Sunday, August 18, 2013

Another Dieter's Dinner from The Critical Mom

What do you feed three starving people who are beginning to think that tofu tastes "really good, Mommy!"  These are meat-eating German men, too, chowing down on Tofu marinated in garlic, rosemary, and thyme with a little egg and stir-fried in a teaspoon of vegetable oil.

Okay, a square meal for these guys without anything fattening:

First, chop up a zucchini or two and a yellow bell pepper, and enough garlic to make James Beard roll over smiling in his grave.

Throw these into a large frying pan into which you have place a carefully measured tablespoon of olive oil.  Preferably the greenest kind, since you're no longer supposed to fry anything in the stuff but if you do, at least use the green kind.

Set aside.

Pre-heat your oven to 190-200º C or around 375º F

Wash a chicken big enough for three hungry eaters.  Put in pan.  Stuff with the vegetable mixture.  Once it is stuffed, squeeze a lemon or a lime over the chicken, and sprinkle on garlic salt and Lemon Pepper.  Put in oven for an hour.  About fifteen minutes before you take it out, pour over it water in which ginger has been soaking all day.  (This is instead of the white wine I would normally use).

While the chicken is cooking, make some healthy whole grain.  I used large-grained bulgur, the kind from TEMA, 

http://www.temafinefoods.com/

The "fine importer of Arabic foods," as their website accurately remarks, and alas the German housewives won't set foot in the one in our town.  The place needs a facelift, that's why.  The food inside is gorgeous, so ignore the walls that need a paint job, etc.  You never saw fresher vegetables, fresher lamb, and I'm sure it's Halal, or a better selection of inexpensive, high-quality grains, a tamer and more expensive version of which may be found at EDEKA.

So I used large-grained bulgur from Turkey, and I rinsed it in a sieve and dumped it into a frying pan in which was sizzling a diced red onion turning transparent in one tablespoon of olive oil (I won't lie--it wasn't the green kind, but it will be the green kind when I get around to buying the green kind).

Olive oil has a nicer flavor than plant oil.  Rather, it has a flavor, and plant oil doesn't.

So you put in the bulger and stir it around with the onions.   If you were making this dish the non-dietetic way, you'd have added more olive oil so the bulgur really browned.  Anyway, you add grated carrots instead, and pour on chicken broth and simmer on low heat til the bulgur is fluffy.

We ate.  Oh, did we eat.  When my husband cut the chicken the gleaming vegetables with rosemary (forgot to say, added a bit of fresh rosemary) looked like something the Good Housekeeping kitchen would have liked to photograph.

1 comment:

  1. This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

    ReplyDelete