Black Bean Salad

After some heavier meals I made from the Chicken Biryani I made last Thursday, I decided to make something a bit lighter and serve a black bean salad for dinner on Saturday.   I used a Cooking Light recipe for the salad.  

Photo: Becky Luigart-Stayner; Styling: Fonda Shaia

The ingredients include avocado, lettuce, black beans, tomatoes, fresh parsley, fresh cilantro, green onions, and jalapeno.   At less than 200 calories per serving, this salad needed a bit more substance to make this a meal, so I added some roasted chicken I bought already roasted from the grocery store and I made a dressing for the salad.    The dressing included some olive oil, vinaigrette, fresh garlic, chili powder, sugar, and lime juice.   This is my take on a southwestern variation of a greek salad dressing.  

With the chicken and the dressing, dinner came in at a little over 400 calories and it was delicious and satisfying.

Spicy Southwestern Dinner - Redux

For dinner on Thursday, I did a repeat of the Spicy Southwestern dinner I made back in August.    I've been trying not make any dish more than 4 times per year, so I have a put a 3 month waiting period between all repeats.   But I have to say, I have been looking forward to a repeat of this meal since August.  

 Photo: Becky Luigart-Stayner; Styling: Cindy Barr

The Southwestern Tabbouleh is a riff on a classic middle eastern dish I grew up eating but with the bold southwestern flavors I have come to love since moving to the west coast.  

The recipes for the Southwestern Chicken Soup and Southwestern Tabbouleh both come from Cooking Light and I think the versions I made tonight were my best attempts yet at reproducing these delicious dishes.

Three Bean Chili

As the weather turns colder, I always look forward to making a pot of chili.   I will usually make chili for dinner 2 or 3 times during the fall and winter season.   Until tonight, I have always made chili using my mother's recipe which is pretty much beef stock, cooked ground beef, cooked onions, a can of kidney beans, diced tomatoes, a little tomato sauce, salt and chili powder.   It makes a wholesome and delicious chili that reminds me of home.

The past couple of years, my wife hasn't been very enthusiastic about my family chili recipe, so I decided to try something new and move to a healthier vegetarian recipe.    I found a Cooking Light slow cooker recipe for Three Bean Chili on myrecipes.com

This recipe adds a few more spices and flavors compared to my family chili recipe.   The Three Bean Chili includes jalapeno, Worcestershire sauce, and cumin and of course some additional types of beans and no meat.

Both my wife and I liked the new recipe better than my family chili recipe and I could always add meat to this recipe if desired.   But I like this healthier, lighter take on chili.   I am sure I will make this a couple of more times before spring.

Chevy's Grilled Chicken Fajita Recipe

Given the success I had with the steak fajitas and the crab enchiladas, I decided to try another recipe from my Chevy's cookbook... Grilled Chile-Rubbed Chicken Fajitas.   Making fajitas is all about the marinade for the meat and Chevy's Chicken Fajita marinade includes a kind of chile paste called achiote paste, tropical fruit juices, onion, garlic, and vinegar.  

I marinated the chicken for several hours before grilling and I cooked the veggies on the stove using a spice consisting of oregano, chile powder, cayenne pepper, and salt per the recipe.

Everything turned out great.   The fajitas were delicious!

Chevy's Crab Enchiladas

My wife gave me a Chevy's restaurant cookbook for my birthday.   Chevy's used to be one of my favorite places to eat out.   I have written about Chevy's restaurant in a previous blog post. 

I decided to try to make the Crab Enchiladas using a recipe from the new cookbook.   This is not a light recipe... this is full fat!  I figured, though, that based on many months now of cooking lighter and healthier food, I could try the Chevy's enchilada recipe and if the dish turned out well, I could try making a lighter version of the enchiladas in the future.

The recipe for Chevy's Crab Enchiladas can also be found online in an article by Bay Crossings, a publication about maritime culture in the San Francisco Bay Area.

My crab enchiladas turned out really good.   It is really the sauce that makes these enchiladas so delicious.   The recipe yields about 6 enchiladas which made for 3 servings.   The sauce for the 6 enchiladas is very rich and includes 1 cup of heavy whipping cream, 4oz of cream cheese, and 1/2 cup of Monterey Jack cheese.   

Each serving ended up at about 800 calories.    I am sure I make a healthier version of this recipe without giving up a lot of flavor and will probably give this a shot in a couple of months.

A Spicy Southwestern Dinner

For our Sunday night dinner, I made Southwestern Chicken Soup and Spicy Southwestern Tabbouleh.   I have made both dishes in the past, but never together.  I thought they would compliment each other well and so I have been looking forward to an opportunity to make this dinner.   Both recipes are Cooking Light recipes I found on myrecipes.com

When I first tasted the soup, I was a little disappointed, and then I remembered that I had not yet added the lime juice or avacado.  Both ingredients made a huge difference and after adding them, the soup was as delicious as I remembered.  

 Photo: Becky Luigart-Stayner; Styling: Cindy Barr

Both dishes turned out great.   I had enough left over Tabbouleh that we were able to have left overs for dinner the following night and enough to take for lunches.   The Tabbouleh is great warm or cold and its the kind of food that is delicious and makes you feel good when you eat it because you know its healthy food.  

Total calorie count for this meal including 1 2/3 cup of soup and 3/4 cup of tabbouleh was 500 calories.   I generally try to eat about 300 calories for breakfast, 400 calories for lunch, 500 calories for dinner and another 500 calories in healthy snacks through out the day like bananas, apples, mangoes, peaches, carrots.

Shrimp Tacos

I didn't cook on Saturday.   I needed to go into the office to do some work so my wife did the grocery shopping and cooking.   She made some delicious shrimp tacos.

