The Balanced Kitchen

Time for food. Time for Life.

Slow Cooker Turkey Meatballs with Sauce

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“By posting this recipe I am entering a recipe contest sponsored by Kikkoman and am eligible to win prizes associated with the contest. I was not compensated for my time.”

As I have mentioned in past posts, spaghetti and meatballs is a big deal in this house and I have my tried and true meatballs and sauce recipes that I use whenever it is on the meal plan. I have made them so many times that I can knock it out in about 45 minutes, which isn’t too bad, but when the opportunity to play around with Kikkoman Soy Sauce came up and I was brainstorming what sorts of recipes I would like to make easier for myself (and you!), the first dish that popped into my head was spaghetti and meatballs….

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Baked Egg Rolls with Peanut Dipping Sauce

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This week I have something new to share with you! I was recently accepted into a really special community of food bloggers called Recipe Redux. Each month we are assigned a theme or challenge around which we have to create a new recipe. I am so excited to be a part of this community and also to have this new source of inspiration for developing delicious, healthy, easy recipes to share with you! So this month the theme was:

Stir up some of your earliest culinary recollections. Did you stand at your grandmother’s elbow to learn to cook? Or did you learn by stumbling through a cookbook by yourself? Share a healthy recipe and the accompanying story about one of your first cooking memories.

For me, it is all about my mom. I have so many warm and wonderful memories of her cooking, about how she always welcomed us into the kitchen to cook with her (which, of course, I largely rejected). I remember her ability to make any meal feel special, her enthusiasm for trying new things, and her passion for cooking from scratch. My mom also really wanted us to be good cooks and when I was in high school she announced one day that from that moment on my brother and I were each going to be responsible for dinner one night a week. We had to plan it and cook it. I was horrified!! But I started poking around in cookbooks and making dinners, some of which were absolutely inedible! One of the first dishes that I truly enjoyed making was eggrolls. I loved the ritual of it: the creation of a filling, the rolling them just right, the frying, and then the hot crispy pockets that you got to enjoy.

But, of course, they were deep fried, so as I got more and more wrapped up in teen body image issues I rejected them and forgot about how much I loved to make them… until this challenge!…

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Letting Go of Perfection

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This morning as I was thinking through what I was going to write about today, I kept coming back to the stress I am feeling about cooking the turkey for Thanksgiving this year. This has come as a surprise to me because, in general, roasting a turkey is something I feel pretty confident about.  I mean, this isn’t the first turkey I have ever made and every other one has been a success, but as I become more public in my persona as a health coach who is passionate about food, I feel increasing pressure for everything I cook to be: 1) perfectly delicious, 2) the healthiest option possible, and 3) simple whenever possible. That’s a lot of pressure, especially when we are talking about a turkey that will be serving 20 people!

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