Spaghetti Squash Spaghetti (Paleo)

I know there’s a million recipes out there for paleo spaghetti. This is one of my favorites. It was before I even decided to dab my toes in the paleo world. I have made spaghetti squash a million ways, spaghetti, mac n cheese, buttered, buttered & herbed, you name it. It’s so delicious and versatile.

Spaghetti Squash
Ingredients:
Spaghetti squash
16oz chicken stock
4Tbsp butter (preferably organic and grass-fed)
Herbs of your choice (I used parsley)

Directions:
1. Preheat oven to 375 degrees.
2. Slice squash in half.
3. Remove the seeds from the center.
4. Place flesh down in a baking dish.
5. Pour chicken stock into the dish.
6. Bake for 50 minutes or until soft.
7. Use a fork to break the squash out of the shell.
8. Place butter and herbs in a bowl to melt.

Spaghetti Sauce
I’m a total cheater here and prepare while your squash is roasting, about 20 minutes left)
Ingredients:
1lb hamburger (preferably grass fed, organic)
Garlic
Onion
Store-bought jar of spaghetti sauce (I used garden vegetable)
Small can tomato sauce
Small can tomato paste

Directions:
1. Brown hamburger with garlic and onion.
2. Once the hamburger is browned, add jar of sauce with a little water.
3. Add tomato sauce and tomato paste.
4. Heat until heated through.
5. Let simmer until squash is ready.

Pour the sauce over the squash “noodles” to your liking. Enjoy!

Another Quick & Easy Paleo Dinner (Paleo, Whole30)

Here’s another quick and easy paleo dinner! I love things that are quick and easy. When you are only cooking for one person it makes it more worth it when you don’t have to spend hours in the kitchen cooking.

This dinner included chicken thighs, cauliflower, and sweet potatoes. It was delicious. I really, truly, loved this meal. I ate it for like 4 days! HA! I wanted to tell you guys about what made this meal so quick though. Frozen veggies. That’s right, straight out of the freezer. They come from a company called Stahlbush Island Farms. They provide farm fresh, sustainably grown in the USA veggies.

Stahlbush Island Farms is located in Oregon and uses environmentally friendly farming methods for growing high quality fruits, vegetables, legumes, and grains available. They ban GMO’s, protect wildlife habitats, uphold the very highest food safety standards, promote biodiversity, rotate crops for plant health, and grow cover crops to enrich soil. Now here’s the coolest thing, in my opinion, they make their own electricity! They make enough green energy for everything they do. After every harvest they add the remaining fruit, vegetable, legume, and grain material to their Biogas Plant.

When making the frozen veggies I put them into the Pampered Chef Microwave Cooker and cook for the recommended time on the back of the packaging. They always come out perfectly. It really helps when you get home later than expected and they can be put on the table in a hurry. My kind of meal!

What shortcuts do you guys use when making dinner?

Monkey Salad (Paleo, Whole30)

I forgot where I originally found this recipe, but it is amazing. It’s such a quick way to make a breakfast a little bit bigger to help make it through the morning. Now I must admit, I go to work at 6am. I am not a morning person, but I get off of work at 2:30pm. It totally makes it worth it! So I have this some mornings when I’m needing a little extra fuel to make it through the morning.

Monkey Salad

Monkey Salad
1 banana
Cashews
Coconut (I use Dang Brand toasted coconut)

Slice up banana, sprinkle with cashews and coconut. Give it a slight stir and enjoy!

I usually try to eat at least one cashew and a couple flakes of coconut with each slice of banana. That’s just me though. It has a nice little tropical taste. I love it. It would be good if you were having a sweet tooth attack or just needing a little something. This recipe is paleo and Whole30 compliant. Though Whole30 says that you do not need to eat fruit, if you choose to you can eat this!

Do you have any snacks that help you make it through that final push until lunch? What are your go to snacks?

Breakfast for a Week

Sometimes on Sunday’s I make breakfast for the whole week. When I do this it usually involves sausage and eggs, probably 2 of my favorite breakfast items! I usually just make a little scramble.

Browning the Sausage

This recipe is so simple, first you brown the sausage, then add eggs (as many as you think look right), cook until all the way cooked. Then serve on a plate with salsa. SO SIMPLE!

You could also serve this with avocado, sweet potato, fruit salad or a variety of other delicious things! After I breakfast on Sunday I dish up the leftovers for the rest of the week. It makes breakfast easy to grab and go out the door. Perfect.

Do you guys have any thing you do to make the rest of the week a tiny bit easier?

 

Quick & Easy Paleo

Here is a go to meal for me when I have a busy night. I made this on Monday. Monday was insanely busy. I went from work to crossfit to home to mow my lawn/clean up after the storm and then go play softball. Yeah, my body was so ready for bed when I got home! We won’t mention that I had the long weekend at the Bucking Horse Sale.

Anyway, onto the meal. When I need something quick I usually turn to sweet potatoes roasted in the oven, another vegetable and a protein. In this case it was chicken thighs, sweet potato and asparagus. Can I just say that I’m going to be heart broken when asparagus is no longer on sale. I love asparagus season. Anyway, I digress, I roast the sweet potatoes in the oven and I fried the chicken thighs on the stove in olive oil and seasoned with lemon pepper. They taste wonderful!

What do you guys do for dinner on crazy busy nights? Do you give in and go out to eat? I try really hard not to eat out unless it’s at a good restaurant. It’s been a habit that was really hard to break but once it was broken it was a place I never wanted to go back to. So now I look for easy meals to make like this one.

Chicken Fajitas

Last week I had a serious craving for chicken fajitas! It was all I could do not to go to my favorite Mexican restaurant and get some. I thought though, that it would just be overwhelming with temptations that are not paleo. While I am not 100% paleo yet, I am trying not to fall into my old habits. So instead of going to the restaurant I made them at home! Easy peasy.

