 I love a good peanut curry.....if we go out for thai food we typically get a couple dishes to share and the panang curry is almost always the one we choose! Dan recreated it the other night at home and it was probably the BEST peanut curry he's ever made!!! So obviously....I had to share the recipe with you guys!! I know it's been a while since we last posted a blog but I'd LOVE to get back into blogging/sending out a newsletter. Would you guys find value in that?? What would you want us to post more about? Quick update on our life.... 1 year ago we moved out of our RV and into a house....and now we've moved back into the RV!🤣🤷🏼♀️ I had been praying for a while...asking God to show us whether we should keep the rv or continue to try and sell it...if we lived in it (instead of the house we were living in) we could drastically use our income in different ways!! i.e save, pay off all of our debt and more! Anyway we’d been looking at monthly RV spots around Austin and they were all booked solid and had a waiting list for long term spots....but the other day we found a park just 15 min west of my sister’s house. We emailed them and they had availability starting in October! I had this random idea (aka not a coincidence...total God thing) to ask if they needed a camp host and they said they were actually looking for one!! We’d get our monthly spot paid for...plus utilities. We’ll do maintenance/greet guests and check them in, 4 hrs a day, 5 days a week....and we’d get paid for that too! Anyway. We met with them and she texted that same night saying they wanted to offer us the position😱 This seems to be a huge answer to prayer....BUT it’s also a huge change for us! There are some downsides but also a lot of upsides. So basically the last couple of days have been a bit overwhelming trying to decide if we should do it or not....praying, talking, crunching numbers etc....and we decided to do it! 🙌🏼🙌🏼SOOO....now the packing, downsizing, selling of things, simplifying begins! So thankful that we’ve done this before so we know what to expect! I love the quote: “I’m not sure what the future holds but I know who holds the future”. Have you ever had a big decision to make?? What was it and how’d you do it?? 2 questions I asked myself: “does this decision and life change bring us closer to God? And “Does it bring us closer to the purposes He has for us?” Moving forward into the unknown is scary. But I also know that when we live such a safe life with no risk taking and no faith, the enemy loves it. God provides opportunities that will stretch us, mature us and challenge us and we GET to choose. I always want to be OPEN to the crazy changes and possibilities He has for us!  OK....now the recipe to the BEST VEGGIE PEANUT CURRY of all time!!
Ingredients: 1 tbsp coconut oil 4-5 carrots 1 onion 3 cups broccoli 1 cup green beans 1 can drained chickpeas 1-2 cups broth 1/2 c peanut butter 1/4 c curry powder 2 tsp garlic powder 1/4 c fish sauce 1/4-1/3 c Soy Sauce (we use gluten free soy sauce or tamari) 1 can full fat coconut milk Salt & pepper to taste Directions: Cook onion and carrot for 5 minutes in coconut oil. Add everything but the broccoli and green beans and bring it to a boil. Cook for 5 minutes. Add broccoli and green beans and simmer on low for another 10 minutes. Top with cilantro and/or hot sauce and ENJOY!!!!
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 I know some people that begin to drive heave if they are threatened to eat a brussel sprout. A couple are in my immediate family. Growing up my mom on occasion would make them but they were usually either steam or boiled with some butter on them. Although I could probably stomach that now, at the time it was one of the most disgusting flavors. The smell was similar to what a Band-Aid smells like and I could only imagine what they taste like. Had my mom prepared sprouts this way, I'm guessing there would have been a 50/50 chance that I would have actually eaten them. I mean they are still green and green food in our house was immediately met with rejection, unless it was Jello. That stuff was delicious! Just don't ruin it by putting fruit in it! The process of roasting brussels is pretty straightforward. One key is making sure you start with fresh brussels not the frozen version. If you get the frozen ones, they will be more apt to just steam and bring you and I back to that Band-Aid flavor and smell. So start fresh! Then all you need to do is trim a little bit of the chewy stem off of them if there is some. We like to half or quarter ours from there depending on the size. You could roast them whole but they would take a LONG time so that's not advised. Once you halve them, spread them out evenly on a baking sheet. Drizzle with roughly 2 tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil per pound of brussels. Season generously with salt and I like a little pepper also but not always. Once seasoned, put them the oven that was preheated to 425. Depending on the size they should take anywhere from 20-30 minutes and I like to stir them half way through. What you are looking for is for them to start turning slightly brown if not black. In the cooking world that's called carmelization! Do it! They aren't burnt, they are perfect that way. It will bring out some of the natural sugars that are in a plant that is inherently bitter and if prepared poorly can taste like Band-Aids! Try it this, I bet you will like brussels for the first time! Or at worst you won't hate them. Want to take this next week off from planning your own Healthy Meals? Let us do the work for you! Follow the link below and we will give you are 5 Day Meal Guide for free!
