Quick & Healthy Dinners For Busy Nights
Hello again, 40FRESH fans! We have three more quick and healthy dinners for you to add to your dinner roster. Each of these dishes is a little bit more outside the box than our previous suggestions. As a matter of fact, you might need to go to some specialty stores to find a few of the ingredients. Alternatively, you can prepare some of the harder to find ingredients yourself.
Don’t worry though! All of the options below can be put together in 45 minutes or less. In fact, two of the dishes can be prepared in less time than it takes to watch a commercial-free episode of your average sitcom. Let’s get to it!
Today’s Checklist
If you’re following along with the 40FRESH Challenge, here’s your homework for today:
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Make Wednesday’s dinner menu
Add ingredients you need for Wednesday’s dinner to your shopping list
North African Pork Chops
Estimated Time: 15 minutes
This North African specialty uses ras el hanout, which is a rich and unique spice blend. If you’re having trouble finding it at your local grocery store, you can always make your own. We like this recipe from Canadian Living, which they’ve paired up with a cauliflower couscous. For the couscous, you can always chop up the cauliflower in a high-speed blender if you don’t have a food processor.
Note that this recipe does call for diced tomatoes and tomato paste. Depending on the brand you choose, you could run into some Nope ingredients. Bionaturae is a good brand for both tomato paste and diced tomatoes.
Risotto
Estimated Time: 45 minutes
Risotto will take a bit longer than the other dishes, but you won’t regret the additional effort once you get a taste of this rich and creamy meal. A lot of recipes for this Italian specialty call for some sort of broth. If you don’t want to spend time making your own chicken broth (like we discussed on day 22), try out this easy recipe from Bon Appétit. Since it contains dry white wine and parmesan cheese, you’ll use up a bit of your daily Limited allocation, but trust us: it’s worth it.
Although this dish is delicious without any add-ins, we suggest balancing out the limited ingredients with the addition of the suggested veggies. We highly recommend the burst cherry tomatoes and browned mushrooms, in particular.
Chilean Sea Bass
Estimated Time: 20 minutes
Depending on where you live, it may be difficult (or expensive) to find a fresh Chilean sea bass. Despite its name, it’s not a bass and is actually a form of cod. Also called Patagonian toothfish, it comes from the deep waters of the southern ocean off the coast of Antarctica and nearby countries.
Assuming you can find it, we recommend Organically Addison’s recipe for pan seared Chilean sea bass. Even if you can’t (or if you’re worried about the environmental impact), you can still use this recipe and just substitute cod.
While you’re searing up the fish, get some rice cooking in the Instant Pot. A salad or veggie like steamed carrots. If you opt for the salad route, make sure your dressing is 40FRESH compatible. We recommend dressing with a bit of olive oil and pepper or mixing some olive oil and balsamic vinaigrette together.
Your Dinner Menu
Same as the past two days, you’ll be picking out a 40FRESH meal that you want to make next week. In your food journal, fill in your dinner of choice for Wednesday. If nothing appealed to you above, feel free to go back to Monday or Tuesday’s suggestions or substitute your own.
Once you have your Wednesday menu picked out, make sure to add any ingredients you’re missing to the weekly shopping list.
Up Next...
We’re halfway through our series of healthy and quick weeknight dinners! Tomorrow we’ll be back with a few more options that are perfect for any season.
Continue on with your breakfast, snacking, and drinking habits and don’t forget to cross out another X on your accountability calendar. Tell us in the comments how your 40FRESH Challenge journey is going! What’s working well and what are you struggling with?