Global Inspired Chicken Recipes

We all know chicken can be a healthy option, but sometimes it just gets boring.  Here are three healthy dishes with some global flair to help liven up your weekly fare. 

Chicken Tikka Masala
This slow cooker recipe is a bit more involved (and requires a pretty stocked spice rack) but is probably one of the best things I've ever cooked.  We served it with rice, cucumber salad, and some toasted chickpeas.  You can find the recipe in this fabulous cookbook.

Chicken Taco Salad
This one is a super simple staple in our house.  Cube the chicken and cook it with a taco seasoning packet.  Serve it up with a buffet of black beans, sauteed onions, shredded lettuce, light sour cream, and salsa. 

Sesame Chicken
We decided this recipe tasted nothing like what you get from your local take-out place, but was tasty in its own right.  We served it with a vegetable stir fry. 

Healthy Super Bowl Snacks

Aside from Thanksgiving, the Super Bowl may be the 'holiday' that revolves most around food: the chicken wings, the pizza, the guacamole, the chips.  And I didn't want to miss out on those things.  So I fiddled a little with a few classics - chili, Tex-Mex layer dip, and nachos - to make healthier versions. 

The dip was by far the tastiest.  It's just a layer of fat free cream cheese, a layer of re-fried beans, a layer of diced tomatoes with chopped green chilies, jalapenos, and red onion, a layer of fat free cheddar cheese, a layer of chopped artichokes, and a layer of guacamole.  I ate it with Special K crackers instead of tortilla chips, but anyone eating it with chips would never know that this was a healthy dish. 

For the nachos I had to use tortilla chips because otherwise it wouldn't be nachos!  But I topped them with two slices of reduced fat cheddar, a jalapeno slice, salsa, and a little dollop of fat free sour cream and fat free re-fried beans. 

 

As the main course, I made turkey and vegetable chili.  I just brown lean ground turkey and then add  two cans of red beans and every veggie I can imagine: onions, peppers, carrots, celery, zucchini, broccoli, diced tomatoes, corn, and mushrooms.  It ends up being mostly vegetables, but there's enough meat and spice to make it feel like a really hearty chili.  The best part is, I now have lunch for the rest of the week!