 One of the big things that separates a good meal from a great meal is a sauce! If you like to eat out at nice restaurants like we do, that is something that they all have in common, a fantastic sauce pairing that goes along with the main course. It can provide a balance of flavors, it can tie a dish together, and it can provide a needed level of moisture/fat with a leaner cut of meat. After years of watching cooking shows and a little experimentation myself I've learned some basics in sauce making and how to combine flavors. If you are novice learning some basic skills in this world will certainly help. Here is a link to an article talking about the 5 French Mother Sauces. Might sound a little fancy but most sauces that exist in the world are a spinoff of these base sauces. From this you can play with flavors that pair with your main dish. Another thing I would recommend is a book that I pull out on occasion, The Flavor Bible. This book is fantastic in that it allows you to look up a food, say pork, then it gives you a list of other foods, veggies, and spices that pair well with it. So combine that with the basics of how to make a sauce and you are pretty much set!
The cool thing about The Flavor Bible is that it highlights the ingredients that work best. For this Bacon Apple Butter, I knew we were making pork so take a look at pairings above...
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 East Meets West... All the comfort of my grandma's homemade meatloaf combined with all of the flavor you would get from some of the best Indian curry dishes that I've had. Sounds about perfect, right??? This dish is pretty straightforward to make, nothing fancy, unless you want to make your own curry powder. If you do make your own curry powder with fresh roasted spices, please let me know how you do it or let me know where I can buy it. Even without your own curry powder this is one of those dishes that you can make and impress the heck out of some friends or family. Don't take my word for it though. If you like meatloaf but love some ethnic food, this is a great combo. Pair it with one of your favorite veggies. We did some roasted asparagus but anything will work. Can't wait for you to try. After you do, we would for you to come back and let us know what you thought.
 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!
 One of Laura's favorite things on the planet is a good meatball! One of my favorite things on the planet is some good pasta! Being gluten free now for almost 3 years I don't nearly get good pasta all that often. One item that didn't make the cut on things to bring in our RV was my pasta roller and cutter! So we have to stick to store bought GF pasta which isn't always the best. W'eve had pretty good luck lately with the Barilla GF pasta. It's a corn based pasta which obviously isn't health food but every once in a while we are all for having a good pasta meal. I know you didn't come here to learn about GF pastas, so let's about this meatball!! One challenge with meatballs is they traditionally have breadcrumbs in them which unless they are made from GF bread is off limits in our house. Some things that I've used as that binder substitute in other recipes are sweet potatoes, quiona, ground up GF crackers. With this recipe I opted to skip the binder. It did make the meatballs a little stickier when rolling them into balls but is was manageable and still made a good meatball, texture-wise. If you want to alleviate that stick meat batter, go ahead and add a 1/2 cup of bread crumb or any other binder to the mixture. We also like to find any opportunity to sneak greens into our food. Feel free to follow suit and add some like we did or leave them out. If it would have just been Laura and I eating these we would have likely added more. We were able to sneak these in and Eli still enjoyed the meatballs which is a big bonus. We paired this meal up with our basic marinara sauce that you can find here, just leave out the ground beef since you are doing the meatball.
 One food that I have yet to find since going gluten free is a fried egg roll...they just don't exist out in restaurants and we didn't opt for the RV with the deep fat fryer. We've had a number of our challengers post in our accountability groups about creating different versions of this dish. I finally got around to make some myself and have to say it hit the spot. We were a little spoiled too, since the two days before this my aunt picked most of the veggies that went in this dish straight out of her garden. Fresh cabbage, fresh carrots, and fresh onions!!! The only thing we added to the dish was some red pepper, garlic and the pork. Oh and a few spices and some asian sauces!
 Pizza... everybody loves it! Even those of us that are living a healthier life love to indulge in it. It's actually one reason why I bought the domain, www.healthierpizza.com. Don't try heading over there yet, at this point it is just an idea in my head. The idea came to me because a healthy life shouldn't be one that is absent of pizza. Upgrading some of the ingredients is the place to start. We have other posts on upgrading the crusts with whole wheat flour or using cauliflower. We have a fun recipe where we eliminate dairy and add some extra veggies with this Thai pizza. We even love the pizza so much we incorporated the flavors into this lentil dish. With all of these, I had yet to create a delicious and healthier option for one of the most basic components, a good red sauce. Last night while Laura was away, Eli and I decided to make some pizzas. We tried out a new premade gluten free crust from Mikey's. The crust is made from paleo friendly ingredients and was pretty tasty! We topped that with a homemade red sauce that took 2 minutes to mix up then just a little time to simmer on the stove. Check it out and let us know what you think. If you end up tweaking it feel free to comment below with what you did. This is one thing I'm always playing around with and improving. 