 {3 Day Refresh Results!!} We're a bit behind on blog posts since I did the 3 Day Refresh at the end of July and I'm just now writing this blog. Major apologies...but moving on :) Long story short: I actually liked this cleanse!! I loved the food I got to eat, the shakes were delicious and it helped me drink more water...which is always a struggle of mine. It's going on sale November 10th and I think I may purchase it again and do it again! It's way more fun to do it with other people so if you're interested, shoot us an email. I totally FAILED at taking "before" pictures before I started...I was kicking myself by the 2nd day because I know that pictures are the best way to measure progress!!! DARNIT!! So I grabbed some progress pics that Dan took of me back on June 13...those are on the left and the right were taken on the last day of the 3 Day Refresh. All in all I'm super pleased with the whole experience....except for one day. I decided to workout with Dan and did 22 min hardcorps...I was completely fine during the workout but around 5pm I got dizzy and cranky...so I ate a little something (not on the plan) and felt much better!! My goal was NOT weight loss. It was to try the program out because I'd never done it, give myself a little cleanse after the 4th of July and just being too lenient with snacks, alcohol and treats. ➡️ I ended up losing 3.2 lbs and 1.5 inches...kinda crazy! I loved the simplicity of the meal plan and the vanilla fresh protein shakes...and that I still got to drink my beloved Shakeology 😜 The dinner recipes were so tasty and just like we cook anyway so it wasn't a huge change. I didn't follow the plan exactly to a T because I didn't give up coffee...but I limited it to only 1 cup a day and switched to water the rest of the day. By the end, I was excited to have carb and wine again...but it was only 3 days! Totally doable...and I felt FABULOUS at the end! 
One thing we really encourage a lot of our clients to work on is to be more veggies, especially greens. One of the easiest ways to get more greens in is to eat more salads. We love our salads, and try to it one 5 days a week. We aren't just talking about a little side salad with dinner. We are talking full on, stuff my face and stomach salad that is loaded with greens and veggies. We see a lot of people that grasp that concept which is awesome, but then they douse all those quality veggies with some low quality salad dressing.
A couple of tips if you do buy store bought dressings;
If the idea of eating more veggies and cleaning up your eating sounds like something you would be interested in, we will be hosting a special group on Facebook in a little over a week. The group will revolve around having a salad a day for week. We will provide recipes like the one above and some more tips on how to put together an amazingly healthy salad. If you are interested click on the image below and RSVP.
This dish was totally inspired by leftovers. To be honest a lot of the meals we make are throw together at the last minute. We try our best to just keep healthy ingredients in our fridge, freezer and pantry. Then I (Dan) find inspiration either from Pinterest, Google, a random cooking show or something I've made before to dictate what we eat. I'm not the most creative person when it comes to other things, but food, that's my jam - pun intended!
Seriously this soup was so easy to make and you could easily scale it up if you wanted to make it for a larger group. Like most soups the key to flavor is using a flavorful broth/stock and letting it simmer for a long time. I recently made up a batch of chicken stock in our pressure cooker. Homemade stock makes a huge difference in my opinion both in flavor and quality of ingredients. I probably need to write up a post about our stock recipe. Very simply we just add water, old chicken bones, carrot, celery, onion, garlic, bay leaf, thyme, apple cider vinegar, peppercorns and a little salt into our pressure cooker. We pressure cook it for about 3 hours and it turns out great! We hope you enjoy this soup! We always love to hear if you try out our recipes, so if you give it a try, drop us a comment on the post or shoot us a message.
