Bok Choy and Tofu Stir-Fry

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Recipe Link: Bok Choy and Tofu Stir-Fry
Points Plus Value: 5
Difficulty: I have a rice cooker, which made it much easier, but I would still say this is a pretty damn easy recipe.
Servings: 4, or three if you have a husband who isn’t satisfied with a half a cup of rice.

So I haven’t updated in a while … Holidays and all. I was awful. Stuffed my face, didn’t exercise, didn’t even track. Totally went off the rails. Food, booze, the whole nine yards. Pigged out on takeout Chinese on New Years Day (and paid for it … my stomach is so not used to deep fried food anymore.) Didn’t use light recipes for the “occasions” and for some reason - some kind of damn Christmas miracle - when I weighed in today I was the EXACT weight I was before the holidays. I’m now down 14.6. I was stressed as hell about it, too. I have no idea how that happened. Maybe my stomach is shrinking? Whatever. I lucked out.

So this week I was determined to get back on the horse of cooking WW recipes and to stop being a slacker (I had done some over the holidays, but ones I had already posted, so, yeah, boring). I had a friend over for New Years who is Vegan, and had bought some tofu that I had planned to roast, but didn’t end up using, so I looked up “tofu” on the WW site and voila. Here we are.

This recipe was really good and super simple. The stir fry itself takes about 10 minutes to prepare and about 10 minutes to cook, so the rice pretty much takes up the most time. The only mod I did to it (there’s always one!) is I pre-fried the tofu in cooking spray until it had a nice brown crispiness to it before I did the rest of the stir fry, ‘cause I find that even firm tofu will crumble apart and be mushy if you just drop it raw straight up into a stir fry. The ginger, soy and hoisin is a super simple yet flavourful base for a stir fry.

Totally recommended!

Aside: I had purchased some Vegan Cheddar for my friend to set out for some cheese and cracker action, and we didn’t end up using it. My husband just set some out for a snack to try it (as I am writing this) and yeah. It’s nasty. Maybe it has to be “in” something. On its own? Eeeesh. It’s not even really low fat. Bummer. Totally NOT recommended. Maybe it was a shitty brand, though? Who knows. Even the dog won’t eat it. Happy New Year!

Beef and Vegetable Cheese Casserole

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Recipe Links: Beef and Vegetable Cheese Casserole
Points Plus Value: 7 
Difficulty: The recipe itself says moderate, but there’s not much to it, it just takes about an hour and a half of prep and bake
Servings: OK … So the recipe says 4 servings, but when I had all of the prepared ingredients ready to go into the pan, I realized it wasn’t going to be able to fit everything in a 9” casserole dish. More like a lasagna pan. There was no way I was going to eat 1/4 of that … but I was hungry so I did like 3/4 of a serving. And I ended up (after husband grabbing 1/4 of it) with 4 1/2-serving lunches out of this sucker. Nice.

OK so I really like cheese. I have a super-huge weakness for cheese. I also have a super huge weakness for regular, salty kettle chips, but I can only eat like 10 of those for 10 points, and that’s just a sad, sad waste of my time (and points.) ON TO CHEESE. I pretty much picked this sucker for the cheese. So now you know about my cheese problem. Let’s move on.

Think of this like a pasta-less lasagna. It was really good (although a little watery, from the veg) and despite the fact that it wasn’t the prettiest thing in the world it tasted decent. My only substitution on this one (there’s always one, isn’t there?) was the spices. The recipe calls for “1 tbsp parsley, oregano or rosemary, chopped” but I don’t have a lot of fresh herbs on hand in the winter so I did a mixture of the three of them dried. Classic “Italian” mix. I think the spice mix is what gave it the lasagna flavour.

Cooking time aside (I think I might be able to streamline it a little more next time by multi-tasking) I think I might adopt this one as a regular. It’s a pretty great “cold winter night” recipe. I would definitely recommend it. Also, it makes A LOT, so it would be a pretty decent “potluck” dish (‘tis the season.)

