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!

5 Ways To Stretch a Meal and Save Money

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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:…

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

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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….

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5 Ways to Shift to Sustainably Raised “Happy Meat” Without Breaking the Bank

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This post was written in honor of Food Day 2015, which is this Saturday, October 24th. What is Food Day? It is a chance for all of us to explore and celebrate healthier and more sustainable food, both with our families and with our larger communities. In other words, it is a cause that is near and dear to my heart! 

For decades now people have assumed that I am a vegetarian. Maybe it is because I’m from Boulder, Colorado. Maybe it is because I am passionate about many social justice issues. I don’t know. For years, though, I felt guilty. As if I were somehow betraying my own true self. I flirted with vegetarianism, buying tons of vegetarian cookbooks and cooking primarily vegetarian meals, but it never fully stuck.

Overtime, though, I became increasingly uncomfortable with the idea of eating any meat. I became more and more aware of the toll that conventional meat took on the environment, the animals involved, and my own body. So about 13 years ago I made the decision that from that point on I was only going to eat what I call “happy meat.” To me, “happy meat” is meat that is sustainably and humanely raised without the use of growth hormones or antibiotics. Usually, but not always, it is organic. And more often than not it involves leaner meats (i.e., poultry and fish).

When I started down this path there were a couple of things that I had to come to terms with. The first was that I basically stopped eating meat at restaurants. This was hard at first, but now when I go to a restaurant that serves “happy meat,” I am completely overwhelmed by all of the options and usually opt for a vegetarian dish. The second was that I couldn’t afford to eat much meat. The meat that I was willing to buy was (and is) more expensive, so I was forced to start thinking more carefully about how I ate meat, when I ate meat, and why I ate meat. In the end it became clear that I had to cut way down on the amount of meat I was eating. So I started learning ways to eat less, but better meat.

Since making the transition, I have developed five tips and tricks that have been helpful to me. I truly believe that in making these changes I have come to more fully enjoy and savor the meat that I do eat. So if cutting down on meat or shifting away from conventional meat towards the “happier” stuff is something you have been interested in, perhaps these tricks will inspire you to try:…

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Finding Flexibility: What to do when life throws you a curve ball

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I was just saying (ok, maybe complaining) to my mom that in the past two plus months, every single time I have had a day to catch up on work projects there has been a sick kid or snow day. And today was no exception. Waking up this morning to discover that we had delayed openings for school was frustrating enough and by 8am school had been closed. Boy, did I get grumpy. As I sulkily sat down to figure out a plan for the day, though, I noticed that something interesting happened: when I took a deep breath and accepted the unexpected, I was then able to come up with a plan that would allow me to do some work but would primarily be focused on getting other obligations taken care of, tasks it would be easier for me to do with kids around, which would then free up time on other days. In other words, I was being flexible.

When our lives get super busy, remembering to remain flexible can be really challenging. We come up with a set idea of how things are going to go and then oftentimes convince ourselves that the approach we have come up with is the only option that will work.  The reality, though, is that there is almost always another way. It may not always be the preferred way or the smoothest way, but there is usually another way.

Here are some of the things that I try to do in order to remain flexible (which is kind of against my nature) in these moments of unexpected curve balls:…

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My Favorite Cheap, but Healthy Ingredients

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As the final installment of my series on saving money in the kitchen I want to talk about some ingredients that I depend on to keep my own family’s grocery bills down and that I also recommend to my clients a lot. These ingredients are staples in my house for two reasons: 1) they are cheap and 2) you can do a lot with them without much effort. So without further ado, let’s jump in….

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4 Tricks to Lower Your Grocery Bill

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How much do you normally spend when you go to the grocery store? $100? $200? $300? More? And how many times a week to you go to the grocery store? I regularly have clients who, when they start working with me, are spending more than $300 week on groceries AND eating out numerous times. That adds up to a lot of cash.

Why do we spend so much at the grocery store? For some it is impulse purchases—that box of cookies to keep your kid quiet, that $5 chocolate bar that looks too good to pass up, the chips because you are starving and can’t resist, the bunch of kale because you’ll cook it this time for sure, or the pre-made food because after making it through the grocery store you deserve the treat of not having to make dinner. For others it is duplicate buying because you can’t remember if you actually have parmesan cheese or not. And for others it is the types of products being bought.

No matter what the reason, here are some ways to help you to cut that grocery bill down, and still have good, delicious, appealing food in your fridge!…

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Cooking from Your Pantry

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How many times have you stood in your kitchen and panicked that “there is nothing to eat for dinner!” I know I have done it many, many times. But as I have worked hard to start saving money on the food we eat, I have pushed myself to really try to cook from what we have whenever possible and this has taught me that this reaction is not due to a lack of gratitude for all that we are lucky enough to have, it is an expression of discomfort over what we don’t know.  I have come to realize that this panic comes either from a place of not knowing (or thinking we don’t know) how to make something from what we have in the house or from a place of believing that each meal should be specially planned and shopped for in order for it to somehow be a true meal. And I have come to understand that both of these reasons are bogus and here are some ways to snap out of those mindsets….

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5 Ways to Use Up Leftovers

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I’m very excited to announce that in four weeks, on Wednesday, October 8th, Lori Atwood of Lori Atwood-Fearless Finance and I will be hosting a WEBINAR on money and food called 30 Minutes/$30: How to Spend Less and Eat Better in Less Time (sign up here!). So to get you excited to join us for this awesome event, I will be doing a 4-part series on ways to save money in the kitchen.

The first topic I am going to tackle is the hatred of leftovers. We all know that cooking once and then eating the leftovers can not only save you time but also money, but many people hate leftovers and so the idea of cooking a big meal to use throughout the week is just not going to work… Maybe it is because your parents served the same thing night after night, maybe it is because you want something new every night, or maybe it just grosses you out.  No matter what the reason, there are some ways to overcome this aversion and take advantage of what you’ve got….

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Self Care: Quick and Cheap Ways to Unwind

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For years I have been a proponent of self-care. As a social worker I often encouraged not only clients, but also co-workers to make sure they were finding time to rejuvenate themselves. As a health coach, it is something that becomes a focal point in my work with almost every client. With friends, I am often encouraging them to find ways to unwind and take care of themselves.  There was just one hitch: I am not so good at taking my own advice….

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