“WHAT’S IN YOUR POCKET?”
All tagged healthyish
This quick, healthy weeknight meal comes together in 30 minutes and brings a lot of color and flavor onto the table. The soup is great on its own, but incredibly hearty when dumplings are cooked in the blue-ish broth infused with garlic and scallions. Top with your favorite fresh herbs and pickles and a hefty spoonful of chili oil.
Last July, I started deleting my instagram account daily. I’d download it in the morning and set a timer for 15 minutes before checking in, post a picture if I had one to share, respond to DMs and comments, comment on posts in my feed, and then delete the app until the evening, when I’d do the same thing all over again.
Here’s the gist: kale and scallions are cooked to a crisp in olive oil or ghee while lemon juice and salt marinate the remaining raw kale in a separate bowl. The trick to charring kale is making sure it is dry when it goes into the pan and leaving it alone for longer than you think you should before stirring it. After the kale in the skillet is plenty crisp, I add a healthy pour of maple syrup into the pan and let the liquid cook down and caramelize onto the leaves. The charred kale reduces to about half its original mass, and when it is added to the bowl with the lemony kale, the uncooked half is ever-so-slightly steamed by the hot kale, offering what looks like a smaller yield overall— a.k.a. the most flavorful way to put two times the kale into my body in just one sitting. A beautiful component to an easy weeknight meal.
Making stewed black-eyed peas and collard greens for New Year’s this year slipped my mind until midday on the first of January when I realized we had no “good luck food” on the docket for the day. Too hungry to wait for a pot of beans to cook, I grabbed a can of Black-eyed peas from HEB and made a black-eyed pea avocado salsa to stuff into fresh collard wraps with quinoa, chicken, herbs and pecans. So this year we skirted the traditional beans and greens, but still managed to fit black-eyed peas and collards into a fast, good luck meal.
Healthyish is my new mantra this summer. How can I stuff my face with delicious pocket foods while keeping my diet well-rounded? How can I make healthy Mexican food so I’m not wanting to undo the button on my jeans after eating? How can I use up the turkey picadillo I made earlier in the week? These healthyish turkey taco and black bean empanadas are the way to go!
Sweet potato empanadas with pineapple and coconut, inspired by a recipe for a community cookbook in South Texas.
