Balsamic Mustard Chicken

Today's lunch turned out to be a delightful concoction I created on the fly. I told you all that I'm just getting bored with the same old same old sorts of recipes, right? Well, I put some things together today that I never would've considered before. It's kind of funny, too, because one of the ingredients contains another of the ingredients that I used, so it was a natural marriage. I just never considered it before.

Balsamic Mustard Chicken (110 calories)

100g chicken (110 calories)

2T Balsamic Vinegar

2T Stone Ground mustard (I use Plochman's)

3 cloves fresh garlic, chopped coarsly

2t dried basil

Mix all ingredients except chicken in a small bowl. Add chicken and cover on both sides with the marinade. Cover and let stand 1 hour in frig. Place chicken on rammikan and pour remaining marinade over the top of it. Bake in oven 20 minutes at 350*. When 20 minutes is done, pour 2T hot water over the chicken to dilute the marinade a little, then cook another 10 minutes. Take out of oven and cut chicken into bite sized pieces, then toss with marinade before transferring to your plate.

I served this with lemon cucumber (see the picture for what they look like) fresh from a neighbor's garden. I topped the cucumber with fresh ground pepper and dipped the slices into Walden Farms Ranch dressing but decided that I liked a litte bite of the marinade and chicken on top of each cucumber best. :)

Balsamic Roast Beef

Tonight, it's time for something a little heavier than normal. Chicken and fishies are nice most of the time, but they leave me feeling "empty." In the summer, I'm a fruit and veggie person - but as it cools off, I want RED MEAT. Roast, steak, hamburger... (<--Read: Dead cow, ready to consume.) It's kind of morbid, I agree, but it is what it is.

I also wanted something different from the roast recipe I came up with already. Something a little more tangy, cooked slower, so the roast would be tender. Here's what I came up with:

Balsamic Roast Beef (150 calories)

100g roast beef (150 calories)

sprig of fresh basil

2 cloves garlic, cut into slices

2t Braggs' Liquid Aminos

2T Balsamic Vinegar

pinch nutmeg

salt and pepper to taste

Marinate roast in Braggs' and Balsamic for two hours in the frig. Then, in 8" square of foil, center roast and add pinch nutmeg, salt, pepper, garlic, and basil. Cover and close tightly in the foil, then pop in toaster oven (or conventional oven) at 300* for at least an hour. Serve with your choice of veggie! Seriously yummy.

I wanted to pair this up with a veggie that was low in calories so I could have a large amount of it. The fishies are, on average, 50 calories less than beef. That translates to a whole cup less of some sort of veggie. So, I chose cabbage. You get the sharesies on how I steamed it up below:

Dilled Cabbage

Allowed amount of cabbage

3t dill seed

3t salt

Add dill seed and salt to the water. Steam the cabbage up and add a little Braggs' Liquid Aminos to taste and serve up.

Phase 2: First Meal

Well. We had a pretty simple first meal. Even though I found all those recipes, we were unprepared because we didn't even want to think about food for the last couple days. Here's the lunch menu:

Balsamic Vinegar Cucumber (45 calories)

3 cups cucumber

balsamic vinegar over it to taste

Braggs' Shrimp (90 calories)

100g shrimp (about 16)

1T Braggs' Liquid Aminos

In semi-heated dry pan, add shrimp and pour Braggs' over shrimp; "fry" in Braggs' until shrimp are cooked.

It was all delicious and so wonderfully light after all that nasty fat. We had *a* melba toast with the lunch - it was sort of a pitiful silly thing next to the heap of cucumber. I wondered why we needed to eat it, but I'm not going to question the process, just follow it. It leaves 95 calories for the fruit that I plan to eat as a snack. No clue what the fruit will be yet, but that's saved for it, regardless.

So far, I'm at 155 calories for the day and it's 2 in the afternoon. Nice.

This is the easy part, isn't it? This phase 2 thing isn't hard at all so far. Phase one was much more difficult.