Diet Friendly Fast Food

(It's Friday and usually on that day I usually feature  Phase One Friday recipes from the past that have been my personal favorites.   I'll definitely keep doing that, but going forward I'm going to mix it up a bit and occasionally spotlight favorite recipes that aren't Phase One, for a new feature I'm calling Friday Flashbacks.  Today's favorite is this Low-Sugar Fresh Cranberry Salsa with Cilantro, Lime, and Jalapeno from my friend Trina, something I've made every year since I first tried it for Thanksgiving in 2011.  If you haven't tried this recipe yet, I highly recommend it!)

When my friend Trina started to talk about the fresh cranberry salsa she's been making every Thanksgiving for years, I was a bit skeptical until she told me the ingredients list.  I'm not someone who loves all things cranberry, but the combination of fresh cranberries with cilantro, green onion, lime juice, and jalapeno had so many of my favorite flavors, it was pretty much a given that I'd like it.  As soon as I tasted this (and loved it!) my brain started imagining ways to eat it.  Of course, this cranberry salsa would be fantastic on your Thanksgiving dinner plate next to the turkey, but I'd also love it spread on a turkey sandwich, layered into a turkey casserole, dipped up with celery or pita chips, or eaten as a pan-sauce over sauteed pork or chicken.  I can already tell this is one of those recipes I'll be making over and over, so thanks for sharing Trina!

(Updated with better photos and step-by-step instructions, March 2014.)  Have you heard that cauliflower is the new trendy vegetable for 2014?  I don't know who decides these things, but personally I'm kind of excited to see a versatile and low-glycemic vegetable like cauliflower getting the spotlight!  My love for cauliflower is well documented in the recipe archives, but there are quite a few of my early cauliflower recipes that can really use a photo update, like this amazing way to cook cauliflower I posted in 2006 when I was infatuated with Mark Bittman's wonderful book The Best Recipes in the World.  In this recipe with Tuscan origins, the cauliflower is briefly simmered, then sauteed in a generous amount of olive oil that's been seasoned with garlic and finished with both lemon zest and lemon juice.  This is a pretty garlic-flavored dish, which was fine with me. But if you're not sure how much you like garlic, or if you're planning a romantic evening, you might want to reduce the amount of garlic.

Most tartar sauce is definitely not diet-friendly, which is why I came up with my Ultra-Easy Double-Dill Diet Friendly Tartar Sauce Recipe.

How do you feel about tartar sauce? I'm sure some food snobs consider it to be a very boring and ordinary condiment, but I absolutely love tartar sauce and don't think I'd ever pass it up in a restaurant if I was having some kind of mild-flavored fish.  Unfortunately, most tartar sauce is a long way from being diet friendly for South Beach or any other type of diet.  The reduced fat ones you buy at the grocery store are loaded with sugar, and most tartar sauce recipes are a bit too heavy on the mayo to be what most people would consider a healthy condiment.

But lately I've been really trying to eat more fish, which got me thinking about how much I love tartar sauce, so I decided to try to come up with a tasty tartar sauce recipe that didn't have sugar and was lower in fat. It took a bit of experimenting, but this Ultra-Easy Double-Dill Diet Friendly Tartar Sauce recipe combines fat-free Greek Yogurt, regular or reduced fat mayo, dill weed, capers, and dill pickle relish, and it's not only easy-to-make, it's as delicious as any tartar sauce I've ever tasted.

This Slow Cooker Salsa Chicken with Lime and Melted Mozzarella is a new recipe for A Month of Daily Phase One Recipes, and I'm pretty sure this four-ingredient recipe will become a favorite for lots of my readers who like flavorful dishes that use things you usually have in the house.  But if anyone is looking at the photo and thinking it doesn't look like a slow cooker dish, let me share how it took Jake and me three attempts to come up with this final version of the dish (which we thought was perfect.) 

(For Phase One Fridays I feature Phase One Recipes from the past that have been my personal favorites.  Phase One Recipes are also Low-Carb and Gluten-Free.  These amazing Oven-Fried Green Tomatoes are seriously delicious, but almond flour is calorie-dense, so use portion control if you're eating this for phase one!)

This is the time of year when people with vegetable gardens have a lot of green tomatoes on the vines, and some of those tomatoes are never going to get ripe. And if you still have green tomatoes, do I dare to say that you *must* make these Oven-Fried Green Tomatoes with Sriracha-Ranch Dipping Sauce.  Seriously, they were so good that I wondered why it has taken me so long to try a healthier riff on fried green tomatoes, and I'm sure I'll make them every year now when I have green tomatoes.

Use the CrockPot to cook this Spicy Brown Rice and Black Bean Cheesy Bowl and keep the kitchen cool.

