Janine and Jade's Clean Eating Cookbook

Healthy eating shouldn't be about sacrificing the pleasure that you get from food. If you create healthy meals that taste great, then it is going to be a lot easier to embrace changes to your diet.

In the Jade episode of X-Weighted Families, we saw how Janine and Jade collected interesting recipes and made their own "clean eating cookbook". Janine explains why: "For Jade and I it was crucial to have tasty food or we would become bored and it would never become a new lifestyle to live by. When we started our journey I got rid of all the unhealthy condiments such as ketchup, mayo and butter. We stocked up on spices, vinegars, nuts, salsa, lemons and herbs to enhance the flavor of our clean recipes. Before, Jade would make fries and eat them with ketchup or mayo. Now she makes healthy fries using sliced yams sprinkled with cumin and eats them with Salsa. We have created some wonderful meals by getting creative and playing around with combining different spices and herbs."
 
Janine says that by including Jade in food selection and preparation at home, she became very open to try new flavour combinations. "She found the Fiesta Salad recipe and asked me if we could make it so she could bring it for a school lunch. Jade’s backpack is always so full - so 1 container with a yummy, healthy lunch made it easier to ensure she brought a good lunch," says Janine.

Creating your own cookbook, like Janine and Jade did, is a great way to get the family interested and involved in planning healthy meals. You can find healthful recipes online, in magazines or by borrowing books from the library.

Here are a couple of Janine and Jade's favourite recipes - so why not start your own book and add these recipes to it...

Fiesta Salad

Ingredients:

2 cups cooked brown rice (Janine suggests substituting wild rice for a nuttier flavour)

1 cup cooked corn

1 red pepper, diced

2 chopped green onions

3/4 cup dried cranberries

1 grated carrot

3 tbsp chopped fresh parsley

1 clove garlic, crushed

4 tbsp soy sauce

2 tbsp lemon juice

1/2 cup olive oil

1/4 cup roasted pine nuts or slivered almonds

1/4 cup sunflower seeds

Ground black pepper, to taste

Instructions: Combine the rice, corn, red pepper, onions, carrot, cranberries and parsley in a large bowl. In a separate bowl, mix the garlic, soy sauce, lemon juice and olive oil, then pour over the rice mixture. Add in the nuts and sunflower seeds, plus black pepper to taste.

Janine says, "this is the one that we prepared on the show. I’ve brought it to pot luck events and it’s always a hit."

Salmon with leeks and red peppers

Ingredients:

1 leek, cut in to strips (use the white part of the leek)

1 red pepper, cut in to strips

2 tbsp chopped parsley

Grated rind and juice of 1/2 a lemon

2 wild salmon fillets

1/4 tsp paprika

Salt and pepper to taste

Instructions: Put the leek, red pepper, parsley, lemon rind and juice in the bottom of a microwavable dish, stir well and cook for 3 minutes on high. Stir the vegetables, then place the salmon fillets on top, sprinkle with paprika, salt and pepper, then cover and cook on high for 4 1/2 minutes. Leave for 5 minutes to stand before serving. 

This recipe takes just 20 minutes to make and Janine says, "We both LOVED the flavor combinations and were very surprise how good the Salmon tasted being cooked in a microwave."

This post is a repeat, but look forward to more original content to come in the future.