Here are 5 ways I had fun with cooking today while sticking to my diet:

1. Gave myself the challenge to only use food that I already had on hand.  No quick trips to the store or borrowing from neighbors.

2.  Mixed and matched recipes to put together a meal.  I had 2 red bell peppers that I could stuff but the only healthy, low calorie recipe I could find called for bulgur, which I did not have on hand.  So I found a recipe for a quinoa pilaf and stuffed the peppers with that instead but used the first recipe as a guide for stuffing and baking the peppers.

3.  Experimented with flavors.  I didn’t have argula which was called for in the pilaf so I looked at other cookbooks to see what they seasoned quinoa with and decided to use some turmeric to help boost the flavor.

4.  Had fun with colors.  Since I was making stuffed red bell peppers as the main dish I had a green bean and aspargus sautee sprinkled with red pepper flakes for the side dish.  The bright red and green looked great on the plate.

5.  I kept it simple.  It’s a Monday and it would have been easy to say forget it to cooking tonight, in fact it would be easy for me to say that on any night.  Although I did not know what I was going to fix, or what ingredients I was going to use, my only requirement was that it had to be easy to prepare.  Mission accomplished.