BEHOLD: UGLY BUT DELICIOUS (grabbed some light-rye toast to soak up extra sauce)

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Slow Cooker Country Captain Chicken with Rice

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Recipe Links: Slow Cooker Country Captain Chicken with Rice
Points Plus Value: 9 
Difficulty: Easy, but because of the slow cooker it takes a tonne of time.
Servings: Yields 2 1/2 cups chicken mixture and 1/2 cup rice per serving, but wow. 2 1/2 cups of chicken? You’d have to eat it out of a vat. Who wants that much chicken? I think I did 1 1/2 cups. 

Sorry for the crappy picture … didn’t take it with a flash.

This one was ok … but I can’t see us making it again. The points value alone made it too much for me to even want to take leftovers for lunch (I usually save my points for dinner - Yup) and the recipe itself need A LOT of adjustment. Firstly, the amount of chopped tomatoes alone in there pretty much made the whole thing taste like … well, chopped tomatoes. It was over-powering. We ended up cutting it by adding a bunch (at least a tsp) of cumin,  and a whack of hot sauce (Crystal Sauce … the best hot sauce ever made) and then it was finally tolerable.

We only had button mushrooms on hand, not shitake, but I don’t think that would have made much difference in the flavour. It was pretty bland and boring … like tomato soup with chicken and rice thrown in. Nothing to write mom about, that’s for sure. And for what you ended up with, it was way too much effort and took way too much time.

Bummer.

Baked Tilapia with Oven Baked Fries

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Recipe Links: Baked Tilapia and Cumin-Spiced Oven Fries
Points Plus Value: 3 for the Fish, 4 for the fries
Difficulty: Easy, but you need a good 45 minutes for the fries
Servings: One 5oz Fillet (I halved that), and 12 Fries

This is an amazingly satisfying recipe for the points value. I was looking up breaded fish recipes, but this one looked so easy that I decided to go for it, and let me tell you, the fish can be done literally in 15 minutes. The fries, on the other hand, take a bunch more time. After chopping the potatoes (it calls for half sweet, half yukons, but I am not a fan of sweet potatoes — I must be the only person in the world) and dressing them, you’re pretty much having them in the oven for 30 minutes. Cook for 10, flip, cook for another 10, flip and then another round. The fish calls to be broiled for 5 minutes, but I found that if I just threw them in for the last ten minutes it saved time, but I think they could have used another 5 after that (at 450° and not broil.) OR i could have done a broil for the last ten minutes of the fries which would have crisped them up a bit. Either way would have worked, but the fries had already set off my smoke detector once, which really pisses off my dog, so who knows.

I DIGRESS

I am still finding these recipes to be pretty simple and delicious … I am still losing, and that’s surprising considering I am wicked lazy with exercise and drink WAY too much wine. Like, I pretty much spend all the weekly points and activity points I use on wine. So there’s that.

Cheers!

Oh … forgot to mention the sauce I whipped together. Not a WW recipe, but it’s a simple, home-made tartar. 1/2 Cup of low-fat Olive Oil mayo (find it tastes better than reg. fat free mayo and is only a point per TBSP), a tbsp of mustard, a medium-sized dill pickle, chopped finely, and a bunch of dill chopped finely. Easy, low fat and super tasty. In fact, if I don’t make this sauce for my husband when I serve fish I swear he won’t eat it. I assigned it 2 points for the mustard and mayo, and stuck to a tbsp. serving.

BONUS PIC OF THE DOG WHO GOES EVIL WHEN THE SMOKE ALARM GOES OFF:

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Cilantro Lime Chicken Soup

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This isn’t actually a Weight Watchers recipe, but it was good, simple, and super light. It’s an awesome soup from Chatelaine Magazine. You can find the recipe here.

Nutrients per Serving
  • 74  calories
  • 7 g protein
  • 8 g carbohydrates
  • 2 g fat
  • 1 g fibre
  • 142 mg sodium

Using the calculator this came out to about 2 PP per serving. Pretty awesome. I feel like I could get about 6 servings out of this soup (it says 4) so it’s good for lunches, leftovers. Just pop it in the freezer.

We added a little extra chili flakes and powder, just ‘cause we like some spice, and our friends had made it the evening before and recommended adding more pepper and chili.

On the side there I took some WW 6” Tortillas and cut them into strips, laid them out on a cookie sheet sprinkled with sea salt and baked them at 400 F for about 12 minutes. Turned out to be pretty good … actually tasted better than store bought “baked” tortillas which I find too sweet.

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