This is a very light meal.   I had two tacos with each taco containing abut three shrimp on a corn tortilla with shredded cabbage and a creamy green sauce which contained sour cream, cilantro, and lime juice.   The shrimp were sauteed in olive oil and seasoned with salt, cayenne pepper, garlic powder, coriander, and cumin.

I also had some tortilla chips with salsa to go with the tacos... here's the calorie breakdown:

Food	Calories
3 oz cooked shrimp	120
2 corn tortillas	90
2 tablespoons of green sauce	57
1 oz tortilla chips	150
2 tablespoons of salsa	20
Total	437

Steak Fajitas (Chevy's Style)

This is a repeat of a dinner I made last May using the Chevy's restaurant recipe for the marinade.   Like last time, it turned out great.   Really delicious.   I don't think its as good as Chevy's, but still the best Fajita recipe I have found.   This is one of my wife's favorite dinners and she told me she could have this once per week, she likes it so much!  

Like the last time, I used Smart & Delicious Tortillas from LaTortilla Factory which are about half the calories of a normal flour tortilla.  

Southwestern-Style Shimp Taco Salad

This is my favorite time of year.   The sweet corn is starting to show up in the produce section of the grocery store along with fresh peaches and cherries.   Plums are just around the corner.  

My routine was disrupted this past week because it was the last week of school for my daughter and with all the end-of-the-year activities, I didn't do much cooking worthy of noting here.   Friday night I the spice-rubbed pork tenderloin which I have written about here a few times.   This is my daughters favorite dinner and she requested it.   I served corn-on-the-cob with the pork tenderloin and everything was really delicious.   

I was out with friends Saturday night, another night I would normally cook.    Tonight for dinner, I used some of the left over corn to make a taco salad.   This is another Cooking Light recipe I found on myrecipes.com.   I made this many months ago, maybe even a year ago, and my wife really didn't like it that much.   But, this evening she suggested a taco salad using the corn, so I decided to try this dish on her again.

Photo: Becky Luigart-Stayner; Styling: Cindy Barr

I sauteed the shrimp instead of grilling them, and I marinated the shrimp in the chipotle sauce, olive oil, lime juice, and cumin for about 15 minutes before cooking.   The shrimp cook in just a few minutes so most of the work for this dinner is chopping and prepping.    The salad ingredients include romaine lettuce, tomatoes, corn, fresh chopped cilantro, green onions, black beans, and of course the shrimp.   

The shrimp smelled so good when they were cooking and they tasted just as good.   The whole salad was delicious.   The recipe says this dish makes 6 servings at 228 calories per serving.   But using just a little less shrimp than called for in the recipe, but the same amount of everything else, including the sour cream and avocado, my version of this dish yielded two nice sized salads at about 550 calories and that includes 1 oz of tortilla chips per serving at 142 calories.   This is just about perfect for dinner... especially since I was at the pool with my daughter for a couple of hours just before dinner and I was really hungry.

Steak Fajitas (Chevy's style)

The last time I made Steak Fajitas in February I mentioned wanting to try a marinade that was supposed to taste like the marinade used by Chevy's restaurant.   I finally got around to trying it this weekend and I would say the steak fajitas had a similar flavor to Chevy's but I still think Chevy's (on a good day) is better. 

My wife really liked the fajitas and said that they were better than Chevy's.   Anyway, the recipe for the Chevy's marinade is on Big Oven and I do think they were the best Fajitas I have ever made at home.

The recipe says to marinate flank steak overnight... which is a good idea if you are using flank steak.  I didn't have that much time, so I paid more for some very lean and tender New York Strip and marinated the steak for about three hours.

Since I started a diet back in April, I have been avoiding flour tortillas due to the high sodium and calories.   But, I recently discovered Smart & Delicious(TM) Light Flour Tortillas from La Tortilla Factory.  They are about 1/3 fewer calories than regular flour tortillas and much less sodium, and they taste great.   They are a little thinner than the tortillas I am used to eating, but with such delicious steak inside, it all worked.

I also sauteed bell pepper and onions to put in the fajitas along with the steak.   I ate two steak fajitas for dinner with about 2oz of steak in each fajita, a little sour cream, onions and bell bepper and some salsa and the whole dinner was about 600 calories.   That's a little more than I have been eating for dinner, but I still stayed within my calorie budget for the day.

Spicy Southwestern Tabbouleh

I enjoyed the Bulgar with Cranberries I made a few days back so much, that I was looking for other variations of tabbouleh to make.    I found this recipe for Spicy Southwestern Tabbouleh and I had intended to try it out over the weekend, but just didn't have the chance, so I tried making it for dinner tonight.  

Photo: Becky Luigart-Stayner; Styling: Cindy Barr

 Not really a good idea for a week night since there are more than 25 ingredients many of which need some chopping.   The worst is cilantro.   Pulling the leaves off takes me a long time and this recipe called for a cup of chopped cilantro... that's a lotta cilantro!

Anyway, I did finally finish and it really was delicious and I am looking forward to having leftovers of this dish over the next couple of days.

I also made lemon garlic halibut.   I sprinkled salt and pepper on fresh halibut and then marinated the halibut in minced garlic, lemon juice, and olive oil for about 20 minutes.   Then I cooked the halibut over medium heat in a pan with some olive oil for about 6 or 7 minutes.    Turned out great!

Dinner was late getting to the table and I spent about 2 hours in the kitchen on this meal!  Of course, during that time I made a separate dinner for my daughter and helped her with plan a pool party while I cooked dinner.  

This is another pretty healthy dinner.  The tabbouleh is a little over 200 calories per serving and the halibut was about 150 calories for each 4 serving... so the dinner was just a little over 300 calories.

I am doing well on my diet and I have lost 10 lbs since April 12th, when I started tracking my weight and being disciplined about what I eat.