Healthy and Easy Cooking Ideas

Author: Chantilly Lane Gifts
Healthy and Easy Cooking Ideas
Are you getting bored with cooking? Are you tired of the same old meals? Are you having trouble trying to think of healthy dinner recipes? I had been feeling exactly that way for a while until my Aunt shared with me how she has been cooking for years. It's called using your imagination. And I never thought I had it in me until I tried a few "recipes" that she suggested. I'd like to share some of those ideas with you.

One of the things I have been trying to do is to cook healthy meals without going through a lot of fuss. One of the easiest things I've been trying lately is making a very simple "sauce" to serve over whole wheat pasta. Now, I'm an old fashioned Italian cook who makes her own homemade pasta and spaghetti sauce. But I cook my spaghetti sauce all day long to get the flavor I want. So making a "sauce" that only takes me a fraction of the time was strange to me. But boy have I been enjoying it. And my husband and I have been enjoying some delicious meals.
One of the things I do is either take fresh tomatoes or canned tomatoes. I will put them through a food processor to puree them. I will then cook them up in a large sauce pan with lots of fresh garlic and onions, and add loads of spices like sweet basil, Italian seasoning, salt, pepper, and any other spices you like. I will also add some romano or parmesan cheese for flavor.
After that cooks for a while, I might add a little chicken or beef broth for more flavor. Then I start throwing in anything I feel like eating with it. I especially like to add fresh or frozen spinach and let the spinach cook for about 15 minutes in the tomato mixture.
Now this is where your imagination comes into play. You can add anything else you'd like (or nothing else if you'd prefer). But consider adding all sorts of different vegetables to make it more like a pasta primavera. Just adding broccoli is also delicious.
Here are some other things you could consider throwing in the sauce: peas, carrots, sweet potato chunks, zucchini, cauliflower,lima beans. I'm sure you can think of so many other things you could use.
Whatever combination you use, once it all cooks together (you'll want it to be a very thin sauce), then you can toss it into cooked whole wheat pasta. If the sauce isn't thin enough, you can always add some of the water that you cooked the pasta in. It's a great way to thin out the sauce and adds a little body to the sauce without watering down the flavor.
One of the other things I've been trying to do a lot is cook with plant-based foods. These are foods like artichokes, avocados, beans, root vegetables, and of course rices and pastas. There is a great cookbook I found that has loads of recipes for plant based cooking. It's called Renegade Recipe Guide. These are some of the most delicious easy healthy meal recipes I've ever found. You can use the link below to check it out and see the list of recipes they have available.
http://www.usfreeads.com/3027637-cls.html
Article Source: http://www.articlesbase.com/cooking-tips-articles/healthy-and-easy-cooking-ideas-5728089.html
About the Author
http://www.usfreeads.com/3027637-cls.html