Tasty healthy dinner inspiration needed

[26minutes]

OK, so I need to lose weight post baby and DPs medication is making him pile on the pounds stone. Also he has a family history of high cholesterol so he's eager to help keep his down, but we've both been terrible eaters in the past and only since being together have we started eating properly. So we're both clueless about food, would love to learn more and have a better, healthier, more varied diet. I've looked on a few recipe sites and none of the 'healthy' stuff inspires me.

Our current 'menu' (mostly homemade):

Cottage Pie
Lasagne
Spag Bol
'Cheap pasta' - this is a 9p bag of pasta with a 79p jar of pasta sauce
Chicken & Bacon pasta
Chicken chow mein - quite a lot of veg, but probably cancelled out by the amount of sauce I use
Frozen night once a week
Hunters Chicken
Roast
Chicken in gravy with potatoes & veg
Pork chops with mash & peas
Pizza (fresh shop bought)
Pukka Pie with mash & veg (need to find some decent recipes for pie)
Fish with potatoes & veg (fresh cod or smoked haddock)
Sausages
Toad in the Hole

All our meat is lean, we rarely have Toad in the Hole because while it is lovely it's a heart attack waiting to happen with the amount of oil dripping out of it!

We are much better than we used to be and nowhere near as fussy as we were when we met, but we still get bored with the same old stuff week in week out. Also there's quite a long list of things we don't like:

Seafood, apart from the above.
DP doesn't like lamb except on a bbq
I don't like sweetcorn & cauliflower, there's other veg I don't like plus some that he doesn't like but they're the only 2 that spring to mind.
I'm funny with textures, getting better but things like fajitas I don't like because of the different textures. I've only started eating a hot dog together in the last 5 years or so (used to eat the roll & sausage seperately until then )
I don't like tomatoes, I pick the big bits out of lasagne etc and have only been eating pizza since meeting DP, but if it has too much tomato on it I can't eat it.
I don't like eggs (again a texture thing)
He's not a big fan of boiled or jkt potatoes.
We also both eat with our eyes probably more than most people do. For instance, neither of us will eat curry because it looks disgusting, so it needs to look apetising too.

PLease help, I know it's a challenge, but we're stuck in a rut. Thanks

A slightly 'left field' suggestion that is a good way to make you completely rethink how your dinner plate is made up is to go vegetarian for a week. There are lots of good recipe books around and what you find is that, by eliminating meat and fish from the menu, you have to get more creative with things like pulses, grains, vegetables. Plus you have to be more adventurous with herbs and spices so that everything is nice and tasty.

Vegetarian food also tends to be rather bulkier for the same or fewer calories as a meat meal....good if you want to lose weight. The high fibre content helps your digestive system remove the crap from your system and reduces water retention.... also good for weight-loss. After 1 week of vegetarian meals there will be some you want to add to your usual diet and some you won't.

In the meantime, see what you can do to get rid of some of the refined starch from your regular meals. Swap white bread, pasta, batter and pizza bases for wholemeal versions, for example. Serve whole, new potatoes rather than pappy mashed potatoes. White starch is very fattening.

Can you eat salad? We tend to during the warmer months have a lot of lean grilled/bbq'd meat with salad. Steak and salad, marinated chicken and salad. Etc. All very healthy and v easy to prepare.

I just agreed with Cogito on another thread and will do again here.

It looks like the things you eat are centred around meat as the main event (a roast, a chop, sausages, mince in spag bol/pie etc). There also aren't many salads or veg listed which makes me think that if you have them at all, they're a side dish rather than the main dish.

Could you move towards more dishes that use meat as a flavouring rather than as the centerpiece? (This helps keep costs down as well.) When DH and I first started living together he was very much a meat and potatoes type - he has now had enough delicious food with little or no meat that he doesn't look for the meat any more, and he certainly came round when he saw how much money we saved not eating tons of meat.

For example - some popular dinners with him:

• frying up pancetta cubes with loads of fresh broad beans (no skins) and eating with goat's cheese, bread and a salad.
• frying 2 chicken breasts, cutting into strips and serving over a caesar salad
• making a stew of butter beans and kale/chard with some chorizo to flavour
• stir-fried savoy cabbage, bacon and fennel seeds & a single bratwurst sausage on the side with mustard (usually with toad in the hole you might have 2-3 sausages so cut down to just one as a "side")
• minute steak with a big green salad (lettuce, salad onions, avocado, feta cheese, walnuts, mustardy dressing)
• chard gratin with one rasher of streaky smoked bacon minced and mixed in, again with a big green salad and some bread
• cauliflower cheese as a main dish, again with a rasher of smoked streaky diced and mixed in, green salad, bread

Now the thing with salad and this is really silly is this...(please don't read if you are emetophobic (sp?))

