dinner

Spicy Sweet Potato Noodles with Chorizo and Chickpeas

Claudia's Cookbook - Spicy Sweet Potato Noodles with Chorizo and Chickpeas cover

I am in love with my spiralizer. I took one look at it and I knew we would be soul mates. A couple months ago during my healthy eating quest, I came across Ali and her amazing blog, Inspiralized. If you haven’t had the opportunity to check out her blog, I highly recommend you do. The focus of her blog is to create delicious healthy meals by using her spiralizer. After visiting her blog for the first time, I immediately went to Amazon and bought my very own spiralizer. And it’s worth every penny. And this is coming from a girl who isn’t really into vegetables! 

I’ve made quite a few of Ali’s recipes and they are all incredible. The meals are such a healthy game changer for me. I slightly adapted this recipe to include white sweet potatoes and chickpeas (Ali’s recipe calls for white beans). I used chickpeas because I didn’t have white beans in the house. I have since used white kidney beans in this recipe and it’s still super delicious as well. I also used an amazing red wine chorizo sausage from La Grotta, which is a local Mediterranean market here in Winnipeg. I cannot tell you how yummy this dish is. My husband has already requested that we have it again by week’s end! This definitely is a a nice healthier alternative to your traditional comfort food dishes. 

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Quinoa Burgers

Claudia's Cookbook - Quinoa Burgers 7

Reason #852 why I love being on vacation: I have the time to meal plan and grocery shop.

This past week I have been enjoying my vacation immensely. I’ve actually been to the grocery store 3 times in 3 days. I love it. I also finally have the time to look through all those cookbooks that I own and am able to meal plan some healthy dinners. This is huge people, huge. This recipe is one of my all-time favs in the healthy department. These Quinoa Burgers are so simple and insanely delicious. Even my Dad loved them. Again, that’s huge! They are filled with warm flavor and crisp veggies. They are also very light. My Dad liking “hippie food” is your biggest reason to try this recipe out in a hurry.

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Buffalo Chicken Quinoa Stir Fry

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Tonight I participated in my last TRX training class. It was a little bittersweet for me. The 10 weeks of classes totally kicked my butt on multiple occasions. I won’t miss the weeks where I couldn’t walk properly for 5 days after. However, I will miss the huge sense of accomplishment after each class was over. It was also extremely gratifying to notice progress from week to week. I realized halfway through the sessions that I no longer felt dizzy…or the urge to roundhouse kick the instructor for following up our gruelling strength training exercises with the likes of burpees.

I find being on a healthy eating plan is way easier than being on an intense exercise plan. Maybe it’s because I was never a true fan of exercising for the sake of getting in shape. As a kid, my parents decided to put me in a ton of team sports. Therefore, at a very young age, I didn’t correlate sports with actual exercise. Sports meant fun times with friends and perfecting my stick-handling and batting skills. The fact that sports were actually good for me physically was a total added bonus. But I digress…

Don’t get me wrong – clean eating, although easier, can get pretty damn boring. I am always looking for ways to add flavour and spice but not calories. This recipe is perfect. It is absolutely delicious. The amount of veggies creates a great texture, paired with a spicy (but not too spicy) sauce and fluffy quinoa…you simply cannot go wrong with this dish. I Instagramed this dish a few weeks ago and had multiple request for the recipe. So here it is!

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Nalysnyky

If you haven’t read the Inspiration section of this website prior to reading the rest of this post, I highly recommend you do. Mainly because it explains the copious amounts of sinful butter in this recipe. Well, it sort of does. It more or less justifies it as an essential in Ukrainian cuisine.

Nalysnyky (pronounced NAL-YES-NAH-KEH) is a staple on our family dinner table on all holidays. They are often made ahead of time and frozen until the day of the dinner event. I actually have never had them otherwise until I made this recipe with Claudia for the blog.  I have to admit, if you can, eating them fresh is the way to go. Nalysnyky is essentially cheese filled crepes (slathered in butter of course and baked). This recipe takes a total of one hour from start to finish and truly is worth every minute.

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