No chips and salsa, no tortillas, no cheese, no sour cream. Awesome. All the temptations were gone. So here’s how I made them.

Ingredients:
2 bell peppers
1 onion
2 chicken breasts
taco seasoning

1. Chop the bell peppers and onions.
2. Heat olive oil (not extra virgin) in a skillet on the stove.
3. Add onions and bell peppers

Veggie Mix

4. Chop chicken into strips
5. When the peppers and onions start to soften, add chicken to the pan
6. Cover and cook until the chicken is cooked through
7. Add taco seasoning and water (the water helps to disperse the seasoning all over the chicken and veggies)
8. Serve on a bed of lettuce, topped with guacamole and salsa

Chicken Fajita Salad

This dinner definitely satisfied the craving for chicken fajitas without blowing my diet. It was wonderful the next day for lunch as well. The flavors just merry and get even better the longer it sits. Delish! I got to the point where I quit eating the lettuce and would just eat the chicken and veggies. YUM! It’s very versatile. You could also make paleo tortillas or serve with plantain chips. Both would be great paleo options.

Have you guys made any yummy paleo recipes? Is there any substitutes you use to paleo-fy things?

Weekend Breakfast

This last weekend I made a super yummy breakfast! I got some breakfast sausage from the butcher at my local grocery store and decided that I would make deconstructed breakfast burritos! Why not?! The tortillas are usually high in calories and well since I’m mostly paleo, they are not very paleo friendly, so the decision was pretty easy. Now, this isn’t totally paleo and depending on where you read it may not be very paleo at all, but that’s okay by me.

So I fried up the breakfast sausage, potatoes and eggs. Then I topped it with cheddar cheese and salsa. It was great! The best part is that I have breakfast for the entire week. I split all the leftovers into 5 containers. I’m so excited to have a breakfast to grab and go on the way out of the house in the mornings.

Weekend Breakfast Hash

I usually cook a bigger breakfast on the weekends. It’s kind of my thing. I really enjoy taking the time to make a breakfast and savoring every bite while watching crap TV and drinking a cup of coffee. It definitely is the way to start the weekend off right. Then reality sets in and you have to do laundry, clean the floors, pick up the rooms, etc. It’s a never ending cycle.

Leftovers?

The other morning I had a ton of leftover asparagus. Now, I LOVE asparagus, so I thought why not have it for breakfast as well? So I made two eggs in my Pampered Chef Microwave Egg Cooker (it’s a stone, not plastic) and a couple Applegate Chicken & Apple sausages and BAM instant breakfast.

Leftover Breakfast

See, doesn’t this look just delicious! It was probably one of my favorite breakfasts ever. I usually just have the eggs and sausage, but adding the asparagus was probably one of the most ingenious ideas I have ever had. I should probably go stock up on some more before it goes out of season and I can’t afford to eat it anymore. It’s been on sale so much lately that I cannot help myself. I probably have it at least twice a week, plus leftovers.

My favorite way to cook the asparagus is to roast it in the oven. I just drizzle with olive oil, salt and pepper and put it in the oven at 425 for 10 minutes. It comes out perfect every time. I don’t remember where I found the way to cook it, but I have been doing it for years!

What is your favorite in season vegetable right now? Are you finding new ways to eat it? What about new ways to prepare it?

Quick Paleo Dinner

Last night I wasn’t really feeling the whole cooking thing. I really struggle with the motivation after going to the store for some reason. However, last night I would not allow myself to give into temptation and get pizza slices at Lucky’s Market. They have amazing pizza, but it’s most definitely not Paleo. So…Lucky’s weekly ad had pork sirloin chops on sale as well as some asparagus. I think you can see where this is going. So for dinner last night I made the pork chops, asparagus, and a baked sweet potato.

Let me just say it was AMAZING. I don’t know why it’s so hard for me to realize the simplest meals are usually my favorite. Here is a picture of what I had, YUM!

So it just goes to show that a meal can be pretty quick, maybe not as quick as a drive thru or picking up pizza at the store, but it was still pretty painless to throw a couple potatoes in the oven and a couple chops on the stove. I got some good Netflix watching in while the food was cooking and of course that is also relaxing, in my world.

Recipe aka Dinner Prep:
1. Preheat oven to 425
2. Wash up 2 sweet potatoes
3. Stab the potatoes all over
4. Place on a foil lined baking sheet
5. Bake for 30 minutes
6. Turn the potatoes and bake an additional 30 minutes
7. Place the pork chops in a fry pan on the stove over medium heat
8. Cook until the chops are no longer pink in the middle
9. Wash the asparagus
10. Bend until one snaps, to be a guide for where to cut the rest of the bunch
11. Cover in olive oil, salt and pepper
12. Place in the oven with the sweet potatoes when there are 10 minutes remaining
13. EAT!

Just a quick note on Lucky’s Market here in Billings. It has been a wonderful addition to the grocery stores here. We have been sorely lacking when it comes to affordable places to get great produce and other Paleo items. I’ve been able to find almost everything I’ve looked for there, including, ghee, Enjoy Life chocolate chips, coconut oil and organic produce. Another huge plus about Lucky’s is they have double ad Wednesdays. So I try to make my lunch/dinner menu based on the ads for the week. It works out pretty well so far.

Clyde had his normal turkey and sweet potato dry dog food. I don’t think he’s impressed. Oh well what’s a girl to do?

Have you guys ever made a super easy dinner that helped you realize it’s not so bad to cook for yourself? What drives you to avoid the drive thru or the deli counter at the store? Have you in the Billings area tried Lucky’s yet?