How to diet fast 1 week

This Green Chile Turkey Taco Salad with Peppers and Avocado has a dressing that's seasoned with green chile salsa.

I'm a big fan of taco salad, so recently when my niece and cooking assistant Kara was doing the Whole 30 challenge, I thought it would be fun to come up with a taco salad that's Whole 30 approved.  I also wanted a taco salad that didn't have beef, and this delicious Green Chile Turkey Taco Salad with Peppers and Avocado is the combination we came up with.   Simmering the meat with green chile salsa and other seasonings, using a little of the same salsa to add flavor to the dressing, plus adding green and red bell peppers and finely chopped fresh Poblano chiles to the salad greens gives this salad a lot of savory chile flavor with just a little heat.  Kara and I both loved the flavor of this turkey taco meat mixture; if you have family members who don't want salad it would be delicious inside tortillas for regular tacos as well.

I have high standards about what recipes actually end up making an appearance on Kalyn's Kitchen, so if you see a recipe here you know I really enjoyed the dish.  And then in that growing collection of recipes I enjoyed, occasionally something pops up that's a complete wow!  These Fish Taco Cabbage Bowls were so delicious that when my nephew Jake and I tested the recipe, we both kept saying over and over how good they were. 

The Fish Taco Cabbage Bowls are definitely an offspring of the Sriracha Beef Cabbage Bowls I made last year, also a wow for me.  Obviously I love cabbage, so if you're not a cabbage fan this may not be for you. However, if you like fish tacos with slaw and spicy mayo dressing give this a try and I bet you'll love it just like I did for a quick and healthy dinner!

Spaghetti Squash Low-Carb Taco Bowl has all the flavors that make you love beef tacos in a spaghetti squash bowl!

I seem to be on a little spaghetti squash binge at my house and if you haven't discovered the deliciousness of spaghetti squash yet, maybe this Spaghetti Squash Low-Carb Taco Bowl is going to be the recipe that gets you to try it!  I know some people think of spaghetti squash as mostly being a low-carb substitute for pasta, but personally I put it in a class all its own, and I've enjoyed it in casseroles, sauteed with vegetables, in a gratin with chard, and in a twice-baked casserole with pesto, to name just a few. 

The only hard thing about this recipe is cutting the raw squash apart before you season it and roast it.  Some people like to microwave the squash for a few minutes to make it softer, but I just hack away at it with a big knife.  I prefer roasting the squash for spaghetti squash bowls like this, because you can season the squash and the roasting process dries it out a little, but if you prefer you can cook the spaghetti squash in a slow cooker, cook it in the microwave, or cook it in a pressure cooker.

Maybe everyone but me knows about the idea of cooking ground beef in the slow cooker without pre-browning the meat, but when I saw this idea popping up on various blogs, I was intrigued.  I don't use a lot of ground beef, but I do love Taco Salad, and the idea of having Spicy Ground Beef for Tacos, Burritos, or Taco Salad in the freezer was enough to get me to try this method.  I love the ground beef tacos you get at a Mexican restaurant, where the meat is highly seasoned and very finely broken apart, so that's what I was going for.  I was fully prepared to try this several times to perfect the recipe, but my first try was a winner!  I did use a very generous amount of Cholula Hot Sauce to season the meat, so if you're making this for kids (or adults who don't like much heat) you probably want to use the smaller amount listed in the recipe.

I guess I'm officially settled into the new house, because I had my first cooking session with my nephew/cooking assistant Jake, and we loved having the the new bigger kitchen so both of us have plenty of room to work.  The new house also has big windows and great light for photos, but I found there's almost too much light, and I'm going to have to do some experimenting to get the light filtered just right for food shots.  All those big windows are also going to make taking photos of the kitchen a bit of a challenge, but I promise some kitchen photos will be coming soon!  The house still has quite a few boxes to get unpacked, but on Saturday my brother Rand and I hung pictures and arranged my collection of African art, so the house is starting to look like it's mine.