Healthy and Sane

Entries Tagged as 'eggplant'

Dinner parties are where it’s at

February 18th, 2010 · 29 Comments · breakfast, dessert, eggplant, entertaining, restaurant reviews, salad, snacks

When we were kids, meals were always prepared by the parents (most likely by mom). They were simple and satisfying, except for maybe that occasional vegetable you really would rather leave on the plate ;) For birthday parties and other celebrations, in my house my parents always prepared a giant feast (we actually had 2 large parties – one with all the kids, and a second one with all the adults – man, that’s a lot of prep!). If you are an American, the birthday parties were likely held at somewhere fun like Chuck E. Cheese. I never experienced such a thing.

In middle school, my family moved to Israel and the idea of take-out was introduced into my life. This was further solidified when we moved to the US, and most gatherings with friends were now at the local Dunkin Donuts or at someone’s house with a giant plastic container full of Chinese food. College was pretty similar, except alcohol was introduced into the mix – in large quantities at that.

Over the past few months, Adam and I hosted and attended a few dinner parties. There was no greasy, cheap food, no binge drinking – just a home-cooked meal with nice wine and a great conversation. Last night, on the way back home from such a dinner party, it hit me – this is what you do in your late 20’s (and probably well into your 30’s or until kids start ruining all your fancy plans)! I have to say – I’m really liking this new stage of my life, and I can’t wait to host more dinner parties at our own house soon!!

Before I get into the dinner party details, let’s quickly review the rest of the day’s eats – they were really good! :)

BREAKFAST

2 Vermont spelt toasts with low fat cottage cheese, Zoe’s granola and almond slices + 1 orange

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Toast close-up – great combo!

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Juicy orange…

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MID-MORNING SNACK

1T peanut butter + 1/2 apple

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LUNCH DATE

The fun lunch date I mentioned last night was with the lovely Shannon of Tri 2 Cook. She joined me for a sweaty spin class and then we went to b.good. My salad from Friday finally convinced her to give b.good a go! I stopped myself from ordering the same thing and got the sesame ginger chicken salad this time – mesclun, carrots, jicama, edamame, sesame seeds, sesame sticks, orange-soy dressing

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The lighting there is horrible but hopefully you can see all the goodies in there… chicken + sesame sticks

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jicama, carrots, edamame…

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I really liked this salad as well. Shannon liked her b.good burger. :D

For dessert I stopped by Paradise Bakery and got myself a choc chip cookie. I <3 them!

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The salad + cookie combo held me over for 7 hours!! And now we get to the part where I tell you all about the dinner party Adam and I attended last night. :D

DINNER

So as you all know, we currently don’t have a kitchen to cook in. Somehow we were talking about that and Turkish food, and my co-worker Egemen offered to cook dinner for Adam and me one day. Hey, you don’t have to ask me twice! I’ve never had homemade Turkish food so this was quite a treat.

Egemen did a really great job setting up for dinner. There were lots of candles and some simple apps to munch on while he was finishing up dinner. Very cozy. His friends Margaret and Amanda joined us for the meal as well. We all loved the juicy strawberries and the cheese sampler.

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I had a few glasses of wine with dinner. Here is my first pour.

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And now for the real treat – slow braised lamb + hunkar begendi (eggplant cream)

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Egemen really went all out! The lamb took 2 days to marinate + 3 hours to cook. It was really melting in your mouth – so tender! The hunkar begendi was the most unique eggplant dish I’ve had. It is a combo of roasted eggplant meat, flour, butter and mozzarella. SO good. You could really taste the smokiness of the eggplant. Now I miss my mom’s.

Dessert was another traditional Turkish dish – walnut and cinnamon stuffed figs (sorry, I don’t know the exact name) with vanilla ice cream and chocolate fudge

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This was very sweet and very cinnamony – a small portion was perfect to end the meal on a sweet note. Delicious! Thanks Egemen for hosting us – we’ll need to return the favor by cooking for you and the girls next time. :D

Do you like dinner parties?

