Fashionably Fit

I went looking for a tasty pork recipe to use up a few pork chops I had in the freezer from New Year’s (when the traditional meal in western Pennsylvania is pork, hot dogs, sauerkraut, beer and brown sugar tossed into a slow cooker). I found this brown sugar and balsamic glaze from Let’s Dish Recipes and thought it sounded delicious.

My next move was so dumb it probably shouldn’t be written on the Internet, but here I am. I whisked all of the ingredients together and then brushed it on the pork chops after pan searing them, figuring it might be OK.

Well … it was OK. But really just OK. I figured it would be taste a lot better if I actually followed the directions, so I added a pork loin roast to our grocery list.

It was beautiful. And delicious.

Brown sugar and balsamic glazed pork roast

Ingredients

• A 2 pound boneless pork roast
• Dried cilantro, salt, pepper, garlic (all to taste)
• 1/2 cup water

For the glaze

• 1/2 cup brown sugar
• 1 tablespoon cornstarch
• 1/4 cup balsamic vinegar
• 1/2 cup water
• 2 tablespoons soy sauce

In a small bowl, combine the sage, salt, pepper and garlic. Rub the mixture all over the roast; put it in the slow cooker with the 1/2 cup of water. Cook on low for 6 to 8 hours. (Keep an eye on it if you can; all slow cookers are different and mine cooks like it’s on speed, even when it’s filled to capacity.)

An hour before dinner, combine all of the glaze ingredients in a small sauce pan and whisk until it thickens. Brush on the roast while it finishes.

Yep. You read that correctly — meatloaf muffins. This is not some perverse item I dreamed up to combine my loves of baking and meat. It’s just an easy way of making portion-controlled meatloaf.

I like meatloaf. Since I started cooking I’ve tried a couple different recipes, a couple Crock Pot varieties … but none ever tasted like classic meatloaf, ketchup glaze and all. It seems like when I make it in a loaf pan, half of the thing is lost to the grease on the bottom of the pan, and the rest of sticks to the pan, and it’s just a hideous mess.

Meatloaf muffins, thankfully, are not a hideous mess. And two of them are a serving, so there’s no hacking at a loaf and hoping you got the right amount. And just like its full-size friend, it tastes way better the next day.

Meatloaf muffins

From Cooking Light

Ingredients

• 1.25 to 1.5 pounds of lean ground beef
• 2 eggs
• 1 onion, diced
• 1 cup diced carrot
• 1 teaspoon oregano
• Minced garlic to taste
• 1 cup Italian seasoned breadcrumbs
• 1 cup ketchup
• 2 tablespoons yellow mustard
• 1 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce

Preheat the oven to 350 and coat a 12-muffin tin with nonstick spray.

Mix the carrots, onions and oregano together and sauté in olive oil; set aside to cool.

Mix the beef, eggs, breadcrumbs and remaining ingredients together, adding in the onion mixture when cool.

Scoop the meatloaf mixture into the muffin pan. My muffin cups were filled above the brim.

Bake at 350 until a meat thermometer reads 160 — this took about 35 minutes for me.

Before I started to count calories and lose weight, it never occurred to me that condiments were part of my problem. I mean, how bad can a mere sauce be?

Hoooo boy. Bad. And barbecue sauce can be one of the worst — it’s usually loaded with sugar and carbs and all kinds of junk.

Don’t get me wrong — if I’m at a hole-in-the-wall BBQ joint, I go whole hog (heh heh) and slurp up every sauce they have. But if I’m eating barbecue at home, there’s a better way.

It’s this shredded barbecue beef from Taste of Home.

This recipe is so simple and so delicious. It does include brown sugar and whatever sugar is in the ketchup, but I still think it’s pretty healthy.

