Protein Packed Breakfast Bowl

Mmmm. Breakfast. My favorite meal. Breakfast for breakfast is amazing enough, but breakfast for lunch or dinner... Unbeatable. While I really enjoy a good waffle or fat-laden omelet from time to time, during the week, I try to come up with food combinations that will keep me fueled all day and help repair my muscles from working out (not to mention the muscle pains that come from chasing and lifting a very healthy-sized two year old boy).

I recently stumbled upon this snack on Pinterest and it inspired me to turn it into a breakfast bowl by adding an egg and omitting a couple of other ingredients. I had it for breakfast this morning and (I promise) I have been filled with energy all day and have not had any potato chip/Oreo/peanut butter out of the jar cravings. Not to mention, this healthy, delicious, filling breakfast takes less than 10 minutes to put together.

Ingredients

• 1 large egg
• 1/2 avocado, sliced
• 1/2 C low fat cottage cheese
• 1/2 C chopped tomatoes
• Freshly ground pepper to taste
• Cayenne pepper to taste (optional. I personally like almost every food to be spicy)

Directions

1. Scramble egg to desired consistency, adding pepper and cayenne pepper if desired.
2. Combine all ingredients in a bowl. 
3. Sprinkle on more black pepper, if desired.

Chocolate Chia Seed Pudding

I wrote a post a little over a year ago about the health benefits of chia seeds. In short, the have tons of fiber, calcium, and protein and they give you energy. I try to incorporate them into my lunch as often as possible so I can avoid the feeling of exhaustion that comes along with the 2pm hour. And in case you're wondering, it always helps with my energy in the afternoon.

The other day, I was reading a post on Mind Body Green (love this site!) and it mentioned that eating chia seeds before bed can lead to lucid dreaming! Which translates to REM sleep, which means you're going to wake up feeling amazing the next day. And the older I get, the more I believe that a good night's sleep can make everything else fall into place. The website also mentioned making a chia seed pudding and replacing your evening snack with it.

Ingredients

• 1/4 C dry chia seeds
• 1 C vanilla almond milk
• 1-2 T brown sugar (you can omit brown sugar entirely if you don't have much of a sweet tooth)
• 2 T cocoa powder
• 1-2 T honey

Directions

1. Mix together chia seeds, brown sugar, and cocoa powder.
2. Mix in almond milk and make sure to mix thoroughly, so all ingredients are well blended.
3. Put mixture into fridge and stir every now and then to make sure seeds absorb the moisture.
4. Leave in fridge for at least two hours (or overnight to eat for breakfast!) and before serving, drizzle with honey to taste.
5. Enjoy!

Pumpkin Spice Smoothie

Good morning! I got to bed late last night (10:45) and woke up early (5:26). I've managed to pick up the house, drink some coffee, chat with the husband, squeeze in an hour-long workout (after four days of absolute SLACKING), and make a new kind of smoothie to add to my list of favorite foods!

For those of you who are looking forward to fall because everything pumpkin spice will be available, well, you're in luck. This smoothie is DECADENT. And of course, it's totally healthy. Has anyone heard how amazing pumpkins are for your health? They're packed with fiber, beta-carotene, and one cup has more potassium than a banana. So... let's tally up what that will do for you. It will help your skin, your eyes, your hair, your digestive system, and your muscles, just to mention a few things. And the list goes on way beyond what I have listed here.

Another good thing? It's a smoothie so it only takes five minutes to throw together.

Ingredients

• 1/2 C pumpkin puree (From a can. YES. The stuff you use for pumpkin pie is just plain ol' pumpkin. No sugar, salt, etc. Just mashed up pumpkin.)
• 3/4 C vanilla almond milk
• 1 T honey
• 4-6 ice cubes
• 1 t pumpkin pie spice

Directions

1. Put ingredients into blender.
2. Blend until smooth.
3. Drink up and feel like a million bucks.

Recipe makes roughly 1 1/2 cups and has only 178 calories. YES!

(Sources: As usual, About.com's Calorie Counter and Huffington Post.)

Quinoa Parfait Recipe

Two healthy, delicious recipes in a row?! Yup, yup, yup! I couldn't resist trying this today and blogging about it tonight so maybe some of you can try it out tomorrow morning!

This one I found on PopSugar.com and kind of adapted it. Partially because I don't use some of the ingredients (i.e. Stevia) and partially because there's no way I could eat that much in one serving. And I can eat a lot. I also keep looking to quinoa to help give me protein because I don't eat a ton of meat anymore and I manage to get way too many carbs between my love of bread and all of the fruits and veggies we eat in our family. Why quinoa for protein? Well, because it's a complete protein. A complete protein is one that has all of the nine essential amino acids that the body doesn't make on it's own. A lot of protein sources don't contain all nine. More details on complete proteins here.

Onto the recipe!

Ingredients

• 1/8 C dry quinoa (cook it as usual in 1/4 cup water and it will expand to about 1/4 of a cup.)
• 1/2 C fat-free yogurt
• 1 t honey
• 1/2 t ground cinnamon
• 1/3 C blueberries
• 1/3 C chopped strawberries
• 1 ripe peach, chopped

Directions

1. While quinoa is cooking, mix yogurt, honey, and cinnamon.
2. In a separate container, mix blueberries, strawberries, and chopped peaches.
3. Layer quinoa, yogurt mixture, and fruit mixture. Repeat.