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Eight no mountain I can’t climb

August 10th, 2009 · 18 Comments · Cooking Light, baking, dessert, eggplant, product reviews, salad, snacks

Ok, I am a complete cheeseball with the title of this post (yes I know that this is completely incorrect English), but whatever – I ran EIGHT miles yesterday!!!!!! It was a really fun run too. Just wonderful. I mentioned that I met Molly at Vinalia a few weeks ago, and that she was running the same 1/2 marathon race as me. Well we’ve been talking about maybe going for a run sometimes and yesterday was finally the day. What better way to get to know each other than go on a long run? We were chatting nonstop the entire time and the run just flew by. I was starting to get a bit tired when I realized that we had only 1/2 mile left, so instead we both picked up the pace.  It’s a lot harder to run and talk so our pace was slower than we’re used to (a little under a 10 minute mile… around 9:50 or so), but it made for a really pleasant run. I can’t wait to do it again!!! Thanks, Molly, for being so awesome :D

So yeah, I pretty much felt like a million bucks for the rest of the day. Long runs on a late Sunday morning are becoming my favorite thing. They just make me feel like I’ve really accomplished something, and also give me an excuse to veg out for the rest of the day (with packing and whatnot I couldn’t fully take advantage of my right to veg, but I still did some serious R&R). Onto food…

I started the morning with a simple breakfast/snack – 1 organic spelt toast with Barney Butter, blueberries and coffee. I was out the door in about an hour. This was the perfect fuel for the run!

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After the run and the shower, Adam and I decided to go grocery shopping. I knew I haven’t eaten enough at this point, so I created a little tasting plate of my new dessert hummus with some Kashi honey-wheat crackers.

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These do not taste like hummus (thankfully since although delicious, hummus is not dessert ;) ) but are called hummus because the base is chickpeas. The consistency is kind of of a drier hummus but the flavor is spot-on whatever it’s called – like pumpkin pie tastes like pumpkin pie, maple walnut is exactly that (and is awesome!), peanut butter has a strong pb flavor, etc. Check out the Crazy Camel website for all the flavors they offer. I love that it’s a small local company with a unique product – I mean who’s ever heard of dessert hummus?! I also love that a serving is about 60 calories (like regular hummus) but you can make some pretty indulging tasting desserts. For now I love every one except for the toasted almond – tastes like marzipan. Chuck sent me a list of tasting combo recommendationa so I can’t wait to experiment/get a little more creative with these guys. There will be apples, red grapes and maybe graham crackers involved :D

After a trip to TJ’s, it was time for lunch. I got some sweet pea leaves at the farmers market last week and could not wait to make a salad with them. Have you ever tried sweet pea leaves? They have such a sweet flavor with just a hit of sweet pea taste. Very cool. This was my first time trying them and they made for a great salad base. I hear they are also great sauteed with some EVOO and garlic, so that’s what I’m trying next. I love discovering new veggies!

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In the salad: sweet pea leaves, grape tomatoes, cucumbers, blueberries, goat cheese and pecans. This was perfect drizzled with some strawberry balsamic vinegar – nice a summery.

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After hours of packing I finally started to get a bit hungry. These guys were the stars of the (dinner) show. The colors and shapes of the veggies are just so cool!

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I was craving a harcore vegetarian dish and found this recipe for eggplant stew over couscous from Cooking Light. I omitted the onions, added mushrooms, and doubled the amount of eggplant since the comments on the website mentioned that there wasn’t enough of it. The commenters were right, because even after doubling the eggplant I couldn’t taste it. It basically dissolved in this dish, which by the way was delicious!!! Adam kind of hates eggplant and zucchini but I thought with enough tomato sauce and cheese he could enjoy this, and he did. I loved it too. My only complain is that this picture sucks :lol:

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And then there was dessert. I love baking once in a while because then I have something to look forward to in the treats department and my stuff is much healthier than anything I’d buy. I found this recipe for fudgy mocha-toffee brownies in an old Cooking Light magazine, and after realizing it was their “best bar cookie of all time” I couldn’t wait to get to baking! I used peanut butter chips instead of toffee chips (all I had on hand) and added a few walnut crumbles to the top. Here is the result:

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Mmm, definitely fudgy.

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I had 1 piece (1/16 of the pan) after dinner.

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Yum! A perfect healthier treat – definitely something to look forward to with a nice cup of tea. :mrgreen:

I also got a bit hungry towards the end of the day and had a few small handfuls of raw pecans (unpictured). For some reason on my long run days I’m not particularly hungry but I try to remember to still fuel myself. How was your weekend?

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A super lazy Saturday

December 13th, 2008 · 9 Comments · December No Mindless Munching Streaking Challenge, baking, breakfast, dessert, eggplant, pasta, sandwich, snacks

Wow, I’ve been la-zay today!  Seriously, I hardly left the coach today.  Bad!  There was no exercise but definitely some yummy and healthy food, though :D

BREAKFAST

I really love feta in omelets and since I had an open package of feta today’s breakfast was an obvious choice.  I sauteed some grape tomatoes with some spinach, added 1 egg and 2 egg whites and 1 oz of light feta.  Yum!  I also toasted 1/2 of a Food for Life english muffin for a side + made a large cup of coffee with skim milk and agave nectar.

