The Nifty Foodie

My husband and I planned on doing a Superbowl Mexican feast (for 2), so I was searching for salsa recipes. I happened to come across this recipe on Delish Blog, and was intrigued. Roasted vegetables are always awesome, so roasted salsa had to be all sorts of amazing.

Roasting all of the vegetables made the house smell so yummy, and I just couldn’t wait to dig into this! It had amazing flavor, but my husband and I agreed that our tomatoes probably weren’t ripe enough. We were craving a more rich tomato flavor in the salsa. I can’t wait to try this again in the summer with fresh local tomatoes!

Roasted Tomato Salsa
Source: Delish Blog

Ingredients:

• 1 1/2 pounds tomatoes, cut in half lengthwise
• 1/2 large white onion
• 4-6 cloves roasted garlic
• 2-3 large jalapenos, deseeded & deveined, cut in half lengthwise
• freshly ground black pepper & kosher salt
• Extra-virgin olive oil
• 1/4 – 1/2 cup cilantro, roughly chopped

Directions:

1. Heat oven to 400°F . Gently toss the tomatoes, onions, garlic, jalapenos with the olive oil in a large bowl. Alternatively, use spray oil to gently coat the veggies (You just don’t want it to burn). Season with a little freshly ground black pepper. After they are nicely coated arrange in a single layer, tomatoes cut-side facing up, across a parchment or foil-lined baking sheet, roast in the oven for 40-50 minutes, (depending upon the size of your tomatoes). You’ll know they’re ready to come out when they start to get a nice color and the tomatoes start to collapse. Remove from the oven and cool.
2. Puree cooled tomatoes, onion, garlic, and jalapenos. Alternatively, puree half of the veggies and hand chop the remainder and combine. Season with salt and stir in the cilantro. Refrigerate.

Since my husband and I are trying to eat healthier, I thought a simple roasted chicken would work well for dinner. I didn’t really follow a recipe at all this time, so I guess you could say this is an original. It does involve butter, but hey, it’s not that much really. The skin does come out super crispy, but I opted not to eat mine. This is for two people, but this can easily be doubled, tripled, whatever. It’s a really flexible recipe and easy to do!

Herb Roasted Chicken Breast

Ingredients:

• 2 bone-in chicken breasts
• 2 tbsp. butter (Edit: The second time, I used canola oil instead since butter seemed to smoke up the house. It worked MUCH better.)
• 3 tbsp. freshly chopped basil
• 3 tbsp. freshly chopped parsley
• 2 tsp. salt
• 2 tsp. freshly ground black pepper
• 1 tsp. onion powder
• 1 tsp. garlic powder

Directions:

1. Preheat your oven to 400 degrees.
2. Wash and dry chicken in the sink. Add salt/pepper under and over the skin of the chicken.
3. Knead the butter in your hands until it is fairly soft. Add in the basil, parsley, onion powder and garlic powder. Mix until thoroughly combined.
4. Add herbed butter to the chicken under and over the skin of the chicken
5. Bake for 1 hr or until juices run clear on the chicken.

The Skinny (with skin/no skin) – per serving, serves 2:
Calories: 262.9/191.3
Fat: 19.7 g/12.5 g
Fiber 0.5 g/ 0.5 g

I do enjoy baking from scratch, but sometimes, I’m up for trying shortcuts. I found this recipe by perusing the Weight Watchers boards, because I wanted to try something a little different than pumpkin bread for breakfast.

This was a pretty good scone, but I think the recipe needs a little work. I think next time, I’m going to try brown sugar, more white sugar and more spices. I also didn’t have Splenda, which was recommended for the recipe, so I subbed sugar.

This was also a fairly wet batter, so I couldn’t really shape these like traditional scones. I ended up using a large cookie scoop to scoop individual scones out, and it worked out fine.

Pumpkin Scones
Source: adapted from a Weight Watchers forum

Ingredients:

• 2 cups Bisquick Heart smart mix
• 1/3 cup mini choc chips (omitted to save calories)
• 6 packets of Splenda (used 4 tbsp. sugar)
• 1/2 tsp. ground ginger
• 1/2 tsp. nutmeg
• 1/2 tsp. cinnamon
• 1/4 tsp. ground cloves
• 1/2 cup pumpkin
• 1 egg
• 3 tbsp. skim milk

Directions:

1. Preheat your oven to 425 degrees.
2. Mix all dry ingredients in a bowl with a whisk.
3. Mix pumpkin, egg and milk in a separate bowl and add to dry ingredients. Mix until just combined.
4. Using a large cookie scoop, place scones about 2″ apart on a parchment paper lined cookie sheet. Bake for 10 minutes or until the scones start to brown on top.

The Skinny: per serving, serves 8

Calories: 124.4
Fat: 2.6 g
Fiber: 1.5 g

Kung Fu Chicken…. sounds like an extreme dish to me. Well, when rapper Coolio writes a cookbook, you should expect it to be extreme. That’s right children of the 90s, Coolio wrote a cookbook. I didn’t see it coming, but apparently he’s been a foodie for quite sometime now.

