Dinner on the Fly

In everyone's life, tragedy strikes.  Our past week has been a life unexpected.  My father in law just spent 8 days in the hospital, 4 of those in the ICU.  The diagnosis is still unknown, but we are hopeful that the Mayo Clinic, our next stop, will provide us with some answers.

Since we have spent most of our days at the hospital, a forty minute drive from our house, our food choices have been the quick and easy kind, namely from some random fast food joint. Unfortunately, as you can also well imagine, our food choices this week were not the most healthy for us either. 

I really wanted to stick to my life goal of experimenting with a new recipe every week, no matter what, so my challenge was to find a very quick and easy meal.  I also wanted to make something of a more healthy fare, since we have been so terribly unhealthy for the majority of this past week.  Thank goodness I had come across this recipe a few weeks ago, printed it off, and had it shoved into my very cluttered and unorgainized binder, which is mostly made up of loose leaf recipes that always end up all over my floor at some point when I pull it out. (Side note: must remember to purchase a hole puncher one of these days for the tiny kitchen elves have not magically done it all for me in the six years that I have had this binder, and so I must come to the conclusion that kitchen elves really must not exist or just get tons of jolly good entertainment from seeing me repeatedly dump the entire contents of it all over the floor.)

Hearty Turkey & Rice from Taste of Home

Ingredients:

1-1/2 cups instant brown rice

1 pound extra-lean ground turkey

1/2 medium onion, chopped (not a big fan of onion so went easy on it)

1-1/2 cups salsa
1 can (8 ounces) no-salt-added tomato sauce
1 teaspoon reduced-sodium chicken bouillon granules
1/4 cup shredded cheddar cheese
1/4 cup sour cream
Sea Salt, to taste
*Chopped tomatoes, baked tortilla chip scoops and sliced olives, optional

Directions:
1.  Cook rice according to the package directions.
2.  Meanwhile, in a large nonstick skillet coated with cooking spray, cook turkey and onion over medium heat until turkey is no longer pink. Add the salsa, tomato sauce, bouillon and sea salt; heat through.  

 I served this dish with some shredded fiesta blend cheese, a dollop of sour cream and some tortilla chips for scooping.  Both of us enjoyed this dish!  It was so completely easy to make.  It is almost too easy, really.  It was a very light on the stomach, deeply satisfying and we had lots of leftovers for lunch tomorrow. I will definitely make this dish again, especially on those nights when I just don't have a heck of a lot of time to make make anything too labor intensive.