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Orange Wednesday: Sweet Potato Soup

This Sweet Potato soup is soooo yummy but not overloaded with calories. It's an ultimate winter food but I like it so much that would definitely eat it all the year round. This specific recipe of soup makes a perfect match for the Orange Wednesday as it contains sweet potatoes, a pumpkin and carrots.



Ingredients:

2 sweet potatoes
2 cups of pumpkin
2 carrots
1 celery root
1 large chopped onion
3 sliced cloves of Garlic
Chicken stock
Some fresh thyme
1/2 a cup of rose wine.
1/2 a cup of cream (15% fat)
1/2 tsp of nutmeg
Salt and pepper to taste
2 tbsp of oil olive

Directions:

Peel the sweet potatoes, the carrots and the pumpkin, and slice into large cubes.

Fry the onion in a pot with some olive oil until it gets yellow.

Add the garlic and the celery root, and keep frying for 1 minute.

Add the carrots, the sweet potatoes and the pumpkin, and keep stirring for 3 minutes.

Add some fresh thyme, the chicken stock and the wine, just enough to cover the vegetables, and bring to a boil.

Low the fire to medium hit, and cook for 40 minutes until the vegetables are soft.

Remove the pot from the fire, fish out the thyme and blend with a hand blender until you get a smooth cream.

Return the pot to the stove, add the cream, the nutmeg and salt and pepper to taste.

Cook for 5 more minutes.

Serve hot and garnish with some fresh thyme, a few drops of olive oil and a splash of pepper and nutmeg.

Enjoy!

More Cooking Videos: Easy2Cook.tv

Read Also:

Add Color To Your Diet
Black Beans Soup Recipe
How To Cook Broccoli Properly
Free Organic Vegetable Gardening At Home

Adding Orange Color To Your Diet!

Our Colorful Diet Week continues with orange fruits and vegetables. Yay! Orange color is a happy color and orange recipes are yummy.



But what's actually so good about the orange food?

Orange fruits and vegetables are a great source of beta-carotene which is converted in the body to vitamin A. It strengthens the immune system and prevents several kinds of cancer. It's also good for eyes. Citrus fruits are also rich in vitamin C and potassium.

What orange products will be the best choice for your fun and healthy diet?

Carrots, pumpkin, sweet potato, peppers, oranges and grapefruits - this is what you need. These fruits and veggies are low in calories and rich in fiber, contain vitamins and minerals that will do good to your body.

And now, on to delicious and healthy recipes for the Orange Wednesday!

Orange Wednesday:

Orange Wednesday: Sweet Potato Soup
Orange Wednesday: Orange Banana Smoothie
Orange Wednesday: Carrot Spicy Salad

Black Tuesday: Black Bread Sandwich Ideas

What makes a sandwich both healthy and delicious? Here are a few tips for making your sandwich good for your diet menu and yummy.



First, make sure you use a proper bread. As a big fan of Russian Black Bread, I would recommend trying to make a sandwich with this kind of bread. However, using any whole-grain bread is also OK.

Second, choose your favorite vegetables for a filling. Think of fresh, thinly sliced tomatoes and cucumbers, crunchy carrots and onions - what can be healthier?

Next, you should pick low-fat products for the nutritious part of your sandwich. Nonfat cheese, eggs and mushrooms could be good for vegetarians; chicken, turkey and low-fat beef - for meat eaters; tuna, salmon and sardines - for fish lovers. Avocado works well in sandwiches too, although it's high in fat, so try to avoid eating avocado snacks too often.

Finally, don't forget about the dressing. Olive oil works well with all veggies, pesto sauce is usually combined with tomatoes and some types of cheese, low fat mayonnaise could be used for an egg salad sandwich and lemon juice, of course - it's a must when it comes to a fish sandwich.

The variety of healthy sandwiches is really huge, you just need to find your favorite and put it in your lunch box! Healthy diet IS fun, isn't it?

