In this episode of Simple Shifts: Conversations to Fuel the Body, Mind and Soul, Martha and Peter discuss how to simplify eating with versatile ingredients, focusing on cottage cheese. They explore various easy recipes and meal ideas that incorporate cottage cheese, emphasizing its adaptability for singles and couples. The conversation encourages listeners to embrace simplicity in cooking and share their own ideas.
Make Eating Easier – The Cottage Cheese Edition Podcast
Video Transcript
Martha McKinnon (00:00)
Hi, welcome to Simple Shifts: Conversations to Fuel the Body, Mind and Soul. I’m Martha McKinnon from the blog Simple Nourished Living and with me is my brother and partner, Peter Morrison.
Peter Morrison (00:12)
Hi there.
Martha McKinnon (00:14)
Hi, how are you?
Peter Morrison (00:16)
I’m doing good. How are you today?
Martha McKinnon (00:19)
I’m doing really well. So on today’s episode, I thought it would be fun to talk about ways that we can make eating easier. And there’s lots of different ways we can make eating easier. And I thought this could maybe even be a whole series. But what came to my mind today was cottage cheese as an ingredient just for being able to feed yourself in a multitude of ways, breakfast, lunch, dinner, snacks.
And so if you have cottage cheese in the fridge, you can feed yourself in a way that’s easy. Some ways require cooking, other ways don’t. And sometimes I think it could be helpful just to think about an ingredient when you’re feeling overwhelmed. If you have one or two go-to ingredients, then you can feed yourself in a way that’s easy and effortless. And a lot of our readers are singles or couples.
And so they can work for families, but oftentimes, I think what’s helpful here, what we get a lot of feedback around is, how do I feed myself if it’s just me? You know, I want to keep it simple. I don’t want to go to a lot of trouble. And so cottage cheese can be one of those go-tos. I love it.
We have a lot of recipes on the Simple Nourished Living that we can link out to in this post. One that comes to my mind, cottage cheese just makes such an easy breakfast. There are so many ways you can, know, cottage cheese with any amount, any type of fruit, fresh fruit, canned fruit. We love pineapple with cottage cheese. We love peaches with cottage cheese. I love berries with cottage cheese.
On the website, we have kind of a fancier cottage cheese and fruit that’s kind of a banana split bowl, you know, with bananas and some fruit and just a little sprinkling of granola. And so it just makes for an easy breakfast. You could make a smoothie bowl, cottage cheese with your smoothie or as a smoothie bowl, could be another great, simple breakfast.
Peter Morrison (02:18)
The classic Danish, right? The Weight Watchers danish.
Martha McKinnon (02:23)
Yes, and so we have a great vintage recipe. It’s from the first, that original Weight Watchers cookbook (affiliate link) that came out,I think it was in the late 60s for a cottage cheese danish. And so basically that could be a slice of toast, an English muffin, gently toasted, and then topped with cottage cheese, a little sprinkle of cinnamon warmed in the toaster oven for a few minutes. That’s sort of a classic vintage go-to recipe that we can link out to on the site.
Peter Morrison (02:55)
I sometimes add it to scrambled eggs too. Sunday mornings we have kind of a late breakfast lunch kind of thing.
Martha McKinnon (03:04)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah, and so, and again, eggs can be great for breakfast, lunch, or dinner, right? Real easy. So you could add cottage cheese to your scrambled eggs, to an omelet, and enjoy that for a quick and easy lunch, for a quick and easy dinner, for breakfast. Definitely, that’s a great one.
There’s another wonderful recipe on the site that uses cottage cheese and eggs and then some other, again very versatile recipe some veggies. I think the recipe on our site has a little bit of ham in it, but it wouldn’t have to. You could add more vegetables. And basically, the concoction is mixed together, placed inside a tortilla. You line a pie plate (affiliate link) with a tortilla, and then you take the mixture, put it in the pie plate, in the tortilla, in the oven for a few minutes.
And that’s just, again, it’s meal prep too, because it’ll make several slices that you could then just warm up for a quick and easy breakfast, lunch, or dinner throughout the week. So it’s sort of quiche-ish, but in a much simpler form. So that’s another go-to way to use cottage cheese.