 Meatloaf... it was a staple in our house growing up! My mom would always make it with beef and slather on the ketchup sauce on top. It was actually quite tasty, except for the onions. I despised onions when I was a kid. Not the flavor as much as the crunch that you would occasionally get from one that wasn't cooked enough. Times have changed quite a bit! The breadcrumbs that you would normally add to meatloaf would now make me breakout in a rash. The high fructose corn syrup in the ketchup, yeah... we are just going to avoid that if we can. That's the backstory on how this recipe got created. I suppose with mushroom sauce this maybe is closer to the salsibury steak that we would occasionally have in our tv dinners. No matter what you call it, I hope you call it delicious! We certainly enjoyed it!
I don't know why I don't always have a batch of this soup in our fridge. So good!!! Five years ago I would have laughed at you if you would tell me that soup can be an entire meal. I guess I was used to terrible canned soups or the tiny cup of soup that you get at restaurants. Oh how the times of changed.
Now my view of soup is basically it is liquid salad! Seriously though if you make a good soup it should resemble a salad. So if you don't like to eat salad, I suggest you try soup instead. This version of chicken tortilla soup is loaded up with veggies, quality protein, and of course some amazing chicken stock. When I make soup I love to make a huge batch because it tastes better the next day! Feel free to scale this recipe up or down but it makes about 6 large bowls of soup. Also as a little bonus here is a how I like to make my chicken stock at home which is super simple. Homemade Chicken Stock
Chicken Tortilla Soup Recipe
Ladies if you need a way to get your husbands to eat a salad, start with this one. I mean what guy doesn't like steak, then you combine that with mushrooms and gorgonzola cheese, it's a win! The asparagus and tomatoes are there as a way to sneak in some more veggies! The dressing is super simple and adds a fun punch of flavor. It's crisp, it's herbacious, it's delicious.
We would love to know if you try this one out! Leave us a comment below. If you love it don't forget to Pin It so you can save it for later!
Laura loves curry!!! So what do you do when your wife loves curry, you make curry for her. Sometimes I'm all about doing things from absolute scratch. In the case of curry, it would be fantastic to toast my own spices then grind them fresh and use my mortal and pestle to make a paste. But let's be honest that takes time and energy.
Instead we found a pre-made curry paste, added in some fresh veggies and fish and a couple other ingredients and we had a delicious dish in under 30 minutes. This was my first time ever using fish in a curry and it turned out pretty great. If you are completely scared of fish or don't like the flavor, too bad, try it anyways. I think you will be surprised that the curry is the dominate flavor and not the fish, so it is a good way to give fish a try. Feel free to add your favorite veggies to this dish. You don't have to use what we used, we just had these on hand and that is why we love curry dishes so much, because they are so versatile. You could also sub out the quinoa for rice or even zoodles or sweet potato noodles if you want to go grain free. The possibilities are endless. We hope you enjoy this one as much as we did.
I think I first heard of Danielle Walker on one the podcasts I listen to on a regular basis. She has a pretty incredible story of beating an auto immune disease, ulcerative colitis, through dietary changes she made. It's a great story that really shows the power of food. I would encourage to check out her blog or book Against All Grain.
Danielle has a recipe for this same dish that was my inspiration for making this. It was super simple and even Eli ate it. You can pretty easily scale the spice up or down depending on if you are feeding kids or you just don't like spicy food. Eating healthy food doesn't have to be flavorless which I think a lot of people fear. You just need a well equipped spice cabinet. You could easily sub out the ground beef in this recipe for ground turkey, shredded chicken or beef if you happen to have those on hand instead.
Our pressure/multi cooker has been a lifesaver while we've been on the road. For convenience I wish I could just say we have an Instant Pot because 90% of the people that own a pressure cooker own an Instant Pot. We just happened to find an incredible deal on a different model, a Fagor. Doesn't exactly have the same ring as Instant Pot, does it. Either way, like I said this piece of equipment has been fantastic for us to make quick one pot meals. If you are an Instant Pot user hopefully it has similar settings and you can translate my Fagor talk to your machine.
If you are all about fast, tasty meals that are easy to clean up I highly recommend you look into getting one of these. With RV living this is perfect, because it means less dishes and dinners that can be made last minute after a day of exploring or swimming in the pool. Win for everyone! Seriously this recipe maybe takes 20 minutes of active cooking time and 27 minutes of downtime letting the pressure cooker do its job. If you really want to kick up the flavor of this dish, add some chopped bacon, 3-4 pieces worth right away with your chicken. We had bacon for breakfast the day we made this so opted to not have anymore that day. So easy and so good! Go make it and lets us know what you think.
 Citrus and summer go hand in hand in my book. I know it isn't technically summer yet but the weather in South Alabama has felt like it is the middle of August. I'm sure if you were to talk to locals they would tell you how great the weather has been. For this Minnesota boy it's a different story. Temps were in the 80's everyday and the humidity was above 90% everyday. That's hot! Being in South Alabama we had the benefit of getting some really good shrimp and it was cheap. This has definitely been one of the things that I've enjoyed about traveling so far, local food! Getting to eat food that was picked, farmed or fished recently is so fun and adds so much more flavor. We've tried to take in local markets wherever we are and get some fresh veggies and proteins, then fill in the gaps with some food from the big box stores. I made this while in Gulf Shores, Alabama and it was super light and perfect for a warm day. We hope you enjoy it!! If you have a shellfish allergy you could easily leave out the shrimp and do a piece of baked whitefish.
