Tags
bangers, beef, good eatins, ground beef, ground pork, meat, paleo, pork, recipe, simple foods, squash, sweet potatoes
Oh the holiday season.
How we love to celebrate.
And by celebrate we mean eat.
It’s hard not to get through the next couple of weeks without over eating, over drinking and over indulging all in the name of the Christmas spirit. People gather together to wish each other Merry Christmas, out do each other in the ugly sweater category, and clink glasses to another year gone by.
This year we’ve decided to kibosh the over indulgence with a little help from our friend, Brooke, over at Brooke: Not On a Diet. I’m sure most of our few readers have heard or read about her phenomenal weight loss but if not then just clicky clicky the link there and spend a little bit of time getting to know her (she’s amazing!)
She’s brought back the Skinny Snowman Challenge this year and we jumped on the opportunity to spend the next 5 weeks keeping on track with our food, our water, our exercise and all around “keep your hands out of the Christmas chocolate as much as possible”. The concept is simple enough: Each week we print out a points chart and keep track of a few very important factors like logging food, getting lots of veggies, drinking a crap ton of water, leaving some sweat behind and completing some mini weekly challenge.
This week’s challenge: Try a new recipe.
Welllllllllll…..
You know we are all over that like (insert some saying here about cake or rice or flies) and since we love to create in the kitchen we came up with our own recipe.
In our house you can always be assured of finding one thing in stocked in our freezer: Ground Meats. Mostly of the pork and beef variety. We keep ground meats stocked because in a pinch to make something delicious we usually revert to a meatball or banger recipe. Same meat + different spices + different veggies = a whole new recipe.
This is a leek and spinach banger we whipped up last night and it was pretty freaking amazing. Ingredients logged in on MyFitnessPal puts each banger at about 132 calories and considering the size we make them that’s a pretty darn good number.
The only time consuming part is the veggie prep because you know how much we love being in the kitchen and putting our knife skills to work. There’s something to be said about spending time in the kitchen, slowing down and really putting some effort into your food.
Enjoy!
Leek and Spinach Bangers
Ingredients:
- 2 pounds ground meat of choice (we used beef/pork)
- 3 Leeks, cleaned and sliced thin
- 3-4 cups of raw spinach, chopped
- Garlic, peeled and minced
- 1 tbsp FoC (fat of choice)
The first thing you want to do is prep your leeks, spinach and garlic. Everything should be minced, chopped and sliced small enough to fit into a meatball size serving without chomping down on a big ole piece of something (not that chomping down on a big hunk of garlic isn’t delicious because it is but just in case the person you’re sharing your meal with isn’t a fan just spend a little extra time working on those knife skills).
Once everything is looking all pretty and ready to go, grab a medium sized saute pan and add your FoC over medium heat. Add Garlic and saute for ~1 minute, then add leeks and spinach and continue to saute until spinach wilts (about another 2-3 minutes)
In large mixing bowl add sauteed mixture to ground meat and mix well.
Using same saute pan over medium heat, form palm size bangers (like sausages but a little flatter) and cook on each size for about 2-3 minutes or until cooked thoroughly.
Right now here in Atlantic Canada winter squashes are in abundance so naturally we paired these with an Amber cup/Sweet Potato mash with a heaping side of vegetable (Lots of check marks for our skinny snowman challenge with this recipe!)
~Now that’s good eatin’ Folks!