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You are here: Home / Archives for Health Fitness and Beauty / Nutrition

Grilled Halibut

September 11, 2009 by Tricia

Last Saturday evening we had Grilled Halibut for dinner. It’s very easy to make, and it’s a healthy meal!

Here’s how I prepared the halibut for grilling:

Grilled Halibut Dinner for Two

  • 2 pieces of Halibut (approx 1 inch thick, 1/2 lb per piece)

Marinade:

  • 2 tbsp olive oil
  • 1 tsp lemon juice (concentrated)
  • 1/2 tsp paprika
  • 1/2 tsp dried dill or 1 tsp chopped fresh dill

Mix marinade ingredients together in a mixing bowl or flat dish (corning ware?) that is large enough to hold the fish.

Rinse Halibut pieces and pat dry. Place the Halibut in the marinade container, turning once or twice to make sure the fish is covered in marinade. Let sit for approximately 30 minutes prior to cooking.

When cooking fish in the oven or on the grill it’s good to keep in mind that it takes approximately 10 minutes to thoroughly cook a 1 inch piece of fish.

Prepare the grill by oiling it and once it’s reached a high temperature place your fish on the grill. Halibut usually has skin on one side so place the skin side down when you first begin to cook the fish. Turn after approximately five minutes and cook the other side for another five minutes (10 minutes in total per inch thickness of fish) or until the fish is opaque and begins to flake easily. (test with knife or fork while cooking.)

Serve the fish immediately after cooking. Asparagus and grilled vegetables are wonderful additions to this meal.

Steamed Asparagus

When preparing Asparagus I rinse the asparagus, then snap off the hard ends on the stalks. I then place the Asparagus spears in a microwave steaming dish and cook them for approximately three minutes.

Once the Asparagus spears are tender I drain any water from the microwave steamer, place the asparagus in the bottom tray with a little bit of margarine (we use canola margarine) and a few drops of lemon juice concentrate. I then toss the asparagus in the margarine and lemon juice and serve. The lemon really adds to the flavor of the asparagus. Delicious.

Grilled Vegetables

Grilled vegetables are easy to prepare and cook on the grill. You can grill just about any vegetable on the grill (onion, eggplant, zucchini, peppers, garlic, tomato etc) – just make sure that you cut your veggies large enough so that they don’t fall through the grill and or use a veggie grilling basket on your barbecue.

The other day I purchased a basket of zucchini and a basket of green peppers – what better than to grill them!

Simple marinade for grilled veggies:

  • two tbsp olive oil
  • 1 tsp garlic powder or 1/2 tsp finely diced fresh garlic
  • sprinkle of ground pepper
  • 1 tsp Italian seasoning mix

Mix marinade ingredients together in a bowl.

Prepare vegetables for grilling

  • 1 Zucchini
  • 1 pepper
  1. Cut Zucchini in half lengthwise and then quarter each half creating 8 zucchini wedges
  2. Clean and Quarter the pepper removing all seeds
  3. (prepare any other vegetables you might like to try grilling)
  4. Toss the vegetable pieces in the marinade and let sit for approximately 30 minutes before grilling.
  5. grill veggies on medium to low heat, turning often to prevent charring. Serve immediately once done.

If you enjoy grilled vegetables you should look at this grilled veggie recipe!  The recipe above is very simple, but if you want really tasty grilled vegetables or your cooking to impress this grilled vegetable recipe is the one that I’d use! Yummy!

This meal if very quick and easy to prepare and oh, it tastes so good! Give it a try and let me know how you liked it!





Filed Under: Dining and Restaurants, Home and Lifestyle, Nutrition, Recipes Tagged With: barbecue, BBQ, delicious, dill, easy, easy grilled fish, easy recipe, grill, grilled fish, grilled halibut, Grilled vegetables, grilling, halibut, lemon juice, paprika, recipe, Recipes, spice, steamed asparagus, tasty, yummy

Herbed Pasta with Spinach – I’m Stuffed!

March 17, 2009 by Tricia

I’m so full right now! Chris and I just had a kind of late dinner. Oh I was prepared to cook it by about 6:30, but Chris wasn’t due home from work until eight so I had to wait before I could try out a new recipe.

Yesterday while reading the March issue of Chatelaine (a Canadian Magazine) I came across a recipe for Herbed Pasta with Spinach. I modified the recipe a little bit as we didn’t have any goat cheese (feta) and I couldn’t find a brand I liked in the grocery store yesterday. So I used 3 tablespoons of herb and garlic light Philadelphia cream cheese instead of the goat cheese and I added chicken to the recipe. Yummy!

