[JMC885]

I love cooking, and we all know that the best way to eat well is to actually prepare food yourself, so let's share some recipes and meal ideas! Here are some of mine.

Breakfast: Pumpkin is packed with vitamins and fiber and is low in calories. I love to add a little bit to oatmeal with cinnamon and Splenda. This is good with apple cinnamon or maple brown sugar oatmeal flavors, too. In all, it comes out to 3 points and keeps you filled through the entire morning.

Dinner: Tofu shiritaki noodles are a miracle. Sautee them with 1tb light butter, garlic, spinach, 1/4 c white beans, and grape tomatoes for 200 calories.

What kinds of fun diet meals do you enjoy?

[Sanna Maria]

I like broccoli with parmesan cheese, so here's my version of it (serves 2)

I've made it by first boiling broccoli florets (steaming would be better), then whisking 2 or 3 egg whites until they are hard and adding some grated cheese, 2 tbsp parmesan and 2 tbsp extra light mayo to the egg whites. Then all you need to do is put the broccoli into an oven dish and spoon the egg-cheese-mayo mix on top and broil it in a hot oven for about 6 to 7 minutes.

Calorie wise I think it's best to use light version of the cheese and use a kitchen scale to weigh it and obviously eat as much broccoli as possible, because the topping should be just for flavour I'm sure there's ways of making the dish lighter, like by not adding any grated cheese, just the parmesan.

[Civakas]

I love turkey chili with white beans. I make a batch every two weeks and freeze the leftovers so that I can have chili for lunch or whenever I'm too lazy to make dinner. One cup is about 175 calories.

[mayness]

A lot of the recipes I make aren't particularly low-cal... I don't really use "diet" ingredients... but here are some of the better ones:

Chinese Green Beans
Stir-fry Sauce - not really low-cal, but you don't need much, and stir-fry is an easy way to prepare a lot of veggies!
Butternut Squash "souffle" - leave out the oil
Italian Vegetable Custard
Banana Oatmeal "cookies" - supposedly from the Fat Smash Diet... not very cookie-like, but something easy to make with overripe bananas, since I'm sure most of us aren't eating much banana bread these days.

[Civakas]

Mayness - your green beans recipe reminded me of one of my favorite recipes: ginger garlic green beans. I like to chop up some chicken and let it soak up the sauce at the bottom of the bowl. mmmmm.