Monday, February 13, 2012 at 07:01 AM
Sometimes, I make a recipe that is so simple, that I’m not so sure that it’s blogworthy! Basketball nights are so crazy in our house. Somehow, we have to get homework finished, dinner done and then everyone back out the door to basketball in under an hour. If I leave the office late (most of the time!) or get stuck in traffic (all the time!), I’m not even there for the whole hour. So the crockpot saves the day on basketball night.
I was telling my co-worker, Kim, about this recipe. We often chat about what we put in our crock-pots last night. I told her that I didn’t know if this recipe was special enough for A Better Bag of Groceries. The ingredients are so simple, so basic. And the magic ingredient is soup!
But then, again, my kids love it. And one of the reasons why it’s a Basketball Night meal is because they eat it rather quickly. The chicken is so moist – it just falls apart. Perfect for little teeth – and my son, the slow-eater. Kim suggested that I include it here. And she is a smart, experienced Mom – who has her teen-aged kids helping to get dinner on the table while she commutes home!
Ingredients
1 or 2 medium onions, sliced
1 red bell pepper, cut into strips
1 small package mushrooms, cleaned, destemmed, and sliced
3 large chicken breasts (or 4 if they are smaller)
1 can Campbell’s Healthy Request Cream of Mushroom Soup (NuVal score of 35)
Directions
Slice your veggies.
Trim any fat from the chicken
Layer chicken in the bottom of the slow cooker
Layer vegetables on top of the chicken
Layer soup on top of the vegetables.
Note: You don’t need to add any water. Really!
Cook on low all day (8 hours or more). Remove chicken and vegetables with a slotted spoon and put on a plate.
The soup really thins out during the cooking from all the water that was in the vegetables. I use a half cup of cold water and 1 tablespoon of corn starch mixed together. Turn the heat up on the slow cooker to high. Thicken the remaining liquid with the corn starch mixture.
Serve over shredded chicken, peppers, mushrooms and sauce over parboiled rice with a vegetable of your choice on the side.
Easy and crowd-pleasy! A can of soup and my crock pot saved the day.
Posted by: Melissa
Posted in: Dinner Recipes, Slow Cooker Recipes
Tags: Campbell's Soup, crock pot recipes, crock pots, Dinner Recipes, Slow Cooker Recipes
Thursday, September 22, 2011 at 07:17 AM
Welcome to Cooking With Catherine Katz! Catherine, creator of my favorite recipes that are both nutritious and incredibly scrumptious, happens to be married to NuVal visionary Dr. David Katz. Catherine first started contributing to this blog almost a year and a half ago! I’ve been featuring one of her recipes just about monthly ever since.
David and Catherine just returned from a family vacation with their five children in Hawaii.
I told her that she should open the Katz Modeling Agency!
Seriously!
Back in the states, the weather has been turning cooler, so I was looking for a good Fall recipe. All my friends, it seemed, were making roast chicken. It was all over everyone’s facebook wall posts. I found a fabulous recipe while flipping through the Flavor Full Diet, David and Catherine’s cookbook.
Yum! This looked perfect. Except, we could not find currants anywhere! So, we used dried blueberries instead.
Ingredients:
1 medium roasting chicken (NuVal score of 28)
1/4 teaspoon salt
Freshly ground black pepper to taste
2 teaspoons extra-virgin olive oil (NuVal score of 11)
2 yellow onions, thinly sliced (NuVal score of 93)
1 cup red wine
1 cup fat-free chicken broth (College Inn, Light and Fat Free Chicken Broth, NuVal score of 2)
6 Tablespoons dried currants
2 Tablespoons rinsed and drained capers (Alessi capers, NuVal score of 11)
2 teaspoons crushed dried rosemary
- Preheat the oven to 375 degrees. Rinse the chicken and pat dry. Remove all of the bottom skin and as much of the skin on the sides as you can with kitchen scissors, leaving only the skin on top. Lightly salt and pepper the cavity and place the chicken in a roasting pan.
- Heat the oil in a heavy skillet. Add the onions and cook for about 5 minutes, or until soft. (Do not add more oil; the onions will “sweat” perfectly with this amount and don’t need to brown at this point. They will caramelize in the oven.
