Those of  you who are  friends with me on Facebook know that I love to cook, and have a habit of posting recipes and photos of  delicious meals that I make. I’ve decided it’s time to bring these this habit to my blog, so that I can easily refer back to the recipes. And if interested, so can you.

How a recipe makes the cut

To be clear, I won’t be  posting my own creations. I rarely come up with my own recipes. I’m a pretty good cook, but I am no chef. I know what I like, I’m getting pretty good at finding the great recipes from reading them, and I have cooked enough to make minor adjustments if needed. So that’s what you’ll see: other people’s recipes. Nothing original here! Yes, I give credit where credit is due – respect to the real chefs out there!

Why post recipes from others if they’re already online?

Basically it’s to pull some great recipes into one location: to help you find great recipes without having to search the vastness of the interweb.

Why do I care? Because I have a personal mission to encourage people to cook more. I am convinced that we will all be healthier if we cook more and eat out or take out less. Food has the power to be either medicine or poison. Make it yourself, and there is less likelihood that you’ll be in poison territory. Yes, you can order healthier options in restaurants, but how many of us do? And when we do, how are the portions?

I also have a second mission: to help people to realize that healthy eating can be delicious. No, I’m not drunk. I speak truth. I say this as a healthy living enthusiast, but also as a lover of food, and a lover of my taste buds. I would never disrespect either with a crappy recipe. And from that perspective, I understand why people don’t realize that it is possible to cook healthy food that is also tasty. I think it stems from some of the recipes posted by other fitness enthusiasts and professionals. If you regularly see people eating baked skinless chicken breast with a side of spinach and boiled potatoes as a “healthy and tasty” meal, then, I understand why you don’t try healthy cooking. But please understand It doesn’t have to be that way! That is not an example of healthy and tasty: it is an affront to taste buds everywhere!

Every recipe you see posted here will be taste bud approved. In fact they will all meet what I call the Triple Crown of cooking:

1. Tasty. If it doesn’t taste good, nothing else matters. Period. End of story.
2. Easy. I have coined a phrase that you’ll see on a lot of the recipes I post: “Fridge to Fork in 30 minutes“, or whatever time it takes for that particular recipe. My preference is for foods where the Fridge to Fork time is 45 minutes or less. I came up with this term because I was frustrated with recipes that make ridiculous claims about how long something takes to make. I’ve made “30 minute” recipes that took an hour. Maybe they meant 30 minutes after you have chopped up all the veggies. For a recipe to become a regular for me, it typically takes less than 45 minutes from the time you step into the kitchen to the time you are sitting at the table with a forkful of food moving toward your mouth. I say typically because there are some incredible recipes that take very little time to prepare, but have a longer  cooking time, which might bring the Fridge to Fork time to more than an hour. I think you will love some of these recipes,  so I don’t want to exclude them. In these cases, you can be confident that these recipes do not require you to be active during that whole time. It may be 15 minutes of work followed by 1 hour in the oven. Not a good option when you get home 30 minutes before dinnertime, but maybe a great option for a Sunday evening meal.
3. Healthy. I don’t follow any single nutrition plan: Not Paleo, not low-fat, not intermittent fasting, not weight watchers. I follow a simple approach to eating that doesn’t really have a name:

“Eat real foods as much as possible; ones that agree with your body. Don’t eat too much of it.”

As much as possible, I will also post calorie and macronutrient values for each recipe.

Once I post recipes, I will sort them and add links to this post, so feel free to bookmark this post and check back every week or so.

Look for the first recipe later today…

And remember – healthy and tasty are not mutually exclusive!