Newest Food Finds

A student of mine has been bringing these mini cucumbers in as a snack lately and they looked delicious so I decided to give them a try! I grabbed from from Giant on sale 2 packages for $5.00. I sliced them up today and two mini cucumbers is a great, crunchy snack for only 30 calories! The mini cucumbers have more flavor and much more crunch than a normal cucumber. Additions that I plan on trying them with are Laughing Cow cheese and Lighthouse Ranch Yogurt dressing!

New food find for the week: Pepperidge Farm Light Style Extra Fiber Bread, only 40 calories a slice!

                                          

Taco Stuffed Peppers

After Cinco de Mayo on Sunday, I had leftover ground turkey taco meat. Yesterday and today I took it as a topper for my salad and it was perfect, but I needed to get rid of it quicker. So I came home and searched in my refrigerator for something I could use it in for dinner, when I stumbled on green bell peppers! Stuffed Taco Peppers it was. I didn't have a recipe for this so I kind of just made it and we shall see how it goes.

I had 8 small-medium sized green peppers. I started off with de-seeding the pepper and removing the stem. The easiest way to do so is to stick the knife in the top of the pepper and make a circle around the stem. You are able to pull out the stem and most of the seeds in one easy motion. I doubled check for any loose seeds before I moved on. After removing the stem and seeds, I sliced them in half straight down the center of the pepper.

Next, I boiled some water, which I placed 3 pepper halves into at a time. I let them boil for 3-4 minutes then removed and continued with the others until all had boiled for 3-4 minutes.

While in the water

After removing them from the water

Since the ground turkey taco meat was already cooked, I just had to microwave it to reheat it. I added a little Ortega Taco Sauce (maybe 1/2 - 1 TBSP) to the meat and stirred it before reheating just to add some flavor and to avoid drying out the meat.

After the ground turkey taco meat was reheated, I used 1/4c and scooped meat into each pepper half.

Lastly, I topped each pepper half with 1/2 slice of Sargento Pepper Jack (new and only 40 calories a slice) to add a little kick to the pepper!

I placed it in the oven at 350* for 20 minutes.

I served the Taco Stuffed Peppers with a container Minute Ready to Serve Brown Rice.

 A healthy dinner is served in under an hour! 

According to the my calculations on My Fitness Pal

168 calories included:

2 pepper halves (1 whole green bell pepper)

1 slice of Sargento Pepper Jack (split on two halves)

2 oz of Ground Turkey Taco Meat (made with McCormicks Taco Seasoning/Water)

With Minute Read to Serve Brown Rice Cup of 230 calories 

Total of 398 calories for the entire dinner