Weight Watcher’s Deep Dish Pizza Casserole comes together in under 30 minutes. The crust is store bought, so you don’t have to wait for it to rise and kneed the dough, and it takes under 10 minutes to brown the ground beef.  Browning the ground beef is probably the hardest part. Prep all your ingredients while the ground beef is browning and you’re pretty much done. Super easy and you can use whatever your favorite toppings are. I just added a couple slices of pepperoni to mine and garnished the pizza with some parmesan cheese and some herbs. So good!

I didn’t have any Italian Style stewed tomatoes, so what I did was use an 8 oz can of no-salt added tomato sauce, some italian seasoning, oregano, and crushed red pepper. Turned out marvelous!

Recipe adapted from Food.com.

Weight Watcher's Deep Dish Pizza Casserole

 

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Ingredients

• 1 lb ground round
• 1 (15 ounce) can chunky Italian-style tomatoes
• cooking spray (Pam)
• 1 (10 ounce) can refrigerated pizza dough
• 6 ounces shredded part-skim mozzarella cheese

Instructions

1. Preheat oven to 425°.
2. Cook meat in a nonstick skillet over medium-high heat until browned, stirring until it crumbles. Drain, if necessary, and return to skillet. Add tomatoes, and cook until heated through.
3. While meat cooks, coat a 13 x 9 inch baking dish with cooking spray. Unroll pizza crust dough, and press into bottom and halfway up sides of the baking dish. Top the pizza crust with meat mixture.
4. Bake, uncovered, at 425° for 12 minutes. Top with cheese, and bake 5 minutes or until crust is browned and cheese melts. Cool 5 minutes before serving. Yield: 6 servings. Each serving is 6 Weight Watcher's points.
5. Serve with a salad mixed field greens and a fat-free or low-fat vinaigrette.
6. Read more: http://www.food.com/recipe/weight-watchers-deep-dish-pizza-casserole-224261?oc=linkback

Notes

Calories 282.4, Fat 19.7 g, Carbohydrate 5.1 g, Fiber 0.7 g, Protein 20.5 g
Points Plus: 7

Nutrition Information

Serving size: 6

3.2.1311

If you haven’t noticed lately, I’ve been trying to post more healthy recipes. I’ve been watching my google analytics a lot lately, and that is what you people seem to like the most that visit my site. So, more healthy recipes it is! Don’t be surprised if I post a really fattening recipe

These lighter pepperoni pizzas are only 7 points plus a piece for the whole pizza if using turkey pepperoni slices. Pepperoni is fattening in general and hard to not avoid all the fat and calories. I really like using pitas for a pizza crust now. You can do a lot with them. Let your pizza creativity run wild. The pita brand I like is called Josephs’ and one pita has 60 calories and less than 1 gram of fat per pita.

Ingredients

1 Josephs’ Pita Bread 60 calorie

1 tablespoon of pizza sauce

2 tablespoons of reduced fat mozzarella cheese

6 slices of Turkey Pepperoni

Optional:

Italian Flat Leaf Parsley

Parmesan Cheese

Directions:

Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Place 1 pita bread on a sheet pan and bake in the oven for 5 minutes. Take the pita out and top it with the sauce, cheese, and pepperoni. Bake in oven for 10 minutes or until the cheese is all melted. Garnish with parsley or parmesan cheese.

Serving Size: 1 pizza

Calories: 262
Carbs: 14.07
fat: 13.28
Fiber: 5.5
Protein: 25.76

I have been watching what I eat lately, and counting my calories. So far, I’ve lost 5 pounds! It hasn’t been easy too.  I was getting so frustrated with myself because of it,  I just had to force myself to do it. I’m using fatsecret.com to keep track of calories. What I like most about that site is that it figures out calories, protein, fat grams, and so on for recipes. It’s kind of like another myfitnesspal.com and joining is free.

I’ve also been expanding my chili horizon recently. I used to only like chili with beef and beans and a lot of spice in it. Now, I’m adding more vegetables to my chili like onions and bell peppers. Call me crazy, I know. Chili is very filling and if you use lean ground turkey the chili is now a low fat bowl of goodness with all those vegetables. I like to top my chili with cheese, chips, and green onions.

Ingredients:

1 tablespoon olive oil
1 lb 99% lean ground turkey
1 medium onion, diced
1 red pepper, chopped
1 yellow pepper, chopped
2 (15 oz) cans tomato sauce
2 (15 oz) cans petite diced tomatoes
2 (15 oz) cans black beans, rinsed and drained
2 (15oz) cans red kidney beans, rinsed and drained
1 (16 oz) jar deli-sliced tamed jalapeno peppers, drained
1 cup frozen corn
2 tablespoons chili powder
1 tablespoon cumin
Salt and black pepper, to taste

For the rest of the recipe, please visit Two Peas and Their Pod’s website!

