Year: 2013

Marinated Vegetable Salad (Vegan & Gluten Free)

Melissa King 33 Comments

Marinated Vegetable Salad.  This is a dish we have been making for a long time.  We got the recipe from my mother-in-law.  I love cold salads.

I recently wrote 5 Quick and Easy Salad Ideas that included a lot of my other salad recipes.  They taste great and don’t take much effort at all.  My kind of recipe if you haven’t noticed by now!

 

Marinated Vegetable Salad

 

We used dried beans for the recipe and just soaked them all in one big jar overnight, and then boiled them in the morning for about 15-20 minutes until they became soft.

Then, we let them cool before putting this recipe together.  Dried beans are far cheaper and taste much cleaner too.  I never noticed that until I started eating them on a regular basis.

 

Marinated Vegetable Salad

 

Want to make this recipe?  Watch the video below.  For more videos, you can subscribe to my You Tube Channel.

Looking for more salad recipes?

 

Marinated Vegetable Salad

Marinated Vegetable Salad

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Prep Time 10 min

Ingredients

  • 2 cups chickpeas
  • 2 cups kidney beans
  • 2 cups pinto beans
  • 2 cups corn (I used frozen)
  • 3 -4 T red wine vinegar
  • 2 T olive oil
  • 2 garlic cloves
  • 1/2 tsp salt
  • 1/2 tsp oregano
  • 1/2 tsp cumin
  • 3 green onions chopped
  • 3 stalks celery
  • 1/4 cup flat leaf parsley chopped

Instructions

  1. Whisk together the vinegar, oil, garlic, oregano, cumin and salt in a bowl.
  2. Add the beans and corn.
  3. Then, add the onions,celery and parsley and toss to coat.

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Recipe Notes

You can eat this right away, but for the best flavor, please let sit in the fridge for at least 8 hours. That’s it. Easy! This makes about 6 good size servings servings. It should keep for at least a week in the fridge.

Marinated Vegetable Salad

Blueberry Oatmeal Waffles (Vegan)

Melissa King 49 Comments

Blueberry Oatmeal Waffles. So I got this waffle iron about a month ago.  My first few attempts at healthy waffles were epic fails.  Today I finally came out with a winning recipe!

These blueberry oatmeal waffles came out great!  My kids really enjoyed having these blueberry oatmeal waffles.  I hope you enjoy them too!

 

Blueberry Oatmeal Waffles

 

I got some organic blueberries from Sprouts yesterday and they were so good!  Blueberries are on the “dirty list, so I only buy them organic and in season.  I haven’t had them in months.  When I saw them sitting there, I had to snatch up a couple pints.

So glad I did because they were sweet and juicy!  We got some yummy strawberries too.  So good!  Waffles and pancakes are super easy to whip up fast.  I actually mix the dry ingredients the night before, so it takes just a minute or two to add the wet in the morning.

My daughter made a happy plate, as we like to call it around here.  She loved them!  If you don’t have a waffle iron, try one of my Homemade Granola Recipes or my Peanut Butter Pancakes for your Sunday morning breakfast.

Blueberry Oatmeal Waffles

Blueberry Oatmeal Waffles

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Prep Time 10 min Cook Time 10 min

Ingredients

  • 3/4 cup oat flour
  • 1/2 cup spelt flour
  • 1 1/2 cups milk (I used almond milk)
  • 1/2 cup rolled oats
  • 2 tsp baking powder
  • 1 T maple syrup
  • 2 T coconut oil
  • 1 egg (I used a flax egg replacer)
  • 1/3 cup shredded coconut
  • 3/4 cup blueberries (I used fresh)

Instructions

  1. Preheat the waffle iron.
  2. Mix all the dry ingredients together in one bowl.
  3. Mix wet in another.
  4. Add wet to dry and mix well.
  5. Fold in blueberries.
  6. Spray the waffle iron with oil before spooning batter on each time.
  7. I used a 1/2 cup measuring cup to scoop the batter onto the waffle iron.

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Recipe Notes

I got 4 large waffles out of my batch. If you have leftovers, you can freeze them in a plastic container with parchment in between each waffle.

Getting a Spouse on Board to Clean Eating

Melissa King 13 Comments

This has come up a few times now.  So, I thought I would write a post about getting a reluctant spouse to change their eating habits.  Sometimes, they can be worse than the kids!  I am fortunate enough to have an amazing husband who has been on board since day one.  His high cholesterol and scary family history was enough for him to change his ways.  His cholesterol dropped over 76 points in 4 months of eating clean with no meds!

veggies

1.  Don’t change everything at once.  That can sound overwhelming.  Instead, try baby steps to make the change a little smoother.  Maybe you can change one thing a week.  My first thing I changed was, I stopped buying packaged granola bars.  I just started making my own.  After that, it was processed sugars.

2.  You can use healthier processed foods as a stepping stone.  Maybe you can stop buying Kellogg’s cereals and start buying Nature’s Path Organic.

3.  Educate your spouse by suggesting books to read like In Defense of Food, or even movies like Food Inc to watch.  That movie is an eye opener for so many.

4.  Hide healthy foods in normally not so healthy ones.  You can sub out white flour in recipes with white whole wheat flour and maybe move on to spelt flour.  Or make a homemade spaghetti sauce that had ground up veggies inside.

5.  Let your spouse have a say in the shopping.  Perhaps if they have a choice to pick out some healthy things, it may not feel like as much of a power war.