When I saw that a fellow foodie received an email for food bloggers to review this cookbook, I’ll admit, at first I wasn’t very interested. I’d like to remember Coolio as a “Gangsta’s Paradise” type of guy. However, when I mentioned it to my husband, he seemed anxious to get his hand on this book and try a recipe. So, I emailed the publisher and requested to review the book.

Upon receiving it, my husband and I skimmed through the book, laughing at how he wrote the book. It’s almost like he’s talking to you, without censors, and spices are measured in “dime bags” and “nickel bags” vs. teaspoons and tablespoons. There are recipes like Backyard Grass Salad, Bro-ghetti, Pimp my Shrimp and Jarez Make-It-Rain Peanut Butter Cookies.

So, how did we choose Kung Fu Chicken? Easy…we were looking for a simple, weeknight meal that was healthy and well, this fit the bill.

Upon tasting it, it really wasn’t anything Asian as we expected. This dish, however, had a striking similarity to a Louisiana dish called Sauce Piquant. We had no problem with that though, since this dish was rather tasty!

Kung Fu Chicken
Source: Cookin’ with Coolio

Ingredients:

• 1 lb. boneless, skinless chicken breasts
• 1/2 medium white onion
• 1 tsp. minced garlic
• 2-3 tbsp. olive oil
• 1 “dime bag” (or tbsp.) salt
• 1 “dime bag” (or tbsp.) pepper
• 15 oz. can tomato sauce
• 14 oz. crushed tomatoes
• 1 tbsp. asian sweet chili sauce
• 3-4 tbsp. soy sauce

Directions (straight from the book, to get an idea of how he wrote it):

1. Take your chicken and chop suey it up into quarter-size pieces.
2. Kung Fu grip your knife and chop up your half of a white onion.
3. Get out your garlic. If you already got it minced, you’re ready to go.
4. Warm up a large skillet over medium heat and toss in your olive oil, onion and garlic. Sneak it into that pan like a ninja with a plan. Saute that up for 4-5 minutes.
5. Throw in your chopped chicken, along with salt and pepper to taste, and let that cook for 8-10 more minutes.
6. Crack your cans of tomato sauce and crushed tomatoes and pour them into your large skillet, covering up all that chickeny-garlicky onion-ness.
7. Add in the red chili sauce and the soy sauce, and stir occasionally with a wooden spoon. Cover the skillet between stirs.
8. Let all that cook up and coagulate together for 10-15 minutes, until the chicken is cooked. Add salt and pepper to taste.
9. Take it all out and serve it up with some brown or white rice.

The Skinny - per serving, serves 4 (not including rice)

Calories: 212.5
Fat: 11.0 g
Fiber: 5.0 g

Since it’s unbelievably less than 8 weeks until Christmas, I’m finding myself more and more in the mood to bake. Be sure to check this blog every Monday leading up to Christmas for some baked goods that are also SKINNY!!

I spent this weekend making another package for Operation Baking Gals, and happened to find this recipe trying to find a spiced biscotti. I was glad to find that I wouldn’t feel too guilty tasting this recipe to make sure it came out fine since this is a recipe from Cooking Light.

That being said, this was a pretty difficult dough to work with. It’s extremely crumbly, and you really have to work it well to get it to form into logs. In the end, though, this was a pretty good biscotti, and it’s definitely worth a try!

Snickerdoodle Biscotti
Source: Cooking Light (found on Recipezaar)

Ingredients:

• 2 3/4 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 cup sugar
• 2 teaspoons baking powder
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 1 tablespoon vegetable oil
• 1 teaspoon good vanilla extract
• 3 large eggs
• cooking spray
• 2 tablespoons sugar
• 1 teaspoon cinnamon
• 1 large egg white

Directions:

1. Preheat Oven to 350.
2. Measure flour into a large bowl and add 1 C. Sugar, Baking powder, and salt.
3. Mix oil, vanilla and the eggs in a small bowl and add to the large bowl, your dough will be dry and very crumbly.
4. Turn dough out onto a floured surface and knead 7 or 8 times. It may take a while, but the dough will eventually come together.
5. Divide in half. Shape each portion into a roll about 8 inches long, and place them a six or so inches apart on a cookie sheet lined with parchment. Flatten each roll to 1 inch thick.
6. Combine the 2 Tbsp. Sugar and cinnamon, then gently brush the tops of the rolls with the egg white and sprinkle with cinnamon sugar.
7. Bake at 350 for 30 minutes.
8. Remove from the sheet and cool for 15 minutes.
9. Cut diagonally into 1/2 inch slices and lay them cut sides down on the cookie sheet again.
10. Reduce oven temp to 325 and then bake 10 more minutes, turn over and bake 10 more. They’ll be soft in the middle but will harden as they cool. Cool completely on a wire rack.

The Skinny: per serving, makes 30

Calories: 83
Fat: 1.1 g
Fiber: 0.4 g