Have you considered these things for dinner?

[shelley]

Since part of balancing one's diet and lifestyle includes having a heavier lunch and lighter dinner, here are some meals to consider for dinner that you may not have considered before.

One of the keys to vital health is completely rethinking dinner. That means think small yet still filling enough so that you can make it without eating until the next morning.

For a heavier meal that leaves you feeling more satisfied and ready to calm down and sleep, try hot cereal with milk (or milk substitute), cinnamon, butter or flax, brown rice syrup. One of the best dinners is breakfast! The hot cereal can be just about any grain - quinoa flakes, brown rice farina, Bob's Red Mill's 5 grain or non-gluten grain mix. Or you can make Congee.

Another good breakfast for dinner idea is the Fritatta. This is basically a Spanish Omelette, much easier to make than a French omelette because you finish it off in the oven. Traditionally, you butter your oven-safe frying pan and saute green onions/scallions sliced fine. Preheat the oven on Broil setting at about 350 degrees. Scramble 3 or more eggs, adding a good sized pinch of sage and thyme, dash of salt and pepper. Pour into the pan and let it set. Once there's a good layer of cooked egg, top with a little bit of grated white cheese - pepper jack, parmesan/romano, a good Mexican white cheese, something like that. Put it in the oven so it's just a few inches away from the heat for about 3 minutes. The eggs should rise a bit and come away from the edges of the pan, but you don't want it too brown. Slip the whole thing onto a large dinner plate and then eat as is, or slice it like pie for multiple servings for the entire family. Have it with some avocado and/or tomato salad - yum!

For a lighter meal that still leaves you feeling full enough and your sweet tooth vastly appreciative, consider having nothing but a slice of fruit pie. If you haven't had any fruit servings that day and have already met your protein needs, a slice of warm apple or blueberry pie with a small scoop of Hagaan Dazs is an excellent dinner. And if that's all you're having for dinner, then you can probably afford the ice cream calories. I do this most often after I've cooked a large Sunday meal early in the day. We don't have dessert at that meal, we wait until dinner time and eat our dessert then.

Any of the smoothies and protein shakes make a wonderful dinner. If they don't give you enough of a ballast, add two tablespoons of freshly ground flax seeds into the mix, and/or a handful of raw nuts. It would be best to use kefir rather than rice dream if you're going to do this, as the fiber will slow down digestion and transit times and make the rice dream more available to the yeast in your intestines.

Cottage cheese and pineapple is one of my favorite meals. I prefer the small curd cheese, and I go ahead and get the one with fat so that it's more sustaining over a long period of time. I also add in either flax or wheat germ oil, a sprinkle of nutritional yeast, to make it even more filling and nutritious. I get the already chopped up pineapple in the produce section for convenience, as chopping up a whole pineapple is a pain and I can never eat the whole thing before it spoils. Go for canned if you must. Pineapple is a wonderful addition to one's diet, and you can eat it with the cheese because bromelain, an enzyme found in pineapple, digests all kinds of proteins. It also reduces inflammation.

Have you ever eaten lima beans the right way? Most people have not, and like spinach, they are wonderful when cooked right, awful when not. People tend to eat them canned, when they've lost any chance at having a wonderfully mealy texture much like a baked potato. No no, you have to buy frozen lima beans if you can't get fresh. If your store gives you a choice, get the Fordhook lima beans and not the baby lima beans. The larger the bean, the meatier and mealier it is. Boil them in just enough water to cover for about 20 minutes. Drain and butter liberally. They are very much like white potatoes, but more green tasting, and very very filling. Enjoy them with some other veggies or with a grain like Quinoa or rice for perfect protein. I like them with one of Lundberg's parmesan risotto dishes, as both take 20 minutes to cook anyway.

Today's Sunday "brunch" (more like Dinch) is going to be traditional tacos made with ground buffalo, and garlicky shrimp tacos with cabbage flavored with thousand island and topped with a mango/papaya salsa. Yes, in this case I break the fruit rule because it's not a whole lot of fruit and the spices make it much more digestible. I'm baking the tortillas after spraying them liberally with olive oil, so they'll be soft, warm, malleable. Black beans and a sweet corn pudding on the side.