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!

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, 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.