If you are like me and you grew up with the Food Pyramid as your reference to what a healthy diet should look like, then I'm sure you will follow my logic in this post. That pyramid told us to eat a certain number of grains, pastas and cereals. It also mentioned meat and protein, listed dairy as a food group and told you to limit fats. Although if you look closely at the pyramid, fruits and vegetables are separate, but the advice you hear all the time is, "Eat your fruits and veggies." If you follow anyone in the health world, I'm sure you've heard that statement before. If you do a quick google search on the subject you will get results like these:
Experts Recommend 5-9 Servings of Fruits and Vegetables Per Day
Then if you click into some other links from what I would consider well educated institutions like WebMD or Harvard School of Public Health you find that they have articles that lump the two groups together as if they are interchangeable.
So why is this bad advice? Instead of the saying, "Eat your fruits and veggies" it should actually be "Eat your fruits" and "Eat your veggies." The problem comes when you combine the two. Especially when that advice is what we teach our children. If these two food groups are lumped together - like they almost always are - and you have the option to eat sweet fruit versus slightly bitter greens like kale or arugala, which are you going to choose? Which are your children going to choose? The difference between eating 9 bananas in a day versus 9 cups of broccoli is pretty significant.
By comparing these two, the intent isn't to say that fruit is bad or even worse than vegetables, they're just different. It is easy to see though that if a person were to consistently eat a lot of fruit that they would be consuming a lot more calories and a lot more sugar. It is a "natural" sugar but it is still sugar that your body will either use as energy or store as fat if it isn't needed.
My advice would be that you aim for a minimum of 5 servings of vegetables per day...and preferably non-starchy varieties. So that means things like broccoli, cauliflower, various greens (kale, spinach, chard, romaine), carrots, sprouts, jicama, celery, onion, garlic and so on. I know things like avocado, tomatoes, peppers, and squash are technically fruit but for the sake of getting nutrient dense, low calorie foods we will call them fair game for your 5 servings per day. As far as the popular advice out there that says you should eat 9 servings of "fruits and vegetables" per day...that total number is fine in my opinion. If you want to eat more that - even better. I would always strive though to keep your veggie to fruit ratio to be 2:1. So take the 5 servings of non-starchy veggies, add in maybe a sweet potato or regular potato and that gives you 6 servings of veggies. Go ahead and eat three servings of fruit to get that that 9 number! Some advice on fruit selection: if your goal is weight loss try to keep 2 of those 3 fruits lower in sugar content, so things like melons, berries, citrus fruit. Your higher sugar fruits would include things like bananas, apples, grapes, dates, figs, and mangoes. Once again if you don't use that sugar you will store that sugar for energy later in the form of fat. Continue to eat your fruit and continue to eat your veggies but stop lumping them together as one! 
Superfood is a buzz word in the health world these days. Eight years ago as a single guy if you would have asked me what my definition of superfood was I probably would have told you anything that is super cheap or super easy to prepare. So frozen pizza and hamburger helper would have fallen into that category.
Oh how the times have changed. Now I look for every effort to search out real superfoods and add them to my diet. I recently heard about broccoli sprouts and the amazing health benefits that they have. So I had to do a little research and find out all about them. Basically a majority of the health benefits that would classify broccoli sprouts as a superfood stem back to one compound in it, sulforaphane. Sulforaphane is an antioxidant that has been shown to eliminate cancer causing free radicals, reduce inflammation, help your heart health and reduce your chance of diabetes. [1] Not a bad resume for a plant that is only a few days old! Here's the "super" thing about sprouts versus the broccoli that you buy in the grocery store. With sprouts you are eating the whole plant including the the roots, not just the trimmed up pretty part that you see on grocery store shelves. The average pack of sprouts that you would buy in a grocery store has around 4,000 sprouts, that is 4,000 future heads of broccoli!!! Also with the sprout the you get anywhere from 10-100 times the amount of antioxidants that are in the adult plant if eaten within the first 7 days. [2] Sulforaphane tends to peak in the broccoli plant around the 3 day mark and begins to decline after that point. So eat them early and eat them often. Sprouts can easily be added to salads as I did with my salad pictured above. You can also juice them and still get a lot of the benefits from the sulforaphane. We also recommend adding them to your smoothie or shake. Don't take this post as a reason to avoid regular broccoli because there are still tons of health benefits from the adult plant too. Vitamins like vitamin A and C and minerals like magnesium, calcium, iron, and magnesium increase as the plant ages so we still encourage you to eat mature broccoli also. We would still consider regular broccoli pretty darn super too! Let us know how you use your sprouts or if you are planning on trying broccoli sprouts.
