This week I never got around to doing a meal plan.. le sigh.. Luckily, that’s what Pinterest is for! I found this pretty easy sounding GF pizza crust using quinoa, so I thought I would give it a try. I soaked the quinoa overnight; I decided to make two because I always figure if you’re going to make a mess, might as well make double the mess! I omitted the garlic and seasoned it with dried rosemary and some tumeric. To give it a little more flavor, I used garlic olive oil to cook it in instead of just regular. I cooked it on the stove in a full size cast iron skillet and thought it worked great!
I froze one and let the other one sit out, awaiting toppings for dinner. For the sauce, I mashed up half of an avocado with some lime juice, garlic olive oil, and salt and pepper. Then I topped it with tomatoes, black olives, spinach, mozzarella cheese, feta cheese, and some dried rosemary. It was awesome!! It is pretty filling crust, so even though it was only about 9 inches, I still was very satisfied just having half for dinner and saving the other half for the next day.
I also made tacos this week, which really weren’t any different than I always made them: with no taco seasoning. I’ve never liked taco seasoning, so several years ago I just started making my meat separate from the hubby’s and that works fine. I added smoked paprika, tumeric, some garlic olive oil spray, and salt and pepper. I used corn tortillas from Trader Joe’s and just warmed them up on the stove.
Tonight I made Gouda & Spinach Stuffed Pork Chops- they turned out great! I found the recipe in a random magazine and made some adjustments based on what I had on hand and my dietary needs. The recipe called for thick pork chops and we only had small, thin ones, so instead of trying to stuff anything into them, I decided to just stack them! This worked out very well, though eating “one” was really too much since it was really two pork chops, so we each just ate a half. Here’s my recipe:
6 thin pork chops
3 slices smoked Gouda
3 handfuls of torn, fresh spinach
1-2 tbsp dijon mustard (Hy-Vee brand actually is low FODMAP safe)
1/2 cup or so of almond meal
Preheat oven to 400 degrees and spray a glass dish. I spread a small squirt of mustard on each pork chop then dipped it in the almond meal. I placed one pork chop, almond meal down, in the dish then put a slice of smoked Gouda and then piled on a handful of spinach. Then I stacked another pork chop, almond meal up, on top. Cooked for 35 minutes. Husband approved!! Though I do have to admit, I think anything you put that smoked Gouda on is going to taste good 🙂
I’m doing some travelling over the next week and so eating will be an interesting task. I’m mostly worried about this weekend and what to eat on the road the day before my half marathon. I think for my pre-race breakfast my plan is just to have some Erewhon brown rice crisps and a small clementine, but I know that the entire day before I’ll need to be careful too. Might just be eating some carefully selected salads!! I did just make up another batch of granola, so I’ll have that on hand for snacking at least. This round I followed the oats & amaranth granola recipe that I used before except instead of amaranth I used sesame seeds. I also decided to experiment by adding some almond butter, yes I know I said that it may be giving me problems, but I just can’t live 100% without it and I figured having only about 4 tbsp throughout the whole granola shouldn’t bother me too much. The reason I decided to add it was that I really want this granola to have some good chunks in it! It has been successfully crunchy ever since adding the egg white, but it has been crumbly and therefore hard to snack on. Good for cereal and on yogurt, but not so good for trying to just eat out of the bag 🙂 It is cooling now, so we’ll see if adding the almond butter was successful or not!