Cooking Basics - The Balanced Kitchen

BIG ANNOUNCEMENT!!

August 2, 2017 By Jessica Braider Leave a Comment

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!

Recipe Roundup: April Edition

April 27, 2017 By Jessica Braider Leave a Comment

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!…

5 Ways To Stretch a Meal and Save Money

April 20, 2017 By Jessica Braider 2 Comments

My oldest son is turning nine (!!) this week and over the past couple of months my husband and I have started to notice a pattern: sometimes there isn’t enough food on the dinner table. We haven’t yet reached the run-to-the-fridge-to-scrounge-up-more-food levels yet, but we have definitely hit the oh-no-there-won’t-be-enough-leftovers-for-lunch-tomorrow levels. The amount that I have been making over the past few years (which, by the way, is definitely enough food for a family of four, plus leftovers) is just not cutting it, especially on soccer practice days. Just yesterday, for example, I made 13 baked chimichangas and then had to dash out before dinner to get to a meeting. When I got home, there were only three left. Not only had the three of them eaten 10 chimichangas, but they weren’t even sure how it had happened! Where did all that food go?! I knew this time would come, what with having two boys and my husband coming from a long line of big eaters, but I did not expect it to arrive when my kids were six and eight (what is it going to be like when they are 12 and 14?!).

Because of this uptick in food consumption I have definitely noticed that our grocery bills have started to creep up a bit and so I am starting to be even more diligent about using some of the techniques I saw my mom put into place when I was growing up. My mom is a serious pro at these things. Family friends always talk about how amazing it was to watch my mom feed huge groups of people with what appeared to be very little food. So whether you are just trying to cut down on your food bills, you are hoping to save up for a summer vacation, or you have some other fun plans for a little extra dough, here are some tricks to feed the hoards without breaking the bank:…

Waffleritos: And How to Use Up the Food You Already Have in Your House

March 21, 2017 By Jessica Braider 2 Comments

I’ve got an awesome, super simple, extra flexible recipe for you guys this week! Waffleritos. Yup, you guessed it, a combination of waffles and burritos, and what could be better than that? But first, some practical tips on how to cook with what you’ve got. The inspiration for the recipe and this post comes from this month’s challenge from The Recipe Redux:

Spring Clean the Kitchen. Cook with at least 3 ingredients that are actually in your refrigerator or pantry right now. Try not to go to the store to buy anything new. Give tips on how to make a healthy dish out of whatever you have on-hand.

This topic is near and dear to my heart and is tied to one of the complaints I hear from people over and over again—that they struggle with food waste—vegetables go bad before they can use them all up, meat is forgotten and goes off, and they are reluctant to buy recipe-specific ingredients because they aren’t sure how they will use the remainders in other recipes. I have even spoken with people who have decided that they’d rather order out instead of grocery shop and cook because the food waste stresses them out so much. I am very sympathetic to this struggle as it is one that I experienced for years when I was first becoming comfortable with cooking. I vividly remember going into my produce drawer and finding slimy green things that made my stomach turn. I also remember struggling with what to do with leftover ingredients from new recipes I had tried (I used to avoid buying cabbage and bok choy at all costs for this reason). Over time, though, as I became more comfortable with cooking and improvising, I found this source of stress started to dissipate and I developed a couple of tricks that were really helpful in avoiding food waste….

The Recipe Roundup: What I made, what worked, what didn’t

March 2, 2017 By Jessica Braider 4 Comments

As you likely know, more than anything my goal with my business and this blog is to help make cooking accessible. So today I am starting a new feature on the blog that I will offer periodically called: The Recipe Roundup.

With this series I want to give you an honest account of what worked in my kitchen and what didn’t. I’ll share ways that I simplified recipes, ways I adjusted them, how easy or hard I thought they were, and, most importantly, how they turned out. My hope is that this series will show some of the practical tricks you can use to simplify and modify recipes but that it will also exemplify how flexible, creative, and fun cooking can be, even when things don’t turn out as planned…

So without further ado, here’s my first installment of The Recipe Roundup…

2016 Round-Up: Best Recipes and Posts to Inspire and Feed You

December 29, 2016 By Jessica Braider Leave a Comment

The end of year is often a great time to take stock of what we have learned and how we have grown and changed. This year has been a big one for The Balanced Kitchen and I am so grateful to all of you for joining me on this journey to make cooking simple and delicious! In an effort to inspire you to get 2017 off to a delicious and happy start, I wanted to share with you the most popular posts and recipes this year. Enjoy and Happy New Year! Here’s to a joyful, delicious, and healthy 2017!…