Here’s the original recipe:

Herbed Pasta with Spinach

  • 1/2 of a 450 gm pkg of chunky pasta (rigatoni, rotini) – about 2 cups
  • 19 oz can of stewed tomatoes
  • 1 tsp Italian Seasoning (or 1/2 tsp each of dried basil and oregano leaves)
  • pinch of chili flakes
  • 1 cup crumbled goat cheese
  • 3 cups baby spinach leaves
  • Cook your pasta as per the package directions and set aside.
  • Meanwhile, pour tomatoes with juices into a large saucepan and set over medium high heat. Add seasonings. Boil uncovered, stirring often to develop flavors – about 3 minutes. Reduce heat to low and simmer, uncovered, stirring occasionally while pasta cooks.
  • When the pasta is cooked, drain and then stir pasta into the tomato mixture along with half of the goat cheese. (Here’s where my recipe differs. I added the light cream cheese directly to the stewed tomatoes when they were simmering as I didn’t have any feta cheese). Stir in the spinach leaves (they will wilt quickly once added to the hot pasta) and serve with the remaining cheese sprinkled on top.
  • My recipe also differed in that I added chicken to it. Prior to making the sauce and pasta I got out a large skinless boneless chicken breast, cut it into bite sized pieces and then sauteed the meat in a pan with some Italian spices, basil and garlic. I then set the chicken aside until the pasta dish ready and topped our servings with the chicken pieces.

Delicious!

I only used half the sauce and half the chicken that I’d cooked for our meal so we’ll have this dish again tomorrow. I certainly don’t mind eating the same meal for dinner two nights in a row – not when it was this tasty!

Do you ever come across recipes in magazines that look and or sound so tasty that you want to try making them right away?

Filed Under: Dining and Restaurants, Health Fitness and Beauty, Home and Lifestyle, Nutrition, Recipes, Recreation Tagged With: basil, chicken, chicken_breast, cream_cheese, delicious, dinner, easy, feta, goat_cheese, herbs, italian_spice, oregano, pasta, recipe, spinach, stewed_tomatoes, tasty, yummy

Some posts draw more spam than others

February 21, 2009 by Tricia

Last week I wrote a post about how Chris and I have been trying to eat healthier in the past month. Not that we usually don’t eat good low fat foods or anything, but we really stepped it up in light of Chris’ high Cholesterol.

Well let me tell you … that post has received more spam comments in the past week than any other post I’ve written in the last month!

The comment spammers are all from sites that talk about weight loss, health foods and diet pills. Oh and a few of the spammers seem to be fixated on hamburger for some reason, even though I never mentioned hamburger let alone hamburgers in the original post. Weird.

Do you ever write posts that seem to bring all the comment spammers out of the woodwork? What topics draw the most spammers?

Filed Under: Blogging, Health Fitness and Beauty, Items to Try, Nutrition Tagged With: chicken, comment_spam, diet, foods, hamburger, healthy, pills, spammers, weightloss

Trying to eat healthier meals

February 13, 2009 by Tricia

I’ve always tried to cook healthy meals for Chris and I, but over the last few months and especially the last two weeks since Chris got out of the hospital I’ve really stepped it up.

We’d occasionally have a pre-made frozen dinner such as Loblaws Blue Menu grilled vegetable lasagna, but after re-reading the ingredients list and cholesterol listings on the package we’ve even cut that out of our “occasional easy food menu”. Chris has really high bad and good cholesterol levels as well as very low triglycerides. He’s on medication now to control his cholesterol and given the way we normally eat we don’t think our diet has much to do with his high cholesterol levels even the docs say it’s probably genetic, but it sure can’t hurt either him or I to eat even better.

Lately we’ve been eating a lot of skinless boneless chicken breasts. I bake them in the oven in a casserole dish and they are very tender and moist. I also steam up to three different veggies in the microwave – usually carrots, broccoli and cauliflower. Last night we had Teriyaki chicken and tonight we’re going to have chicken breasts marinated in a honey Dijon marinade. Yummy.