Cottage cheese can be great on a baked potato. In fact, I was just out for dinner where the restaurant we went to serves a wonderful, in lieu of sour cream, it’s just cottage cheese that’s been blended with some herbs, black pepper, garlic, and that can be great on a baked potato.
One of the classics, again, that I learned at Weight Watchers meetings years ago was just the combination of cottage cheese and salsa in a baked potato. And again, it’s just a quick and easy lunch or dinner that doesn’t take a lot of effort at all. If you’ve got a microwave (affiliate link), you don’t even have to bake the potato in the oven. You can just pop it in the microwave for five minutes or so.
Peter Morrison (04:55)
You mentioned cottage cheese bowls or like a banana split bowl or a smoothie bowl, but did you mention smoothies? I forget.
Martha McKinnon (05:07)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, well I said sort of smoothie bowl or smoothies, so either one. Yeah, cottage cheese. And especially for people who don’t like Greek yogurt. Greek yogurt can be very tangy for some folks, and so cottage cheese can be a great alternative to Greek yogurt if you’re using the fat free it is zero points on the Weight Watchers Plan. And it provides that good boost of protein, but less tangy if you find that offensive part of Greek yogurt.
And you can take it you know, as we said, bowls, we sort of went in a sweet direction with the fruit, but you can go savory, you know, with veggies. So you can take your cottage cheese and mix it with any amount of vegetables, protein, you know, and create a savory bowl at lunchtime. I love to take, you know, chopped radish, bell pepper, cucumber. I love lemon pepper with the cottage cheese in this concoction in a bowl, and so that can make a great, quick and easy lunch. You could boost it even further with hard boiled egg or tuna if you wanted even more protein.
What else can we do with cottage cheese?
Peter Morrison (06:12)
Isn’t there some, aren’t there some recipes on the website that add it to pasta?
Martha McKinnon (06:20)
Yes, so cottage cheese can be a great boost to pasta in lieu of, you know, in a pasta bake. Even just even stirred in, you know, stirred in. You could take, you know, cottage cheese and just stir it into a pasta and add whatever vegetables you wanted. We’ve got a couple of baked recipes we can link out to. There’s one that uses a tomato and zucchini in a sort of a ziti bake. You can use it in lieu of ricotta cheese in a lasagna or some type of baked pasta, so it has a lot of uses with pasta.
Again, another great way to boost the protein when you’re eating your pasta. You could mix it with rice too. Orzo would be fun. You know, the sort of cottage cheese, orzo, peas, all warmed together, that could be really cozy, comforting. So you can cook it, you can, you know, eat it as it is, and you can use it really any time of day.
I hope this is helpful for folks in, again, just thinking easy ways to eat. It doesn’t have to be complicated to eat well, to eat simply, to eat healthy, if you just give yourself a little bit of time to think about it and have a few ingredients readily available. So I think this could be a fun ongoing series where we just talk different devices, different ingredients that we can use just in a multitude of ways so that if you have this ingredient on hand you know, you can feed yourself.
Peter Morrison (07:46)
Yeah, I like it. It’s a good idea.
Martha McKinnon (07:49)
Cool. Any other thoughts? I’d love for readers to share because I always love the comments. I love that however many ideas I have there’s always more and I love when readers share with me because I love all those I love the ideas and other readers are benefited when you share comments so so that’s really great.
Peter Morrison (08:09)
Right, and I feel like on Facebook, I think, maybe Instagram, I’ve seen, I wanna say it’s called a pizza bowl, maybe. I’ll have to see if I could find it. It’s like cottage cheese, maybe crushed tomatoes, probably some oregano, and maybe some turkey pepperoni or something. Looks interesting.
Martha McKinnon (08:36)
Mm-hmm. Yep, yep. So you get all those flavors, you know, in a much healthier way.
Peter Morrison (08:47)
Great. Thanks for sharing. If you found this helpful, please share it, like, subscribe. We’d love any support you could offer.
Martha McKinnon (08:58)
And be sure to check out Simple Nourished Living where you’ll find tons of easy, healthy, Weight Watchers friendly recipes and tons of tips to help you on your weight loss, weight management journey.
Peter Morrison (09:12)
Have a good day.
Martha McKinnon (09:14)
Have a good day. Take care, everyone.
