Sausage and Quinoa Stuffed Peppers

Today, I modified an awesome recipe for stuffed peppers. While the recipe called for couscous, chickpeas, and feta cheese, I substituted quinoa and sausage. It was delicious, incredibly healthy, and totally in line with our paleo experiment.

Sausage and Quinoa Stuffed Peppers

two red bell peppers
two yellow bell peppers
package of Mediterranean spiced quinoa
pound of ground hot Italian sausage

1. Cut the tops off the bell peppers and remove any and all seeds and white meat along the insides.
2. Place the peppers in a large pot of water and bring to a boil. Boil for 7 minutes or until tender. When done, drain and set the peppers aside.
3. Meanwhile, cook the quinoa according to the package directions (basically bring to a boil for about 15 minutes, then cover, cool, and fluff).
4. Also, meanwhile, brown the ground sausage in a skillet.
5. When everything is done cooking mix the quinoa and sausage together.
6. Fill peppers with sausage and quinoa mix.
7. Enjoy!

I really enjoyed the healthy mix of tastes, but my husband added sriacha sauce to give it a little more kick. If you like, you can add hot pepper flakes to the quinoa and sausage mix to give your meal a little more heat or add hot sauce as needed while eating.

Chicken Stir Fry

After talking to a good friend of ours who has recently embarked on a paleo diet journey, my husband suggested that he and I attempt something similar. I've been pretty bad about my diet lately, defaulting to premade meals or going out to eat or slacking off and eating ramen or cereal or frozen foods. And yet, after going to the doctor for my insurance check-in, I found out I've lost over 20 pounds anyway!

So I'm motivated to try again with some new recipes. Also, I think the stricter ideas behind the paleo diet will help me restrict caloric intake without having to track every single calorie every time. Now, note, the husband and I will not be doing the full paleo. We're hesitant to give up carbs completely now that we're climbing regularly, and I hit the gym about three times a week for cardio. Also, I love cheese. So the thought of completely forsaking cheese is a little blasphemous.

Still, our modified paleo will be more strict than previous incarnations of my diets. We'll be limiting grain and starch as well as dairy intakes to once a day. So if I throw cheese into an omelette for breakfast, there's no more dairy for the day.

With that in mind, I'm embracing a whole bunch of gluten free recipes. Tonight I made a wonderful chicken stir fry that didn't even need rice or noodles. Of course, the husband may eat his leftovers over some ramen for lunch tomorrow, but that's his gluten for the day.

So here it is. Let me know if you like it!

Chicken Stir Fry


1 lb chicken
sesame and ginger marinade (premade, but we had it in the pantry, so I had to use it!)
1/4 cup soy sauce
2 tsp minced garlic
2 tsp grated ginger (I used the powdered ginger, and it worked fine. I imagine fresh would rock though.)
2 large carrots
half pound snap peas
two cups mushrooms
1 cup chicken broth
t tbsp cornstarch

1. Chop up the chicken into bite size pieces, removing any extra skin or tendons.
2. Cover in the marinade and refrigerate for at least 30 minutes. The longer you marinate, the stronger the taste, but really I only needed about 30 minutes to have amazing juicy chicken.
3. Chop up veggies. Carrots should be cut up into sections about the length of your smallest finger and then cut lengthwise from there until fairly thin. Snap peas are good just in half, and mushrooms generally sliced.
4. Mix together the soy sauce, garlic and ginger in the bottom of the wok. Heat up to medium heat. My wok heats ridiculously fast, so I just put it up to about 250 and the soy sauce immediately started bubbling.
5. Heat that up for about two minutes.
6. Add chicken and cook thoroughly, mixing in the sauce fully. This takes about five minutes.
7. Add the carrots and mix well.
8. When they start getting a little soft, add the snap peas.
9. When they start getting soft, add the mushrooms.
10. Finally, when the mushrooms start to change their color slightly, add 1/2 cup the chicken broth. Allow this to come to a nice bubbling broth and let some of the broth cook off.
11. Meanwhile mix the remaining broth and cornstarch. Add as the last and let it cook off a bit more of the liquid.
12. Enjoy alone or if you want to put on noodles or rice, feel free. The sauce is pretty amazing and would be great with something to absorb it, but that defeated the gluten-free part of it for us.

You can also add some red pepper flakes in with the soy sauce for a bit more heat.