Posts Tagged ‘recipe’
New Beginnings
So, while I managed to not veer wildly off course during my stay in lovely Baltimore, I did manage to get home and eat everything in sight. Seriously. Everything.
Today begins a new, starting with this week’s break of choice: the fruit smoothie. I have been noticing that every since I reintroduced Go Lean bars into snack repertoire, my diet has been noticeably lacking in fruit. Hence, the breakfast smoothie:
Breakfast Smoothie
1 medium banana (1.5 pts)
1 cup strawberries (0 pts)
½ cup plain, nonfat soymilk (1 pt)
Put it all in a blender, and blend until smooth. Add some ice if you want it look like you have 20 ounces of fruity goodness to consume. Total points: 2.5. Also, for those of you who are WW buffs, this smoothie is also CORE.
I’m finding the smoothie does a couple of things for me. First, it helps me get in two servings of fruit. Second, I can’t eat in three seconds flat, so I spend the majority of the morning sipping, which makes me feel consistently satisfied until lunch time.
Once More with Feeling
At what point do you consider a recipe officially part of your meal repertoire? I have decided – today – that I have to make the recipe three times, in a reasonable amount of time, like say a month or so, in order to consider it an old stand-by. The first time I made Chickpea Noodle Soup from Veganomicon, I raved about it on A View from the Park. I’m not sure anyone was listening, except perhaps, my sister, who now also makes this soup on a nearly weekly basis.
Seriously people, would I keep making the soup if it wasn’t fantastic?
Check out the original recipe.
This soup has so much going for it – beans, buckwheat soba noodles, veggies, the option to add some greens. It’s a no-brainer, health-wise, but for the sake of too many snacks pre-run tonight, I decided to WeightWatcher-ify the recipe tonight. Look at that, I made a new word.
Here’s what I did:
2 tablespoons olive oil –> I reduced this to 2 tsp, and to compensate, I used a few splashes of vegetable broth as needed to sauté the vegetables.
6 cups water or vegetable stock –> I actually up the amount of liquid in this recipe to approximately 8 cups, sometimes I use all vegetable broth (store bought), but last night I used half water, half broth. The effect was a somewhat lighter soup.
6 ounces soba noodles –> Soba noodles expand a lot once cooked. Six ounces isn’t necessarily too much, but I reduced this to four ounces and still felt like I had noodle-palooza going on in my soup.
Finally, I added a handful or two of spinach at the end of the cooking process (at the same time as the miso).
Based on six servings, the WW points value of this soup is 3. That’s approximately one and a half cups of soup per serving. Keep in mind, the original WW points value of this soup is only 5, still very low, so go on with your bad self and make yourself some soup. Either way works!