References
 So we asked you guys via our Facebook Page what were some of your guilty indulgences. For most humans at some point in our lives we have all had certain foods that we ate because they just taste so damn good even though we know they are unhealthy. Mac and cheese definitely falls into that category. There are two kinds of mac and cheese in my mind, the first being the kind that came out of the blue box with powdered cheese. I'm pretty sure that cheese sauce had crack in it because it tasted so good, especially the spirals....but seriously, this is about one of the most processed foods you will find on a store shelf. Frankly, looking back I don't even know if I would call it food. The second version is the homemade version which is loaded with butter, cream, and cheese, not to mention the vehicle to consume said fat mixture is an enriched white flour noodle. Just in case that wasn't enough fat, I would usually throw some bacon into my version too. So the feat of "healthifying" this dish was going to be a tough one. I knew that I wasn't going to try to make a powder that somehow magically turned into cheese. So the other option was to try to recreate the base bechamel sauce that traditional mac and cheese is made from. Your traditional bechamel is made from fat and flour and it usually incorporates onion. In the case of mac and cheese, you also add cheese to it. I had heard of someone else making a cream sauce out of cauliflower before so I figured this would be the perfect time to try that out. I've done a cauliflower puree before, so this was simply making that a little thinner to resemble a bechamel sauce instead of mashed potatoes. So I've now got a creamy sauce but then I had to somehow infuse that sauce with a cheese flavor. Let me just start by saying actually cheese flavor is next to impossible to recreate but I feel this got close. So a lot of cheeses have a nutty taste to them along with a an obvious saltiness. Salt is the easy part, so for the nutty factor I used cashews that I had soaked in water for about 4 hours to soften them. Another ingredient that our friend Lindsay over at The Paleo Paramedic told me about was Nutritional Yeast. Nutritional yeast has a natural cheese like flavor. It is also a great source for your essential B vitamins, which if you live in the vegetarian or vegan world can be the toughest vitamins to acquire through food sources. So I added all of that to get it tasting like a cheese sauce...but that last elusive thing was giving it that cheese color. Tumeric to the rescue. Not only is tumeric a superfood but is also turns anything it touches yellow. So we've got a blob of cheesey like goodness which is actually really healthy for you but do you just drench regular noodles or at best whole wheat noodles in this sauce and call it a day? You certainly could and you would have a tasty dish...so if you want to stop right there, feel free. But to ultra-healthify this dish, why not find another vegetable that would resemble elbow macaroni. My brain ran the gamut of veggies trying to think of something that would resemble the texture and size of elbow macaroni. If you are following us or in the healthy eating community you have probably heard of Zoodles or noodles made out of zucchini. Typically, most people use a spiralizer or mandolin to cut zucchini into either a spaghetti or egg noodle like shape. I wasn't able to get that little curve in the noodle or make them hollow by just using a knife, but I cut zucchini into a 1/4" x 1/4" by 1" pieces so that it would resemble macaroni.  What would some homestyle mac and cheese be without a topping, right??? So to add that crunch to the top of this dish I just added some crushed almonds that I combined with some dried parsley and oregano.  Some possible modifications if you aren't looking for an ultra healthified mac and cheese option or you don't need to follow a vegan diet.
 This soup was something we just threw together the other night as an attempt to eat something spicy to get baby moving a bit. The soup was delicious but didn't do it's job to help move along labor. You could certainly modify this to include whatever veggies you have in your house. We happened to have some swiss chard that we picked up from the farmer's market this past weekend so it worked out great.
 The hardest part about making this is the chopping and finding fresh ingredients. After that, it is super easy and here is how I did it. I juiced all the citrus in a bowl and added the cider, then I added the jalepeno pepper, onion, and garlic to the citrus juice to "cook" it with the acid so it would take a little bit of the bite away from those ingredients. Then just mix everything together. If you want to make it a little more hearty and make it a main dish, you could add some black beans or maybe some cooked shrimp or chicken. Ingredients
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