Ingredients Archives: Cinnamon

One-Pan Apple Chicken Breasts

By Ami on March 11, 2016 in Main Dishes

Chicken is cheap and has great protein, so we buy a lot of it. But chicken can easily become very boring. This is a fun change from a basic grilled chicken. I read a recipe similar to this in a “healthy” cookbook. I was shocked it was considered healthy with all the sugars and hydrogenated oils. I changed up some of the ingredients and left out the processed sugars and was very pleased with the results. My daughter loved it and since kids are always a good indication of whether a recipe is actually good, I’d say this one is a keeper.

Saute a sliced apple in the coconut oil until it’s tender. I used a Granny Smith apple because they were on sale but any apple will work fine. Set the apple slices aside in a bowl.

Season the chicken with the cinnamon, salt and pepper and add that to the pan with the rest of the coconut oil. Just brown both sides here. You’ll completely cook the chicken a little later. Browning it a bit before cooking it keeps it juicy and locks in the great flavors.

Now set the chicken aside. Don’t worry about keeping it warm as it’s going to go back in the pan later. Add the onion, cover the pan and cook the onion until it’s soft. If you don’t cover the pan, the onion with get brown and crunchy. You don’t want that. You want the onion as soft as the apple.

Now add in the liquids and let that simmer a bit before adding the chicken back in. Once the chicken is completely cooked, add the apples and make sure everything is warm.

The best part about this dish (besides the flavor) is the fact that it comes together in one dish. I hate washing dishes so I cut out as many as possible when cooking. We ate this over rice, but you can use quinoa or mashed sweet potatoes.

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No Sugar Chocolate Banana Muffins

By Ami on January 8, 2016 in Breakfast, Guilt-Free Treats, Healthy Snacks

Every morning my son’s breakfast includes a mini muffin. This is my way of cramming a bit more protein and nutrients into him in an unprocessed way before sending him off to second grade to solve the world’s great problems. I always look for muffin recipes heavy on nuts and/or eggs and low on sugar. We generally stick to banana muffins, but to keep things interesting, I’m always trying to find something else. I found this recipe from Yummy Mummy. It looked delicious, but since I was giving it to my son every morning for breakfast, I wanted something without added sugar or sugar substitutes and without chocolate chips. So using Yummy Mummy’s recipe as my base, I came up with a version without sugar. We’re all very pleased with the results and I can continue to give my son a muffin every morning without feeling guilty. Luckily as a mom, there are still plenty of other things I get to feel guilty about every day.

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Perfect Mashed Sweet Potatoes

By Ami on December 18, 2015 in Side Dishes

When I was a little girl, my mom tried to give me a sweet potato for dinner. After tears, screaming and a fair amount of pouting, it was accepted in our house that I did not like sweet potatoes. I lived for years thinking this to be true until one day I decided to be daring and eat a sweet potato. It was like making a new best friend. Since that day we buy a large bag of sweet potatoes every week. We eat them as fries, as cubes, roasted, in potato salad, in breads and pancakes, baked and loaded, and most popularly, mashed. Mashed sweet potatoes serve as a great component to a lot of dishes. You can use them as a side dish or a base for meatballs or stew. After trial and error, I’ve found the best way to make mashed sweet potatoes.

You can cook the sweet potatoes by boiling them or baking them whole. I usually boil them. Just peel, cube and boil them until they’re tender.

Then mash them with the coconut oil, milk and seasonings. They’re so easy and delicious! My 5-year-old does not like regular potatoes, but loves these mashed sweet potatoes. Enjoy your Christmas sweet potatoes!

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No-Bean Chili

By Ami on November 6, 2015 in Main Dishes

I don’t like beans. It’s not the taste or the texture; it’s the after effect. The night I eat beans, I’m groaning on the couch, my stomach churning. The problem is, I love chili. I love it on chips, I love it on fries, and I love it in a bowl with avocado and sour cream. But every no-bean chili I’ve tried is usually just glorified Sloppy Joe meat. So I decided we needed to come up with a healthy no-bean chili that still has that great chunky chili texture. Here is what we came up with.

