Healthy Living Can Be Tasty

For people who want to eat healthy, the challenge can be making healthy snacks or meals that taste good. Using the right fruits mixed with the right vegetables can add the sweetness needed make a bland dish desirable. In this dish, mangos are that fruit.

If one wants a truly healthy meal, they should learn to cook for themselves so they know exactly what is going into their dishes. Fast food and sit-down restaurants use a lot heavy cream, butter or too much oil to make things taste better because that is the easy route. A touch of olive oil is healthy and tasty as well. One dish that can be a snack, dip or a topping to a plain chicken breast or pork loin is mango salsa. Salsa is a very easy dish to make. It is very healthy because it is nearly all fruit and vegetables.

A food processor makes it a little bit easier, but using a knife and a cutting board just means it takes a little bit more time. Start off with the ingredients that need a little bit of cooking. Sweet onions work best because they are not too pungent and usually do not need to be cooked down.

If red onions are the onions of choice, cook them down in a pan on low heat with some garlic powder, salt and pepper to take some of the pungent onion flavor out and cool it in the refrigerator while the other ingredients are being chopped up. Sweet corn is another item that should be cooked and cooled.

The Recipe:

• 2 Roma tomatoes- clean out the seeds and dice up
• 3 thick slices of sweet onion
• 11 grape tomatoes diced
• 1/2 mango chopped
• 1/2 cucumber- peeled and diced into small cubes
• few spoonfuls of sweet corn
• juice of 3/4 lime
• 6 or 7 dashes of Crystal hot sauce (or favorite hot sauce to taste)
• Tbsp of cilantro
• Tbsp of extra virgin olive oil
• salt, pepper and garlic powder to taste

The mango, sweet corn, cucumber and grape tomatoes will give the dish a sweetness while the hot sauce, onions and spices will spice it up a bit. The roma tomatoes and olive oils act like a coolant. If a hot salsa is what is desired, use your favorite hot sauce combined with diced jalapenos. Refrigerate and enjoy as a dip or a topping on protein like chicken or a lean pork loin.