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Cooking Fast & Simple (and sweet potato hash recipe)

I hope you all enjoyed your Mother’s Day weekend! My mom had to work, so my family and I made the weekend as special as we could for her, which included me making raw, vegan peppermint patties and chocolate covered strawberries. One of these days, we’ll go get massages together. It’s becoming tradition.

Friday night is when I decided to do my baking. So, I didn’t want to take up any time making a dinner. Luckily, I stumbled upon a sweet potato hash recipe earlier in the day, and I happened to have all of the ingredients at home. Don’t you just love when that happens?!

I had this whipped up in 20 minutes. I tell you time and time again, I’m not a fancy cooker, unlike what many people in my life think. I’ve got a busy schedule, just like most of you. I don’t have hours to spend in the kitchen. But you don’t have to spend hours in the kitchen in order to have a fabulous dinner! This is the perfect example.

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Food Feature: Mustard Greens (and zesty spring salad recipe)

At my trip to Whole Foods this weekend, I picked up some mustard greens. Have you tried them? I first experimented with them last year, after I had learned about all the health benefits of greens in my nutrition school. (I teach you this information in my six-month health coaching program!) Boy, was I in for a surprise!

I just assumed mustard greens would taste like all other greens: earthy, fresh and hardy. But mustard greens kind of taste like spicy mustard! They are zesty, tangy and spicy all at once. So for anyone who thinks salad doesn’t taste like anything... try incorporating mustard greens. You’ll never complain about flavor again!

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Cooking with Cookbooks (and stuffed cabbage roll recipe)

The internet has made it so easy to search for recipes, hasn’t it? You think of a recipe you want to make, you type it into Google and a whole slew of recipes come up. Or, you head on over to your favorite blog (maybe mine is one of them?!) and see what’s available there.

The other day, I told my mom I wanted to try making cabbage rolls. I've always loved them, but I had never made them from scratch. So, what does she do? She pulls out our old, dusty, falling-apart Good Housekeeping Cookbook from decades ago and to find a recipe.

This made me smile. While the internet is simple in one way, real physical cookbooks are simple in another way. They are right on your shelf, right where you left them last time you used them.

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Simple Home Cooking (and vegan strawberries ‘n cream oatmeal)

I have a confession. I don’t enjoy wasting away a day cooking in the kitchen. Actually, I rarely enjoy even cooking for an hour! I know that a lot of my friends and family talk about me like I’m some award-winning chef just because I have a blog with weekly recipes, but that’s just not the case.

If you browse through my recipes, you’ll see that most of them don’t take more than 15 minutes to make! As a Health Coach, I live a busy life. I don’t have time to make extravagant, detailed recipes with 20 or more ingredients. I use the same ingredients over and over and just keep switching them up so they taste different and new.

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Want To Discover Your True Self?

If you haven’t subscribed to my monthly newsletter yet, you missed my big announcement! Be sure to head to my homepage and enter your email address at the bottom so that you don’t miss any more news or announcements.

If you did miss it, here’s the deal.

I just completed a brand-new program that is available to anyone who would like to discover their true self and accomplish their goals in a clear-cut way! So far, I have only offered a six-month, one-on-one health coaching program. There are a couple reasons for this.

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Get to Know Your Body (and cashew cheese recipe)

As a health coach, I have come to understand my body on a very, very personal level. To say that I don’t know my body on a personal level sounds silly, because we’re one in the same with our bodies. We’re with them all the time. We live within them. However, the reason I’m a health coach is because of the number of people that don’t know their bodies.

I help people become healthier. What does that really mean? It means that people feel sick all the time, or they don’t have energy, or they can’t lose weight, or they can’t get good sleep, or they have food cravings, or they have digestive issues. What all of these things really mean is that their bodies are doing something that they don’t know how to fix, because they don’t know their bodies on a personal level.

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Gluten Free Pizza Bliss! (and vegan cauliflower pizza crust recipe)

I’m from Chicago, so it’s a given that I grew up with pizza. However, when I gave up gluten and dairy last June, I never really missed the pizza. Maybe it always made me feel sick and that subconsciously made me miss it less. Who knows. The hardest part was probably not having the option to order a pizza when I’m with other people and we have no idea what to eat.

Then, when the world was supposedly ending in December, people started asking the question: what would you want your last meal to be before the world ends? (What would you say? Leave me a comment!)

You know what flashed through my head? Deep dish pizza and a hot fudge sundae. Wow! I would have never guessed that, but it’s what I thought of first. Maybe I’ve missed it more than I realized.

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Healthy Birthday Cake! (chocolate banana mousse torte)

As a health coach, my proudest achievement thus far was this recipe that I’m about to share. It’s not because it came out perfect on my first try, or because I successfully combined two totally separate recipes into one. It wasn’t because I made half of it by candlelight, due to our kitchen lights going out all weekend. (Yep, that happened.) It wasn’t because I made the other half an hour before the party started.

This cake is my proudest achievement because I made it for my most favorite person in the whole wide world, my niece.

I made it for her very first birthday, where the highlight of the party was watching her take her first bite of her first cake as everyone oohed and ahhed and guessed how much cake she’d get on her face. (As it turns out, she is like her daddy. She used a spoon and kept herself very clean!)

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One Sauce, Endless Recipes (Thai peanut sauce recipe)

As a health coach, I keep in contact with dozens of other health coaches on forums. Though we exist nationwide and even across the world, it’s great that we’re able to run ideas across each other, and better yet, share recipes.

The other day, one health coach had a craving for a peanut sauce with noodles, so she asked for suggestions. Once she said that, I couldn’t get it out of my head! So I took off on a journey to create the perfect Thai peanut sauce. This consisted of researching a dozen recipes and taking what I liked from each one. I combined all my favorites and created the sauce recipe I’m about to share!

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The Rundown on Coconut Oil + Uses

These days, coconut oil has become a part of my daily life. I talk about it a lot, and I include it in a lot of recipes. But I find that people often ask me about it, because the majority has never heard of it, bought it or used it. So, consider this post a rundown of coconut oil: the benefits and how you can use it!

Coconut oil is a fat, but it’s good fat, like avocado and olive oil. If you research coconut oil, you’ll find controversy on whether it’s actually good for you or not, because it’s a saturated fat. But really, coconut oil should belong in its own category, because its makeup is so unique to all other fats. While it is a saturated fat, it’s made up of medium-chain fatty acids, which means it breaks apart and metabolizes in your body. Other saturated fats, often from meat and dairy, are long-chain fatty acids that are known to thicken your blood and clog your arteries. They are quite different!

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