healthy meals

You won’t find a coconut cake anywhere that’s this easy to make. One bowl. Simple ingredients. Quick and easy recipe. It’s a variation of my easy one bowl yellow cake with just a couple of changes and one of them is of course, lots of coconut. This is an easy cake you can make quickly and have a delicious homemade dessert ready any time.

I try to always use ingredients that most people either have on hand or can easily find. And I always try to bake without butter and I have done it again with this cake. Even the cream cheese frosting is made without butter and I promise you will not miss it. What you will miss is the rest of the cake because it will disappear very quickly! Click here for the recipe. – Jenny Jones

Click here for my recipe. – Jenny Jones

Smacznego!

This may be the easiest cookie recipe ever. No mixer, no flour, no butter, and only five ingredients. Well… make that six. It’s my peanut butter cookie recipe but this time I added chocolate chips. Wow! They were so good I made them twice this week. It’s a winning combination: peanut butter and chocolate, and even healthier by using dark chocolate chips so I just had to share my “new” recipe.

This recipe is so flexible that next time I might add some extra chopped peanuts too. This simple recipe is so easy, even if you don’t bake, you can make these cookies. – plain or with chocolate chips.  Click here for the recipe. – Jenny Jones

Roasting vegetables is just about the easiest way to cook them. I love this dish so much, probably because roasting brings out the sugar in vegetables so they are sweeter, and in many cases, have more nutrients than they do raw.  Today I used red potatoes, sweet potatoes, red & yellow peppers, green beans, Brussels sprouts, red onions, and carrots. I added some olive oil, salt & pepper and roasted them at 400 along with my pork tenderloin. Here they are after roasting…

This may look like a lot but between the two of us there was not one piece of vegetable left on this tray. We usually save some of the sweet potato slices for dessert because they are so sweet after roasting. With all these beautiful colors, the antioxidants here are enormous. I have two recipes you might like. One is just the roasted vegetables as a side dish. The other is what I made tonight, my fabulous pork loin dinner. (there’s no pork left either!)

Pork is one of the leanest meats you can find, and so delicious! Click here for the recipe. – Jenny Jones

They are low in sugar with as many diced apples as I could squeeze in. The top is the best part because I sprinkle it with a little cinnamon & sugar before baking. I used a mix of Granny Smith and gala apples and I was out of buttermilk so I used a mixture of milk and plain yogurt (about 1/2 & 1/2) and it worked great.

There’s no butter in these lightly sweet, delicious muffins, but they don’t need it. Anything baked with apples is always going to be good. It’s apples!  Click here for the recipe. – Jenny Jones

There’s always something to snack on over the weekend in this house. Sometimes it’s my skinless chicken drumsticks but today it’s my Italian sub pinwheel sandwiches. Today I skipped the cheese and made them with sliced roasted turkey breast, nitrate-free ham, and light salami. The salami is what give them an Italian sub flavor. So here’s what’s inside my lavash bread…. mayo, mustard, Italian seasoning, diced peperoncinis, turkey, ham, salami, and lots of lettuce.

I rolled them up, wrapped them tightly in plastic wrap, and refrigerated them for about 3-4 hours. Then I sliced them, covered the plate tightly with plastic wrap, and now they are in the fridge, ready for the weekend.  Some people add cream cheese or other different meats so you can make them your own. It’s the perfect TV snack if you’re watching the Olympics this weekend. Click here for the recipe. – Jenny Jones

Blueberries are on sale so it’s the perfect time to make my blueberry coffee cake. I have simplified my recipe so it’s pretty easy and if you like baking without butter, I’m your girl. This lovely and delicious cake has no butter, not even in the streusel topping. It’s an easy buttermilk cake and I use a heaping cup of blueberries. The streusel is crispy from the toasted pecans. You can use walnuts but I think pecans, especially when they are toasted first, are much more fragrant.

My streusel can be made with softened butter or a trans fat-free spread, but it’s perfect the way I make it, just using oil. I used to make this easy cake in a 9-inch pan but I like using the 8-inch round pan because the cake is taller. Inspect your blueberries and remove any bad ones and make sure they are not wet when adding to the batter. I toss the berries with a little flour before adding so they don’t sink to the bottom.

This blueberry coffee cake, like all coffee cakes, is best served warm. Click here for the recipe. – Jenny Jones

Any cookies that are crispy, have lots of fiber, no butter, and taste great are my kind of cookies. It’s this kind of cookie that I always have around the house so there’s always something sweet available. I make almost all my cookies with extra light olive oil but you can use any vegetable oil.

Sweets will always be part of my diet so I try to make them as healthy as I can. And crispy cookies like this keep well. I put them in a zip top plastic bag and keep them refrigerated for weeks and they are still great. They’re big, too. This recipe makes a dozen big 4 to 5-inch cookies. Have one for a healthy, high fiber dessert or as a snack with a glass of milk. Click here for the recipe. – Jenny Jones

Not all chicken meatballs are soft but these are. The secret is to cook them right in the sauce. Ground chicken breast is very lean and healthy but since it contains so little fat, it’s easy for chicken meatballs to become dry. But when they’re cooked in the sauce, they are beautifully soft and even more flavorful from absorbing the sauce.

Using fresh bread crumbs also helps with their beautifully soft texture. Fresh crumbs are made by using fresh bread, in this case whole wheat bread, and running it through a food processor. Since I always bake my own simple whole wheat bread, that’s what I use for the crumbs so it’s important to use a soft whole wheat bread for these fresh crumbs. Click here for my recipe and video on making bread crumbs.

You can put this meal, with sauce, together in about 1/2 an hour if you use my Quick & Easy Spaghetti Sauce. In fact, you can follow my Quick & Easy Spaghetti & Meatballs recipe and just swap the beef meatballs with my chicken recipe. Both of these sauce recipes are exactly the same. If you don’t want to use sauce and would prefer to pan-fry or oven-bake these chicken meatballs, you can do that. They won’t be quite as soft, and not as pretty, but they still taste really good.

I experimented with both pan-frying and oven-baking and here’s how you would do that. To pan-fry, heat a little olive oil in a large pan and cook the meatballs for about 10 minutes, gently turning to brown all sides. They won’t be meatballs any more… more more like meat triangles. To oven-bake, place the meatballs on a greased baking sheet and bake in a preheated 400° F oven for about 20 minutes. The meatballs are done when the inside reaches 165° F. As I said, they won’t be as pretty as the sauce version and here is the proof:

Pan-fried                                              Oven-baked

I told you they weren’t pretty!! Of the two options, the pan-fried meatballs tasted better, probably because they were browned. So now you have options, but I highly recommend cooking these chicken breast meatballs in sauce for the best result. – Jenny Jones

Click here for the recipe.

I couldn’t decide what kind of cookies to make today. I often make my giant breakfast cookies but I wanted something different. I like my crispy oat cookies too but I wanted something with even more fiber. So I made a hybrid of both cookies and LOVED them. They are super crispy and as with most of my cookies, they have no butter and no white flour. I followed my recipe for Crispy Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cookies with these changes:

~reduced oats to 1 cup

~added 1/2 cup All-Bran Original Cereal

~used one egg instead of two egg whites

~doubled the vanilla

~added about five chopped mission figs

~added about 3 Tablespoons shredded, sweetened coconut

I baked them at 350° F for 16 minutes and they were perfect. Crispy. Not too sweet. Easy recipe. I like these healthy cookies so much they are now a new recipe here on my site.  Click here for the recipe. – Jenny Jones