SNACK

Breakfast was a little low in calories so I was ready for a snack soon after I was done.  I missed my yogurt so I made a tiny bowl with 1/2 cup of nonfat TJ’s European style yogurt, a clementine and a handful of Erin Baker’s double chocolate granola.  So yummy!  I love yogurt!!

LUNCH

Simple: a sandwich with 2 slices of turkey, 2 tablespoons of homemade hummus and grape tomatoes and a large carrot on the side.

I <3 hummus!

BAKING!

When you have a banana that looks like that, what do you do?

Hehe, it looks like a monster! :lol:  Well, I mashed it and made it into cookies using this recipe from Simply Recipes found on the Bread & Honey blog.  The pictures just looked so good, I couldn’t resist making a batch of my own :D

My 1 banana produced 1/3 of a cup of mashed banana, so I made 1/3 of the recipe.

I also opted to use 1/2 pecans and 1/2 chocolate chips for my “mix-ins.”  Here are some of the progress pics so you feel like you were in my kitchen today :)

Creaming the butter and sugar:

 

Adding the egg and flour…

Folding in the pecans and chocolate chips…

Divide the batter into 10 cookies (30 if you make the entire recipe), and pop in the oven for ~12 minutes:

Here they are post baking, cooling on the cooling rack:

Closeup:

The kitchen smelled absolutely incredible at this point!!  Of course I had to make some tea and have 1 (ahem, I mean 2) cookies :D

I didn’t photograph the second one… I grabbed one of the “uglier” ones.  These were very light and fluffy – very cake-like.  I think I realize that I prefer cookies that are more dense, but because they are light they are also lower in calories, so that’s why I could have 2 of them guilt-free.  There is definitely something to say for that.  If you like fluffy (muffin-top-like cookies) these are yummy and are a nice alternative to banana bread if you have some overripe bananas.  I probably won’t make them again, but I had fun making them and will enjoy polishing them off (hopefully with my husband’s help) over the next few days.  Oh, and they are now resting on a pretty holiday plate.  I love it!!

DINNER

Since like I mentioned before I haven’t left my apartment today (meaning no grocery trip either), I had to whip something up from what we had.  I dug deep into my freezer and found this:

There were 2 little eggplant cutlets left in the box (this is from Trader Joe’s – not sure if you can see that from this pic).  So I made some baked zitti in my toaster oven.  I cooked 4oz of ww pasta for 13 minutes, while that was going baked the eggplant patties according to package directions and cooked up some diced tomatoes with garlic, oregano, basil and red pepper flakes to make a chunky tomato sauce.  Once the pasta was done, I tossed it with the diced tomatoes, divided into two bowls (1 for me and 1 for my husband), topped each pasta bowl with a slice of eggplant, 1/4 cup of part skim ricotta and 3/4 oz of 2% cheddar cheese and baked it right in the bowls in the toasted oven (for maybe 5 minutes and then turned it to broil for a few extra minutes until the cheese browned).  Yum!

 

Here is my first bite… cheesy goodness!

This was very delicious.  Baked zitti with eggplant used to be one of my favorite deliveries back in college, although I used to eat a huge tub of it in one sitting.  This was nicely portion controlled.  Much better!

And a little bit later I had a square of Ghirardelli 72% chocolate square.  This is just ok.  Honestly tastes slightly waxy to me.  I forgot I’m not a fan of this stuff.  I want more chocolate now but trying to resist the urge! :(

Total calorie count for now is 1567, although I have a feeling I’m going to have something a little later (hopefully not but I can’t make any promises).  I’m trying to decided whether I want to go out with my husband and his friends or stay at home and take some thing off my to-do list.  I want to stay home but I’m afraid of being alone with a house full temptations and no-one but myself to stop me from indulging.  I’ll report tomorrow on how I did.

*Edited to add* I stayed at home and I am finally caught up on all of my blog reading.  Yay!!!  I am also extremely proud to report that the only thing I had was lots of water.  I didn’t even give myself the option of having anything else… at first reading all the food blogs made me a little hungry but then I just forgot about it.  So the calorie count for the day is still the number noted above, and today was officially my Day 4 of NMSC!!  I told you I do well with streaking challenges :D  I’m going to try to go to bed soon.  I want to take a hot vinyasa class tomorrow morning.  I haven’t done that in months and I’m actually really looking forward to it!

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Working on my day off

November 12th, 2008 · 7 Comments · breakfast, eggplant, salmon

Today was another crazy day… I need my life to slow down asap! I was supposed to have the day off today but then my boss gave us the option to work today instead of the day after Thanksgiving so I had to take her up on her offer. Working the day after Thanksgiving feels like punishment since pretty much everyone else in the country gets the day off. I did it last year… it’s no fun!