Read Also:

Add Color To Your Diet: BLACK Tuesday
Top 5 Reasons Why Green Vegetables Are Good For You
Green Monday - Easy & Healthy Avocado Recipe
Free Organic Vegetable Gardening At Home

Black Tuesday: Black Beans Soup Recipe

This Black Beans Soup recipe is the first in the Black Tuesday menu. It's especially comforting when the weather is cold.

Ingredients

250 g black beans, rinsed and soaked in the cold water for 12 hours

2 tbsp olive oil

1.5 cups chicken or vegetable broth

1 onion, finely chopped

1 clove garlic, crushed

1 dried chili pepper, peeled and sliced

2 carrots, peeled and diced

1 celery stick, finely chopped

1 tsp cumin

1 tsp dried oregano

Salt and pepper to taste

2 tbsp lemon juice

Yogurt or sour cream and parsley for garnish

Directions

In a large saucepan heat the olive oil, add onions and saute until golden. Add garlic, chili pepper, carrots, celery and stir. Pour in the broth, add beans and bring to a boil. Simmer for 10 minutes. Season with cumin, oregano, salt and pepper. Reduce heat, cover and cook, stirring occasionally, until the beans are tender, about 1 1/4 hours. Put a half of the soup to a blender. Puree until smooth and return to the saucepan, mix well. Add the lemon juice and adjust seasonings. (If the soup looks too thick add some water to desired consistency).

Top each serving with a sour cream or a yogurt and a parsley.

And have a Happy Black Tuesday!

Read Also:

Add Color To Your Diet: BLACK Tuesday
Best Green Vegetables for Your Healthy Diet
How To Cook Broccoli Properly
Free Organic Vegetable Gardening At Home

Add Color To Your Diet: BLACK Tuesday

The Colorful Diet Game continues this week with a Totally Black Menu for Tuesday.

I can hear you thinking: black healthy food? Doesn't it sound weird? Maybe just a little, since we, dieting people, are used to green lettuce, red sweet pepper and orange juice.

In the next posts I'll share with you my recipes for a Black side dish, a Black soup and a Black snack - all easy to cook and healthy, of course.

Read Also:

Do You Know What Diet Actually Is?!
Beauty Salad - Russian Women Ultimate Morning Snack
Best Green Vegetables for Your Fun Healthy Diet

Eat Spinach! (More Green Recipes)

I know I've promised to do some research on a spinach and to come up with some original spinach recipe.

Actually I've found plenty of healthy spinach recipes, please take a look at these 5 I liked the most.



1. Garlic Spinach

This is a delicious recipe for garlic spinach. It's a great way of using up a glut of spinach and works well with baby spinach leaves or even winter spinach. Continue >>

2. Fillet of Sole with Spinach & Tomatoes

Fish, spinach, tomatoes and garlic combine classically in a quick, delicious supper. Serve with steamed new potatoes and a glass of white wine. Continue >>

3. Spinach and Yogurt Dip

Absolutely delicious spinach and yogurt dip. Can be served plain or with pita or any other of your favorite bread. Continue >>

4. Spinach and Beans

This easy recipe uses fresh, in-season spinach, lightly cooked with beans of your choice. It works well with butterbeans, cannelloni beans or even black-eyed beans or chick peas. Continue >>

5. Spinach Salad with Goat Cheese and Walnuts

Refreshing spinach salad with goat cheese, walnuts and onions mixed together for a successful summer combination. Continue >>

Find more spinach recipes at:

Spinachrecipes.org, Spinach-recipes.com, Eatingwell.com

Read Also:

Add Color To Your Diet!
Top 5 Reasons Why Green Vegetables Are Good For You
Best Green Vegetables for Your Fun Healthy Diet
The Secrets Of Organic Cooking

Green Monday - Spring Asparagus with Lemon

Another green recipe for your colorful and healthy diet comes from Chef John's video recipe blog which is highly recommended to all of you who love food and fun (fits me perfectly)!



Chef John's recipes are yummy, flavored with his great sense of humor. I liked this one: Pan-seared Spring Asparagus with Lemon, Balsamic and Parmesan but there are plenty of other great dishes inside. Worth giving a try!

