tastes very good as a bed for haddock or as a side dish. They Call Me Mommy has a similar recipe to make apricot quinoa.

Christina Lucy included a recipe over at The Outdoor Journey for making stuffed bell peppers, which tastes very good. I have made the stuffed peppers a couple of times already since seeing that article.

To make the stuffed peppers, preheat your oven to 350° while you cook the quinoa. Halve the peppers lengthwise and remove the seeds, and then boil them for a couple of minutes. Chop whatever veggies you want to use in the stuffing and combine them with egg whites, herbs, cheese, and the quinoa in a bowl. You may want to chop up tomato, carrot, beans, celery, or anything that needs eating in the fridge. Sprinkle in some bread crumbs, mix everything together, and then spoon the mixture into the pepper halves. Bake for 20 minutes or so.

As you can tell, I’m anything but exact when I cook, but you can get the exact recipes that inspired my quinoa meals by clicking on the links. You can substitute quinoa for most recipes that you already know that use rice or cous cous, and there are a plethora of recipes that you can find online by just looking for them in your favorite search engine.

Do you have any recipes that I should try in the near future?

(Photo Credit: Francisca Ulloa)

Table of contents for Food (January)

1. Make Your Own Protein Bars
2. Add Quinoa To Your Diet
3. 50 Recipes for Protein Shakes
4. Two Easy Chicken Recipes

In a continuing collaboration with Scott over at Straight to the Bar, we will be writing about food and recipes for the month of January. This week, Scott shares a method for making your own protein bars out of a few simple ingredients.

Scott’s recipe calls for equal amounts of peanut butter, protein powder and flour. You mix them together in a bowl or food processor to create a dough-like substance, spread it in a pan, and freeze it. Once frozen, you can cut it into individual bars and then pop it back in the freezer. That’s all there is to it!

You can mix and match different additives to enhance the flavor, or swap the flour out for something like ground oats.

I will be giving this recipe a try, but I have to admit that this probably won’t work as a mainstay for me. I have plenty of healthy foods available at home to eat after a workout, and the only time I eat energy or protein bars are when I’m working out away from home (which is 50-90% of the time depending upon the week.) A frozen treat isn’t ideal, and I would like to find a cheaper alternative. I don’t mind the simple recipe, but protein powder around here costs 80 cents to a dollar per scoop when bought in a 5 gallon bucket, and a cup of powder will be at least 4 or 5 scoops I would imagine.

You can see Scott’s recipe here:

Here’s a video that Kent made of a very similar recipe (he includes butter, splenda and vanilla syrup):

Do you have any home-made energy bar recipes that are worth sharing?

• 1 or 2 tilapia filets per person
• 1 or 2 beaten eggs (depending upon quantity of tilapia filets being prepared)
• Bread crumbs and seasonings (to taste)
• Cheese
• Toothpicks

See? Not much to it. I used bread crumbs, basil, and cayenne pepper, but you can bread the fish with whatever you want. I had American cheese available, but next time I will make sure that I have montery jack on hand. I only needed one egg and could have easily coated a couple of pounds of fish, but I only had 3 filets (about 0.75 lbs).

Instructions

1. Preheat the oven – prepare the filets while you wait for the oven to heat up to 375°.
2. Clean the filets – assuming that you did not catch the fish yourself, rinsing them off should be fine.
3. Mix bread crumbs and seasonings – just dump them onto a plate and shake or stir them up to mix them well.
4. Coat and bread the filets – coat the filets with a beaten egg (or two) and then bread with your mixture of crumbs and seasonings.
5. Top with cheese and roll – put slices of cheese (or shredded cheese, I suppose) on top of the tilapia filets and then roll them up. Keep them from unrolling by sticking toothpicks into them.
6. Bake for 25-30 minutes – the filets will probably take at least 25 minutes to cook; keep an eye on them and try to get them out of the oven with half of an hour.

I served the tilapia filets over rice with some mixed vegetables on the side. It took me about 10 minutes total to prepare everything, including the rice and vegetables, and about 30 minutes for it all to cook. I try to have seafood at least once or twice a week, and this is a quick and easy meal that I will definately be making again.

1. Mix the bread crumbs, cayenne pepper, black pepper, and onion salt on a plate.
2. Wash the catfish filets and coat in flour.
3. Wipe the coated catfish through the egg.
4. Coat the catfish with the breading mix.
5. Grill over low heat. Turn over after 3 or 4 minutes.

Making use of a paper bag to coat the catfish with the flour can save a little time. Once you wash off the catfish, just drop it in the bag of flour, shake a little, and pull it out.

When you are done cooking it, the catfish should have a nice crunchy breading on the outside, and soft tender meat on the inside.

You can tell when the catfish is done cooking by seeing if it will flake when you touch it with a fork. This is easier to check if you leave a few small patches unbreaded.

Here is the recipe that I used:

Ingrediants:

• 1� lbs shark steaks
• 3 tbs soy sauce
• 1 tbs balsamic vinegar
• 2 tbs lemon juice
• 2 tbs olive oil
• Parsley
• Garlic
• Black pepper

Preparation:
Mix everything except the shark steaks in a dish or bowl. Add the fish to marinate. I recommend brushing the marinade on both sides and flipping the shark steaks in occasionally. I marinated my steaks between 20 and 30 minutes. Towards the end of your half hour, pre-heat the oven.