- Add the wine, broth, currants (or berries), capers, and rosemary, bring to a boil, and simmer for 5 to 7 minutes.
- Pour the liquid over the chicken and bake for 1 hour, or until the sauce thickens and becomes a glaze. I opted to use my clay pot, because I love my clay pot!
The Verdict
My kids loved this dish! We all did! Of course, we made this on a Sunday, when we had the time to roast the chicken. And it made the whole house smell so good! Also, we then used the remaining chicken to make a homemade chicken matzoh ball soup. Yummy!
Alternative, More Nutritious Recipe
Whenever I embark on making a “Catherine” recipe, she and I always talk first. We decide what is seasonal or she makes a recommendation for me. So, this time, I emailed her to let her know that I would be making the roast chicken that I found in her cookbook. Well, Catherine tried to email me to suggest that I try her more nutritious update on this recipe. However, her email got stuck in my junk mail for almost a week! I thought that perhaps she was still in Hawaii! So, I went ahead and made the whole chicken. Well, anyway, here is Catherine’s alternative recipe, which I will try next. It also looks fantastic!
I absolutely LOVE this recipe! It always gets rave reviews! I have tweaked it a little since we published the book, both to make it a little more nutritious by using chicken breasts only, and easier to throw in the oven and “forget about it” which I am sure you can appreciate!!
So, what I do is get 4-5 chicken breast which I dredge in a little bit of whole wheat pastry flour and saute in canola oil until just golden but not cooked–it should still be raw–then I place them in a roasting pan and pour the cooked juices over them (wine, currants, caramelized onions chicken broth… exactly as directed in the original recipe) and bake for about 45 minutes.
Question of the Day
What are you craving to make, now that the weather is turning cooler?
Posted by: Melissa
Posted in: Cooking with Catherine Katz, Dinner Recipes, Dr. David Katz
Tags: fall recipes, roast chicken
Friday, July 8, 2011 at 07:07 AM
My family is now on Week 11 of our New Food Challenge and we’re still going strong. How did we get started on this anyway? Well, I guess it was about 11 weeks ago when I was thinking of a couple of new directions I wanted to take with A Better Bag of Groceries. One was Wordless Wednesdays. The other was to spend some time exploring new products in the grocery store. The average American family tries only 5 new products per year. Only five! Yup, most American families stick with the same tried-and-true favorites shopping trip after shopping trip. So, I thought it would be fun to scour a NuVal grocery store, choose some high-scoring products that my family has never tried before and taste test them.
This time it was Price Chopper in Shrewsbury, MA and I found this gluten free penne with a NuVal score of 87.
Fortunately, we do not have a need to buy gluten free products in our house, but many, many people do have conditions (celiac disease, for example) that require them to do so. And from what I’ve seen, there are gluten free products with high NuVal scores, and gluten free products with low NuVal scores. So this pasta was a great find!
I had a mid-week business trip coming up, so I thought I would make a casserole that could be easily re-heated for leftovers. It would make things a little easier for my husband who would be juggling everything solo.
Even though it is summer, I still find that I will make a casserole now and then because re-heat nights are simple and easy. I also still use my slow-cooker!
This recipe is from Cooking Light. I ♥ Cooking Light! One of the best things about this recipe is that you skip the whole “browning the meat” thing. That is a nice perk in summer!
Ingredients
6 ounces uncooked ziti
2 cups marinara sauce (you can make Cooking Light’s Basic Marinara or substitute a jarred sauce, which is what I did)
1 cup (4 ounces) shredded part-skim mozzarella cheese, divided
1/4 cup (1 ounce) shredded Asiago cheese, divided
1/8 tsp salt
1/8 tsp hot pepper sauce (such as Tabasco)
6 ounces ground turkey breast
Cooking Spray
NOTE: I double this recipe! The recipe you see here only serves four. And if I am going to spend time cooking in the summer, there are definitely going to be leftovers from the effort!
Directions
- Preheat oven to 350°.
- Cook pasta according to package directions, omitting salt and fat.
- Drain.
