The Healthy Tales

Archive for the ‘Recipes’ Category

Crawfish is one of my favorite ingredients to cook with outside of onions. There is just so much you can do with crawfish besides boiling it or shoving it into some yummy etouffee. Crawfish can be used pretty much the same as shrimp – boil it, fry it,throw in pasta, rice, or a salad. This past weekend I decided to try a new crawfish recipe that was more summery than my usual crawfish etouffee. I came up with a Crawfish Casserole recipe from my favorite Louisiana cookbook, A Trim and Terrific Louisiana Kitchen by Holly Clegg. This recipe was fabulous and my husband ranked it a 5 out of 5 and he is pretty stingy with his 5 star rating. We will definitely be eating this on a regular basis. Give it a try and let me know what you think!

Crawfish Casserole

1 tbsp light margarine
1 onion, chopped
1 green bell pepper, chopped
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 lb crawfish tails, rinsed
1 can 99% fat-free cream of XYZ soup
3 cups cooked rice
1.5 tbsp lemon juice
salt & pepper
dash red pepper
1 can chopped tomatoes and green peppers (aka Rotel)
1/2 cup shredded fat free cheddar cheese

In a large pan, coated with nonstick cooking spray, melt margarine. Add onions, green peppers, and garlic. Cook until tender. Stir in crawfish, soup, rice, lemon juice, seasonings, tomatoes and green chilies. Mix well. Turn mixture into a shallow 2-quart casserole dish coated with nonstick cooking spray. Bake at 350 degrees for 25 minutes. Sprinkle with cheese and return to oven for an additional 5 minutes.

Makes 6 servings

As prepared: 281 calories, 136mg Cholesterol, 4.8 gms fat, 15.2% Calories from Fat

One of my pet peeves is having mismatched leftovers in the refrigerator. Especially when the toss date is coming up quickly. Today for example, you can find in my refrigerator: cooked edamame, leftover Pei Wei, crockpot diet coke chicken, pineapple tidbits, and bratwurst that needs to be cooked. Since the chicken and the pineapple are the oldest they were my first choice for lunch but I wasn’t quite sure what to do.  Enter an idea!

BBQ Pineapple Chicken Wraps! All I needed were 2 of my low carb wraps and some BBQ sauce to add to four ounces of chicken and a third cup of pineapple tidbits. The results were absolutely delicious and is something I’ll be eating tomorrow to finish up the pineapple and the chicken.  The best part was that everything was already sitting in my refrigerator and is pretty low in Weight Watcher points!

Happy Monday!  I have been busy the past few months and have not meal planned at all!  I am so ready to start cooking at home again and having real food rather than the frozen variety or the take out variety.  Mike is also finally back in town and I can cook for him.  So this week I am shopping in my pantry and refrigerator looking for things to eat.

Monday ~ Beef Tips (from Tyson) and Brown Rice, Side Salad

Tuesday ~ Tuna Helper “Helped” ~ 2 cans tuna, 1 helper box, 1 can corn, 1 can peas.  Served with fruit

Wednesday ~ Left over buffet.

Thursday ~ Semi-homemade Pizza & Fruit

Friday & Saturday ~ Crawfish Etouffee & Veggies

Required Trips to the Grocery Store: 0! Yipee!

Recipes, Weight Watcher points, and photos to come.

I really enjoy slow cooking as it allows me to have a pretty tasty dinner without a lot of work. Usually it goes like this: line cooker with special liner, dump meat into pot, mix & pour sauce on top, run to work. Not a lot of work for a great dinner.

So last weekend before running to HEB, I went through my Fix It and Forget It Lightly Cookbook and decided to give Barbecued Pork Chops a try. I’ve made pork chops before in the slow cooker and they have turned out fairly well so I figured why not. The ingredients were things I already had on hand so I just had to pick up the pork chops which were on sale last week.

Barbecued Pork Chops
4 loin pork chops, 3/4″ thick, trimmed of fat
1 cup ketchup
1 cup hot water
2 Tbsp vinegar
1 Tbsp Worcestershire sauce
2 tsp brown sugar
1/2 tsp black pepper
1/2 tsp chili powder
1/2 tsp paprika

1. Place pork chops in slow cooker.
2. Combine remaining ingredients. Pour over chops.
3. Cover. Cook on high 5-6 hours.
4. Cut chops in half and serve.

Nutritional information: 180 calories, 7gms fat, 11gms carbohydrates, 20gms protein

4 Weight Watcher points per serving

My review: The recipe was super simple. I will say though that I was disappointed in the recipe but I think it was more “cook’s error” than anything with the recipe itself. The chops I bought at the store were bone-in and had quite a bit of fat still on them. As I was making this before running off to work, I focused on cutting out the major chunks of fat on the exterior of the chop but didn’t make it to the inside of the chop. Therefore, there was a ton of fat floating around in the pot and all of my chops cooked into a giant meaty clump. It wasn’t very appetizing looking so I decided against posting a photo. Overall, I would give this recipe a rating of 3 out of 5 stars. I would make it again but I would use different chops and possibly a little more sauce to prevent the fat and cooked together issues I experienced.

A few weeks ago, Mike and I headed over to San Antonio to visit his family.  As we were heading back to Houston, Mike’s mom pulled out two pounds of frozen shrimp to send home with us.  I hated to tell her that I had two pounds already back in the freezer because I didn’t know how to cook it but I didn’t and took it gladly and decided I needed to find a recipe.  So off to Google I went looking for a recipe to use up at least two of these four pounds.

I found a great recipe to try out -> BBQ Shrimp and Pineapple Skewers.  The recipe comes from Razzle Dazzle Recipes.  The recipe did not call for a lot of ingredients and seemed easy enough to make at home so I decided to grab all of the ingredients today at the grocery store and give it a whirl.  What I found was that it really was a great and tasty recipe but the skewer part didn’t work out too well as the end of my skewers are thick and combining that with the thick chunks of pineapple raised the shrimp off the grill plate and they were not cooking.  Once I removed the skewers from the process everything went well.

We had this with my garlic and lime asparagus (recipe to follow) which went very well with the pineapple. I give this recipe two thumbs up and will make it again. I failed to point out the recipe for Weight Watchers but I would think that this would be no more than 5 WW points and the asparagus is about 2 or 3 WW points at the most. I’ll try to remember to do this next time.

Pineapple Barbecued Shrimp Skewers

1/4 cup barbecue sauce
1/2 cup pineapple juice
2 tablespoons lime juice
2 tablespoons chopped, fresh cilantro leaves
1 pound large shrimp, peeled and deveined
1 – ripe pineapple, peeled, cored and sliced into 2-inch chunks
4 – metal or bamboo (soaked in water) skewers

In a mixing bowl, combine the barbecue sauce, pineapple juice, lime juice and cilantro. Pour half of the pineapple-barbecue sauce mixture into a resealable bag, add the shrimp and marinate for 15 to 30 minutes. (Reserve the remaining sauce mixture for basting and serving.)

Preheat the grill to medium-high.

Remove the shrimp from the marinade, discarding the leftover marinade. Skewer the shrimp and pineapple onto the skewers. Grill the skewers on both sides until the shrimp are just cooked through, about 3 to 4 minutes per side. While the skewers are cooking, brush them with some of the reserved sauce.

Serve the skewers with the extra pineapple-barbecue sauce for dipping.