Ziggy's Food, Recipes, and Info!

Hey everyone, I wanted to share something I enjoy doing a lot at home, which is cooking! :)

I cook pretty healthy due to having bad family genes D: So I gotta watch what I eat pretty closely and really into looking for healthy alternatives.

I get most of my fresh ingredients from a local farmers market. I'm lucky because I live in a pretty populated area so it's actually considered an international food market consisting of foods around the world. So if I ever want to make something that you wouldn't typically find in your local Wal-Mart then I get that opportunity. The biggest reason I shop there is because I can get fresh foods for -really- cheap.

My biggest thing about eating healthy is I don't like to cook as if I'm on a diet. I crave a lot of unhealthy foods and a lot of times will come up with different things of healthier alternatives, or once in a while I'll just splurge and have the real thing (Pizza!)

I'm pretty savvy with eating healthy from various people such as when I've had personal training to make sure I was eating the right foods to fuel my body and just from a lot of reading of mine. If anyone has questions they're more than welcome to ask or have me suggest anything.

I guess I can start out with what I made tonight for dinner: Chicken Milanese with a side salad



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Directions:


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Overall the Chicken was extremely yummy, it tasted like it was bad for you with that bit of butter in the frying pan. Something people tend to be very scared of if they're looking to lose weight are fatty foods. Fats are soo good for your body and it's important to consume in moderation. I try to use the real deal in my cooking due to it being easier for my body to digest and more natural. I won't always do it, but if the opportunity is there then I will :)

The salad dressing is fun to make yourself, but it was a little too bitter for me, but I'm not a big lemon fan to begin with unless I'm cooking with it - not laying it on top of my greens. Some concerns may be if you have high blood pressure, due to the salt and breadcrumbs - this recipe does have quite a bit of sodium in it. The cholesterol is also a bit high due to the eggs and butter. That's why it's so important to consume in moderation :) Eat a small breast of this at 4oz

Breakfast! The most important meal of the day! (Fact)

Do you guys eat it?

There's a reason for why they call it breakfast - you're breaking your fast after hours of sleep :) The morning time you've got to kick your body into gear and get something in your stomach. If you don't 'feel hungry' in the morning time, you may wait an hour or so, but your metabolism is asleep and if you picture an old train and needing to continuously throw wood or coal in the fire pits so it continues to run - that's pretty much how your body operates!

That's why I hate diets that restrict the amount of food or kind of foods. You should always feel satisfied, not because you're taking an appetite suppressant, but because your body is content.

I eat a heavy breakfast, because I want plenty of protein to keep me full for several hours to get me through the beginning of work until lunch time. However, if I still had my neat little blender I'd be just as easily making a whey protein shake!

I make two types of breakfasts typically - one for Fpod and one for myself. He works out much harder than I do and doesn't have to watch as much what he's eating. I also try to watch my carb intake (in moderation like anything else) and he needs more carbs due to his workouts. I need to take in consideration that his body and my body need different things :)

So here's our breakfast:


My breakfast:

Ingredients:

Directions:

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His on the other hand has more Saturated Fat and much higher fat content:

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We also had a glass of 2% milk. I had an 8oz and he had a 16oz :P but I didn't include those in the nutrition labels.

The breakfast is high in fat, but it also has a good amount of protein too. I would personally suggest my plate over his, but his isn't necessarily bad. The rest of the day would have much smaller doses of fat in them and we plan accordingly on how we eat.

Nice dishes so far, Ziggy. Simple and clean, lol.

Ever thought of doing more complex dishes? And for that matter, do you take requests? :3

Mm, I can give advice for requests on making them healthier if they're not. But I'm under a pretty tight budget with food and typically plan ahead so I can make them during the week when grocery shopping lol

However, if you suggest something in advance and it sounds really tasty - then as long as you don't mind waiting a few weeks when I go back to the store then that's fine :P

I don't know your definition of complex things, but for breakfast generally no. I'm not a morning person and before work I don't want to be spending a lot of time making breakfast.

For dinner I do try a lot of new things but I don't know how complex you'd call them. I'll post what I make for dinner tonight to see what you think.