- Combine pasta, Basic Marinara, 1/2 cup mozzarella, 2 tablespoons Asiago, salt, pepper sauce, and turkey in a large bowl.
- Note: I used a high-scoring jarred sauce that I found at Price Chopper.
Really, any sauce will do. This Price Chopper brand sauce gets a NuVal score of 74 and it was on sale for $2 a jar. If you double this recipe, you’ll need 2 jars.
- Spoon into an 8-inch square baking dish coated with cooking spray; sprinkle with remaining 1/2 cup mozzarella and remaining 2 tablespoons Asiago. (Note: If you double this recipe, use a 13 X 9 inch pan instead).
- Bake at 350° for 30 minutes or until cheese is lightly browned. Let stand 5 minutes before serving. (Note: Baking time for the Doubled Recipe is 35 minutes).
The Verdict
As part of the New Food Challenge, all four of us in the house (my husband, my son, my daughter and I) need to taste test the new food. So, we all had this casserole for dinner. It got an overwhelming thumbs up around the table.
In fact, while I had hoped that this casserole would do double-duty as the Wednesday night dinner while I was away on business, it did not last that long in our fridge. Everyone kept choosing the leftovers for lunch. It was very popular.
So, I would say that I learned three things from this week’s food challenge:
- Schar Gluten Free Penne tastes great and gets a fabulous NuVal score
- Price Chopper’s Peppers & Onions Sauce costs less than most national brand spaghetti sauces and it gets a fantastic NuVal score (and it tastes great too).
- I love this recipe! You can use it with a gluten free penne, a whole wheat ziti, a Dreamfields pasta, whatever you prefer. Your family will love it.
Posted by: Melissa
Posted in: Dinner Recipes, New Food Challenge
Tags: Gluten Free
Thursday, April 21, 2011 at 07:07 AM
Nothing says spring like asparagus. Did you know that asparagus is actually a member of the Lily family? You can learn more amazingly interesting facts about asparagus at the Michigan Asparagus Advisory Board website.
Asparagus is one of my top five favorite veggies, if not my absolute fav. Most of the time, we roast it at high temps in the oven, or grill it with a little olive oil, and then add some lemon juice and a pinch of Kosher salt. However, in the Spring, and especially for Easter dinner, steamed asparagus seems to be in order. Recently, I asked ABBG readers what foods were they afraid to make (while confessing my own scallop-phobia), and reader Tracey from Connecticut said that her steamed asparagus always came out limp. So, I went to work in the ABBG Kitchen this past weekend, carefully noting and photographing for all of you how I manage to make non-limp, not-mushy steamed asparagus. So, here you go!
Non-Limp, Not-Mushy Steamed Asparagus
First of all, let’s talk about purchasing and storage for a moment. You need to sniff your asparagus while in the store. That’s right, sniff it. If it smells fishy, put it back. The tips should be nice and firm, not at all mushy.
When you get your asparagus home, give the ends a fresh cut – just as you would with a bunch of flowers.
Then place the asparagus in an inch or two of water in the fridge. Try to use your asparagus within 2-3 days.
When you are ready to use your asparagus, you want to give it a really good rinse. Did you know that asparagus grows in sand? And there’s nothing like a little sand in your teeth to ruin your asparagus-eating experience. So, I soak my asparagus in a cold water bath to really rinse out any sand residue.
Check the tips again. If any are mushy, just break them off.
Now, just place your asparagus in a skillet with about a 1/2 inch of water.
And have a good pair of tongs on hand. These tongs are one of your secret weapons against mushiness.
As the asparagus on the bottom of your skillet turns bright green, bring it to the top. So, rotate the greenness.
In the meantime, get your 2nd secret weapon ready: a big bowl of cold water with ice cubes in it.
The asparagus is done when you can pierce it with a fork. It looks like this.
Remove the asparagus spears from the skillet and submerge them into the cold water bath.
This is important because without the cold water bath, the asparagus would continue to cook itself, even away from the heat source.
Just let the asparagus cool down enough to stop the cooking process (it doesn’t have to be freezing – too much time in the bath can cause mushiness). Five minutes should do it.
Then, remove the asparagus from the bath and let it dry.
You will need to help it along – or guess what, you will get mush. So, pat it dry with some paper towels.