Sometime in the future when we have a little extra cash I’d love to get a fruit and vegetable juice extractor. We used to have a juicer but we found that we didn’t use it as much as we should have and gave it to Chris’ aunt. Of course now that it’s gone, and now that we are really trying to eat healthy, I’d love to have a fruit and veggie juicer again. Store bought juices contain far too many sugars and well, buying veggie juices in a health food store is pretty expensive. I don’t see why I can’t make our own carrot juice and other juices right at home.

Each year we grow strawberries, raspberries, carrots and tomatoes in our “flower” garden so I could even save money by using the fruit and veggies that we grow to make juice too.

As I said we don’t have any extra money right now so I’ll have to wait until we have some spare cash and wait for a juicer to go on sale before we get one, but I think that’s definitely on our want list. In the mean time we’ll just eat as many fruit and veggies as we can – they certainly help fill you up and they’re healthy.

Do you read the ingredient labels on the items you buy in the grocery store? Have you been trying to eat healthier lately too?

Filed Under: Dining and Restaurants, Health Fitness and Beauty, Home and Garden, Home and Lifestyle, Items to Try, Nutrition, Shopping Tagged With: chicken, cholesterol, diet, dijon, eat_healthy, extractor, foods, fruit, healthy, healthy_diet, heart, husband, juicer, sale, Shopping, sick, skinless_breasts, teriyaki, vegetables

Happy New Year to all!

December 31, 2008 by Tricia

Chris and I are having a cozy night at home this New Years eve. It’s much too cold (-22 C (-7.6 F)) to go down to Nathan Philips Square to watch the City TV New Years show and well … going out to a bar to celebrate is much too expensive.

Besides, our Toronto live show always sucks. Sorry … but it does. No big name entertainers, only up and coming possible future stars.

So we’re cuddled up on the couch with our dog Midnight and we’re watching the Niagara Falls (Ontario, Canada) celebration on TV. Roger Hodgson, one of the co-founders of Supertramp, is headlining the Niagara Falls show and he’s amazing.

I saw SuperTramp in concert on their last official tour of the original band. I believe it was in 1983. Yes, I know like all big bands that state “this is our final tour” they have come back again a few times, but never with all the original band members (I believe).

Supertramp has always been one of my favorite bands. Yes, I love classic rock (and indie, punk, techno – but classic rock will always be my favorite). Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Cheap Trick and similar bands along with Supertramp are in my top ten list.

So far I’ve heard Roger Hodgson sing The Logical Song, Give a Little Bit, Dreamer, School, and Take the Long Way Home – pretty much the top SuperTramp hits.

I’ve watched the Niagara Falls New Years show in the past and their performers (always big names) usually play until 12:30 so if you can get E or a CJOH station tune in. It’s a good show! kim Mitchell (Max Webster) is also playing. Maybe one year Chris and I will go to Niagara Falls for New Years and see their show.

Now as for the new year? I don’t really make New Years Resolutions. If I do at all it’s to be healthier in the new year than the year past. So far that hasn’t happened for me. I just keep getting sicker. But hey … I can hope, can’t I?

Actually I do have a little more hope for health in 2009.

A few days ago I got a call from my doctors office telling me that my Vitamin D levels were really low. That’s bad news but it gives me some hope. Now that might explain all my muscle stiffness and bone pain (and maybe my increasing back pain) and trouble sleeping over the last year or so. (Yeah, I don’t think being deficient in vitamin D is new, just newly discovered) So maybe now that I’m taking a heavy duty dose of Vitamin D I’ll start feeling a little better. Honestly if I could feel 25% better it would be wonderful, 50% better would be almost miraculous. I don’t dare hope for more than that, but it would be nice.

Whatever you are doing this evening – enjoying time with friends and family, attending a New years party or event or just staying in like my husband and I, I do hope that you are having a wonderful New years eve and I wish you all the best in the New Year.

Thank you for being loyal readers. You have no idea how much I appreciate your visits and comments. Happy New Year.

Filed Under: Canada, Chronic Pain, Health Fitness and Beauty, Home and Lifestyle, Inflammatory bowel disease, Life with Chris, Music, Nutrition, Toronto Tagged With: 2009, band, bone_pain, CityTV, Classic_rock, concert, Dreamer, entertainer, event, Give_a_little_bit, Health Fitness and Beauty, healthier, kim_Mitchell, Max_webster, muscle_aches, New_Years, New_Years_eve, new_years_show, Niagara_Falls, Roger_hodgson, School, singer, stiffness, Supertramp, Take_the_long_way_home, the_Logical_song, toronto_show, Tour, vitamin_d, vitamin_d_deficiency

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