Read Also:

Add Color To Your Diet!
Top 5 Reasons Why Green Vegetables Are Good For You
Best Green Vegetables for Your Fun Healthy Diet

Green Monday - Easy & Healthy Avocado Recipe

Is your diet boring and exhausting you? It shouldn't be! Let's add some color to your diet!

Continuing talking about green vegetables and their health benefits, I'd like to share with you my favorite quick and healthy avocado recipe. Remember that about 75% of an avocado's calories come from fat (the good one but still...) So don't overdose and everything will be fine.

The best and actually the only commonly used avocado recipe is a Guacamole. Many others are just different variations of this great recipe. It can be called "Avocado Dip", "Avocado Salad", "Avocado Relish" and even "Avosalsa" :)

Of Aztec origin, Guacamole was originally made by mashing ripe avocados, with a molcajete (mortar and pestle) and adding tomatoes and salt.
To this basic recipe I usually add a minced onion, some lemon juice and olive oil. To make your meal a bit more nutritious use also boiled eggs (also finely chopped). Mix all the ingredients in a bowl and serve with dark (full-grain wheat) bread. Your 100% healthy avocado snack is ready.

If you're going to make Guacamole to feed your baby, please have a look at this recipe.

Green Monday - Broccoli Gratin

As promised, here's The Best Broccoli Recipe ever! And I mean it cause I tried plenty of them.

This one is my favourite, it's both delicious and healthy.

The great thing about this recipe is that it's kind of universal as you can easily replace some ingredient with other if you want to make your gratin more dietetic or just don't have some specific ingredient ready at hand.

And of course it's easy to make. I don't like sophisticated recipes that much :)

Let's start with the basics.

Ingredients:

750 g broccoli (cut in florets)
500 g soft white cheese/sour cream
2 onions (thinly sliced)
3 eggs
3 tbs flour
1/4 cup Parmesan cheese (grated)
3 tbs butter
salt
pepper

Step 1: Preheat the oven to 180-200°C (350-400°F).
Step 2: Cook the broccoli in salted water. You can use these tips on cooking broccoli. Then drain well and arrange in a lightly buttered baking pan.
Step 3: In a small frying pan, saute the onions in 2 tablespoons of butter until fragrant.
Step 4: In a separate bowl, combine the white cheese/sour cream, the eggs, the flour and stir until smooth.
Step 5: Pour the cheese sauce into the baking pan (over the broccoli) and sprinkle with the Parmesan cheese. Bake until the top is golden.

Now here are some of the finer points:

1. How to turn this recipe into more dietetic?
Just choose the low fat white cheese. It works perfectly for this gratin! You may also decide to get rid of that Parmesan topping because of the extra fat. That's ok with me too, but keep in mind that these really few additional calories worth the fine taste.

2. How to diversify the Broccoli Gratin?
Now this is the fun part as you may play with this recipe to your heart's content.
What I usually do:
- Use different kinds of white cheese (feta cheese, cottage cheese, yogurt, sour cream) and mix them all together.
- Add some other veggies to broccoli. A marrow, a pumpkin and a potato are the best matches. Boil other vegetables together with broccoli (step 2). Don't forget that to some veggies it takes more time to get cooked than to the others.
- Mushrooms! Champignons, portobello, porcino - whatever you like - dramatically upgrade this recipe. Cut mushrooms in slices and mix with the onions (Step 3). Add some butter or water, if necessary.

3. How to make this Gratin more spicy?
That's very easy: add some garlic (1-2 minced cloves) to the onions and fry them together (see Step 3). If that's not spicy enough for you, add a hot pepper :)

4. Is this recipe good for kids?
Yes, it is. Though you'd better not make the Gratin too spicy and try to use natural, healthy products.

That's all, nothing complicated but really delicious and healthy dish.

Read Also:

How To Cook Broccoli Properly
Best Green Vegetables for Your Fun & Healthy Diet
Free Organic Vegetable Gardening At Home

Best Green Vegetables for Your Fun Healthy Diet

Ok, I knew that green vegetables are good for health, I just didn't know how much good they are.

