Sophie, my 17-year old granddaughter, came over last week and showed me how to make her Famous Chocolate Chip Cookies. Here’s our video about them. And it is truly NO exaggeration when I say that those cookies are AMAZING!
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I made a WW-friendly vegetable beef soup today, and it is delicious! The video will walk you through how to make it. The recipe is below.
The soup base is:
1 lb. 96% lean ground beef (10 WW Blue points)
2-3 can diced tomatoes (0 points)
1 can tomato sauce (0 points)
1 quart beef broth (0 point)*
approx. 1 cup chopped onion, 1/2 cup chopped celery (0 points)
Salt and pepper, to taste (0 points)
Directions: Brown the ground beef in a large soup pot. Add the diced tomatoes, tomato sauce, and beef broth. Salt and pepper, to taste.
Now add your vegetables – I usually buy a bag of frozen soup vegetables. However, you can use fresh, frozen, or canned (drain canned vegetables) – corn, carrots, peas, beans, garlic, peppers, potatoes (count the points for potatoes).
Bring to a boil. You can add more beef broth if the soup is too thick. Let the soup simmer for a couple hours to thoroughly meld all the flavors.
This soup will keep in the refrigerator for several days, and it freezes well.
POINTS: I add additional beef broth, if needed, to bring my total amount to 18 cups – which equals 18 servings.
10 total points divided by 18 servings – .555 points (which rounds of to 1 point.
*Some beef broths scan as 0 points for a quart, and some scan as 1 or 2 points for a quart. It depends on the fat content of the particular broth you buy. Scan the broth you use to figure your points. However, even at 2 points a quart, the total still equals less than 1 point per cup/serving.
I wanted a hot dog – particularly a pig-in-a-blanket. And I knew I needed two things to make them: bread dough and hog dogs. First, the dough.
My Bizzy Kitchen has a pizza dough that can be used in many ways, and I like it much better than the 2-ingredient dough because it doesn’t have the strong tangy taste of the Greek Yogurt. You can find the recipe here. It’s quick and easy to put together. Make a batch of the dough, divide it into four equal portions. Put three of the portions into individual zip-lock bags. You can use those portions for individual pizzas or bagels or whatever bread product you’d like. The dough will be good in your refrigerator for at least a few days.
You will use the other portion (1/4 of the recipe) for these pigs-in-a-blanket.
Next, the hots dogs. Hebrew National has great hog dogs, and they have two that can be confusing – a “reduced fat” and a “97% Fat Free” version.
Get the HEBREW NATIONAL 97% FAT FREE BEEF FRANKS. They are only 1 WW Blue point each – and they taste really good!
Take four hot dogs out of the package. Take your dough (which is 1/4 of the recipe) and divide it into four equal portions. Take one portion and roll it into a long snake-like shape and wrap it around one of the hot dogs. The dough might be sticky – use just a little extra flour to make it workable
Sorry, but I forgot to take photos of the four pigs-in-a-blanket ready to go into the oven. However the other three looked just like the one shown above.
Note: I THINK that you could probably get away with dividing the dough into six portions and making six Pigs-in-a-blanket instead of four. It would bring down the number of points each, too. I intend to do that next time.
Bake at 400 degrees for about 15-20 minutes – until bread is nicely browned. The hot dogs are already fully cooked, and so you have to worry about whether they are done. As long as they’re hot, they’re good to go.
POINTS (WW Blue Plan)
1 Pig-in-a-blanket = 2 points (hotdog-1, dough-1)
2 Pigs-in-a-blanket = 5 points (hotdogs-2, dough-3)
3 Pigs-in-a-blanket = 7 points (hotdogs-3, dough-4)
4 Pigs-in-a-blanket = 9 points (hotdogs-4, dough-5)
1 1/2 cups Self-rising flour (16 points)
1 cup monkfruit granuated sweetener (0 points)
1 egg (0 points)
1/4 cup unsweetened applesauce (0 points)
3 medium bananas, mashed (0 points)
Put all ingredients in a large mixing bowl. Mix well.
Pour into a loaf pan (5″ x 10″)
Bake at 350 degrees for approximately 45-55 minutes (depending on your oven) or until an inserted toothpick comes out clean.