Start by cooking the meat and onion, just as you do in every chili.

The great texture comes from a bunch of vegetables. Add a chopped carrot, red, green and yellow peppers and a can of diced tomatoes.

Then add the great flavor with your seasonings. Stir in your seasonings and flavored liquids and let this simmer in the slow cooker for 6-8 hours.

Eat this in a bowl with your favorite toppings or spoon it over hot dogs, sweet potato fries or veggie chips. Better yet, freeze half and reheat it to use in a fun, new way.

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Clean Maple Pumpkin Cheesecake

By Ami on October 16, 2015 in Guilt-Free Treats

It’s Fall!! The air is crisp, the leaves are red, the occasional sweater makes an appearance and the best part of the season shows its lovely orange face: PUMPKIN! I firmly believe pumpkin should be a part of everything I eat whenever possible from October 1 to December 31. It just feels right. Basically, this is me:

The problem is, a lot of those delicious, gooey pumpkin desserts are chock full of refined sugars, processed flours and hydrogenated oils. Because I am not willing to give up my pumpkin desserts, I needed to come up with a healthy pumpkin pie. And not just a normal pie, but a CHEESECAKE! Now listen. Eating healthy doesn’t mean eating “healthy” treats every day. And to me, it doesn’t mean depriving myself of treats for the rest of my life, because that sounds like the worst life possible. What it does mean is eating healthier treats in moderation. We have dessert every Sunday night. We had this last Sunday and the whole family gave it two thumbs up, including my son with sensory eating issues. That’s always a huge win in our household.

I started with this coconut cookie pie crust by Plated with Style. I’ve made this crust for several pies and love it. Why reinvent the wheel, right? I left the crust raw and baked the filling and crust together with great results. I used a regular pie dish and greased it with coconut oil, which I highly recommend.

This cheesecake easily comes together in a stand mixer. If you don’t have a stand mixer, use hand beaters.

I’ve heard of several clean-eating cheesecakes that require soaking cashews and then blending them…. I just stick with cream cheese for this. The sweetness comes from maple syrup, vanilla and fall spices like cinnamon.

The batter will be very thick, so don’t worry it’s wrong if it’s not really pour-able.

The pie bakes for 30-35 minutes. The middle should be a bit jiggly, but not sloshy. I’m not ashamed to say, I teared up a bit pulling this out of the oven because it smelled SOOOO good. It’s like a perfect package of fall.

Once it reaches this state, let it cool before refrigerating at least four hours. I made this on a Saturday night for a Sunday dinner and left it in the fridge overnight.

You can eat this plain or top it with whipped coconut cream. Happy pumpkin season!!!

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Granola Bars with Ingredients You Can Pronounce

By Ami on October 9, 2015 in Healthy Snacks

Even though I really do feed my kids regular meals (Really! I swear!) My kids constantly proclaim to be starving. When i try to explain to them what it actually means to be “starving,” they look at me like I’m crazy and then once again profess that if they don’t get food soon they’ll surely die. This means, we need a lot of easy snacks in our house. The problem is, fast and easy often means processed, junk-filled food I don’t particularly want my kids eating. So while the solution is homemade snacks, as busy moms, we don’t always have a lot of time.

These homemade granola bars are extremely easy to make, very healthy and make me feel like Mother of the Year when I hand one to my kids. That warm feeling last all the way until they start fighting in the middle of the condiment isle of the grocery store and break a bottle of salsa. Small victories really do count.

Let’s compare the ingredients in our homemade granola bars to the very popular Quaker Chewy Granola Bars. The Quaker peanut-butter chocolate chip bars contain artificial coloring, corn syrup, sorbital, artificial flavoring, and several other ingredients I can’t pronounce. In total, these bars contain 7 grams of sugar each and have over 30 ingredients. My granola bars have no added sugar (aside from the small amount in the dark chocolate bits) and contain 9 ingredients, all of which you’ve likely heard of.

Start by combining the oats, coconut, ground flax, almonds, dark chocolate and cinnamon in a bowl. If you can’t do almonds, just up the flax or coconut. No big deal. You can also replace them for another nut or seed you like better.