When you live where it's hot in the summer, using the slow cooker to cook amazing food without heating up the house is one of the best tricks I know.  In fact, on my slow cooker site I feature Slow Cooker Summer Dinners each year, and this Slow Cooker Spicy Brown Rice and Black Bean Bowl would make a perfect summer dinner cooked in the CrockPot.  It took me a couple of tries to get this recipe just right, and for the final version I had the wild idea of cutting up some cubes of string cheese and stirring them into the rice and beans mixture for the last 30 minutes of cooking time, so this is a spicy brown rice and black bean cheesy bowl.  Everyone likes cheesy don't they?  I tested several versions of this out on my niece Kara and her family, and they gave the thumbs up to the version with cheese, but it's definitely optional if you prefer it without the cheese.

Here are 25 Deliciously Healthy Low-Carb Recipes found on Kalyn's Kitchen and other great blogs during January 2015.

It's already February 2; can you believe we're that far into the new year?  I normally post this monthly round-up of 25 Deliciously Healthy Low-Carb Recipes on the first day of the new month, but I waited a day because I was pretty sure my low-carb round-up wouldn't be able to compete with the Superbowl!  I spent last night at the Denny Family Superbowl Party at my brother Mark's house, where I tried hard not to consume too much of the sugary and carb-loaded foods most people bring.  (And I took these Deviled Eggs with Green Olives for Mark, who loves green olives as much as I do.)

Of course in January when half the world goes on a diet it's a great month to spot low-carb recipes, both on Kalyn's Kitchen and other blogs around the web, so there are some amazing ideas being featured here.  I also did a round-up of 25+ Amazing Low-Carb Slow Cooker Dinners on my slow cooker site, and if you take a look at that you'll have a double helping of delicious low-carb recipe ideas (just in case you got a little off track at your own Superbowl party!)

When you need some healthier comfort food, this delicious Hatch Green Chile Enchilada Sauce can come in handy.

December has to be the month of comfort food, wouldn't you agree?  And one of my favorite ingredients to make healthier comfort foods is this Hatch Green Chile Enchilada Sauce.  (And Kudos to this company for having a gluten-free variety of their delicious sauce and clearly labeling the can so people will notice it comes in gluten-free.)  When I posted the recipe for Slow Cooker Green Chile Chicken Cauliflower Rice Burrito Bowls recently, I mentioned how I have been a bit obsessed with this sauce, and after I counted up how many recipes I've used it in, I decided it's time to officially designate this as one of my Kalyn's Kitchen Picks!

(For Phase One Fridays I highlight Phase One recipes from the past that have been my personal favorites, and this recipe for Baked Chicken Stuffed with Pesto and Cheese is something I've made over and over.  It's also been one of the most popular recipes on the blog for a while now; hope you enjoy if you haven't tried it yet!)

For several weeks now I've been keeping an eye on the basil plants in my garden, hoping to get one more batch of pesto in the freezer before the plants started to freeze.  For the last few days the leaves were starting to look a little brown on the edges, so today I trimmed the plants vigorously and made a big batch of pesto.  Then I made this Chicken Stuffed with Pesto and Cheese!

(For Phase One Fridays I highlight Phase One recipes from the past that have been my personal favorites, and this recipe is one I'd love to make on the weekend so I'd have leftovers to eat for lunch of a quick dinner during the week.  If you're not a slow cooker fan, there are directions at the end for making this on the stove.)

On Halloween night you know the kids aren't going to want to eat anything but candy, so why not make this slow cooker beef stew with lots of adult flavors to keep the grown-ups happy?  You can start this mid morning and by dinner time it will be ready to go.  If you'll be gone all day, just do the advance prep the night before, refrigerate the ingredients in a plastic container, and put the cold ingredients in the slow cooker and let it cook all day while you're out.  I'd love this with a dollop of sour cream on top, but no matter how you eat it, this stew is loaded with flavor.  (There are also stove-top instructions if you don't have a slow cooker.)

(Updated with better photos and step-by-step instructions, August 2014)  One of the wonderful things about having summer squash in your vegetable garden is that soon you'll have so much of it you feel perfectly justified in picking them when they're tiny, similar to the baby squash you get in the fanciest of restaurants. I first posted this wonderful recipe for Easy Roasted Baby Summer Squash with Feta and Thyme back on 2007 when I had an abundance of baby squash from my garden, but now that I don't have a garden at the new house (yet!) I buy the packages of baby squash from Costco to make this. If you don't have a garden or a Costco membership you can still make this recipe with larger squash that are cut in strips.  Roasting the squash with fresh thyme concentrates the flavor in vegetables in the most lovely way, but dried thyme will also work fine for this recipe.

