Healthy Eating... Simply

As we raise our families, one of the hardest questions we have to answer every day is, “What’s for dinner?”  There have been times in my house where I have tried to be the first one to ask the question just so I don’t have to be the one to answer it. ☺  This has made the morning a bit awkward when I finish my omelet and bacon by asking, “So, what’s for dinner?”  My wife just rolling her eyes at me. 

We have a Betty Crocker cookbook. We got it as a wedding gift and even used it the first few years of our marriage. We now have about twenty cookbooks with recipes ranging from grilling steaks to gourmet French dishes made with five ingredients in thirty minutes. But is all this information necessary?  All we want is to eat a balanced meal that doesn’t taste the same day-after-day. 

Here is our solution: spices. Most of our meals are well-balanced. We chose a protein (steak, pork chops, fish or chicken), some vegetables (broccoli, cauliflower, butternut squash), and a carbohydrate (sweet potato, spaghetti squash, quinoa). The protein is sprayed with a healthy fat, like olive oil, and then seasoned with a regional spice profile as shown in the picture. For example, Tuesday might be “Thai day”. The steak would be grilled with cilantro and lemongrass before being served with a lemon wedge. 

Vegetables would be seasoned with mint and ginger before being placed on a baking dish at 350 F for 20 minutes. And the sweet potato would be served with butter and chiles. Total meal prep time, including cooking, is 30 minutes.

But here is the easy part. The very next Tuesday we may have steak again, but with a different spice profile. The steak would be grilled the exact same way but with a French flair: thyme and rosemary. Vegetables would be roasted again but with Bay leaves and black pepper. The sweet potato would be served with butter and Tarragon. 

After a few weeks of cooking the same food in the same way, we have gotten pretty efficient at cooking. But the flavors are always different, which keeps our meals interesting. To learn more, check out our recipes at https://www.blueeaglefitness.com/recipe.