Throw this quick, healthy, easy fertility food dish together in a flash!
Fast, yummy healthy TexMex salad
If you cooked the ground turkey as directed in my video Easy Fertility Foods 2: Collard Green Breakfast Burrito, you have leftover cooked ground turkey that you can use in this recipe.
Ingredients
Greens: Spring mix, (baby) kale, (baby) spinach, arugula, green or red lettuce. Mix and match, just make ’em green and colorful!
Ground turkey, precooked: 1/4-1/2 C per person.
Salsa to taste
Avocado or guacamole, whichever you prefer
Beans: if you like them and tolerate them well
Any other veggie you want to throw in, including mild green peppers, tomatoes. Corn is not a veggie. Neither are chips.
Dressing: the salsa and guac act as dressing, but you can add a vinegrette with TexMex type spices such as cumin, oregano, chili powder.
Super Easy
Easy is important, as is good flavor; this recipe delivers. Ground turkey still tastes good even when it’s a leftover, so you can’t go wrong. How do I know it tastes good? Because my younger son, who *loathes* leftovers, makes this salad at least 3 times a week and loves it. It’s his go-to, I’m-busy-and-don’t-have-time lunch. The key to easy, healthy food is making a lot of a base ingredient (in this case, ground turkey) and then finding fast ways to use it in meals, leaving you time to relax. 
You can cook several pounds of ground turkey and freeze it into multiple containers. Thaw them overnight; or if you are in a rush, nuke it in the microwave on half power for 2-3 minutes, depending on how much is in the glass storage container and it’s ready to go fast! That makes it perfect for food prepping on the weekends.
Super Fertility Food
TexMex food, when you leave out the chips and cheese, is actually pretty healthy. Mixed greens (green leafies are superfoods), guacamole/avocados for good fats (avocado is also a superfood), garlic and onions in the salsa are anti-inflammatory, beans for fiber, ground turkey as a protein: it’s all healthy and full of good fertility food. Much better than a burger and fries.
Spice It Up
I like my food relatively plain, because my digestion is easily upset. And in Chinese medicine, we don’t like super spicy food: no ghost peppers or scotch bonnets, please! But you can mix in garlic and onions, or uses spices like oregano, mild chili powder and cumin to give the meat extra flavor. If you leave the salsa and beans out, the recipe is FODMAP friendly (cumin is OK for FODMAP); it’s also GF/DF/Paleo friendly
Avocado Know How
Learn how to pick a ripe avocado in the video. Don’t get stuck cutting up a hard, flavorless avocado-shaped lump, or a squishy bruise ball with this easy test.
Green Goodness
Any salad mix will do, just make sure it’s all greens. Iceburg and butter lettuce are too pale: they don’t have a lot of nutrients. Kale, spinach, spring mix lettuces, red or green leaf lettuce, arugula all have darker green leaves that signal a high nutrient content. If you use Romaine, get the kind with the dark green leaves; Romaine hearts aren’t green enough. Green=great!
How To Make the Salad
Toss the ingredients in a bowl: greens, then meat, veggies, salsa, guacamole.
Mix them up, and Voila! Easy fertility food meal in a flash! Seriously, this takes less than 5 minutes.
Dressing is the Question
You can use dressing if you want, but you really don’t have to, the salsa and guacamole mixed make a good dressing. If you want to make your own easy vinegrette, just mix EVOO (extra virgin olive oil, the least processed and the highest in good micronutrients), vinegar (apple cider vinegar, rice vinegar) and spices to taste.
Where’s the Cheese? And the Corn?
Nope. Not in this version. Cheese is inflammatory, and undermines the whole healthy angle. It’s also, as many people find out when they try to eliminate it, addictive. The casein protein molecule actually plugs into the opiod receptors in your brain, which is why people love cheese so much. It makes them feel good. But it’s not healthy. In women with endometriosis, it can exaggerate estrogen imbalance; in women with fertility issues in general, it throws of hormonal balance and increases inflammation. So, no cheese. I talk about hormone imbalances in my course, http://www.fertilityresetonline.com.
No corn, either. First, corn is a grain, not a veggie. So, it adds carbs, and not particularly nutritious ones. Second, most corn is GMO. It’s been modified to the point that the molecular structure is no longer natural, and anything that is overly modified or processed creates weird chemical signalling in the body. Even organic corn can have issues. So in general, I ask patients to avoid it.
This salad tastes good anyway, trust me!
The link to the video how-to is here, take a look! Easy Fertility Food 3: TexMex Salad
Love,
Dr. Lisa
Picture credits:
Avocado: Shutterbug75 on Pixabay
Salad Greens: Salad greens by congerdesign