Your break fast sure yummy, but you need to improve in preparation :)

[align=justify][color=green][font=verdana]Hmm, neat thread. I like the fact that this one is more... in depth than many others in this subforum. Puts mine to shame - but dammit, I can't be bothered with recipes now.

I'll definitely keep an eye on this thread though, especially for the healthier dinners. My ones are a bit more... sure, they're tasty, but I think a bit unhealthy. Have you made Ratatouille before? That's very healthy.

Thanks for the feedback guys, I should have mentioned that I wasn't a professional chef or anything :)

Looking at more meals created in the subgroup versus my own, I guess I do have a pretty basic cooking style, but I try to at least change it up so it keeps things tasty for me. Sometimes you'll find me doing several different kind of similar recipes to see if I can find one I like most.

I also try to keep the recipes fairly easy to keep my budget down and keep the healthy foods up. I typically spend $160 every two weeks for food. But that's food for two people for breakfast, lunch, and dinner along with some snacks. I think I do fairly well with that kind of budget :)



I haven't personally, but I know of it :)



What part do you mean? I know I usually cut open a piece of meat out of fear of not cooking it long enough, and I broke the yolks to my eggs ;) but do you mean something besides that?


One thing I do when I get home from the store is put things in storage bags by serving size. I spend one day making sure everything in the kitchen is ready. Even a big bag of chips/popcorn I'll individually package in little snack bags. One good thing about it is once it's done you can just grab a bag and enjoy it without worrying about the serving size. The other good thing about it is it keeps my fiance from eating the whole bag in one night because 'it makes you feel guilty to grab another little bag after you had one already, and then I'm like shut up guilty conscious! D:'

So one bag of snack food that would last him one night suddenly lasts us about a week.

I also deal with a tiny little kitchen:

I also have a makeshift counter top for food prep that we spent $1 on at TJ Max. I suggest anyone with a tiny kitchen do this:

Herbs are some of the most important parts for me when making dinner, to me it really changes the taste inexpensively (well, once you slowly buy a bunch) without adding fat.

As for what I made for dinner last night: Ginger-lime Chicken

Ingredients:

Directions:

Approximate Nutrition Facts (including that side salad):


The neat thing about this recipe was the fact I used an ingredient I've never used before, which it smelled really nice: Ginger Root. It's really cheap at the farmers market I go to which is .60 cents a pound, while at Wal-Mart it was literally over $3 a pound.

If you ever get some, just pick out some that feels moist and not dry. A little goes a long way, you typically can shred it on a grater and it isn't any harder than a potato when it comes to that.

The meal itself was very nice, the chili oil we used really added a nice kick to it. Fpod loves spicy food and I like it in moderation. But it was very flavorful :)

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Then for dessert, which I rarely ever ever make. I don't have a car right now due to a car accident and it being repaired - so I couldn't just go get something. I got a little creative and made this baby out of things I had in the house: Waffle with ricotta mix

Ingredients:

Directions:

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It's not super healthy, but it was pretty tasty despite my lousy food presentation skills :P it was a nice dessert overall though. Not bad for food around your house, right?

[align=justify][color=green][font=verdana]You should definitely try it. The last one I made was better than the one I made for the thread, at any rate... it'll be nice to see how well you do it over me.

But that ginger-lime chicken looks very nice indeed. I've used ginger a few times in the past, and it definitely works for stirfrys and salad-y things. Plus the dessert - you served it in a glass. That is already reaching upper-tier on things : P

I'll put it as one of my 'meals to get ingredients for' the next time I get paid to see how it goes :)

[font=Verdana][color=blue]Reading at this thread makes me hungry. Fo' real.[/color][/font]

thats waht i mean i thought you didnt intend to broke the egg yoke ;)

Yeah, I didn't intend to. I'm pretty OCD, so if they were meant to be over easy, I would have had to fight really hard to not pitch the mistake, but since he likes them over hard, they were going to be cooked through anyway, so I didn't feel like it really mattered if I messed up :)

this, very much so.



I just have a quick question. I like making pizzas every now and again, but im not that creative really, so I was wondering if you had any healthy suggestions for toppings? I am kind of a poor student though, so I dont have the greatest selection.

