Many of you know, we try to be careful what fats we eat around our house. We love olive oil, canola oil, and flax seed oil (well...maybe not the taste, but the benefits of that one!). But other oils and fats we try to keep to a minimum. Like...no fried chips. For old people like me, it is easy to remember the days before tons of variety in low-fat foods. But now! So many fun and easy choices. We have really been enjoying baked Tostitos Scoops®. They only have 3g fat per ounce, thats about 14 chips! Since we love Mexican food, I thought I'd try these nachos for a bento. This is a great recipe for using leftovers, I know, because that's what I did!
Pick out unbroken Scoops for your nachos, and place them on a baking pan. Spray lightly with Pam. This will help keep them a little crisper.
Heat the beans a little so they'll be easier to work with, the microwave is great for this. Place about a teaspoon of beans on each chip.
Top with a slice of jalapeño, and some chopped tomato. Try not to touch the chip with any liquid.
Using your fingers crumble some Queso Fresco on top of each nacho. This recipe only needed about 1 teaspoon of this wonderful cheese, about 1.75g fat. Place in 350º oven for about 20 minutes. Let cool before packing. These are great topped with shredded lettuce, chopped Avocado mixed with salsa, fat free sour cream, and served with Spanish Rice.
Oh! AND...today is my one year Xanga birthday, and also my real birthday!! I turned 47 today, yay! I want to say how much I have truly appreciated the friends I've made here. Thank you for your friendship. Love, Sheri
One day we were having plain ol' peanut butter and jam sandwiches, so I tried cutting fun shapes right out of the middles.
Maybe our lives are just boring, but the kids got really excited. It was a little surprising actually. On the big kid's sandwiches, I just used cookie cutters,
and on the baby's bread and butter, I used my new heart shaped sandwich cutter. FUN!
This recipe took me almost two years to make. Tres bad, non? Here in our little town we have a wonderful Raley's grocery store. The dietitian for Raley's, Earline, used to come and do little taste testing/healthy foods classes for kids. We get a thrill out of that kind of stuff! In one of the last classes, we tasted Veggie Patch Spinach Nuggets. I told Earline I'd try making them myself and I'd email her the recipe. So, it's a little late, but finally here is my own original recipe for Spinach Balls. And, yes, I am cooking for an army!
Sheri's Spinach Balls 1 medium sized carrot 2 green onions 1 tsp salt 4 cups + 2 cups 100% whole wheat bread crumbs 16 cups fresh spinach leaves 2 eggs or 4 egg whites
Chop carrot and green onion into 1" pieces, place in food processor or blender (I'm not sure about all blenders, but mine will handle it). Process until unrecognizable as food. Then add the salt, then spinach, 4 cups at a time, to the food processor. Just before removing from food processor, add the eggs. Amazingly, it all fit nicely in the food processor. Pour the veggie mix out onto 4 cups of bread crumbs, mix with a pastry blender, or by putting batches back in food processor (1/2 the recipe at a time). This mixture seems dry, but is really nice and moist. I rolled a few balls by hand, but the easiest way to deal with lots and lots and lots of spinach balls, was to use my wonderful 1.5" ice cream scoop. I just scooped one ball at a time right into the bread crumbs...no need to dip in egg, since it was moist and already contained egg. Spray a cookie sheet with non-stick spray, bake in preheated 350º oven for 20 to 25 minutes or until browned.
These tasted pretty similar to the ones we've bought, but I thought the bought ones were a little better. I did try freezing and reheating these...eh. They were much better fresh, but could have been redeemed by heating in a skillet with a little oil instead of re-heating in the oven. Remember, they are extremely low fat. I haven't found that I like extremely low fat foods that have been cooked, frozen and reheated.
If nothing else, these were simple. Here's the ingredient list for the Veggie Patch Spinach Nuggets (which I love, btw!):
Well, my boys were making stop motion movies all week, so I wanted to make one. I've never done this before, but my husband has shown the boys how and they've made some pretty amazing cinema using playdough. I've watched and wished I had time to do it. So last night, while making pizza, I set up my stuff and went to it. It was wild!
Just before I made the pizza, I was working on a real bento. It's
a mixture of old and new ideas really. We've made what we call Birds
Nests or the family name 'Holey Toast', which is a piece of bread with
a hole cut out and placed in an oiled skillet, with a whole egg broken
into the hole and cooked.
Here we tried a slight variation. We made cutouts of flowers and cut holes from the centers. Then poured in scrambled egg to make a center. It worked reasonably well, some of the egg leaked out of the centers, but was easily broken off after it cooled. The taste was a great surprise! It was good! Baby Spinach made beautiful leaves, and even the baby ate some straight up, no dipping sauce, because I guess it's way more fun to eat flower leaves than to eat "spinach"?
Some apples cut in the same way, Annies whole wheat bunnies, and of course the obligatory dried cranberries that seem to be so popular here amongst the raisin haters. Here's a photo of all the flowers. Just so you know, it would take a lot of these flowers to fill up a bunch of boys...have fun!