6.  If you have young children, maybe you can explain that you want to set a better example for them.  I can tell you that is the number one reason why we are on a journey to clean eating.

If anyone has any other suggestions or maybe something that worked for your family, please feel free to add in the comment section of this post.

 

Vitamin Water Exposed

Melissa King 36 Comments

I used to live on these things.  This was my favorite flavor too.

SAMSUNG

Let’s see what is in this stuff.  Looking at the nutrition facts, the sugar content is already alarming.  32 grams = about 8 tsp of sugar, all processed.

SAMSUNG

Crystalline fructose is derived from corn and is 98% fructose.  It is used in place of high fructose corn syrup(HFCS) and is 20 % sweeter than table sugar and 5 % sweeter than HFCS.  In addition, there is more sugar in the form of cane sugar.  Basically, the main components of this drink are sugars.  The other ingredient that bothers me is “natural flavor.”  That is too elusive to me.  Did you also know that Coca Cola owns Vitamin Water?  Coca Cola is one of those companies that opposes GMO labeling because they really don’t want you to know what is in their products.  You can make your own fruit infused water by filling up a bottle with water and adding fresh fruit.  I like to add oranges and pomegranates. Strawberries are good too. Let the water sit overnight and it will have a nice taste in the morning.  Much better than this bottle of processed sugar.  Drinking one of these is almost as bad as a can of coke, which has 39 grams of sugar.

Homemade Clif Bars (Vegan and Gluten Free)

Melissa King 194 Comments

Homemade Clif Bar recipe.  When I made my Healthy Cookie Dough Bites the other day, I thought the flavors would be a great base for Homemade Clif Bars.

So, I set out to create them.  A lot of readers lately have been asking if Clif bars are okay to eat.  I used to but them by the case as well.  I would take them to work in the days when I waited tables on the Las Vegas strip.

Here are the ingredients to the Chocolate Chip Peanut bar that I got off their website:

Chocolate Chip Peanut Crunch:

Organic Brown Rice Syrup, ClifPro® (Soy Rice Crisps [Soy Protein Isolate, Rice Flour, Barley Malt Extract], Organic Soy Flour, Organic Roasted Soybeans), Organic Rolled Oats, Organic Toasted Oats (Organic Oats, Organic Dried Cane Syrup, Ascorbic Acid, Natural Vitamin E [Antioxidant]), Organic Cane Syrup, Organic Peanut Butter (Organic Peanuts, Salt), Chocolate Chips (Dried Cane Syrup, Unsweetened Chocolate, Cocoa Butter, Soy Lecithin, Vanilla Extract), Peanut Flour, Peanuts, ClifCrunch® (Organic Oat Fiber, Apple Fiber, Inulin [Chicory Extract], Psyllium, Organic Milled Flaxseed), Organic Date Paste, Natural Flavors, Sea Salt.

Wow!  That’s a lot of ingredients!  Soy protein isolate is a hidden form of MSG.  There are also “natural flavors” in these.  Those two things alone would make me put these back on the shelf nowadays.  So, moving on to my homemade clif bars.

My homemade clif bar recipe is great because it serves as a good base for you to add whatever kind of flavors you like.

 

Homemade Clif Bars

 

These would go great with a glass of Homemade Almond Milk.

Homemade Clif Bars

Homemade Clif Bars

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Prep Time 10 min Cook Time 20 min

Ingredients

Instructions

  1. Preheat oven to 325.
  2. Grind up the oats and almonds in the food processor .
  3. When they have a crumbly consistency, add the dates and coconut.
  4. Lastly add the water slowly as you pulse the ingredients together until a batter forms. It will be thick and sticky.
  5. Line an 8X8 pan with parchment paper leaving enough paper sticking out on each side so you will be able to lift the whole thing out when done.
  6. Working carefully, spread batter evenly out to all the sides.
  7. Press mixture down with a spatula to get it firm.
  8. Bake in the oven for about 20 minutes.
  9. Let cool completely before removing intact.
  10. Cut bars with a pizza cutter .

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Curried Kidney Beans and Corn

Melissa King 6 Comments

This is a dish that my husband and I have been making for a long time.  In fact, we made it so often, that we got tired of it for awhile.  We also did that with our Black Bean Veggie Burgers.  We decided to make it again because it had been months since we last had it.  If you are thinking about trying something different, I suggest you give this one a try.  It would be a great dish for you to test out whether you like curry and tumeric.

Curried Kidney Beans and Corn

This is also very inexpensive and easy to make.  It makes a fairly good amount too.  Just a warning though, tumeric will stain, so make sure to use cooking utensils that are not white.  I made that mistake and now mine is yellow. 🙂

Curried Kidney Beans and Corn

Curried Kidney Beans and Corn

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Prep Time 10 min Cook Time 30 min

Ingredients

Instructions

  1. In a food processor, mix the onions and garlic. 
  2. Once chopped well, transfer to a large pan with oil and cook the them down a bit.  About 5-7 minutes. 
  3. Once onions and garlic are cooked a bit, add in the beans, corn, spices, salt and about 1 cup of water. 
  4. Bring to a boil. 
  5. Once boiling, turn down, cover and simmer for about 20-30 minutes or until all the water has been boiled off.

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Recipe Notes

You can eat this alone, add it to rice or even top it with some tofu or meat if you are an omnivore. Super easy and healthy.