This week’s Tips and Tricks Friday guest is Megabeth from Veggin’. She shares a few of her resolutions and offers tips on how to incorporate whole grains into our diet. She also tells us how we can trick our dinner guests into eating healthy meals that are also more affordable! I like how she puts it, just don’t tell them there isn’t any meat in the dish and they probably won’t even notice ;)!

Even if you aren’t a vegetarian, Megabeth says, you can still try to create a meatless, creative meal once a week with the ingredients you have at home; you’ll even save a few pennies in the process! Take a look at her Butternut Squash Polenta Bites with Brazilian Avocado Butter, it’s the tasty recipe posted right after the guest post :)!

I’ve been an ovo-lacto vegetarian for a little over 10 years now; however, I think that my resolutions could apply to any diet.

- Use more local produce and products.

Last year, I joined a CSA and it was the best decision I ever made. This weekly delivery of local vegetables and fruits made me focus on planning a menu for the week rather than “playing it by ear”. As a result, I had less wasted food and was more prepared when I hit the grocery store. I am also fortunate enough to work within walking distance from a weekly farmers market. Between the two, I’m able to supplement my fresh vegetable intake and help support the local economy.

- Use more organic foods

I’ve noticed that over the past few years my local grocery stores have started expanding their organic options. At first it was in only the fresh produce area. Now, there are even more organic products in other areas – canned vegetables, chips, dips, snacks and more. We are already bombarded with a lot of chemicals in our daily lives, a few less that we ingest could only serve to help us.

- Check out healthier alternatives

This year, I plan to step away from white rice and cook more brown rice. It’s always tempting to head to the white rice because it’s so much quicker to cook. But, if I cook a large batch of brown rice at the beginning of the week, I just have to heat it up later. This is a small switch that will reap great benefits. I already cook whole wheat pastas and eat whole wheat breads, the switch to brown rice is only natural.

- Try at least one new recipe a week.

I didn’t become a vegetarian overnight. In fact, I phased out meat slowly out of my diet and soon I didn’t miss it at all. What I did do was introduce new vegetarian dishes into my diet. And, with the advent of so many faux meat products, it was pretty painless to live without meat. And, by opening my kitchen to a wider variety of recipes I’ve never been bored.

For meat eaters, I would aim towards trying one meatless dinner a week. You’ll be surprised at the great meals that you can make in any kind of cuisine imaginable – Chinese, Italian, Indian, Tex-Mex and more. Check out your library for vegetarian cookbooks or just search for recipes online.

A meatless meal can be as simple as a bowl of pasta and a jarred pasta sauce with mushrooms or peppers. Served with a salad and garlic bread, you’ve got yourself a wonderful meatless meal. If you have people in your household that must absolutely, positively have meat at every meal, don’t point out that the meal is “vegetarian”. I’m sure if you don’t point out the lack of meat…no one will notice.

You can even try something that looks elaborate but is really easy to make, like the Butternut Squash Polenta Bites with Brazilian Avocado Butter. People will be so impressed with what you’ve pulled off that they won’t notice that it didn’t have meat in it.

I have a confession to make. I don’t eat raw salads very often, though I adore cooked greens; hand over buttery cabbage, kale and spinach! Pasta salads, I love ‘em. Bean salads, they’re delicious…but a part of me feels like I need to have a green shell and move at a snail’s pace in order to enjoy a raw leafy salad, my mom’s old turtle’s favorite food.

For now, I’ll stick to salads like this one…it’s Jen’s Couscous, Shopska Style! Role out the red carpet for this salad’s unique key ingredient: Israeli cous cous. It may look fancy, with all those bright colors provided by some of the best veggies, but Jen from Real Good Taste promises that you can make it in just 20 minutes! Cucumber, tomato, and bell peppers never looked so good, especially when combined with the cous cous that’s finished off with a sprinkling of feta cheese.

If we’re calling this a salad, shouldn’t it have some kind of dressing? Of course, olive oil and red wine vinegar! That’s all you’ll need. The best part about the salad? It can be whatever you want to be, according to Jen, a meal or a side!

So many times I find myself wanting to lather a chicken in barbecue sauce or a spice mix before roasting it. I forget that some of the most delicious and fragrant ingredients come straight from the ground. And I have to confess that when it comes to turkeys and chickens, butter is often the ingredient of choice. I melt the butter with a few spice blends and lather it on the chicken, as if the skin itself doesn’t have enough flavor–and we all know the skin is the best part!

Patty’s Lemon Roasted Chicken with Vegetables will cleanse the palate. It’ll remind you of nature’s simple goodness, the stuff that comes from the soil and isn’t tainted with other strange substances and fillers whose names we can’t pronounce.

Fresh rosemary and lemon are the key ingredients that add vibrant flavor and life to the chicken she roasts in the oven for 45 minutes. To make this meal well-balanced, Patty adds potatoes, carrots, and onions to the casserole dish that she bakes the chicken in. This is a tasty one-casserole dish meal that practically makes itself!