Cooking directions:
Take the shark steaks out of the marinade and place them on a broiling pan, but do not dump the marinade yet. Broil 4 to 6 inches from the heat for 4 or 5 minutes per inch of thickness per side. When you turn the shark steaks over, brush the marinade on both sides again.

You will want to serve the shark steaks with some vegetables and some rice or noodles.

Take whatever vegetables you have laying around, slice them up into small pieces, and throw them on a roasting pan with some olive oil and whatever herbs suit your fancy. Roast them in the oven for 15 to 20 minutes at around 375°_F to 400°_F. When I tried it, I used carrots and cucumbers alongside my chicken drumsticks for the last 15 minutes. The cucumbers came out all right but not great, but the carrots were very good. We put some thyme and onion salt on them along with the olive oil. I definately plan on experimenting further.

The best cut of meat that I have yet found for beef jerky is the flank steak from a local Butcher shop here in Maine (Pat’s Meat Market). I freeze the steak, and when I am ready to marinate it I take it out of the freezer for 10 or 15 minutes and then cut it while it is frozen. That is the best way to get good cuts. It helps to have sharp knives. The side where my palm partially thaws the steak while I am cutting is always the most difficult to cut. The thin strips you cut should finish thawing in your marinade shortly after dropping them in.

What goes into the marinade, you might ask. For me, it is different every time, and I don’t measure anything. I usually start with a beer base; if I’ve opened up a beer that I’ve brewed and it is not yet ready to drink, then I will use that. Usually, the stouts and porters make the better jerky, but feel free to experiment or even use other liquids. I will usually dump a lot of soy sauce, steak sauce, sometimes some worcestershire sauce in there…then comes the black pepper, the garlic salt, the onion salt, the cayenne, the random other seasoning that catches my fancy…

I just mix and match and pick what I have plenty of at the time and what seems to suit me.

Let the marinade sit in your fridge for at least 8 hours, preferably a day or two. Mix it around a bit. If you have a food dehyrdator, then cooking it is a cinch; just load the trays, and flip it once after 4 hours or so. It will take at least 6 hours on the highest temperature, but 8 is usually a better time to shoot for. I went 10 hours on my last batch.

If you don’t have a food dehydrator, you can use a normal oven. Since you need to leave it cracked and I have a very curious kitten, though, I opted to spend the $30 on a dehydrator. Plus, the electricity costs less and there is less chance of burning myself.

If you aren’t going to eat it all in the first week or two of making it, you might as well freeze some. It may not be necessary, but it can’t hurt. If I am planning for a trip, I’ll wrap it in baggies with about a serving size, and leave it in an outer pocket of a backpack so that I can just reach behind me for a good snack to replenish the body!

Beats spending $20-$30 per pound at the grocery store. I probably make it for somewhere around $8-$12 per pound (when I use the flank steak) and only a few dollars a pound on cheaper cuts of meat. Maybe a dollar per pound if somebody gives me the meat off an animal they shot.

My favorite food is probably ghoulash. My mother used to make it for me as a kid, and it was one of the first meals that I mastered. It is a beautiful thing; it is cheap to make, you can easily make 8 servings at a time, and it tastes better after you have reheated it! How many foods can you say that for? Reheating it in a frying pan is the best way, but it is still really good out of a microwave. I am not much of one to nuke my food, but reheating ghoulash is fine by me.

The great thing about ghoulash (besides its reheatability and its self-marinating goodness) is that it gives your body a lot of the fuel that it needs to do its work. You have your veggies, your meats, your straight up carbohydrates, and for some enterprising folks you have your dairy as well (although the dairy tends to not keep as well as the rest of it and is better off being put on each serving rather than cooked in).

I will give you my recipe in a simple form. It is very easy to make substitutions and additions; for example, I often use ground turkey instead of beef, and will some times add in sausage. Lately, I have been cooking 3 or 4 carrots in with it as well (which tastes great).

Ingrediants:

• 1-1.5 lbs ground beef
• 1 green pepper
• 1-2 onion(s)
• 1.5-2 jars sphaghetti sauce (Classico Spicy Red Pepper goes great)
• Seasonings to taste (I like a garlic pepper mix we used to buy in CT and basil and sometimes oregano)
• 1-1.5 lbs of elbows (macaroni)

1. Brown the beef, and chop up the pepper and onion into small pieces (as well as any other vegetables you are going to add), start the water boiling for the macaroni.
2. Drain the beef, and put the chopped veggies in with it.
3. Sautee the veggies as long as you like, but remember that they will continue to cook in the sauce so you do not need to leave them in too long before adding the sauce. Lower the heat to medium low, and if desired cover.
4. Cook the sauce as long as you like, and once you figure you want another 10 minutes or so start the macaroni. Generally I play this by ear and don’t cook the sauce too much longer than the elbows take.
5. Drain the macaroni, mix it all together, and serve.
6. Save your leftovers, and to reheat just throw it in the microwave or reheat in a frying pan over medium-low to medium heat.

Melting cheese on it tastes good, as well as parmesan. Generally, I eat it as a one dish meal, and clean my plate or bowl with a piece or three of bread. This will serve 5-8 people depending on how hungry they are and how many leftovers you want for lunch!