Probably my food item that's my biggest weakness is Pizza. When you look at healthy pizza recipes, it can get really expensive really fast versus getting a $5 Little Caesar's pie.

If I'm really really watching what I eat carb wise and limit them, there was one thing that got me the taste of Pizza and the satisfaction of it, but wasn't really pizza at all.

I took low carb tortillas (kind of small ones) and I'd put a little oil in a pan and drop the tortilla in, throw some "pizza shredded cheese" that Kraft has, and a spoon full of diced tomatoes (from a can) and then add "Italian seasoning". I would also add things like turkey pepperoni on it (which is really low in fat, and you don't -have- to get turkey, but it tastes just as good.)

I tossed another tortilla on top, and the cheese binds the two tortillas together and I'd just get both sides a nice golden brown from the small amount of oil in the pan.

The tortillas come 8-10 in a bag, no more than $2, the can of diced tomatoes wouldn't be more than $1, the cheese maybe $3 (look for store brand too!), and if you don't have a seasoning called Italian seasoning at all then you can make your own with basic spices:



You can keep that in a small jar and use whenever.

Obviously it's not traditional pizza, but it does get the craving satisfied and it tastes really yummy too. But you can make really expensive pizza's with wheat dough, fresh veggies and feta cheese, mozzarella cheese, and it really not be that much different than a regular pizza. (and a regular pizza is much cheaper - not as healthy, but the cost is ridiculous otherwise)

Maybe someone has a better idea though :)

My apple pie sundae. I'll post nutrition information and a recipe later :) Gonna make me some jerk chicken tonight.

Oh, and that sundae was soooo good. Good lord.

*edit*

Correction, I'm gonna prep my jerk chicken tonight so it can marinade in the fridge overnight.

I thought of you when I was having a massive craving for pizza tonight! Pizza is one of my biggest weaknesses. I crave it all the tiime and it's so unhealthy for me.

Fpod promised to be the strong will when I craved during the week because we agreed we'd only eat out once a week (Saturday's). Well today I wanted pizza really badly but he said no - I had to stick to my plan.

So I sat around thinking "What the hell can I do that's pizza like but not so unhealthy and full of carbs like pizza....?"

Well, I happened to have spring roll wrappers in my freezer. If you go to an international store or farmers market that sells a lot of foreign foods you can get them a lot cheaper than at walmart of something. I get mine like 20 wrappers for .98 cents.

Since I had those I went to Wal-Mart grabbed a .98 can of pizza sauce, a $2.50 bag of pizza cheese, and $3.50 bag of turkey pepperoni (you won't know the difference, I swear!)

With that I was able to make 8 spring roll wraps with tomato sauce, cheese, and pepperoni and baked them for 10 minutes at 350 degrees. The 8 spring rolls nutrition wise was the equivalent of 2 slices of pepperoni pizza. (and who only eats 2 slices??)

The trick is to actually measure out your serving sizes. Out of the 8 wrappers, I used 2 servings of cheese, 2 servings of sauce, and 2 servings of pepperoni.

The trick with the cheese to get the bang for your buck is actually measuring the grams with a scale versus 1/4 cup (28 grams) (you get waay more cheese if you measure by grams versus the cup). 17 pepperoni was a serving, and 1/4 cup of sauce (about a regular spoon full each wrapper stretched it to the serving size)

It doesn't seem like much, but when you eat 8 of those suckers you're pretty darn satisfied :) The best part is you have plenty of left overs to make more.

So for about $10 you can get way more healthy pizza snacks and get way more out of them.

A tad late reply, but I was too lazy to upload this when I made it a while ago.


I wanted to make my own dough, so I used wholemeal dough to make it healthy-ish.

Mozerella was cheap and I added some cheddar on top. Chicken and bacon cause om nom nom, and some red onions and basil to give it some colour. :3

OOh :3 that looks soo good.

Oh you ..., I can't eat JPEGs! So tired of eating toast and ramen noodles.. ;__;

Oh now that just looks sinful. I am gonna have to try that myself once finals are over for the year.