Anyways, the good news about coming in to work today was that I got to wear jeans (!) and it was quiet so I got a lot of work done :) Onto foods now…

BREAKFAST

I’ve been kind of lazy/tired the last few nights and didn’t prepare my food ahead of time, so this morning was another grab ‘n go game. Today I was really brave… I actually brought a fresh egg to work. I wanted to make an egg and cheese but didn’t want the english muffin to get soggy by the time I got to work, so I figured I’d just make it at work. I was gentle with my bag and it arrived there safely. It worked perfectly!!!! Pretty cool!

I microwaved the egg in a mug for about 1.5 minutes, while the english muffin was toasting. I then added a slice of cheese over the egg and zapped it for a few more seconds in the micro… put it all together and here is my beautiful breakfast :) Yum!

A few hours later I had my cup of coffee. Here it is next to my running schedule… it’s taped to my desk for reference. Whenever I have a run “scheduled” I do the mileage/time it says on there and cross it off when I’m done. Today I was itching to do a run when I got to work, but unfortunately I never got to it. It’s ok, I’ll definitely get it in tomorrow :) ! As you can see, I have a 3 mile run next… easy!

SNACK 1

I was planning on going to the gym during lunch, so I had a pre-workout snack of pear + Ellie Krieger’s energy bar. I was trying to be all artsy with that pear picture but I think I missed it this time :)

Well the workout never happened. My stomach was freaking out so I kept on pushing the workout, then work got busy… you know how it is. Tomorrow… seriously! It’s going to be glorious!

LUNCH

For lunch I made another quicky salad. Sorry it’s been kind of boring lately… like I said, the last few days it’s been hectic in the mornings. Leftover salmon and thai string beans from last night, which was amazing + mixed greens, grape tomatoes, cucs + 1 tablespoon of goddess dressing.

Btw, I followed this recipe for the salmon. It was very delicious. I highly recommend it! And the goddess dressing, well we know how obsessed I’ve been with it lately. It hasn’t gotten old yet!

I wanted to be bad all day and I had a few close calls. I actually stood in front of the vending machine with a dollar in my hand at some point, trying to decide between a snickers and a mars bar. I couldn’t decided whether I wanted it, or would feel bad about. Just trying to make that decision made my stomach hurt, so I knew there is no way I would eat it guilt-free. So I put my dollar back in my pocket and stepped away from the vending machine (and left the kitchen!)…. small victory #1.

SNACK 2

1/2 banana + 1/2 packet of Barney Butter. Is it just me or does this look dirty? My husband thinks I’m crazy so I’m posting this picture despite being a little unsure about it… It was delicious though!

Another close call later in the day… I went to get my nails repainted and wanted to grab a sweet from Starbucks. I thought I’d just take a look at the case and see if anything looks “worthy.” There was a small line, so I thought this was my sign. I knew this was a bad idea. I was just in one of those moods today. Anyways, I walked past the Starbucks and now I’m happy I did!

DINNER

I had no plan for dinner tonight except I knew I wanted to use up the rest of the huge eggplant that I bought for the tart I made on Saturday. I was thinking about maybe making something with goat cheese but my husband proposed eggplant parm (he doesn’t like goat cheese… or eggplant really so this was the only way he would consider eating it). I looked at a few recipes but they all seemed way to complex and time consuming, so I decided to just wing it.

I cut up the eggplant into rings and roasted them in the oven at 350* for about 10 minutes (I sprayed the pan and the eggplant rings with some EVOO). I then dipped each ring in egg beaters and bread crumbs and put them back in the oven for another 15 minutes or so. Then I topped them with pasta sauce, put them back in the oven for maybe 10 minutes and the last step… topped them with part skim mozzarella and broiled them until the cheese was melty (~3 minutes on high broil). This is the pan:

And my plate with some steamed broccoli:

Midway through dinner I decided I wanted some more carbs, so I toasted an english muffin and made a little sandwich with the last ring. Yum!

And then the munchies hit and I gave in :(

Raspberry brownie I blogged about on Saturday:

Trailmix straight out of the bag:

100 calorie chocolate stick:

Organic hard cider:

And chocolate covered edamames and 2 chocolate chip cookies (not pictured).

I’ve been in a bit of a funk the last few days as exhibited by my little binges on trailmix, etc. BUT all of your comments made my night and I have a renewed excitement about this blog and my healthy eating. Yay!!!

Also, I’ve been tagged by Kelly from The Pink Apron!!!!! My first tag ever! I feel like a real blogger now :D Thanks, Kelly!!! I’ll think of some fun facts about myself tomorrow! Don’t give up on me, ok? I’m still sane, not that healthy today, but tomorrow is a new day :)

Good night!

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