Chicken wraps - healthy fast food part 1

I'm a sucker for fast food! I love anything with melted cheese, loads of bacon, 17 different kinds of dressing slabbed on or between some sort of eatable vehicle, preferably consisting of some white bread. Burgers, hotdogs, pizza, sandwiches - you name it, I'll stuff it down my throat with great pleasure! But that's not what this blog is about! The term healthy fast food, reminds me of some sort of not very interesting recipe consisting mainly of lentils and broccoli, found in one of my girlfriends magazines. But fast food has to taste fatty and it has to taste good! Nobody would be tempted to order a triple-mega-bacon-cheese-burger with Godzilla fries and a huge jug of coke if it wasn't delicious. So taste and the eat-while-lying-in-bed-possibly-with-a-hangover-ability is what we're going for here!

One of my favorite things to make when I get the inevitable fast food cravings is different kinds of wraps. It's also important to me that the dishes I put in the fast food category, actually is fast to make! The wraps I made today took about 10 minutes to make. Here's what you need:

2 wholewheat tortillas
½ onion
a couple of small tomatoes or 1 big
1 avocado
1 chicken breast
1 small bowl of cottage cheese
1 clove of garlic
a bit of fresh basil, I used some purple basil, but the normal green stuff is fine.
a bit of dried thyme
a bit of lime, lemon or even vinegar just something nice and acidic.
Salt & pepper

Cut the chicken in to bite size pieces and throw it on the pan and sprinkle with the thyme, season with salt and pepper fry until done and take of the heat. Chop the vegetables, remember to chop the onion fine, nobody likes big, horrible chunks of onion. Chop your basil and mix with the cottage cheese season with salt and pepper and add your lime (or whatever) to taste. Warm your tortillas in the oven til soft and remember to get them out before they turn crispy - or simply nuke them. Place your filling on the tortillas and roll them up anyway you like. Turn on your TV and enjoy while lying on your couch.

This is great because the avocado and the cottage cheese provides the fatty flavor, while also giving it the kind of greasy feel, that you normally crave Sunday morning. Some of the ingredients like avocado and cottage cheese can be a bit hard to find i Thailand, but if you can't find some of the ingredients substitute it with something else. Cooking is all about being creative!

ThaiDiet

Pad Pak Ruam Mit!

One of the hardest things when trying to stay fit here in Thailand is avoiding rice. Rice is served at every meal and in my time here i have actually grown to love the stuff! Problem is, my body doesn't. Often times when eating out, which most of us do most of the time here, the meals comes with rice. I try to limit my intake of carbohydrates to after I've worked out, which means that I can only eat rice once or maybe twice a day. One of those meals that you can find anywhere and which really helps you out in times of hunger is Pad Pak Ruam Mit! Normally just consisting of a selection of vegetables stir fried with - among others - oyster sauce, it lacks protein. To counter this i ask to get it witch chicken ("saai gai") and most importantly, without rice ("mai saai khao"). I often order this dish for lunch, and as every stall offers this dish with a different selection of vegetables, i haven't grown tired of it yet!

a plate of pad pak ruam mit saai gai

This dish is on offer literally everywhere, where they offer made to order dishes. You will be able to recognize these stalls, by the all important tool the wok, and also these stalls tend to be a little bigger and have more ingredients on display - even sometimes several gas hubs.

Som tam & gai yang

a plate of som tam & gai yang

One thing I think we all know about eating healthy is that we have to eat a lot of vegetables. Most of us will instantly think of salads, consisting of lettuce, big chunks of onion and a few slices of tomato and cucumber, no dressing. Boring as a math lesson and about as packed with flavor as a cardboard box left out in the rain. The Thais don't really eat salads as we do, and often times it can be a bit hard to find meals with a lot of vegetables if you want to avoid filling your stomach with carbohydrates. The solution is som tam. This great dish made out of shredded unripe papaya, maybe some carrots, maybe even mango or cucumber, pounded in a pestle and mortar with sugar, fish sauce, peanuts, tomatoes and lots of chilies and garlic cloves. Something I really love is the long beans that is most often added, which together with the peanuts gives the dish some crunchiness and a nice consistency.  There is dozens of different kinds of som tam, some with fermented crab, some with dried shrimps, some even deep fried, but for the beginner the standard one is a good place to start. This is what many Thai women - known for their great looks - have at any chance they get, and some of them have as many as 10 chilies in! This is extremely spicy and I normally go for about 4-5 which is still quite potent. If you want to avoid the spicyness all together, then ask for "mai phet", not spicy.  To increase the health factor ask for "mai waan" (not sweet) as they sometimes tend to make it overly sweet and thereby miss some of the healthy potential. Spot your som tam dealer by a glass display case full of vegetables and a pestle and mortar.

Another thing most of us know already is that chicken is a superb way of getting more protein, without all the bad stuff. Here in Thailand chicken is very often fried, and even though its absolutely delicious, I don't think, I have to give any further explanation to why we need to avoid it, to get the physic we're after. Fortunately a lot of the chicken you see here is not fried, but rather grilled and therefore by far the healthier option of the two. Here its called gai yang and every time you drive by a grill (often made out of an old oil barrel) you will catch the scent of the chicken slowly grilling away over it. This usually gets my saliva running and luckily most places that sell gai yang also have som tam on the menu as the two goes together as burger and fries - healthy burger and fries!