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The Balanced Kitchen

Time for food. Time for Life.

BIG ANNOUNCEMENT!!

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Six years ago, I was struggling with the path my life had taken. I had two very small children, I had left my career working with trauma survivors, and I was doing erratic consulting work that bored me to death. I knew I needed a change and so I wrote an email to my closest friends and former colleagues and asked them a question: “If you could see me doing anything, what would it be?” I encouraged them to be creative, to be crazy, to think outside of the box. Every single person responded, and everyone said the same thing: something with food! As soon as I saw the word food, I knew I had found my answer.

Within the year, I completed a training program to become a health coach and launched The Balanced Kitchen. I had found my true calling! I was able to share my belief that cooking could be a simple, easy, healthy, and delicious part of life. I got to help people who really wanted to eat a healthier diet and cook for themselves and their families, but didn’t know where to begin. In short, I had the best job ever!

Today, I am sharing the latest development in this wonderful, challenging, exciting journey. I am SO excited to announce that I have become the new CEO (and owner) of The Six O’Clock Scramble!

 

What’s The Scramble?

For those of you who aren’t familiar with it, The Six O’Clock Scramble, founded and run by the amazing Aviva Goldfarb, is an online meal planning service committed to helping busy people get quick, easy, and delicious meals on the table every night. Aviva and I share the same philosophy: making dinner should be a low stress and enjoyable experience and that family dinners are one of the most rewarding and important opportunities to connect with and nourish the people we love and ourselves!

The Scramble will give me a platform to encourage even more people to get back into the kitchen, to experiment with new tastes and cooking techniques, and to feed their friends and families healthy, delicious meals that are simple to prepare.

 

But What About The Balanced Kitchen?

Some of you may be asking, what will happen to The Balanced Kitchen, to the recipes found here, and to my weekly musings on food, feeding kids, feeding ourselves, and life balance? The answer is twofold: my recipes will stay archived here on The Balanced Kitchen, but my new recipes and posts will all be on The Scramble.

I invite you to join me at The Scramble to continue getting inspiration and ideas for feeding yourself and your family well. In an effort to make that as simple for you as possible, I will be merging my list with The Scramble’s. What this means is that you will continue to receive emails from me from time to time with recipes, cooking ideas, and lots of other opportunities to experiment with cooking and eating, just from The Scramble rather than from The Balanced Kitchen.

 

Join The Scramble Family!

Finally (and perhaps most importantly), as an enticement and in celebration of this big change, I am offering a Friends & Family discount if you’d like to join The Scramble’s meal planning service. I love and believe in this service because it helps to make cooking that much easier and more accessible. So, if getting a meal plan delivered to your inbox or phone each week sounds appealing, if a generated-for-you shopping list sounds amazing, if access to a database of over 1,000 carefully curated recipes sounds wonderful, then join us! (And if you aren’t sure we have a 2 week free trial, so there’s no risk!)

Thank you for your support of The Balanced Kitchen over these past years. I have loved carving out my space in the food and cooking conversation. I have loved working with you as clients, meeting you at workshops, and sharing ideas with you online. I look forward to our relationship growing over at The Scramble! Sign up for a free trial now (and use the code FANDF17 to get 25% off all memberships now through August 16th).

Happy Cooking, Happy Eating, and Happy Scrambling!

Vanilla Mini-Cupcakes with Tangy Chocolate Glaze

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In honor of The Recipe Redux turning 6, we were challenged this month to come up with a small bite dessert. So fun! And a very welcome excuse to bake some cake!

When I first started pondering what to make, the dessert that popped into my mind was the mini-cupcakes at Whole Foods. I have a weak spot for them. I love that they are small enough that I can happily have two (or, let’s be honest, often three) and that they give me a nice hit of chocolate without being too much. So I thought I would try and come up with a homemade version.

If you have been following me for a while, you have probably caught onto the fact that I am a big fan of using yogurt in baking. I like it for three reasons: 1) like buttermilk, it makes things fluffier, 2) unlike buttermilk, I almost always have it in the house, and 3) it adds some protein to whatever I am baking. My love for using yogurt in cakes was firmly solidified a couple of months ago when I came across the yogurt cake recipe on the Kitchn. No beating or stiffening of eggs, only one bowl used, and yet out comes a fluffy, delicious cake—it is a lazy cook’s dream cake recipe! So I adapted it a little to make it a smidge healthier by including some spelt flour and cutting down on the sugar and the outcome was outstanding! (Note: I have found that using whole grain flours, like whole wheat or spelt, in cakes works better in cupcakes than it does in full-sized cakes, it just doesn’t rise quite enough as a big cake because the flours are denser…)

For the chocolate glaze, I also wanted the tangy-ness of yogurt to enliven the flavor and bulk up the nutrition, even if just by a little bit. So I tweaked a Cabot recipe by decreasing the sugar (why does every frosting recipe call for so much sugar?!). All I can say is that if I could eat these cupcakes for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, I totally would. And, in fact, I just might have them for breakfast tomorrow…

Happy Birthday, The Recipe Redux!

