Just like the Boy Scouts, my NUMBER ONE  rule when I’m trying to lose weight is: Be Prepared! I can’t even count how many times I’ve cheated on a diet because I was starving when I got home and I didn’t have any healthy meals in my fridge, forcing me to tear apart my cupboards in search of the microwave Easy Mac and Cheese that I knew was in there, somewhere.

Yes, temptation is everywhere, even in my own home. But I’m much less likely to cheat on a diet when I have my meals planned out – and cooked – for the next two or three days.

And that is why I found myself cooking sausage and peppers at 11 pm last night.

I got home from salsa class at 10 and I was starvinggggg. Fortunately I had curry chicken and cauliflower rice in my fridge from the night before. I INHALED it. So good. Anyway, I was sitting on my couch watching Futurama when all of the sudden I realized that I didn’t have any meals prepared for today. Shit.

To the kitchen! I already knew I would be making sausage and peppers: I had a green pepper in my fridge that needed to be used before it went bad, so that morning I had defrosted a pack of chicken sausage. I quickly cut up the onions and peppers, then I threw them into one pan while I cooked the sausages on my little cast iron grill. Twenty(ish) minutes later I was finished.

Healthy Sausage and Peppers

Ingredients (about two servings):

• Sausage – I used Nature’s Promise Chicken Sausage for this one, which has 5 decent-sized links. You can use any sausage you want though (healthy or not).
• 2 green peppers (which is how many I would normally use)
• 3 or 4 onions
• Olive oil
• Optional: garlic, oregano, thyme, salt

Directions:

1. In one pan, heat the olive oil, then saute the onions and peppers until they start to get tender, maybe 5 minutes. Add the garlic, oregano and thyme and cook for another minute or two.

2. Cook the sausages over a medium flame for about 10 minutes, rotating so they’re brown on all sides (I like the cast-iron grill because it gives the sausages will have the grill lines.)

3. Cut the sausages into pieces and add them to the onions and peppers. (Cutting the sausages into pieces ensures that they are cooked on the inside. Mine were completely pink when I first cut them!)

4. Cook for another 10 or so minutes, until the sausages are completely cooked.

All done! Add some salt if you want.

I was gonna divide the sausages into two servings, but then I made the mistake of looking at the nutritional info on the package and saw that each sausage contains 620 mg of sodium! That’s a lot. So I split the vegetables into two servings and divided the sausages into three servings – meaning that I have some sausages ready to eat when I come home hungry on Friday night after an evening of drinking. Gotta be prepared!