Tonight's Dinner: January 22, 2014

Tonight I headed to the gym for a short workout.  I don’t know what it is with me, but when the pressure is on to get in shape for races all I want to do is sit around… as if I don’t already sit all day at work.  I’ve had to really force myself to make my gym membership worth it.  With this drought,  I joked that I would go there just to take showers, but now I’m actually thinking it’s a good idea since I haven’t been getting  my money’s worth with the workout portion.  It might get me to work out more too.  

Tonight’s workout consisted of:
30 minutes stationary biking
3 minute plank, 2 minute, 1 minute
45 second boat flutter kicks, 30 seconds, 15 seconds
2-1 minute rockers in pushup position on a stability ball. I put my hands flat on the base and rocked slowly from left to right for full body toning. 

When I got home, I immediately started dinner.   I’m still trying to get used to brown rice, but whenever I make it I don’t want to eat it.  I had defrosted turkey thighs and decided to do a simple garlic and rosemary rub.  It was really easy to do and pretty healthy as I only used about two table spoons of extra virgin olive oil for both thighs.

Garlic-Rosemary Turkey thighs
5 cloves garlic, minced
3 springs Rosemary, minced
2 tbsp EVOO
Salt and pepper to taste
 Directions:
Preheat oven to 375 degrees.  Mix garlic, rosemary, and EVOO in small bowl.  Generously pepper both sides of the turkey.  Sprinkle a little bit of kosher salt on both sides.  Using two fingers, separate the skin from the turkey thigh and add garlic-rosemary mixture into the pocket.  Put remaining mixture on the top of the skin.  Bake covered with foil for 40 minutes.  Uncover and bake for another 20 minutes.

I chose to salt and pepper the turkey separately instead of adding it to the garlic mixture so that I could control how much salt we were using on each piece.  I used very little and I think this recipe would be fine without salt if you are really trying to watch your sodium intake.  The downside of using very little salt in my cooking is that when I eat at restaurants a lot of things taste very salty to me and I wind up feeling extremely bloated the next couple of days.

We were pretty low on veggies since I was planning on doing a chicken and vegetable stir fry for Nick’s parents when we go over to their place to do his laundry.  Luckily, a friend had given us a large bag of home grown Swiss Chard, kale, an spinach.  In a small pot, I tore the large leaves up and cooked them down with a little bit of low sodium vegetable stock.  I also added a handful of baby spinach that I use for my juicing.  Knowing that the greens would wilt down quite a bit, I only added about half a cup of stock and then covered the pot.  They did wilt down as expected and the small amount of stock I used kept them from burning while adding a ton of flavor. I didn’t really know how to cook the greens since I’d never cooked with them before.  I just did what I’ve seen people on TV do, minus the butter and bacon.  I did add a little drizzle of EVOO to the pot to give it some richness.  I let them simmer over low heat while the rest of our dinner was cooking.  At the very end I added some frozen corn and cayenne pepper for texture and kick.   

Greens for two
½ c fresh kale, torn up
½ c Swiss chard, torn up
1 c baby spinach
½ c low sodium vegetable stock
1 tbsp EVOO
 1 c frozen corn
1 tsp cayenne pepper
Salt and pepper to taste
 Directions:
In a medium sized pot, add kale, chard, spinach and broth.  Bring to a boil.  Add EVOO and salt and pepper to taste. Cover and lower heat to simmer for 1 hour, stirring occasionally. Add corn and cayenne. Cook uncovered for 5 minutes.