Here’s a classic recipe from Lisa of Magic Sprinkles. It’s so good, it’ll have you singing La-La-Lasagna right after you take the first bite :). Her take on this tasty Italian meal is cheesy, meaty, and hearty. Lisa says she likes lasagna to come out “bubbly hot” so that when she’s about to dive in, she can see “cheese strands stretching tenaciously from plate to fork!”.

If you’ve got a big appetite or a big family, you’ll want to make this lasagna for dinner. Lisa says her La-La-Lasagna will serve 10-12, making this ideal for potlucks, family gatherings, or freezing to enjoy later. Speaking of freezing, when Lisa made her lasagna, it was a toasty 80 degrees and she didn’t want to heat up the house with more cooking, so she went with Ronzoni’s oven-ready noodles…not a bad idea!

To add more flavor to the lasagna sauce, Lisa spiced up a jar of spaghetti sauce with basil and oregano. To make it chunky and delicious, she also threw in a few diced tomatoes. Lasagna isn’t always the quickest thing to make, but Lisa’s recipe and tips will reduce your time in the kitchen…that is, until the lasagna’s served–we don’t know how long you’ll spend at the kitchen table afterward :)! Seconds? Yes, please!

DickandDebbie reinvent fast-food fish and chips with their no-fuss baked Fish and Chips recipe. This guilt-free treat will satisfy your craving for something fresh! Another healthy ingredient that’s used in this recipe, that you might not have even considered using before, is bran oil!

Bran oil is what gives the Panko breadcrumb mix a cohesive and slightly moist texture so that a crispy piece of fish results from the baking process. The freshness comes from the lemon, fresh parsley, and capers — savory ingredients that are also added to the breadcrumb mix. And the potatoes? They’re lightly fried in butter, just a teaspoon of the good stuff does the trick. You’ll have golden potatoes to go with your crispy baked fish in no time.

This is the meal to make on a busy day. It’s light, tasty, and doesn’t require much planning. You can prepare this in about a half hour!

Tres. Leches. Cake. Tres Leches Cake! Tres Leches…Cake! No matter how you break it up as a word, it’s a delicious cake! It’s one of my favorites and brings to mind Summer parties with family. If you’ve never had Tres Leches Cake, I’m sure you’ll be convinced to make it right after you take a look at Carolina’s recipe!

In her blog GabesBabyMama, Carolina says that it took her 6 years to perfect this recipe! So you know it has to be good. I know how frustrating it can be to search and search for that perfect recipe and still have to continuously tweak the recipe so that it’s as delicious as you want it to be. You don’t have to do that with Carolina’s recipe, she’s already done all the hard work :)!

So what are the names of the tres leches that go into Carolina’s cake? Heavy cream, coconut, and evaporated milks soak the white cake over night, making it moist and delicious. The next day, you can enjoy the cake with one of many toppings. Carolina suggests topping the cake with one of the following: Cool whip, fruits, nuts or chocolate! This cake is so delicious, you can even enjoy it plain~

If you’ve resolved to eat healthier this year but are finding it difficult to do so, then you’ll appreciate the following tips and stories from our bloggers.

Here’s a healthy meal that Alisa, The Meat and Potatoes Foodie, put together under an hour. It has texture, flavor and it creatively makes use of chicken breast! Who says chicken breast has to be served plain, anyway?

Alisa knows eating right isn’t about completely restricting yourself, your food can have flavor and still be healthy, let’s check out her story!

I have never been a good dieter. In fact, the few times I attempted dieting in my life directly correlated to me gaining weight. I would do as we’re all told - eliminate this and avoid that, etc. only to end up breaking down and scarfing down a pizza and a bucket of beer two days later. For me, putting restrictions on food was always dangerous territory.

And it’s not that shocking when you think about it. We’ve gotten so confused as a society about food, blindly jumping on the fat free bandwagon, the no carb bandwagon, etc., we’ve forgotten to use common sense. Fat isn’t evil - nor is pasta! There’s no more any ‘lethal’ food than there is a miracle one. So if I have anything worth listening to about healthier eating, it’s to use your head. Eat a lot of vegetables. Limit your sweets. Put balance ahead of worrying about ‘good’ or ‘bad’ foods and things will net out as they should.

It sometimes helps me to apply a ‘what have I eaten today?’ checklist. For example, if I have a salad for lunch, which I often do, then I have a green light to do have a nice well rounded dinner including a protein and vegetables, anything from roasted chicken with sauteed asparagus and some potatoes roasted with olive oil. Again - it’s not like ‘Oh I had a salad for lunch - cheese enchiladas for dinner it is!’ I use common sense. I eat a ton of roasted vegetables (Even my husband, the anti health freak, would take roasted Brussels Sprouts or asparagus over french fries any day.) And I do eat pasta - I just tend to pass up the ones drenched in a heavy cream sauce in favor of light, veggie filled olive oil based dishes. And if I’ve had a carb heavy lunch, than I’ll skip the pasta that night in lieu of something relatively low in carbs such as a turkey burger sans the bun and a salad.