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Vanilla Mini-Cupcakes with Tangy Chocolate Glaze
 
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Cupcake recipe adapted from: The Kitchn Yogurt Cake Glaze recipe adapted from: Cabot Chocolate Layer Cake
Author:
Recipe type: Dessert
Serves: 48
Ingredients
  • For the cupcakes:
  • 1 ½ cups whole milk plain yogurt
  • ⅔ cups extra virgin olive oil
  • 1 cup sugar
  • 3 eggs
  • 1 teaspoon vanilla
  • 1 ½ cups all purpose flour
  • 1 cup spelt flour (or white whole wheat flour)
  • 2 ½ teaspoons baking powder
  • ¾ teaspoons baking soda
  • ½ teaspoon salt
  • pinch freshly ground nutmeg
  • For the glaze:
  • ¼ cup plain whole milk yogurt
  • ¼ cup unsweetened cocoa powder
  • ½ teaspoon vanilla
  • 1 ¼ cups confectioner’s sugar
Instructions
  1. To make the cake:
  2. Preheat the oven to 350 and line two mini-cupcake pans with liners.
  3. In a large bowl, whisk together the yogurt, olive oil, sugar, eggs, and vanilla.
  4. Add the flours, baking powder, baking soda, salt, and nutmeg and stir until there are no lumps.
  5. Distribute the batter amongst your muffin cups and bake for 15 minutes. Place them on a cooling rack and allow them to cool completely before glazing them.
  6. To make the glaze:
  7. Combine the yogurt, cocoa powder and vanilla in a large bowl.
  8. Using an electric mixer, slowly beat in the confectioner’s sugar until there are no lumps.
  9. Carefully dip the top of each cupcake into the glaze, turn onto its side, and spin gently to let any drops fall off, then place them on a tray. Place the tray into the refrigerator for at least 30 minutes to let the glaze firm up a bit.

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Recipe Roundup: April Edition

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This month is kind of a wacky month for my recipe roundup because three of these recipes come from one cookbook: Ottolenghi’s Jerusalem: A Cookbook*. I have a complicated relationship with this cookbook. I love it because everything that I make from it comes out so well, the pictures are beyond beautiful, and the recipes are truly inspiring, but I also find it challenging because many of the recipes include obscure ingredients that, truthfully, I am not willing to drop lots of money on to possibly use just once before they go bad. So I have started adapting when I use the book and so far that has worked out pretty well!…

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Cranberry Yogurt Cake with Maple Glaze: A Simple Dessert for the Holiday Season

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In my foodie family there are many holiday dishes that are considered sacred: Eggs Benedict on Christmas morning, my mom’s buttery fresh spinach, my brother’s carefully timed and rotated stuffed turkey, my mom’s poached pears with chestnut puree, and my mashed potatoes. Most of these dishes are not only a little bit richer than I would usually make, but they are also very labor intensive, and that’s how we like it. We love spending hours in the kitchen together, usually with bouncing fun music playing, creating these rich and delicious meals.

Other than my mom’s poached pears, however, there are few dessert recipes that are considered essential (and even that one isn’t made every year). So when The Recipe Redux announced the challenge for this month: “The holiday baking season is upon us. Time to pull out all the stops. Show us the healthy holiday dessert you will be sharing with family and friends this season.” I was excited to see what I could come up with. I wanted to create a recipe that would not only have some redeemable nutritional aspects to it, but that would also be a simple one that anyone could do. My goal of simplicity was a bit selfish because I hoped that in making one that was easy, perhaps I could entice the boys to start making it with me and that over time it could become their special recipe to contribute to future holiday meals….

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Managing Treat Season for Ourselves and Our Kids

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As much as we may want to live in denial, we are about to enter what I like to call treat season, that time of year from Halloween through New Years when there are seemingly endless supplies of sweet treats. This is a time of year that used to stress me out both because of my own treat consumption and because I felt like I was in a constant state of negotiation with my kids. In the past two years, though, I have not found it nearly as stressful and I wanted to share with you the things that I have done that I think have been helpful, both for myself and for my kids….

