Clean Cooking.
A few weeks ago, I announced my goal to lose weight and get healthy by eating clean. What does eating clean mean? It means getting rid of all preservatives, chemicals, artificial sweeteners, hydrogenated oils and other really bad stuff that you shouldn’t be eating. I was really gung-ho about it and found all kinds of info about it online, mainly on the website called The Eat-Clean Diet. They have a ton of recipes for all different types of meals and the ones we’ve tried have been pretty good.
So how have I been doing overall?
Eating out is proving to be quite a challenge. A couple road-trips and a networking dinner threw a wrench in my clean eating plans. I try to salvage when I can, though. I was in Boston last week on business and didn’t have much time to eat lunch before hopping on the train home. Instead of getting the usual combo meal at a fast food restaurant, I ordered a salad. But I also got a diet soda (which is not on the clean eating menu because of the artificial sweeteners). The last couple of weekends we’ve been going to see movies to catch up on the Oscar nominees, and I got popcorn and a diet soda both times. So not clean.
It’s easier at home because we don’t buy anything that isn’t clean. Lots of organic cereal and oatmeal with frozen berries for breakfast. Greek yogurt and berries, cottage cheese and clementines, and leftovers for lunch. We’ve been experimenting with a lot of new recipes for fish and chicken, too, and a lot of cookbook recipes can be made clean if you buy the right ingredients. Our desserts are healthy and clean too, since we only buy dark chocolate now.
A few people asked me to keep them up-to-date on what I’m eating, so I thought I would post a recent dinner I made for Erik and I.
It’s called Parchment-Baked Chicken with Arugula, Sage and Rosemary and it’s from the Eat Clean Diet website. Click the link to get the ingredients and direction.
In addition to the arugula, sage and rosemary, the other clean ingredients include chopped plum tomatoes, chicken breast, salt, pepper and olive oil. The recipe also calls for kalamata olives, but I dislike those kinds of olives so I didn’t use them.
The first time I made this, it took me about an hour to prepare everything. The second time, it took half that time. But overall, the entire prep and cooking time takes about an hour (half an hour to prep, half an hour to cook). It’s actually pretty easy to put together once you have the tomatoes chopped up. You just pile on the ingredients, wrap it all up in the parchment paper and bake.
I will say that it’s a bit challenging doing this clean eating because there are a lot of ingredients we have to buy for the first time. We have a ton of spices now. I kinda wished I had waited to start a clean eating diet until after I got married and received the awesome spice rack we registered for!
I will note that the recipe calls for a lot of sage. We used sage from the spice section at the supermarket, so I’m not sure if “fresh chopped sage” would make much of a difference. If you do use a bottle of sage, I would use a little less than the recipe calls for – unless you like sage.
We paired the baked chicken with multigrain spaghetti and Newman’s Own pasta sauce. Apologies for the poor quality of the photos. Our camera battery died and I was forced to use my iPhone.
If you do cook this up, let me know what you think! I’ll be back later with more recipes that we’re using around here.
First off, I’m so glad you’re blogging a lot again, I was seriously missing your blog a while back. And secondly, thanks for posting this recipe and the clean eating link and the pics! I am drooling ova heah and look forward to hearing about more recipes you guys try out!
Haha. Yeah, I think I burned out after blogging EVERY SINGLE DAY in November and December, and most of October. I was noticing I wasn’t posting as much. But I have an editorial calendar set up now, so I’m hoping to hit more of my favorite topics now that I have something to kind of jog my memory about what I like to write about. And definitely more food posts coming soon!
This looks really good! I’m with you on the sage. In general, I prefer fresh herbs, but the stuff from the store is always far more than I need and I hate to waste it. Currently I have thyme languishing in my fridge…
I agree. The arugula we used was fresh, but we ended up tossing half of it because it was too much and started to go bad. Very unfortunate.
This looks delicious. I might try to sub in spaghetti squash and make it a low carb meal. I am going to put this into my menu rotation.
Thank you. I hope you continue to share about your adventures in clean eating. Thanks for admitting to the popcorn and diet coke, it is good to know that I am not the only one who tries really hard to eat clean but still caves with diet coke and popcorn at the movies!
I don’t know whether you are talking about dried sage, when you refer to ” a bottle of sage,” but a general rule for substituting dried herbs for fresh is 1/2 tsp of dried for 1 Tablespoon of the fresh, so if you used dried sage, you should have used 1/3 tsp. of dried sage. If the dried herb is powdered, use 1/4 tsp for every Tablespoon of the fresh.
I did not know this!! Thank you for the cooking tip. That makes so much more sense! Clearly, I am new to this whole “cooking” thing.
That looks delish! And bet of all, super easy! Looking forward to more clean eaton posts
Please allow me to laugh maniacally when you mentioned “spice rack”. Given that I have, at last count, 48 distinct herbs and spices in my kitchen, some of them purchased in industrial-sized containers for next to nothing (why spend $4.50 on a 1/2 oz bottle of McCormick oregano when you can get a half-liter-sized jar of Badia oregano for under $3.00?), spice racks per se are little more than space-wasters. Most of my seasonings are organized in those wooden boxes clementines ship in; the remainder are in a three-drawer taboret that slides under the kitchen table or on a wire “DVD storage rack” which also holds bottles of cooking and finishing oils and vinegars and some of my cookbooks.
(FWIW, those Clementine boxes are a cheap way to organize kitchen stuff.)
We actually don’t have a proper spice rack now. More like a spice shelf, along with our other baking goodies. We will probably get a real one in our registry. It would be nice to have one, so all the labels are facing me. It can take a few minutes of looking and a few yells of “Are you sure we have this??” before all spices are located.
I find most spice racks don’t have labels for a fair amount of the stuff I keep — for example, summer savory, turmeric, allspice, star anise, and several distinct types of dried chili — nor enough spaces to keep it all (as I said, 48 distinct herbs and spices, not counting salt or black tellicherry pepper). It’s kind of useless for me to put bay leaves in a tiny bottle: you can put three or four in there — one meal’s worth (unless that meal is meatloaf, in which case all bets are off) — versus whole loads of them in the large Badia jar. OTOH, it’s counterproductive to put one’s seasonings helter-skelter in the kitchen cabinet because you have to take apart the whole cabinet to find what you need (we lived like that for years before I left for uni, and it adds so much stress to cooking it’s ridiculous). Keeping spices organized in plastic bins or (like me, I’m cheap) clementine cartons means everything’s in one place, you take out the spice box and find what you need, then you put it away afterwards and minimize counter clutter (not to mention light damage to the seasonings). Having a list (like an Excel spreadsheet) in a common area (do you have a shared directory or network drive somewhere?) of what you have and what you don’t can also help when you are planning a recipe.