Once you mix this together, stir in the coconut milk, peanut butter and vanilla. I finally gave up with the spoon and went in with my hands. It may be a git gooey, but it saves a lot of time. This just goes in a 9×13 pan and into the fridge to set.

Even after I cut these into bars, I keep them in the fridge. They stay fresh and and stay set that way. But I will take one out, wrap it in plastic and put it in my purse for a trip to the grocery store. They will stay set for an hour or two without refrigeration.

Try them out. I guarantee you’ll have that Mother-of-the-year feeling.

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Healthy Orange Cherry Breakfast Scones

By Ami on September 11, 2015 in Breakfast

Growing up, there was a Village Inn about two miles from our house. Sometimes on Saturday mornings, my BFF and I would walk there for breakfast, indulge in a sweet breakfast pastry (aka pie) and then walk back to my house. We felt like we were so healthy, walking the four miles it took to make the round trip. Little did we know, we were packing on enough sugar and bad carbs to require us to walk about 50 miles to break even.

Even with the knowledge I have now, I still have that taste for delicious pastries branded in my brain. Luckily, there’s a much healthier way to indulge.

These scones are sweetened only with dried fruit, cinnamon and orange zest; and made with a combination of almond flour and coconut flour. This keeps the protein high and the processed carbs low. These scones have less than 5 grams of sugar each.

This easily comes together in a food processor. This is my ancient food processor my grandma found at a garage sale for $10. It’s one of my favorite tools and even though it’s death will mean I get to buy a newer model, I hope this one lasts forever.

Combine everything but the cherries in a food processor. Let everything process until the dough forms a ball.

Add the dried cherries and process again. These are the only dried cherries I’ve found without added sugar. This is one of my pet peeves. Fruit is so full of natural sugars, why do we feel the need to sweeten them. I found these at Walmart of all places.

I like to let the cherries process for a bit to break them into small pieces. This distributes the sweetness throughout the scone. If you like bigger chunks of cherry, mix these in with a spoon.

I bake these in my awesome scone pan, but you can pat this in a round disk and cut into eight triangles, cut them into squares, or roll this out and cut them with a circular biscuit cutter.

These bake quickly so you don’t have to wait long. Rather than top these with frosting, we just drizzle melted coconut butter over the top. The kids think I’m the cool mom giving them frosting for breakfast. They’re such lucky kids.

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No Sugar BBQ Sauce

By Ami on September 8, 2015 in Dressings and Sauces

BBQ sauce makes any meat better. Pour it over chicken, that’s all you need for a great dinner. Pour it over a pork roast and, voila; pulled pork. Smear it on hamburgers and they’re suddenly the best hamburgers ever. My daughter uses BBQ sauce like most kids use ketchup, so we go through a lot of it in our house. While I’m totally okay with adding strange things to food to get kids to eat them, I’m not okay with the sugar content of most condiments. This is especially true for BBQ sauce. When we made the change to a healthier lifestyle, I knew we couldn’t give up BBQ sauce. That’s when I began the quest to make a no-sugar BBQ sauce. Not only did I succeed, but my husband says this is the best BBQ sauce I’ve ever made and my daughter gave it her stamp of approval.

First let’s look at a typical bottled BBQ sauce. The sauce we bought before we made our own, contains 32 grams of sugar in 1/4 C with high fructose corn syrup being the first ingredient. That is crazy. My BBQ sauce has less than 3 grams of sugar in 1/4 C and tastes delicious.

This is also an easy recipe. I didn’t want a recipe that required a lot of sauteing, dish washing and vegetable chopping, so I made it simple. Just throw all the ingredients in a bowl and whisk them together. Yes there are a lot of ingredients, but they are likely things you have in your pantry. If you don’t like an ingredient, leave it out.

I like to store it in a mason jar (or a washed, glass peanut-butter jar since we have a million of those sitting around) and stick it in the fridge. This will stay good for about a two weeks.

One night we had some left over pork roast and needed a quick dinner. I threw the roast leftovers in a slow cooker with the BBQ sauce and we had dinner. It’s almost too easy.