Frozen Chocolate Bananas

Today I have a (sort of) healthy summer treat for you! Recently I've been trying to eat healthier, because I'm still not happy with how I feel. My weakest area in this has been snacks. If unhealthy snacks are in the house, I feel compelled to eat them. Then once I eat them, I feel compelled to eat other unhealthy things. I've noticed that direct correlation in myself: when you eat junk you crave junk, when you eat healthy you crave healthy. So in trying to find a sweet, cool snack for summer, I thought of these babies: chocolate covered banana bites. I'm not a huge dark chocolate fan, so I use semi-sweet chips but you could easily switch to a good dark chocolate and this would be pretty dang good for you, and vegan/dairy-free! Keeping these in the freezer makes them like little chocolate covered ice cream bites, perfect for summer.

Salad in a Jar

I learned very quickly after going gluten-free that my fickle, spontaneous eating habits weren't going to work. When I wasn't planning my meals, I was going hungry some nights or eating (gluten free) foods that were not very good for me and not cheap either. That's when I started meal planning. I've only got myself and my fiancé, so we stretch our dinners for multiple days as leftovers. But with no solid breakfast or lunch plans, I was still eating junk too much. Around this time my mom mentioned something she saw online: vacuum sealing salad in jars. She just liked the idea of extending the lifespan of lettuce, but I saw it as a new healthy habit that would help stretch my budget.
We got the idea from an awesome website called http://www.salad-in-a-jar.com/ . She has a special section on her blog for jarring salad that covers a lot more than I will in this post. All I do is simple jarring of romaine hearts and, recently, cut onion (by itself in a separate jar). We only buy, cut and jar enough lettuce to last a week, but it absolutely lasts those 7 days without browning or wilting. We do this every week after our weekly grocery trip.

Gluten Free Sesame Chicken

Shortly after going gluten-free, I realized that my previous diet as a vegetarian wasn't going to work. Nearly all faux meats contain gluten, and nearly everything else I ate was gluten (bread, pasta, etc.) The transition to gluten free was already going to be tough enough, so I made the decision to eat meat again after 7 years of abstaining. I was instantly excited about eating the things I secretly missed again, until I realized.. They all contained gluten. One of those things was sesame chicken.

I was always a pretty good cook so I decided I would recreate it myself, gluten free. I started with an originally gluten free recipe and that didn't taste like what I remembered. So I moved on to well respected recipes that weren't intended to be gluten free. That was when I found something closer but not quite. So I adapted the recipe to make it my own.