Whole foods for a whole week - dinner & dessert

Eating whole-foods-only for our supper every night has been pretty easy, thanks to my arsenal of favorite recipes.  After a disastrous try at a homemade baked bean recipe earlier this week, I realized that having a recipe that you have already made over & over, with excellent results, is a must.  Because otherwise, after all your prep and cooking, you'll have a meal that you don't want to eat and you'll be tempted to eat something quick & processed or something that comes out of a drive-through window.

With that in mind, I have a few great recipes that I wanted to share.  Most of them are vegetarian - even before this push for whole foods, we almost always had a "veggie night" at least once a week, which consisted of just a bunch of great side dishes.  I think that makes a great meal!  Here are a few of my favorites:

Roasted red potatoes from Martha Stewart.  I've been making these ever since I saw them in the Oct. 2004 edition of her magazine - they are so yummy.  Don't pass on the fresh rosemary - that's what makes this recipe so great:

Another great side dish I just tried this week for the first time was sesame broccoli.  It was much more flavorful than my ordinary boring steamed broccoli.

A few great main dishes we've enjoyed this week are:
-brown rice and black beans - this recipe is so awesome....thanks Martha!
-black bean burgers from Red Light, Green Light, Eat Right - the best black bean burger ever.
-salmon cakes - my family loves this recipe & I loved it in my pre-veggie days.

I knew it would be difficult to find desserts that didn't have any refined sugar or flour in the recipe......those ingredients are in almost every dessert that I can think of!  Raw food cookbooks offer lots of great dessert ideas, however, with this criteria - many are sweetened with maple syrup or dates or agave nectar.  One of my favorite raw food desserts are coconut snowballs from Living Raw Food.  They're basically just Brazil nuts, coconut & agave nectar.  If you don't want to roll them into balls, you can just spread the mixture into a pan, like fudge.  And, as the author of the book points out, eating Brazil nuts helps the rainforest because it encourages people to keep the trees for the nuts instead of cutting them down.....dessert for a good cause!

I also tried a new recipe that I'm really excited to share - it's sort of a pseudo-ice cream.  Frozen banana chocolate chip "ice cream" from The Best Life Diet Cookbook has a grand total of two ingredients in it: frozen bananas and dark chocolate.  I never realized that putting frozen bananas in the food processor would churn out something that so closely resembled ice cream.  I'm definitely going to be making this recipe again!

Another thing I've tried to do with dessert is actually eat it after supper (what a novel idea, huh).  I have a very bad habit of "treating" myself to dessert after the Bachsters have gone to bed.  I found that if you eat dessert right after your meal, you eat less because there's just not as much room for dessert.  So, on the special occasions that we enjoy dessert (not every day, I keep reminding myself), I'll make sure that we all share it together.

Have you been trying to eat better in 2012?  Do you have any favorite healthy recipes......do share!

-Cheryl