And when it’s nice and dry, put it on a microwave-safe, yet pretty, plate.
Now you have lovely, tender but not-mushy, not-limp asparagus. It is also cold. So, right before serving, you zap it in the microwave. It is still lovely and tender and not mushy and not limp. But now it is also warm. You can serve it plain, or with a little fresh lemon or with a traditional Bearnaise sauce on the side. Your choice.
So, if all you’ve got is a skillet and a large bowl, try my steaming/cold bath method. Alternatively, you could invest in one of these:
This All-Clad Stainless Steel Pot from Williams-Sonoma ($59.95) promises to cook your asparagus evenly because it holds the stalks upright.
Either way, you win because asparagus is an Incredible Vegetable and it scores a perfect 100 on the NuVal scale!
Question of the Day
What is your favorite vegetable?
Posted by: Melissa
Posted in: Dinner Recipes, Incredible Vegetables
Tags: asparagus, Easter
Thursday, December 16, 2010 at 07:19 AM
Welcome to Cooking With Catherine Katz, a regular feature here at A Better Bag of Groceries. Catherine is the wife of Dr. David Katz, the founder of ONQI, the algorithm which fuels NuVal scores. Together, she and David have created a collection of healthy recipes in a cookbook titled The Flavor Full Diet. About a year ago or so, I discovered that Catherine was a fan of A Better Bag of Groceries and we’ve been collaborating on the blog ever since. We have a lot of fun!
Catherine and David have five gorgeous children. Here is a recent photo, taken just this Thanksgiving:
Gabe, Corinda, David, Catherine, Valerie, Rebecca and Natalia
Catherine reads A Better Bag of Groceries every day and she and I often chat afterwards about the topic of the day. A few weeks back, when the topic was bread crumbs, Catherine was telling me her secret trick of combining Kashi TLC crackers with nuts to make a nice rich crust for meat and seafood without all the sodium of store-bought breadcrumbs and without too many calories. She recommended that I try her Pecan-Crusted Chicken recipe next, and Catherine always has fantastic suggestions – so I did!
Catherine told me that whenever she makes this recipe, people thinks that she fussed, when really, it is super-easy. Well, we made this, on a busy night, and I thought I had died and gone to heaven! It was delicious! I don’t think I’ll ever make a breaded chicken any other way again! And the best part is that the leftovers re-heat so nicely. They do not dry out at all. So I ate it for lunch for the next two days. Awesome!
Ingredients:
2 boneless, skinless chicken breasts (about 1 1/4 pounds), halved (NuVal score of 39)
1/4 teaspoon salt
15 Kashi TLC Original 7-Grain Crackers (NuVal score of 26)
2 egg whites (NuVal score of 28)
1/2 finely chopped pecans (NuVal score of 65)
Freshly ground black peper to taste
2 teaspoons extra-virgin olive oil (NuVal score of 11)
Instructions:
Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Rinse the chicken and pat dry. Salt lightly (use no more than 1/8 teaspoon of the salt) and set aside.
Finely chop the pecans, if they are not already chopped.
Grind the crackers in a coffee grinder or small food processor.
In a wide shallow dish, whisk the egg whites with a fork. 
On a flat plate, combine the cracker crumbs, pecans, pepper and the remaining salt.
One at a time, dip the chicken pieces first in the egg whites and then in the crumbs, coating both sides well.
Heat the oil in a large, non-stick, ovenproof skillet. Add the chicken and cook over medium-high heat for 2 to 3 minutes on each side, or until browned.
Transfer the pan to the oven for 5 minutes to finish cooking.
Those are Cascadian Farms Shoe-String Fries underneath, by the way. They get a great NuVal score of 81 and we buy at least a bag a week in our house!
Catherine was right! This recipe seemed almost fancy. I think it was the pecans. They added a certain richness. And they really kept the chicken moist.
The chicken even stayed moist when I reheated in the oven and in the microwave for lunches.
Soooooo delicious! Thank you, Catherine, for another great recipe!
Posted by: Melissa
Posted in: Cooking with Catherine Katz, Dinner Recipes
Tags: Catherine Katz, Cooking With Catherine
