Garlicky Poached Chicken Breasts with Ginger and Onion and Quinoa with Spinach and Cheese

Both of the recipes for my Sunday night dinner came from The Biggest Loser Simple Swaps 100 Easy Changes to Start Living a Healthier Lifestyle. I haven't been cooking very much lately, but was inspired to start cooking more once I started this new healthier eating thing. I also came to the decision to give my husband a bit of a break a couple nights a week. I decided to make a nice healthy dinner for him on Sunday night. The recipes for both of these sounded pretty simple even though they had numerous ingredients. The book doesn't list how long each recipe should take to make. I underestimated the effort involved in these! I was in the kitchen for a full hour working on dinner. You can see the screen shot of my BodyMedia device below. I was pretty surprised by it.

Both of these recipes have at least 10 ingredients. There was a lot of chopping involved. I used my Slap Chop chopper for as much of it as I could since I hate using knives, but that thing only holds so much and there was sooooooooooo much chopping! There were also a lot of steps involved in both recipes. It's very important to read the entire recipe before you start and make sure that you know what you're doing. I was pretty rushed since I was short on time. I learned my lesson.

The chicken was really yummy. The carrots and snow peas were pretty good too. The first night, the quinoa was good, but when we heated it up for left overs a couple nights later, the spinach flavor was pretty over powering. I may have gotten over zealous and put in too much spinach though because my quinoa is much greener than the quinoa in book. 

I would make the chicken again, but pick a different side dish since it was just so much work trying to get them done at the same time. I would make the quinoa again, but not put as much spinach in it. 

Now for the fun part! I was really surprised by how many calories I burned just cooking the food! Do you see the really wide blue blob towards the right of the grid? That was me cooking dinner! Look at all of those calories I burned just by cooking dinner!