When Home Doesn’t Exactly Equal Healthy

So I’m back in Tampa again, this time for the two weeks surrounding the Christmas holidays. I usually stay with my mom, who is notorious for all the goodies she has lying around the house. And since she began baking as a side business, there are at least four kinds of baked-from-scratch cakes/pies/tarts chilling in the fridge.

The temptation, I tell you, is daunting. Absolutely daunting.

So I came up with the idea of having a small stockpile of healthier foods that I could integrate with things already at her house and keep eating healthily during these two weeks (more on that in one of my next posts).

If I must say so, I’m pretty proud of tonight’s concoction. And it’s definitely getting a repeat for a future Meatless Monday.

I got the idea for dinner from this post on The Edible Perspective. However, since I don’t eat tofu(more on that here), I used part-skim ricotta to add a bit of creaminess to the pasta. And since all the chicken in the house was frozen (and I’m not one to be patient and wait for thawing), I used a Qorn Chik’n patty I bought at Whole Foods. I love these meatless “chik’n” patties, because they taste just like a chicken sandwich, and they have no soy!

Source

After fully cooking and draining spiral pasta (my favorite ), I stirred in a heaping tablespoon of part-skim ricotta until the pasta was fully-cooked. Next came about 1/4 cup of some of my mom’s amazing, better-than-crack (an assumption, of course) spaghetti sauce. Finally, I added a handful of spinach and the diced Chik’n patty and turned the heat back on to low and stirred it around occasionally just until everything was heated and the spinach was wilted to my liking.

It reminded me of chicken lasagna… without… well… lasagna noodles. It was so delicious, I’ll be making a giant pot of it for my family this week. But this time, I’ll make sure to wait for the REAL chicken to defrost.

I’m heading back to Universal’s Islands of Adventure tomorrow, where I’ll be spending a lot of time in The Wizarding World of Harry Potter… most likely stocking up on a few things from the Hogwarts House I was sorted into (insert judging of my extreme nerdiness here).

If you’re a bit bored, and maybe wondered what house you’d be sorted into, click here and take a quiz.

Yours truly is a proud…