Is there anything better than spinach first thing in the morning? It’s a delicious and nutritious start to the day. Others may write odes to oatmeal, but I think I’ll write mine to spinach and eggs. I’m a savory breakfast person, and although I eat overnight oats almost every day, it’s usually as a mid-morning snack. I just can’t handle the sweetness fresh back from my walk. Continue reading
Everybody and their mother has a recipe for pumpkin butter. I like mine because it’s easy. I can only get fresh pumpkin here in Cotonou, so that’s what I use. For the love of God, don’t roast a whole goddamn pumpkin just for this recipe. Use the canned stuff. Apple cider can be substituted for apple juice, but I like the tartness that comes from good fresh juice. Continue reading
You’d think leftover tortillas would be easier to get rid of. Unfortunately, once they’ve started to go a bit stale, their usefulness in Tex Mex dishes is a curve approaching zero. Tacos and burritos are definitely out. Quesadillas are OK, but they take a lot of cheese and oil, two foods I’m not enthusiastic about right now. Enchilladas are really best with fresh or day old tortillas. Four or five days out, they’re not flexible enough to wrap around fillings and they absorb the sauce poorly.
Enter tortilla soup, a recipe that actually works better the older and dryer your tortillas. And while most recipes call for corn tortillas, this one use flour (mostly because it’s all I’ve got), giving the fried chips a wonderful nutty taste. Continue reading
I have been searching for a perfect tortilla recipe since I landed in Benin 5 years ago as a Peace Corps volunteer. They’re so versatile and so important to the Peace Corps diet, and yet, I hated making them. Doughs that were too stretch to roll right, crunchy rounds that didn’t fold around taco fillings, and tasteless recipes that just weren’t up to scratch.
No longer. Continue reading
Weekday breakfasts are hard. My standby is overnight oats. Mix rolled oats, milk, bananas, and brown sugar together the night before, throw a tupperware in my bag on the way out the door, and snack on delicious cold oatmeal around 9am when the hectic morning finally calms down.
Weekends, however, are another matter entirely.
250 calories. Life is delicious.
Here in Benin, you can either buy ridiculously expensive meats at the grocery store, or you can go to the market. The meat is sourced from the same places, but the market doesn’t have fridges and does have a lot of flies. The solution is to go early in the morning and either cook the meat as soon as you get home, or shove it in your freezer. Hassle hassle hassle. Usually we only eat meat on the weekends, when I have the time to buy it, prep it safely, and have planned ahead enough to create a dish that will last for several days. Continue reading
I fucking hate calorie counting.
I fucking love calorie counting.
Weight Watchers was great (no, not really), but I’m broke running a small business in West Africa and I just don’t have the money to throw around on something that I can get for free.
Every Sunday afternoon, I sit down and plan my meals for the week. It’s kind of fun, but it’s hella time consuming. How do I do it?
It takes fucking forever. Like 2 fucking hours forever. Unfortunately, this is the best way for me to stay on plan. I’m a planner, and if I don’t plan, I’m lost in the sea. And by “lost in the sea,” I mean “not losing weight.”
And then there’s weeks like this one, when Google Spreadsheets farts on my slow connection and loses tons of shit and I want to pull my hair out and scream.
Calorie counting works. And it’s cheap. I like cheap. But damn, what hassle, huh?
I love egg drop soup. It’s hard to find here, in Benin, although rumor has it that there’s one Chinese restaurant that has a passable version. Lucky for me, it’s dead simple to make and super-low calorie too. This may be the only soup recipe where I tell you to go ahead and use faux-broth instead of making it from scratch, but it’s worth it to keep the recipe easy and quick. Continue reading
I am addicted to chicken broth. Not the gross sodium-filled broth in a can or broth from a cube, but delicious homemade chicken broth made by boiling leftover bones, onions, garlic, and carrots in a liter or so of water.
I am not equally addicted to zucchinis, but we are still getting them in our CSA, and I needed a healthy low-cal way to:
Soup it is! Continue reading
Cheap, fast, and healthy. The diet industry seems to spend a lot of time telling us that we can only have two out of three: cheap and healthy? Prepare to spend hours slaving over a hot stove. Cheap and fast? Junk food it is. Fast and healthy? It’ll cost you an arm and a leg. Fortunately, we know that this isn’t the case. While knowing how to cook and take advantage of local ingredients is certainly a huge privilege (as is knowing how to search the Internet for advice when I JUST DON’T KNOW WHAT TO DO WAAAAAAAAAH), my favorite recipes are ones I’ve just thrown together. And yes, I know that it takes a serious amount of cooking experience to know how to throw meals together.
This week will is cheap, fast, and healthy week on himynameistheresa. Easy one or two pot meals that can be easily complemented with a salad. They’re not recipes, so much as guides for the clueless. How do you put a complete healthy meal together? Continue reading