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!

I was at the bike store-coffee shop this morning for an Americano between clients (Cyclelogik has great Americanos – featuring beans from Francescos….mmm…) and was feeling a little snacky. It was almost 1130 and I had another couple of assessments before lunch. So I noticed the snack offerings they had today: a big oatmeal raisin cooking and a protein bar. Not thrilling, but I considered them enough to look at the nutrition numbers for each. The power bar looked decent: less than 250 calories, and it was somewhere in the 3:1 to 4:1 carbohydrate to protein ratio. It has fat, but fat is really not such a big deal – unless there is so much that it increases the calorie content too much. In fact some would call fat essential. And by some, I mean smart people who understand nutrition: The “Essential” in Essential Fatty Acids is not just a marketing thing.
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If you listen to Gary Taubes (author of Why We Get Fat, and Good Calories, Bad Calories), you would believe that the reason we are fat is because we eat too much carbohydrate, and that the way to solve the problem is to stop eating carbohydrates.

I’m not sure that the facts exist to support Taubes’ thesis. One hole, is that we in North America are fatter than virtually everyone else in the world (32% of men and 35% of women in the US are obese), but we eat less bread than they do. In fact North Americans ate an average of 60 lbs of bread per capita in 2000, which is less than half of what the skinnier Spaniards (15% of men and 21% of women are obese), Danes (no data found), and Germans (20% of men and 21% of women are obese) ate.^1,2
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It’s been one week since I started my Precision Nutrition journey (click here to start at the beginning). All in all a pretty great week. Some ups, a few downs, but all in all a pretty great week.

• I have avoided cottage cheese my whole life. I was probably 12 the last time I had it. And even then, it was only because I didn’t make the household food decisions. When I saw cottage cheese in the PN program, for some crazy reason, I decided it was time to give it a second chance. Read more…

My friend Mark Young (check out his great articles at www.markyoungtrainingsystems.com) turned me on to this great TEDx presentation video about will power. If you have 15 minutes to spare, watch this. It is a perspective that I have never heard before.

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I was chatting with Mike at the Fit Shop and he was very keen on the protein bread. I wouldn’t call myself keen, but I was definitely intrigued. I’m generally not a member of the “carbs are bad” fan club, and so whole grain bread is a part of my diet. It’s not an enormous part, but it is a part. But I know many people who stay away from bread either for fat loss reasons or because they feel lethargic when they eat bread. And because I love to stand on a soapbox and talk about all things exercise and nutrition, doing a review of this high protein bread for my blog was an obvious next step. Read more…

This is another follow-up to my previous two posts about sodium and the Health Check label.

The first was about high sodium content of Heinz soups, and the second addressed sodium levels in products with the Health Check logo.

In short, I was driven to correspond with both Heinz and the Heart & Stroke Foundation (who run the Health Check program) after being shocked at the high sodium content of Smart Ones soup. This lead me to identify reporting irregularities in nutrition information posted online. I have received correspondence from both parties that do address this issue. I’ve included copies of both letters below. And for those who are in a hurry, here’s the tweet-sized version:
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I sent the following letter to Heinz Canada after almost buying a can of their soup, but then putting it back because of the alarming sodium levels. Their answer follows…

My email to Heinz:

“Can you please tell me why your soups have so much sodium? I almost bought your Southwestern vegetable soup today but then I saw the label and put it back. 820mg of sodium in a 60 cal serving? Wow! Im not sure Ive ever seen another food that is so sodium dense. Seriously! So 3% of daily calories has 34% of daily sodium?
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Eat outside McDonald’s.

Seriously.

Bring your healthy meal and eat it outside of McDonald’s. Or Pizza Hut. Taco Bell. KFC. Whatever your guilty pleasure.

This thought came to me yesterday as I had to do a quick dash across the street to the mall for something fast to eat before my next client session. I grabbed a booster juice and was drinking it as I walked back through the parking lot, behind the McDonald’s. Specifically, I seemed to have walked right past a vent from their kitchen. So as I was drinking the smoothie, I was also smelling Big Macs and McDonald’s fries. It kind of felt like I was actually eating McDonald’s. That got me thinking back to someone I used to work with who had lost his sense of smell from an accident as a child. He said that he has no trouble keeping a normal weight because the loss of his sense of smell meant that he had no sense of taste either. So food was not a pleasure for him. I thought of this deep connection between our senses of smell and taste.
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I snack. I’m not ashamed to admit it. I try to snack a bit less often, and I try to keep most of my snacks relatively healthy. But snacks definitely have a place in my life.

For a while I was on a mission to find those great tasting snacks that are still reasonable in terms of calories. And boy did I find some. Ever had Chapman’s Frozen Yogurt? Wow. It’s seriously tasty. I recently had some Caramel Pecan Crunch. I’m amazed that it tastes that good at only 140 calories per 1/2 cup serving. I was thinking that this is amazing – basically the same nutritional impact as boring old yogurt, but tastes like ice cream (seriously – it’s good). Obviously this has to be a regular snack item.

But sadly there is a problem. Read more…