The Chopping Block Cooking & Wine Blog

Resist the Drive-Thru in Favor of Quick Healthy Meals

Written by Carrie | Feb 17, 2017 2:30:00 PM

All I wanted to do was pull up to the bright light, speak my order into the backlit menu, order a burger and fries, then sit on the couch and relax. I’m just like you, but my schedule fluctuates: sometimes I work during the day, sometimes I work at night. The fast food choice really isn’t good anytime. I know it’s even worse late at night before you go to bed.

Thankfully, I resisted the urge the other night. I knew we had some ground turkey at home and a couple of sweet potatoes. Jackie and I had talked about making a recipe of sweet potato fries that she had enjoyed before. I was able to peel and slice these pretty quickly, then tossed them in grapeseed oil, sea salt, pepper, cumin and smoked paprika. Then, I spread them out on a Silpat-lined sheet pan, baked at 425 degrees for 15 minutes, flipped them over and baked for 15 more minutes.

We’ve also been trying to focus more on clean eating, using real foods and not processed ingredients. The dip we created to go along with the fries was a base of greek yogurt, which we seasoned with cumin, lime juice, parsley, salt, pepper and agave. This was really tasty!

For the turkey burgers, we kept it super simple. For one pound of ground lean turkey, I added one egg and 2-3 teaspoons of Sarah’s Tuscan Sea Salt, one of my favorite salt blends that we carry at The Chopping Block. It has garlic, rosemary and some chili flakes. Yum! Since I didn’t add any breadcrumbs or oats, the mix was pretty loose. I just had to gently place the burgers in my cast iron pan, let them get nice and brown on one side before carefully flipping over to finish on the other side.

Remember those caramelized onions from my last blog? We topped the burgers with some of those and a little cheese. Throw some kale salad on the plate to keep it real, and there you go!  A quick and healthy late-night meal.

Don’t cave in to the urge of the drive thru. Resist! Eat healthy. I promise you’ll feel better. Check out our Wellness Chef Alia Dalal's clean eating cooking classes for more ideas on healthy eating, Knife Skills to help speed up your prep time, or come by and grab one of our favorite spice blends this month while they are 20% off!

To help you kick start your clean eating initiative, check out our Clean Eating Boot Camp coming up in April at Lincoln Square. In the meantime, download our latest Clean Eating: Eat to Live guide, complete with recipes that work for late nights too!