There's so much written about it that I felt a bit lost in all that information. So I decided to start with some research on green vegetables and then continue with my Green Monday Fun and Healthy recipes.

Well, here's my Top 5 Green Vegetables that are not only healthy but also really tasty.

1. Broccoli

It's so dietetic and so healthy and it can also be so yummy if you cook it right. It's high in vitamins C, K, and A, as well as dietary fiber; it also contains multiple nutrients with potent anti-cancer properties, such as diindolylmethane and selenium. Broccoli's also nice: meals with broccoli look like pieces of art. Broccoli definitely gets number 1!

2. Avocado

It's not leafy and actually it's not even a vegetable but it's green, healthy and one of my favorites. Be careful: about 75% of an avocado's calories come from fat (the good one but still fat...) So don't overdoze and everything will be fine.

3. Lettuce

There's no diet without lettuce as it's a great source of fiber and very low in calories. The secret with lettuce is to get the right proportion with other veggies and with a dressing.

4. Cucumber

Simple but good: poor in calories, rich in fiber and vitamins!

5. Spinach

Spinach is known mostly as a rich source of iron and calcium. I have to confess: I'm not really familiar with this one though I know it's full of healthy benefits. Promise to do some homework and to come up with some delicious recipe of spinach :)

Didn't get into the top but also worth mentioning:

Asparagus, Zucchini, Cabbage, Kale, Green Beans, Celery, Green Pepper, Swiss Chard...

Next time I'll share with you a great broccoli recipe - for those who doubt broccoli's culinary values and those who just want to eat healthy and have fun at one time.

Thanks Wikipedia for the help with the research.

Read Also:

Top 5 Reasons Why Green Vegetables Are Good For You
Add Color To Your Diet!
Crack The Code: Unlock Your Weight Loss and Fat Burning Potential

Top 5 Reasons Why Green Vegetables Are Good For You

Moving on to Green Monday (from the Add Color to Your Diet post), I'd like to talk a little bit about health benefits of green vegetables.



1. Green leafy vegetables provide our body with many essential vitamins and minerals, such as vitamins A, C, and K, folate, iron and calcium.

2. Regularly eating green leafy vegetables reduces the risk of heart diseases.

3. Increased consumption of green vegetables may prevent some kinds of cancer.

4. Spinach, kale, broccoli, and other green leafy vegetables lowers the risk of developing cataracts.

5. Green vegetables are rich in fiber which is really good for health and is especially recommended for weight loss.

You may say: all right but I just don't like the taste...

In my next posts I'll prove that green vegetables can be delicious, you just need to know how to cook them properly so they are yummy and (don't forget!) healthy.

Read Also:
Best Green Vegetables for Your Fun Healthy Diet
How to get your children to eat more veggies!
Add Color To Your Diet!

Add Color To Your Diet!

If you're trying to eat healthy and loose some weight, you've probably been thinking that it's limiting, boring, exhausting - you name it. I suggest stop suffering and start to make fun. Let's turn a diet into a game. How?

The idea is to label every day with a color. Let's say Sunday will be a Red Day, Monday will be Green, Tuesday - Orange, etc.



Here are some colorful recipes for every day of a week. And let's enjoy a healthy food!

Red Sunday:

Red Sunday - Royal Fruit Salad
Red Sunday - Italian Style Tomato Pasta
Red Sunday - Russian Borscht

Green Monday:

Green Monday - Broccoli Gratin
Green Monday - Easy & Healthy Avocado Recipe
Green Monday - Spring Asparagus with Lemon
Eat Spinach! More Green Recipes

Black Tuesday:

Black Tuesday: Black Beans Soup Recipe
Black Tuesday: Black Bread Sandwich Ideas
Black Tuesday: Kasha As a Side Dish

Orange Wednesday:

Orange Wednesday: Sweet Potato Soup
Orange Wednesday: Orange Banana Smoothie
Orange Wednesday: Carrot Spicy Salad

To Be Continued...