A healthier lifestyle

After Dad's health scare over the past week or so, it's been a wake up call for everyone. Daddy Joe and I have been talking about how we need to lead a healthier lifestyle for ourselves and for our children. Not that we're terribly bad, but there's definitely improvements to be made. Genetics play a part, and so does lifestyle (eating and exercise). That we can work on, so we're going to endeavour to make positive changes for body and mind.

And that lead me to finding dinner ideas of healthyfoodguide.co.nz before going grocery shopping today. I'll be interested to see how the dinners go down with my critical audience (and by that I probably mean myself most of all!!!), but I suppose we'll get used to it or go hungry. Not that the dinners I've chosen  are way out of it. Tonight we had Pumpkin, Walnut and Chickpea Patty Burgers. To me they're kind of like felafels, which the girls love so they didn't turn their noses up too badly. Seth on the other hand protested and went to bed with just a top up of milk :(

Usually I'd have some kind of wedges or chips with a dinner like this, but with our new resolve to be healthier, it was just burgers.

300g mashed pumpkin
4 slices soy & linseed bread
1 70g packet of walnuts
1 400g can of chick peas
sliced spring onions
salt 'n pepper

Blitz bread in food processor. Set aside in another bowl.
Blitz walnuts and chickpeas in processor and then mix in the bowl with bread. Add pumpkin, spring onions and salt 'n pepper.
Put in fridge for about half and hour and then roll into balls and flatten into patties. It said 8 in the recipe that I saw, but I made 6 because we were making our 'burgers' on the rest of the soy & linseed bread which is quite big.

I put the patties on baking paper and baked in the oven for about 12 minutes on each side. No oil needed!

The burger/sandwich for us was made with cheese (Tasty of course), lettuce, tomato and cucumber. And I made a nice combo sauce of natural yoghurt mixed with kumara and pumpkin humus....yummy!