Calories in this one? 272. Paired with a medium boiled egg for breakfast, you're not even close to cracking a huge 400 calorie breakfast, packed with healthy protein and low in sugar.

(All calorie values from caloriecount.about.com.)

An Update, A Fitness Buddy, and Meal Planning

Yoga: still loving it. I'm not pretending I'm good at it, because I'm not. But I love it.

My husband bought a really kickass (and manly) spin bike with his Christmas money. He wakes up early every morning to work out. Because of this, I end up waking up early to work out. So my workout, shower, and breakfast is now completed by 5:30am. NICE. Now I have time to do the dishes/laundry/vacuuming before the little one wakes up for the day. Or I can sit and sip my coffee and watch Desperate Housewives on Netflix. Either way, it's fulfilling. And either way, the earlier the workout, the easier my day goes.

And meal planning. Friends, if you have not jumped on this bandwagon yet, I strongly encourage you to do so. We have managed to save money and eat healthier because of this. I've managed to save hours of time that would have usually been spent in a grocery store buying odds and ends. In a totally surprising twist, we've managed to eat classier meals as well. Not just "Boom, here's your meatloaf!" but also, "Hey, here's this baby spinach and goat cheese frittata with a sweet potato hash!" We still eat meatloaf, just not as frequently.

So meal planning. What a pain, huh? I've finally come up with a formula that makes it more simple. Share? Well of course!

Breakfasts: Pick out three or four healthy breakfasts that you like. Choose a breakfast for each day, never let the same breakfast be eaten two days in a row. To me, monotony leads to eating bad-for-me stuff. To the left is a picture of this week's breakfast meal plan for myself. (Saturdays we always eat something bad-pancakes, cinnamon rolls, etc. and Sundays we eat light because we go to church and eat donuts.)

Here is a link to some really yummy (and healthy) ways to prepare oatmeal.

Here is my link to my low-cal breakfast burritos.

And if you want a healthy, satisfying breakfast to take with you, here is a link to overnight oats.

Lunches: I hate coming up with lunch ideas. My current rotation: smoothie and hummus with veggies one day, black bean burger on one of those thin, 100-calorie buns and sweet potato fries the next, and a big, healthy salad the third day. Then I start the rotation over again.

Dinners: Here is where I go to Pinterest and find healthy, easy, seemingly-fancy recipes. Every Saturday, I sit down, write out the entire week's meal plan and a grocery list. I'm trying to teach myself to remember about the food we already have. I try to use leftovers accordingly so we don't throw much away and have to spend more money. Yuck. Who wants to spend more? Here's a picture of this week's dinner plan.

A link for the OUTRAGEOUSLY good spinach, goat cheese, and sweet potato frittata.

The curried butternut squash recipe.

And the peach, feta, and chicken pizza recipe.


So yes. Meal planning is kind of like watching paint dry. To me it is at least... But it has a huge payoff. I highly recommend you give it a shot.

Have a lovely three-day weekend, friends!

Filling, Easy 300 Calorie Breakfast

Good morning! I haven't posted for a while, I know. I guess you'd call it writer's block. I couldn't think of anything that wasn't totally repetitive to blog about, so I just didn't write anything. This morning, as I was making one of my regular breakfasts, I realized, "HEY! That's it! Write about your miracle breakfast burrito!" So here it is!

Ingredients

• 1 100 calorie La Tortilla Factory tortilla
• 2 T Onions
• 1 T Salsa
• 1 Large Egg
• 1 T Greek Yogurt (Or my fave-Mountain High Yoghurt)
• Dash of garlic powder
• Dash of pepper

So I think we can all figure out how to make a breakfast burrito. Saute the onions, throw the beaten egg into the pan and sprinkle on the garlic powder and pepper, cook til it's your favorite texture of scrambled eggs (I like to burn mine a little). Then slather the salsa and Greek yogurt on the tortilla shell, and put on the eggs. Wrap up and eat it. Again, I'm confident that most of my readers can probably handle this and might be thinking, "Chels, why are you posting something so simple?" Well. Here's why.

Truly a miracle. Low-cal wraps!

That 100 cal tortilla shell is 90 CALORIES LESS than a regular tortilla shell. Using Greek yogurt (16 calories) instead of sour cream (26 calories)? You're saving yourself almost half the calories. Garlic powder? Oh yes, it definitely has more calories than the comparable salt BUT remember. Salt is sodium. Sodium is something that we do not need to add to our diets, as there is enough sodium in everything we eat naturally. So while one teaspoon of salt has 97% of the recommended daily intake of sodium and 0 calories, garlic powder has 0% of the recommended daily intake of sodium and only 9 calories per teaspoon. So a dash of it is less than one calorie. I think we can spare that one calorie, right guys? And also-don't ever forget that sodium makes you retain more water which equals bloating. So when it all shakes out, your breakfast burrito is only 227 calories and you've used ingredients that are going to propel you into your day and not drag you down.

Add half of a cup of raspberries (32 calories) and a couple cups of coffee (each with 1/2 tablespoon of creamer, even) and you're still under 300 calories for breakfast at 294 calories total.

Have a GREAT Monday, everyone!