Cut into 8 equal slices. Each slice is 2 points.
My verdict: It is very moist. It took longer to bake than I thought it would. Let it cool before slicing it. Next time I will decrease the monkfruit sweetener. For me, it was a little too sweet. The bananas and applesauce have natural sweetness. So a full cup of additional sweetener is too much. If I wanted to go all natural and add regular sugar to this recipe instead of the monkfruit sweetener, it would add 3 points to each slice (1/2 cup sugar = 24 points).
The idea for these came from my sister, Janice, who posted the recipe on Facebook. It’s a White Lily Flour recipe. I revised it to better fit in with the WW Blue Plan, and I actually came up with a couple of variations. These are 4 points each (WW Blue Plan) if you use the Velveeta slices, and 3 points if you use the Canadian bacon. I had one for dinner tonight, and I am stuffed!
Here’s the recipe:
Notice in the photo above, the egg white that flowed out into the pan. It was fine! The top two have the slice of Velveeta, and the bottom two have the Canadian bacon. I liked the ones with the Canadian bacon best – and they were one point lower! Both were delicious, though! A serving includes one of the large biscuits with the egg in the middle along with one of the smaller cutouts.
When I got home from an appointment earlier today, I wanted a latte or macchiato; I needed an early afternoon energy boost. I started to make a caramel macchiato but then noticed that the jar of sugar-free caramel had “Refrigerate after opening” on it. It has been sitting next to my espresso machine for a couple months. I tossed it in the trash.
With no caramel (except full sugar – which would add 6 points for 2 tablespoons – and I would want more than 2 tablespoons!), I decided to go with a latte instead.
I got a large glass and filled it with ice. Then I poured 4 ounces of espresso over the ice. And since I REALLY like my coffee drinks sweet, and since I had just bought a bag of golden monkfruit sweetener, I added 1 1/2 Tablespoons of it to my latte. I finished filling up the glass with unsweetened vanilla almond milk, and stirred it.
The golden monkfruit sweetener is a brown sugar replacement. So it gave the latte a caramel-y flavor – which I loved.
Weight Watchers points? The only ingredient with points is the almond milk – and it’s 1 point for 1 cup. I used less than a cup, but will count a full point anyway. It is delicious! Just imagine: a large coffee drink for 1 point! I will be making these more often!
I made personal pizzas tonight – one for my husband and one for me. Pizza is one of my all time favorite dishes! The last time we had pizza was during the summer when I ordered one from Domino’s Pizza, and it was less than delicious. It was so bad, in fact, that it turned me off from wanting pizza for a couple months. However, lately after eating so much chicken and tuna and lean beef, I have yearned for something a little more indulgent.
After reading about 2-ingredient dough, and then researching and finding an even better (supposedly) dough recipe, I decided to give home-made pizza another try.
First the dough. I got the recipe from My Bizzy Kitchen. Here’s that recipe:
Dough:
2 cups self-rising flour
1 teaspoon yeast
1/2 teaspoons salt
1/2 cup Fage Fat Free Greek Yogurt
1/2 – 3/4 cup warm water
I didn’t put my dough in the microwave to rise. As a matter of fact, I didn’t let it rise at all because we were making pizza right away.
I divided the dough into four equal parts. We used two of those for our two individual pizzas tonight. I put the other two parts in a Ziplock bag in the refrigerator for pizza later this week. (Note added: We used the extra dough three days later for another two pizzas, and it was perfect! So it keeps well in the fridge for at least three days). The flour is the only ingredient with points. So each of the four parts contain 1/2 cup self-rising flour – which is 5 points on WW Blue Plan.
The photo above shows our two pizzas ready to go in the oven. That’s mine on the bottom – and Ron’s at the top. He added additional sauce on top of his other ingredients. It looks like a barbecue pizza, but it isn’t – just lots of pizza sauce! That’s because he doesn’t usually each much pizza crust because of his blood sugar. Thus, he wanted to be sure he had plenty of the toppings.
In the photo above, the pizzas are on a pizza stone that I bought from Pampered Chef years ago. I had put the pizza stone in the oven while I made the dough. So it was piping hot when we put the dough on it.