I like salad. DP likes salad. A couple of years ago I started to try and eat healthier, much more veg, more salads. After about 2 weeks of this I had a huge salad with a little bit of chicken, really proud of myself. I have never been as ill as I was that night. Basically I came down with swine flu and spent the next week with my head down the toilet. Of course, seeing my salad in the toilet made me blame the healthy eating. So for the next year I refused to touch salad. I had it as a side salad but not as a meal. Last summer I decided to get over it and we had a huge salad. We went out to the cinema, DP only drank half of his pint as he didn't feel very well. That night he was sick! Apparently this was the 1st time he'd been sick since he was a child. So we've gone back to only having it as a side salad. We'd both love to have salad but we have this fear that if we have salad for dinner we'll be ill. We have salad for lunch no problem as well. It's just as our main meal we can't get past the fact that by complete coincidence we were both ill after eating salad.

I said it was silly, we both know it wasn't the salad that made us ill, but we now associate salad with being sick!

Why not try putting veg and salad in at the start rather than going full-on as you adjust to new stuff. Maybe have carrot sticks, peppers, and any other raw veg/salad stuff you like and perhaps some wholemeal pitta cut into strips with dips. Then your DP can pick the bits he likes and you can eat the ones you like and it doubles your options! You could then cut down on the portion sizes of your normal dinners whilst upping your 5 a day.

It seems like you've just got stuck eating the same stuff and have forgotten how nice trying other stuff can be. The going veggie option is a great idea but maybe you're not ready just yet. Also try steaming more veg as it keeps more of the flavour.

Asparagus is in season right now (so really cheap compared to normal) and whilst I would normally smother it in butter I'm trying to help out DH's cholesterol count too so have wrapped it in lean ham, drizzled with just a little oil and cooked in the oven for about 10mins.

Soups are also a great way to eat more veg as you can whizz it up so you don't notice some of the ones you don't like as much. I can't bear celery but it tastes fantastic when cooked with other veg and blended.

Have you thought about growing any of your own veg? We're experimenting this year with carrots and salad leaves. The flavour of home-grown is also much better (well it always is at my mum's! Jury's out on what ours will be like!) and you have the added incentive to eat the fruits of your labour.

Maybe try putting little bits of meat into bigger bowls of salad. We like wee cubed potatoes and lardons fried up together and then sprinkled over a big bowl of salad. The bulk is salad but you still get the rich taste of stuff you've so far preferred.

Adding nuts is also really good for you (and the cholesterol count) unless, of course, you have allergies to them.

Good luck! Trying a smaller version of something new, bit by bit, and gradually widening the choice of what you're happy to eat will make it easier.

So let me get this straight. You both like salad. You'll both have salad for lunch no problem, you'll both have a side salad at dinner no problem, but you're both scared of having a salad for dinner?

What kind of "salad" are we talking about here - caesar? green? tomatoes? beans? There are millions of different types that don't all involve iceberg lettuce and some grated carrots that might not trigger your fears.

I think it is worth doing some work to try and get over this, if you're serious about eating more healthily.

Tyelperion...will need to try some of your suggestions. They sound fantastic!

If you like smoked haddock then kedgeree is a good standby - perhaps with some garliccy greens on the side.

26minutes my mum hasn't eaten parmesan cheese in 36 years because she associates it with throwing up in the gutter outside a pub when she went into labour with my big sis, so I know where you're coming from

For me, healthier eating has been cutting portion size, but filling up on veg (not smothered in butter though!) if I was still hungry. Also drinking more - if I drink 3 litres of water a day I don't get anywhere near as hungry, and I don't reach for crap in the evenings. I never think of anything as off limits, but I do limit serving size.

Aww thanks maman - I have a million ideas, PM me anytime - I love talking about food. I always knew I had found my MN spiritual home when I stumbled upon the food and recipe boards

26minutes, the suggestions from cockadoo and maman to cut down on portion size is a great one as well - eating slowly and eating your dinner off a smaller side plate with a smaller fork helps a lot psychologically to make you feel full faster (I know it sounds weird but it really worked for us!)

Cockadoodle, glad you understand

I actually quite like the vegetarian idea. This isn't jut about changing the way we eat and look at food, it's more learning from scratch.

I was a fussy eater as a child and my mum pandered to it. I'd never eaten a vegetable until I was in my 20s, and then only birds eye petit pois mixed up with mashed potato. It's only since being with DP the last couple of years that I've started eating, and liking, more veg. As a child the only way I would eat potato was as chips. My 'roast dinners' were meat and chips and nothing else, not even a yorkshire pudding. Tinned spaghetti was as far as I would go with pasta so to e eating what I do now is huge for me and it's all been in the last 2.5 years since meeting DP.

So as you see it's not just re-education, it's education, learning totally from scratch.

Tyelperion - you ask what kind of salad. Salad to me is salad. I know there are different types, but what they actually are I have no idea.