Another minor revelation that helped me in my attitude towards food was getting to know my body. In my opinion, there are two types of people - grazers and meal people. For me, ‘grazing’, i.e. eating 5 to 6 small meals a day rather than 3 larger meals, led to metabolic catastrophe. I found instead of stabilizing my hunger, it jump started it. By dinner time, instead of being satiated, I was ready for a deep fried turkey! Once I finally figured out I was a ‘meal’ girl, life got so much easier.

So I eat 3 meals a day and don’t snack. If I do, I have a piece of fruit or a small bag of pretzels (common sense again), but I usually don’t have to if I keep on a schedule. Dinner is my heaviest meal in actual quantity of food, because I don’t need much for breakfast and only a salad or soup for lunch. Figure out when your body needs its biggest meal and plan accordingly.

Again, I’m not an expert or even someone you should listen to - but for me, applying balance to food and figuring out what kind of eater I was made a big difference in my life. And I hope it does yours.

Balance definitely is key. This is why enjoying a dessert every now and then can be a pleasant experience! Especially when it’s something Dhivya from Culinary Bazaar put together. Dhivya knows how to bake a delicious and lean sweet treat; she also has a few helpful tips to offer us!

1) Never eyeball the oil for cooking. Next time you reach out for cooking oil for a supposedly healthy stir fry, take a measuring spoon to do so. Most of time you would find that so called little oil turns out to be much more than 2-3 tbsp. For most vegetable stir fries, 1/2 tsp of oil is sufficient.

2) Next time you fill out some water to boil, reconsider. Use the steamer instead. Less contact with water, more the nutrition.
Example : Mashed Potatoes can be made equally yummy by steaming the potatoes instead of boiling.

3) Adding lentils and legumes to the diet is not only healthy but also heavy in protein but low in fat. Such proteins fill us faster making us eat less and also not worry about calories since they are very low in bad calories.

4) Desserts need not be avoided. Little substitutions like using honey instead of sugar, using egg whites instead of whole eggs, using whole wheat pastry flour instead of plain refined flour makes a huge difference.

Here are a few more of Dhivya’s desserts:
Sakkara Pongal: Traditional South Indian Sweet Lentil and Milk Stew

Poli: Sweet South Indian Flatbread

You know how difficult it can be to take a huge cheesecake to a party. Transporting the cheesecake is a challenge in itself, and trying to keep the sticky fingers away is also an arduous task. Then, when it’s time to serve the cheesecake, the kid in all of us starts accusing the server of handing out the biggest slice to someone else!

Oh, even though you might not say it out loud, I know you’ve looked at your aunt’s dessert plate from across the table with an accusing eye ;0)! Now you don’t have to! Well, you might still accuse the baker of unfairly pouring the cheesecake into the cupcake pan, but I’m sure Amy from Calm in the Kitchen is always a fair baker :)!

Amy’s Mini Pumpkin Cheesecakes will be devoured in seconds, folks will be too busy eating to notice anything else. They’re cute and perfect party food, plus, you won’t need a knife to serve ‘em. Amy made these with a graham cracker crust but says she’ll make them with a gingersnap crust next time, I bet they’re delicious either way. This is a mini pumpkin cheesecake after all, who can deny the power of cheesecake? And I’m thinking it’s even be better than pumpkin pie!

When I can’t decide where to go, I usually end up in the kitchen. I busy myself by experimenting with different ingredients and pray that something edible comes of it. The real dilemma arises when I can’t decide what to make! So many ingredients, only so much time, but so many new recipes I want to try! Oh, and I have to remember that even though I might want to make something with a twist, my husband’s craving Italian food…

Catherine’s Chicken with Sausage, Orzo, and Chickpeas will come to my rescue in that kind of situation. If I want chicken and my husband wants sausage, we can have our cake and eat it too! If he wants a taste of the Mediterranean and I’m craving ingredients used South of the border…we’re still safe with Catherine’s recipe!

In her blog Living the Gourmet, Catherine explains how her dish brings so many different flavors together. You have the cilantro and parsley…then jalapeno, honey and even ketchup are added to this flavorful dish which is sure to fill you up, even the orzo is hearty!

Laura’s Cheesy Sausage Potato Cups with Yogurt Mustard Sauce is a winner. In her blog Real Good Food, she mentions that this is the recipe she made up to enter into a recipe contest. The contest required the use of dairy products; she went above and beyond the ‘call of duty’ by using cheddar cheese and yogurt!

And Laura doesn’t just throw in the cheese and yogurt. She combines the cheese with a savory mixture of sausage and peppers. She tops of this hearty appetizer and snack with a yogurt sauce that she made herself. I never would’ve thought to mix yogurt and mustard, but it works! The sauce adds depth to her already delicious potato cups.

One of the great things about her homemade sausage cups is that they are so versatile. Not only can you add your own special touch by combining the sausage with your personal favorite ingredients, but you can serve the cups in so many ways. They’re colorful, fun, and flavorful–sounds like the perfect side dish or party appetizer to me!