Cod Chowder with Leeks and Sweetcorn

My typical regime for choosing what we eat for dinner is to go to the BBC food website and hit the option to search for "healthy" recipes and then find something that doesn't look like a massive pain in the arse to make.

Today, I hit upon a recipe for smoked haddock chowder. My fishmonger doesn't do smoked fish and was out of haddock, so I made a cod chowder instead. I was a little worried that the chowder would be bland, given that the fish was not smoked, so added a little fish stock to the milk to help it along. The result was very flavorful, too flavorful for my son, who added cheese and extra milk to lighten it up. My husband liked it and it all went in one go - no leftovers at all.

The meal was considered "healthy" by the good people at BBC food, and who am I to argue? but it doesn't offer much in the way of vegetables. I'm sure corn is technically a vegetable, but I imagine that the nutritional value is quite low. I'd guess this meal was classed as healthy because of the fish. I could use this (without the new potatoes) as a recipe for fish pie, and then serve it with a side of green beans. I would probably go further as a pie and have more vegetables on the plate. 

Still, the family enjoyed it, and they all have a nice portion of fish in their bellies.

Low-Fat Chicken Curry

We made a low fat chicken curry from a BBC food recipe. We didn't have any chicken stock so used some tomato sauce.  It was too spicy for me and the boy, might have to add sour cream or something next time. The husband enjoyed it. Check out my rice mounds, classy!

Chicken Pot Roast

I used this recipe but used a whole chicken instead of chicken breasts.  It was unreasonably delicious. I served it with string beans. Will absolutely make this again.

Edit: I made it again in March 2014.  Still delicious. See lower picture. 

Cauliflower Crust Pizza

Cauliflower crust pizza is amazingly delicious. It tastes different, like roasted cauliflower tastes different to baked bread, but both are worthy of exaltation.

All credit needs to go to the lady who wrote this recipe on her blog. She's obviously tried a few things before declaring this the ultimate in cauliflower pizza crust recipes. I've never tried any other, so I can neither confirm or deny her claim that this is the best, but it was fantastic. It doesn't make a very large crust, in future I might have to make two of them to feed my family. It was also pretty fun to make, squeezing the cauliflower though the tea towel was exciting - it makes way more water than you would think! Also, I had to go out and buy a food processor - Walmart had a teeny one for $10. It's super adorable. I felt like a kid in a toy kitchen making food for imaginary friends. It took about 4 or 5 loads in my tiny processor to make enough cauliflower pulp for the base.

We made marinara sauce from the BBC food recipe, which was also excellent. We topped the pizza with mozzarella, Parmesan, chicken and red bell peppers, and garnished with parsley.

I served with a side salad ( baby romaine lettuce, golden delicious apple, red peppers and mozzarella), a pasta salad ( penne pasta, the leftover marinara sauce and Parmesan). Perfetto!

Edit: this was so good we made another one for Julia on the 4th of July.