Calories: 280;  Fat 4:6; Carbs 41;  Fiber 12.8; Protein: 20.59

Points Plus: 7 (serving size = 1 cup)

Sorry I haven’t posted lately. My fancy dslr camera has died. The memory card won’t even insert into the camera and I’ve already sent that camera back to Nikon once and it was pretty expensive to get it fixed. I might be buying a new camera here pretty soon, so I’m stuck taking pictures with my fancy Nokia Lumia phone. I highly recommend these phones because the camera quality on them is AMAZING. I have the 920 which has 10 megapixels on it, but now the 1020 is coming out and has 40 megapixels on it. It is a Windows based phone which I like too.

This pie was really good. Like lasagna, there is the basic noodle layer, cottage cheese layer, and meat sauce layer, but this is in pie format. That is right 3.14. You can use 93% lean ground beef or lean ground turkey to make this pie lighter, and use low fat mozzarella cheese and cottage cheese. It came to 7 points plus a piece for 8 servings. The points plus would be around 10 if you changed the serving size to 6. Enjoy!

Note: I only cover the pie with half the cheese because I have a husband who doesn’t eat dairy products.

Spaghetti Pie

Ingredients

6 oz spaghetti
1 egg, lightly beaten
6 Tbsp Parmesan cheese, divided
1/2 pound Italian sausage
1 and 1/2 cups spaghetti sauce
1/2 teaspoon basil
1 cup cottage cheese
1 cup shredded mozzarella cheese, divided

Directions:

Preheat oven to 350. Lightly spray a 9-inch pie plate with cooking spray. Set aside.

Cook the spaghetti according to package directions. Drain and place in a large bowl. Toss pasta with egg and 4 Tbsp Parmesan cheese. Press the spaghetti mixture on the bottom and up the sides of the pie plate.

Brown Italian sausage. Drain fat. Stir in spaghetti sauce and basil.

Combine cottage cheese and 1/4 cup mozzarella cheese. Spread over spaghetti. Top cottage cheese with meat sauce. Sprinkle remaining mozzarella and parmesan cheese on top.

Bake for 30 minutes or until heated through. Allow to stand for 10 minutes before serving. (It will be runny and fall apart if you serve it immediately)

Yesterday was a good day. Made an excellent soup for dinner, found a black pair of boots for Winter, and got $20.00 in Kohl’s cash. I ended up getting some items for Fall and Winter. Mustard color jeans, a purple sweater that came with a scarf, a Viera Wang scarf, and  a new top. I had some extra spending money so I went a little wild yesterday. In case most of you don’t know…. I’m really into fashion now. I never used to be either. Kohl’s is a good place to do that to find the newest fashion for not a lot of money. I’m almost thinking about having one blog post a week on different clothes that I find. I’ve been looking for a good pair of mustard jeans for a long time now and finally found them. Yay!

Anyways, enough on clothes. I made a really fantastic chicken and dumpling soup with leftover rotisserie chicken that we had. It was in Martha Stewart’s magazine from the October issue. There were 3 different ways to re-make chicken pot pie and this was one of them. They took one recipe and just did it 2 different ways. Kind of cool. To save time on chopping vegetables, I used about a 1/2 bag of mixed frozen veggies from the freezer section. The only vegetables I chopped were the celery and onions.  I want to make 5 other recipes from that magazine too. This soup was really good and only came out to 7 points plus per serving.

Points Plus: 7

Servings: 6

Calories: 273; 12 g fat; 15 g protein; 27 g carbs; 3 g fiber

Chicken and Dumplings

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Ingredients

• salt and pepper (to taste)
• 1/3 cup green beans
• 3 tablespoons unsalted butter
• 1 small yellow onion
• 1 stalk celery
• 2 medium carrots
• 1 + 1/4 cup flour
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• 2 tablespoons chopped fresh parsley
• 2 tablespoons cold butter
• 1/4 cup milk
• 3` cups chicken broth

Directions

Step 1

In a large sauce pan, melt butter over medium high heat. Add onion, celery, and carrots and cook until onion is translucent. 4 minutes

Step 2

Add flour (1/4 cup and save the other 1 cup for the dumplings) and cook, stirring, 1 minute. Gradually add broth. stirring constantly, then bring to a boil. Reduce heat and simmer 5 minutes. Stir in chicken an season with salt and pepper.

Step 3

To make dumplings: Whisk together 1 cup all-purpose flour. 1 teaspoon baking power and course salt. Add 2 tablespoons of chopped fresh parsley. Cut in 2 tablespoons of cold butter. Stir in 1/2 cup whole milk. Drop heaping spoonfuls batter on top of chicken mixture.

Step 4

Cover and simmer dumplings until they are cooked through. About 12 minutes. Top with additional chopped parsley.