2016 Holiday Gift Guide

December 1, 2016 By Jessica Braider 2 Comments

As you know, my goal is to help to make cooking more approachable, manageable, and, hopefully, enjoyable. I want to help to make cooking a natural and stress-free part of your daily life. So when I put my holiday gift guide together each year I am not thinking about the coolest gadgets or the hottest new cooking tool, instead I want to help you find the best, hopefully affordable, kitchen supplies that will help to turn your kitchen into a place you enjoy, a place where you want to spend at least a little time, a place where delicious things are made. So this year I am sharing the tools that I couldn’t live without, tools that have made my cooking life happier and more productive. So add these ideas to your own wishlist or get them for someone you love and then enjoy delicious meals for years to come!…

Simple Roasted Chicken and Vegetable Medley Sandwiches

October 6, 2016 By Jessica Braider 2 Comments

I received free samples of Sabra Spreads mentioned in this post. By posting this recipe I am entering a recipe contest sponsored by Sabra and am eligible to win prizes associated with the contest. I was not compensated for my time.

It is funny the things we can get excited about sometimes. For me, an unexpected moment of excitement has been around this Sabra Spread contest that I was invited to join through The Recipe Redux. To be honest, I was totally psyched to have reached the stage in my food blogging journey where I get to receive samples and create a recipe around a new product that I feel good about sharing with you. It was super cool to receive the FedEx box with an insulated bag inside filled with samples. And it was equally cool to be able to take my first taste of all three of the different spreads, Garlic Herb, Sea Salt & Cracked Pepper, and Honey Mustard, and know right away that I was excited to start playing around with them in the kitchen. When these small pleasures happen I think it is important to savor them and take the time to relish in them, after all shouldn’t life be about the simple and unexpected pleasures?!

So in the spirit of sharing simple pleasures, I wanted to share with you one of our family’s go-to sandwiches these days. Despite my best efforts, my boys have been giving me a run for my money on lunches recently. My 8-year-old in particular has been less than enthusiastic about a lot of the options that I normally offer, so coming up with this simple lunch option to throw into the rotation has been a life saver! I wanted something that he would be excited about, that I could feel good about, that wouldn’t take too long to prepare, and that wouldn’t break the bank. This Simple Roasted Chicken and Vegetable Medley Sandwich has hit all the marks!…

Bare Minimum Cooking: 3 Tricks for Easy Meals During Busy Times

September 15, 2016 By Jessica Braider Leave a Comment

Over the past few days I have been having a lot of conversations with people about how overwhelmed they are feeling. I have come to think that for many of us September is a month of unexpected overwhelm. Here’s my best guess as to why September can be so brutal: for many of us September is a time of transition—a new school year, work commitments start up after summertime lulls, and other communities we are involved with start to kick into high gear with fall activities—and then there are all those pesky things that need to be taken care off that we put off over the summer, or maybe that is just me. So suddenly we find ourselves trying to get into new routines, take care of long lists of things that really should have been done months ago, and snap out of the slower pace of summer. It can be rough and oftentimes something has got to give… and for a lot of people that something is cooking.

But what if you don’t want cooking to be the thing that drops? What if you are working to get into a good routine with cooking so that you can eat healthier, save money, expose your kids to foods other than grilled cheese and macaroni and cheese, etc? Then it is time to do the bare minimum.

Many of you know that one of my main goals is to help people to realize how accessible and simple cooking can truly be. I firmly believe that even in the busiest of times, cooking is possible and worthwhile. So how to you keep cooking as a regular part of your routine when things are so crazy?…

Cooking 101: How to Cook with Eggs, Part 1

August 25, 2016 By Jessica Braider Leave a Comment

Eggs. They are one of the cheapest (even if you buy the pasture-raised, organic ones!) and most flexible protein sources around. But many people feel like they are incapable of making them well. The truth is, eggs are actually quite simple, they just need a little bit of attention. So today I want to break down for you the different ways to cook an egg so that you can add these to your rotation for breakfasts, lunches, and dinners and then next time I will talk about different ways to use eggs in baking (i.e., beating an egg in all its stages)….