I re-did the photos for this recipe with my niece Kara and her adorable four-year-old daughter Quinn.  It had been a long cooking day and Quinn was getting tired of entertaining herself, so I grabbed a kid-safe knife and enlisted her to help cut the baby squash in half.  Quinn has pretty strong food preference, as most kids do at that age, and the whole time we were cutting them up she kept saying "I hate zucchini."  But when the finished dish was ready, she surprisingly agreed to take a bite, and even more surprisingly, she liked it and ate a couple of pieces.  So if you have kids who won't eat their vegetables, maybe getting them to help cook will help!

(For Phase One Fridays I feature Phase One Recipes from the past that have been my personal favorites, and I love this Shrimp and Black Bean Salad with Cilantro, Cumin, and Lime.  Photos for this recipe were updated May 2014 and I'm so happy to have better photos for this favorite salad!)

Shrimp, black beans, cilantro, and lime. It's a combination that goes together so well that you could easily come up with hundreds of recipes featuring this quartet. I bought a big bag of cooked frozen shrimp from Costco, and this was a salad I made for lunch after thinking to myself, hmmm, what else can I make with shrimp? The ingredients were determined by what I had in the fridge and pantry, as well as a well-documented love for cilantro, and this recipe has cilantro in the dressing and more cilantro in the salad, which is just fine with me.  If you're not a cilantro fan I think you could still get a pretty good result with thinly sliced green onion replacing the cilantro in the dressing and just using a little more green onion in the salad, but I wouldn't use parsley in place of cilantro here.

It's January 1, and I always love the promise the new year brings of better things to come.  And this January is bringing a new mobile-friendly design and a better way to find recipes by diet type for Kalyn's Kitchen, so I'm excited about that.  Happy New Year to all my readers and friends!

Although I usually start each month with the round-up of Deliciously Healthy Low-Carb Recipes from the previous month, I wanted to start the new year with a brand new recipe.  This Low-Carb Mock Lasagna Spaghetti Squash Casserole is something that really knocked our socks off when we tested the recipe, and if you're in the need of some low-carb comfort food, I promise this will hit the spot.

WASHINGTON, D.C. - Seeing wildlife conservation in action just gained even more appeal. Americas national wildlife refuges will offer free admission to visitors on these days in 2014:
· January 20: Martin Luther King Jr. Day
· February 15-17: Presidents Day weekend
· September 27: National Public Lands Day
· October 12: The first day of National Wildlife Refuge Week
· November 11: Veterans Day

The fee holiday is an annual inducement to visit public lands. National wildlife refuges are managed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, part of the Department of the Interior.

National wildlife refuges protect many iconic species, such as alligators and bison, whooping cranes, moose and puffins. And they do it on awe-inducing landscapes that range from Oregons rocky cliffs to Texas lagoons, from Maine wilderness to woods and fields inside the city of Philadelphia. Theres at least one national wildlife refuge in every state and one within an hours drive of most major metropolitan areas. 

You can plan a refuge visit around a bird festival, wildlife tour or other special event listed on individual refuge websites or on a master event calendar. Or plan your own outing by hiking a refuge trail or taking a drive along a wildlife viewing route. Experience seasonal wonders, such as the arrival of monarch butterflies or great flocks of migratory birds. Hear elk bugle for a mate or endangered red wolves howl in the night. Many refuges also offer great recreational opportunities such as fishing, hiking and paddling.

National wildlife refuges also help support local communities, pumping $2.4 billion into the national economy and supporting more than 35,000 jobs, according to a recent federal report. More than 45 million people visit refuges every year.

Of the nations 562 national wildlife refuges, 460 are open to the public. Of those, only 35 refuges charge an entrance fee, generally ranging from $3 to $5. Admission to the others is free. The entrance fee waiver does not cover concessionaire or license fees for some activities such as hunting, fishing or special tours.

Other federal land management agencies that will offer fee-free days in 2014 are: the National Park Service, the Bureau of Land Management, the Bureau of Reclamation, the U.S. Forest Service and the Army Corps of Engineers. Please contact each for details.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the National Park Service, the Bureau of Land Management, the Bureau of Reclamation and the U.S. Forest Service also participate in the America the Beautiful National Parks Pass and Federal Recreational Lands Pass programs. These passes provide access to more than 2,000 national parks, forests, wildlife refuges, grasslands and other federal lands.

Four passes are available:
· free annual pass to current military members and their dependents
· free lifetime pass for people with permanent disabilities
· $10 lifetime senior pass for those aged 62 and over
· $80 annual pass for the general public.