I sprayed my hands with butter flavored Pam to smooth out the dough on the pizza stone. Then once we had it spread out, my husband and I added our favorite toppings.
These are the toppings I put on my pizza:
Onion, finely chopped (0 points)
fresh spinach, torn into small pieces (0 points)
fresh chopped tomatoes (0 points)
Ragu Homemade style Pizza Sauce (1 point for 1/4 cup)
Sargento Light mozzarella string cheese (1 point per stick), cut crossways into thin circles. In the photo above, you can see the small circles of mozzarella.
3/8 oz Cabot Cheese, Sharp Cheddar, 75% Reduced Fat (0 points for 3/8 oz.)
At the top of this post is a photo of my baked and ready-to-eat pizza. I forgot to take a photo until I had cut it and put the pieces on a plate. It was delicious! The crust has a little bit of a tangy taste from the yogurt. I really liked it. One great thing about this recipe is that the dough took only a few minutes to put together. And, of course, the toppings were delicious.
And the best thing of all is that the whole pizza is only 7 points. My first pizza in over two months. And I still have 5 points left for today!
In all the WW groups I’ve joined on Facebook, I have heard a LOT about 2-Ingredient dough. So I decided to try it out.
It is simply equal parts self-rising flour and nonfat Greek yogurt. However, people kept mentioning that the dough is very sticky and that it works better to have a little less yogurt. Here is what I did:
2-Ingredient Dough
3 cups self-rising flour (37 points) I made sure to be accurate with this measurement so I could figure the WW points. Set aside about 1/4 cup to use later.
2 1/2 cups Fage nonfat Greek Yogurt (0 points)
Mix the 2 3/4 cups flour with the yogurt in a bowl.. Turn out on a pastry board/sheet or on a piece of parchment paper. Knead briefly – using the 1/4 cup flour you set aside to add, as needed, to get it to a smooth ball. Cut into 16 equal pieces. I used a pastry cutter to cut the dough ball in half – then cut each half in half, etc.
Shape each piece into a ball.
I took some of the balls and rolled them out long and thin, sprayed with butter-flavored Pam, and then generously sprinkled cinnamon on them. Then I rolled them up (like a cinnamon roll), pressed them down, poked a hole in the middle. Voila! Cinnamon bagels.
Some I left plain, and others I sprayed with butter-flavored Pam and sprinkled “Everything but the Bagel” seasoning on them.
They turned out pretty good. They’re a little tangy, thanks to the yogurt. The only points come from the flour. So 37 total points divided by 16 is equal to about 2.3 points each. So one rounds off to 2 points, but two of them round off to 5 points.
I tried both the cinnamon and the “everything but the bagel” – and the cinnamon won, hands down. Spread a little “Simply Fruit” spread on it – and yummy!
Today at my mother’s I decided to try the Zero-Point Cheesecake again. This time I made a fresh cherry compote to serve on top.
The recipe for the cheesecake is at this link.
This time it turned out even better than last time.
I just made some delicious chili – and it’s less than 1 WW/Blue point per serving. The recipe is at the end of this post.
Once you have your ingredients assembled, this chili takes about 10 minutes to put together, and then you’re free to do something else while it simmers on the stove. Although it is less than 1 point per servings, I log it as 1 point to make sure I cover all my bases. I’ve used ground turkey to make 0 point chili, and that’s good. However, the beef gives it a little more flavor and more traditional chili taste. I’m willing to use a point for that!
Quick & Easy Chili
- 1 lb. Lean Ground Beef (96% Lean)
- 1 qt. beef broth
- 3 cans diced tomatoes
- 4 cans beans (I use the Tri-Blend that Kroger sells – but most any bean will do – black beans, pinto, kidney, navy, great Northern, etc.)
- Dried diced onions, bell peppers, celery, garlic (to taste) I get these at an Amish store near us. I keep plenty in my pantry because they make meal prep so much easier. However, you can also substitute fresh veggies instead.
- Seasonings: salt, pepper, chili powder (to taste)
Brown the ground beef in a large pot. No oil or cooking spray is needed. Then dump everything else in. The amounts for the vegetables and seasonings depend on your taste. Cover and simmer for about 45 minutes, and it is ready to go.
Living Real With Carol 