Catching Up With A Few Weeks of Food Photos… SEE?! I’m Eating Healthy!

My food posts have been few and far between lately, but I am making good choices and cooking healthy meals. Here are a bunch of the meals I’ve enjoyed over the past few weeks – some at home, some at restaurants. I like posts like this because I can look back later and remind myself of what I’ve enjoyed… and what I want to make and eat again!

My most recent home-cooked meal, that I made for my father and me. Grilled pork loin chops and sauteed bok choy, both with a citrus teriyaki glaze (from a bottle). Some unflavored ramen noodles on the side, to soak up the leftover glaze.

I brought home Beyond Meat burgers from the store. They’re plant-based burgers, and they’re delicious. I grilled them, and enjoyed it on an English Muffin bun, with ketchup, mustard, lettuce, tomato, and grilled onions, with a big salad on the side. My parents loved these – my dad even said it was one of his all-time favorite burgers. I wanted to bring more home from the store, but the next time I was there, they were all out.

For more on Beyond Meat burgers, check out this post!

This was a meal entirely pulled together from pantry and freezer items, on a day when we were nearly out of fresh stuff. My mom cooked some chicken breasts that we pulled out of the freezer and thawed, and I stir-fried a couple frozen bags of Asian-medley vegetables. We also nuked a couple pouches of brown rice and quinoa – those kinds where you put the whole pouch in the microwave and they cook in only 90 seconds.

My friend Debbie took me to breakfast one day, as a thank you for helping out during a scary morning. She woke up at 4am to the sounds of branches creaking and breaking, and, seconds later, a 75-foot tree fell and crashed into the front of her house.

No one was hurt, but there’s substantial damage to the house, and Debbie’s car was totaled.

Ugh. Double ugh. Sorry for this tone-deaf transition, but… back to breakfast!

We went to a local diner, where I ordered a Greek skillet, which had gyro meat and lots of veggies, plus some potatoes, and topped with feta cheese and two eggs. I had dry rye toast on the side.

Debbie and her family had to move into a hotel, and one night I met them for dinner at Fuddrucker’s, a burger chain that has a location around the corner.

That’s an elk burger (the leanest protein on the menu), served Blackened Cajun style – with onions and peppers, cheese, and slices of Andouille sausage on top. I ordered in on lettuce instead of in a bun. Fuddrucker’s has a big toppings bar for your burger, so I loaded up on veggies and pickles, and ate it like a side salad, since I didn’t order fries.

For breakfast, I usually eat fruit, cottage cheese, or eggs (or some combination thereof). Some days I make a little breakfast sandwich: an English muffin, 1 egg, a slice of cheese, and some cucumber slices. I only need four cucumber slices for the sandwich, but I end up slicing 10-12, and eating the rest while I wait for the English muffin to toast.

Some days I make big breakfast scrambles. One this day I made a huge one and split it with my dad. It’s a huge portion, but it’s only four eggs (two for each of us), plus a huge amount of veggies – I think this one was mostly broccoli and onion. Plus an English muffin – as you can see, we nearly always have those around!

We’ve been making green beans with bacon and onion a lot lately. Chop up three slices of bacon, cook it in a skillet with some onion, and then at the end, add green beans and saute until they’re cooked. For this meal, we ate them with small grilled steaks and a few baby potatoes. The white sauce is leftover sauce that I made for my parents’ 50th anniversary dinner.

Read more about the 50th anniversary dinner here.

We had an extra grilled steak from the last meal pictured, so I cut it up the next night and added it as a topping to a big salad.

My friend Jocelyn gave me a present when I visited her in Ohio a couple weeks ago – a jar of Harry & David Pepper & Onion Relish that someone had gifted her that she had absolutely no interest in. And by “gave me a present,” I mean she slipped it in my bag when I wasn’t looking. Good ol’ Jocie!

I used the Pepper & Onion Relish as a topping for halibut, with roasted Parmesan asparagus on the side. The relish was good! You just have to get over the mental hurdle that it’s savory, not sweet, even though it looks just like every jar of jelly and jam taking up space on the back of your shelf in the fridge.

FINAL PICTURE! I put together a post last year about my efforts to find a healthier alternative to Cheetos. Here’s a product that I found at Whole Foods that I could add to the list of products in that post:

They’re called Lesser Evil Egg White Curls, and I can’t say I’d get them again. I love egg whites (one of the best lean proteins around), but I didn’t care for the flavor of these curls, and they looked nothing like the image on the package (except for very basic shape). Calorie-wise, they’re not all that better for you – 130 calories per serving versus 150 in Cheetos Puffs. And they have more carbs than Cheetos Puffs – 14g in these, versus 13g. These do have triple the protein – 6g versus 2g in Cheetos Puffs, but if you’re looking to junk food to make up four extra grams of protein in your day, you’ve got bigger food issues. Seems like these are barely a lesser evil, so much so that if I’ve got a Cheetos craving, which I get a few times a year, I’m just going for the real deal and buying a small bag at a gas station.

Keep it up, David!

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