Shredded barbecue beef

Adapted from Taste of Home

• 1 boneless chuck roast, about 2.5 to 3 pounds
• 1 cup ketchup
• 1 cup water
• 1 or 2 small onions, diced
• 1/3 cup packed brown sugar
• 3 tablespoons + a few splashes (to taste) Worcestershire sauce
• 2 tablespoons apple cider vinegar
• Chili powder, salt and pepper to taste

Rinse your roast; pat dry and place it into the slow cooker. Dice onion into small pieces. Whisk together ketchup, water, brown sugar, Worcestershire sauce, apple cider vinegar and spices until blended in a sauce. Pour the sauce over the roast and cook on low for about 8 hours.

Move the roast into a large bowl and shred with a fork. Return to the slow cooker to soak in sauce. Serve on a roll (I’m a devotee of the 100-calorie thin rolls.)

Yields: A lot! The original recipe says 12 servings. I don’t know exactly how many servings we get out of it, but it makes for lots of fabulous leftovers.

From the weird-but-good files …

I first made a zucchini pizza last fall, after seeing this post  on Eat, Live, Run, but I’d forgotten how gooooood it was until zucchini was on sale and I threw this together over the weekend. Grate the zucchini, press to remove moisture, mix it with the cheese, and scatter it over the sauce. I put down a layer of pepperoni first, for good measure.

Odd. But delicious.

There are varying degrees of weeknight-appropriate meals.

There’s the I-went-right-to-the-gym-from-work-and-now-my-blood-sugar-is-so-low-I’m going-to-bite-your-head-off-and-eat-that-for-dinner-if-food-isn’t-on-the-table-within-the-next-five-minutes meal. (Hope something’s waiting in the slow cooker!)

Then there’s the I-have-a-little-bit-of-time-but-I-don’t-want-to-spend-more-than-3o-minutes-making-dinner-tonight dish. Enter Eating Well’s stuffed chicken breast recipes. These take a little bit of time, but they’d also be pretty easy to make ahead and store in the freezer.

Eating Well offers a couple variations of stuffed chicken breasts, but I chose the cream cheese and pesto recipe because it doesn’t get much simpler than two ingredients that are already in your refrigerator!

Mix the cream cheese and pesto together. Cut a pocket in the chicken breast and spread about 1/4 of the mixture inside (the recipe is for four pieces).

I love meat, but I was squeamish about working wih raw cuts until recently. I’ve gotten over it and kind of like it. There’s something … aggressive about it.

I was worried the chicken breast would be unwieldy after it was stuffed, but it wasn’t. Brush with egg whites, dip in bread crumbs, sear in a pan for a few minutes on each side. Bake at 400 degrees for about 20 minutes.

I don’t really miss breading when I eat chicken, but this was a nice change of pace — it added just enough crunchy texture. The biggest challenge of this recipe was eating only half of a chicken breast, which is about what one serving would be.

I do not love broccoli, but I’ve learned to like it. I doctor it up with a little olive oil and a sprinkle of parmesan cheese, and it’s palatable.

What do you make on a weeknight when you have a little extra time?

Fiance tackled one project this weekend.

And I worked on another.

It didn’t start out that way. Originally, we were both going to paint, but apparently, there is a very specific method to painting, and I did not follow it to fiance’s satisfaction. So I figured anyone that particular would do the best job all by himself, but he might be hungry afterward. So I got to work making my homemade pizza crust.

Every time I make it, it comes out a little differently. It’s our Friday night tradition and over the last few weeks, it’s really come out thin, crispy and delicious. I got a pizza stone for Christmas, but I haven’t been able to use it yet, because you need one of those large wooden pizza spatulas, as the stone has to preheat in the oven. Maybe the pizza stone will really push the pizza over the edge!

I wanted a buffalo chicken pizza, but fiance wanted a traditional, red-sauce pie, so I made two smaller pizzas.

This isn’t the first time we’ve been indecisive lately. Last week, we were both torn between a spinach pesto pie and regular ol’ pepperoni.

I made a barbecue chicken pizza about a month ago, but we weren’t too wild about it. I love trying new twists on pizza, but then there’s some cognitive dissonance going on, at least for me, when I take the first few bites. No matter what we try, we always come back to the tomato-sauce-and-cheese pie. And, well, duh. There’s a reason it’s a classic.

How do you like your pizza?