Easy and Quick Recipes?

I LOVE cooking, and I became so overwhelmed when trying to eat healthy! Here's something I made yesterday!

24 oz boneless skinless chicken breast
1 celery stalk
1/2 onion, diced
1 clove garlic
16 oz fat free low sodium chicken broth
1/2 cup hot cayenne pepper sauce/or buffalo sauce (I used Frank's)

For the wraps:

6 large lettuce leaves, Bibb or Iceberg
1 1/2 cups shredded carrots
2 large celery stalks, cut into 2 inch matchsticks

Directions:

In a crock pot, combine chicken, onions, celery stalk, garlic and broth (enough to cover your chicken, use water if the can of broth isn't enough). Cover and cook on high 4 hours.
Remove the chicken from pot, reserve 1/2 cup broth and discard the rest. Shred the chicken with two forks, return to the slow cooker with the 1/2 cup broth and the hot sauce and set to on high for an additional 30 minutes. Makes 3 cups chicken.

For the wrap I laid a lettuce leaf on "TortillaFactory" tortilla, added onion, tomato, Greek yogurt, chicken, etc. so yummy and fairly low calories!!

You can invest in a crockpot that has a timer and will start after a few hours of you being gone.

Since you guys both mentioned slow cookers, I figure I'll ask another question while I'm at it. I'm out of the house 9.5 hours from when I leave for work to when I walk back in the door. Most of the recipes I've seen don't have cook times this long. Is there any way I can still make 7/8 hour recipes in that time frame?

I have this problem too and what I find works a LOT better for me is turning the slow cooker on when I'm sleeping and then refrigerating the food in the morning. I then reheat it when I get home from work. Plus I can take it for lunch. Even if the slow cooker switches to "warm" for half an hour for a total of 8.5 hours (lets face it, I rarely get more than 8 hours of sleep on a work night), the food is still good and safe. Using the warm setting for more than 1 hour is actually not a good idea from a food safety stand point (bacteria still grows at the "warm" temperature).

I'll add in a few really quick and easy recipes:

Salsa chicken:
Chicken breast (boneless and skinless)
Salsa
Sour cream (low fat?)
shredded cheese or a slice of cheese (low fat?)

Put the chicken breast on a piece of tin foil on a cookie sheet and preheat the oven to 350F. Spread about 1 tbsp of sour cream and 2 tbsp of salsa on the chicken. Enclose the chicken in the tin foil by folding it into a packet. Bake it in the oven for 25 minutes (for a medium breast, less for smaller, more for larger). Then open the packet (careful of steam) put a bit more salsa on top if it's fallen off, sprinkle the cheese on top and broil (put on the top rack with your oven set to broil) for about 4 minutes to melt the cheese. Turns out perfectly every time Even I, the rubber chicken maker, didn't screw this up my first time haha. And even when I've over cooked it it still managed to be moist (albeit stringy) at the same time and tasted great. It's great because the prep for this recipe is like 1 minute (just splat sour cream and salsa on the chicken hahah and spread it with a spoon).

Similar to the above recipe, you can mix 1/4 cup Dijon mustard, 1/4 cup sour cream, 1 tbsp dried dill weed and 1/2 tsp garlic powder in a bowl and dip the raw chicken in, then cook the same way in the foil packet (this amount of sauce would cover 4 breasts).

I usually cook up a pot of boxed quinoa on the stove while this is cooking - very simple. And then microwave some frozen veggies.

Other good things you can do is to bake frozen fish fillets on a cookie sheet lined with tin foil in the oven with a spice mix of your choice (cajun, tex mex, lemon pepper, greek, italiano, etc). Just place on the sheet, sprinkle and bake! Done!

I also really like buying pre-marinated pork tenderloin from the grocery store and baking that in the oven too. I must admit, marinating it yourself can be very simple. But I'm terrible at planning and tend to buy the tenderloin the same day I cook it.

You can also dump some chicken thighs (I find breast will dry out with this method) into a Corningwear dish (or similar) and cover it in either a "health check" version of a butter chicken sauce or salsa or something and baking that in the oven for 45 mins or so. The clean up is a bit tougher but the food is good and the prep is non-existent.

Roasted Veggies (super easy, super tasty, super healthy)

Take almost any veggie of your choice or a mixture of your favorites. I love onions, bell peppers, Brussels sprouts, broccoli, asparagus, sweet potatoes, red skinned potatoes, zucchinis, yellow squash, etc.

I cut them up in chunks all about the same size and put into a gallon ziploc bag. Add 1 TBS olive oil, salt, pepper, garlic powder, onion powder, and red pepper flakes (or any seasonings you love) and shake it up until everything is coated.

Dump onto foil lined baking sheet sprayed with cooking spray. Bake at 450 for about 45 minutes, turning every 15 minutes. I do cook my squashes and asparagus for a shorter time because they cook faster. So, if I'm combining them with longer cooking veggies I just add them in about 15 minutes later than the others.

Enjoy! :bigsmile:

Another idea, if you don't get a crockpot with a timer, try getting a heavy-duty timer from the local hardware store & setting it to come on at the right time. If the knob on the pot is in the right place, it should work. Test it on your day off to be sure, so you don't come home to cold raw food.