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Homemade Applesauce

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The boys and I are out in Colorado for a few weeks, which means lots and lots of time outside on fun adventures from hiking to visiting farms to riding horses. One of the activities that the boys have been most excited about this trip is apple picking in the horse pasture. And can you blame them? I mean, how cool is it that we get to walk out into a pasture with horses grazing next to us while we pick apples from the trees that have been growing pretty much wildly there for as long as anyone can remember?! We are so unbelievably lucky.

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The only pitfall is that the apples are quite tart. My 8-year-old will eat them pretty happily, but my 6-year-old has declared them to be too sour. The solution? Applesauce! If you have never made your own applesauce, you are missing out on such an amazing and very easy-to-make treat! Homemade applesauce is so much more flavorful than the store-bought stuff. Every fall I stock up on apples and make huge batches of apple sauce to freeze and then am so disappointed when we have finally run out, usually around February, and I open a jar of the store-bought stuff which barely even tastes like apples! Apple sauce is a go-to for us as a lunchbox staple either on its own or mixed with plain yogurt, when kiddos are sick with colds or stomach bugs and can’t manage eating too much, as the basis for cakes and breads, and even as a side dish on nights when I am making a new meal that I suspect one or both of the kids will have a hard time with. …

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Whole Wheat Oatmeal Cookies

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There are few things I love more than a warm cookie right out of the oven. Even in the middle of summer. There is something so comforting about the warmth, the chewiness, and, of course, the sweetness. When I was a kid the first thing I learned to make on my own was cookies. There were all kinds of stumbling blocks along the way as I experimented with baking. Some of them were fiascoes, like the time I used a tablespoon of baking soda instead of a teaspoon. But some of them turned into specialties, like the time I let the chocolate chips get too chopped up in the food processor and the result were sugar cookies with chocolate swirls running through them. My dad called them “spider cookies” and they were his favorite for years.

And yet for years I experienced a combination of craving and guilt when it came to baked goods. I was constantly trying to control myself, which often left me wanting more and thinking about the leftovers incessantly. I would negotiate with myself, finding ways to get another cookie or rationalizing why I should have “just one more.” It was exhausting and stressful and, honestly, took a lot of joy out of eating the treats. So finding a balance in my life where I could eat what I enjoyed and not feel deprived was essential. One of the ways to find that balance was to find ways to make some of my favorite baked goods healthier, but still deliciously satisfying. The interesting thing is that once I found the right balance and was comfortable with the foods I was eating, the intense cravings started to dissipate. The enjoyment was there and the forbidden-ness was gone. It was a revelation!

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Strawberry Muffins: A Seasonal Treat

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Strawberry season is here! I love, love, love fresh and seasonal strawberries and try to enjoy them in any way I can while they are around. Our own patch is starting to slow down now, but the strawberries from our farm share have been getting better each week and have been a big hit with the boys in a variety of ways. Probably the biggest hit (outside of just eating them as is) has been these strawberry muffins. My youngest son fell in love with these at a party in his class and I have adapted the recipe to be a tad healthier and he didn’t notice the difference at all (in fact he inhaled two this morning for breakfast!)….

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Pineapple-Ginger Popsicles

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While I grew up in a family where good food was highly valued and celebrated, from about age 7 on I had quite a tortured relationship with eating. I was incredibly self-conscious about my appearance (I was pretty overweight) and I worried about people judging me by the foods I was eating. This lasted well into my twenties (or even thirties). For me, the shift occurred when I started cooking more. Through cooking I began to shift the way I thought about food. It became less about control and negotiation (“if I have this last cookie, then tomorrow I won’t have anything ‘bad’ and I’ll be back on track”) and more about feeling satisfied and nourished.

For me, part of feeling fulfilled by the food I eat is to have some sort of sweet treat every day. Many times that treat is something that the old me would have considered unhealthy and would have regretted as soon as I ate it such as ice cream or cookies, but other times it is something along the lines of these amazing popsicles which contain nothing but healthiness. These are a sort of upgraded version of the all-fruit popsicles that I loved as a kid, but with no added sugar. They are sweet and creamy and have a nice kick from the ginger!…

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Mom’s Gluten-Free Fruit Crisp

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The boys and I are in Colorado this week visiting my parents for Spring Break. Coming home to Colorado is always wonderful because we get to see friends and family, we spend time in the mountains and with horses, and we spend lots and lots of time outside. But the other reason I always love coming home is that I don’t think there has ever been a time when I didn’t fall in love with some new recipe that my mom has either developed or discovered and this week is no exception!…

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