Yogurt Popsicles - Banana Flavor

Want to cool off with a healthy summer treat? Try making your own popsicles. It's really quite simple. Grab some plain yogurt, mix in some pureed fruit, scoop it into a popiscle mold and pop it in the freezer. A few hours later you have a delicious cool snack. You don't even need a recipe. Want it to be fruitier, then add some more pureed fruit. You can even try mixing two different kinds of fruit together. Try strawberry banana, blackberry blueberry or even orange mango. Still to much work? Then just grab some flavored yogurt and freeze that up in your mold. It couldn't be simpler.

This isn't a recipe from the GI Diet Cookbook but I thought it worthy of sharing anyhow.

TIPS: to make it easier to get these yummy treats out of their molds just run them under some warm water for a couple of seconds and they'll slid right out.

RATING: 9. With some many different flavor options you can't go wrong.

Chocolate Zucchini Muffins

Yummy yum yum! These muffins are my new favorite! Astonishingly they taste good even though they have shredded zucchini in them.

SERVED WITH: My morning coffee. They taste the best the day they're made but I usually freeze them and take one to work each day. When defrosted they dry out slightly but I still enjoy them.

COOKING TIPS: If you want to completely disguise the fact that you are serving vegetables with chocolate be sure to peel the zucchini before shredding it, if not you will see bits of green in your chocolate muffin.

RATING: 9. I will definitely be making these on a weekly basis.

Banana Bread

I bought extra bananas at the grocery store with the intention of making banana bread at the end of the week. I have made this bread before and was anxious to try it again. When something healthy tastes just as good as the unhealthy fattier version deciding which one to bake is not a hard decision to make.

SERVED WITH: A slice is great with a cup of tea or served with some yogurt as desert.

COOKING TIPS: The flax meal in this recipe is what I would consider to be the secret ingredient, it not only gives it great texture but adds a delicious flavor. Make sure your bananas are good and ripe for a sweeter flavor.

RATING: A perfect 10! This sweet treat is moist, healthy, tasty and full of flavor.

Baked Eggs in Ham Cups

This is one of my favorite dishes from the GI cookbook. Tonight I made it for the third time and it tasted as good as it did the first two times. The dish is essentially egg whites with a little seasoning cooked in a nest made of ham slices. I found some great organic ham (and turkey) slices from a local farm called Rowe Farms. The deli slices are sold at my local grocery store which makes it handy to buy. If your having people over for brunch and you want to impress them be sure to serve this. Everyone will think you put a lot of work into it.

SERVED WITH: I always serve this dish with a side salad. Tonight I was organized and added a side of asparagus as well.

COOKING TIPS: Instead of using muffin tins as the recipe suggests I used my ceramic ramekins. It looks prettier and I find a muffin tin that is not completely full starts to smoke. Because of this I had to add an additional 10 minutes to the cook time for a total of 25 minutes in the oven.

RATING: 10. This dish scores a perfect 1o with me because it tastes great, it looks impressive, and it is super easy to make.

Chocolate Pudding

I was desperate for something sweet tonight. Luckily there is absolutely nothing bad for me to eat in the house so I resorted to making a dessert from the GI cookbook instead.

COOKING TIPS: It was very quick to prepare but had to sit in the fridge for about an hour before it cooled down enough to eat. This was my first time making pudding and I was surprised at how easy it was to make but unfortunately I didn't find it to be very tasty. It was more the texture that I didn't enjoy, the flavor was fine. It is worth a try if you are having an uncontrollable chocolate craving. I would have been more satisfied with a small square of dark chocolate.

RATING: 3. It's doubtful I will try it again.

Blueberry Rock Cakes Again!

Here is another shot of a fresh batch of blueberry rock cakes I made this week. Yes! I really really love eating these. Last week I found that the colour and density of the cakes were off a little from normal. After some thinking I realized a few days later that I forgot to add in the baking powder. Opps! They still tasted good anyways but I thought I would pop up a picture of what they normally look like.

Runner's World Meatloaf

This is one of my old stand by recipes. It is not in the GI cookbook. I got it from Runner's World Magazine. It is a pretty healthy dish consisting of lean ground beef, a ton of veggies, and oatbran.
Get the recipe by clicking here.

My dish came out quite wet and didn't serve up in perfect slices but it tasted great anyways. Yes I know it looks ok in the picture but that is only because I squished it together so that it would look appetizing for the photo. What is even better is I have plenty of left overs for lunch for a few days.

SERVED WITH: I had to get a little creative with the veggies this week. I used what I had in the crisper. So we ended up with a side salad, green beans and fried mushrooms. Now that I have been on a healthy eating kick for the past two weeks I am even finding myself eating my veggies plain without any butter or salt. I am learning to enjoy the natural flavor of vegetables. Well I lie, the mushrooms were fried in some butter...that is what makes them taste so good! :)

COOKING TIPS: The trick with the dish is finely chopping the vegetables so that they cook all the way through. I don't have a food processor so I just spend a few extra minutes chopping, chopping and chopping.

RATING: 9. It tastes great and is full of healthy ingredients.