We have started making an effort to clean out our cupboards and freezer as we prepare to move out of our house and into a 300 sq ft motorhome. That means we will likely be making a lot more soups. I had a coworker/chef once tell me about the concept of "Mustgo Soup." When he was making soup for the day he would look in the cooler and see what was about to go bad and that must go in the soup. I love that about soups in that they can be so versatile and there really aren't that many rules. Just throw it all together with a delicious broth and there you go.
This miso soup was super tasty and a ton of flavor. I will say that I scaled back the amount of miso from what we used, it was a little much in my version. In case you've never used miso it is a fermented soybean paste that you can find at most grocery stores in the refrigerator section. I like to shop at our local Asian grocery store, so they have an entire section of it, super easy to find! This is the kind we bought, Miso Paste. I definitely recommend splurging for organic when it come miso since it comes from soy. It ensures you aren't consuming GMO soy which is what you find in any non-organic soy products for the most part. Another miso trick is because it is a fermented food, meaning it contains live probiotics which are super healthy for your gut, you don't want to add miso to boiling soup otherwise it will kill those probiotics. I've also found it easier to separate out some of your broth and add to the miso paste to make a slurry before adding it back to the soup. It will mix in that much better. Hope you enjoy this soup.
When you don't feel like proofing a blog post, you just talk! So you get to deal with my "umm's" and "and's", hope you don't mind. I also want to start doing some more video messaging so hopefully these will get better.
Let us know your thoughts? Do you cook? How has it changed your life? 
If I could eat pizza for every meal I'm pretty sure I would. It's just straight delicious. Now that I can no longer indulge in your standard gluten containing pizza crust I need to get creative in order to get my pizza consumption. I've tried cauliflower crust. I used to make my own dough with standard whole wheat flour and have since found a GF flour that works with that same recipe. I even just bought the domain, www.healthierpizza.com knowing that someday I will dedicate an entire site to pizza. So yeah I love it.
The problem with pizza and a being healthy is they don't exactly go hand in hand. It's usually pretty fatty and pretty carb heavy which is a bad combo if your goal is stay or get trim. This "version" of pizza was a random throw together that I did the other night and it turned out pretty good. I will say with the protein and fiber from the lentils this dish fares on the healthier side too. In the dish I used a homemade pizza sauce. I have to apologize in that I have no idea what I added to it. I think I just googled "homemade pizza sauce" and semi followed a recipe. It's super simple especially if you start with a tomato sauce and not whole tomatoes. If you want to get really ambitious go for the whole tomatoes it will be worth it. Also the longer you can let it simmer the better but in a pinch 10 minutes will do. Just try to avoid adding sugar, there's no need! I should also mention that I did this in our new Fagor pressure cooker. We love this addition to our kitchen and use it all the time for all sorts of dishes and foods. This could easily be done in a saucepan or deep skillet. I was able to saute in this then just add the lid and set the timer and walk away. Pretty slick! 
One of the beauties of pizza is that you can pretty much make it however you want. My favorite combo is pepperoni, sausage, and mushrooms so I got as close to that as I could with the ingredients I had on hand, minus the mushrooms. Feel free to add whatever you like on your pizza to make this your own. Hope you enjoy!!!
Who else loves Thai food??? Yeah I could pretty much eat it everyday. I love the flavor profiles of sweet, salty, sour, and spicy...it's just so good! The noodle dishes are probably my favorite when we go out to Thai restaurants. My go to's are Pad Thai, Pad See Ew, or Pad Kee Mao (Drunken Noodles). Given my new intolerance of gluten, I am a lot more cautious when it comes to ordering food at restaurants. I know most asian noodles are made from rice flour, but I guess I just have trust issues, especially when you add the sauce in on top of that. For example I had no idea soy sauce had wheat flour in it, prior to becoming allergic to it...and most Asian kitchens use soy in everything...so it just makes me a little nervous!
With all of that, I decided to try to recreate a Drunken Noodle dish to ensure that it is 100% gluten free. It's not a perfect representation of the authentic dish but it was pretty tasty.
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If you are a man's man and the only way you would ever eat salad is if it was grilled and has red meat, this is the salad for you. No man would or should ever be ashamed of eating a salad like this.
The idea for this salad totally belongs to a former coworker of mine, Eric Simpson. He is the executive chef and at the golf club I used to work at and was always coming up with super tasty food. Recently I was back out there with some family and someone ordered his version of this salad and it just looked tasty. I actually never tasted it but just got a look at it so I'm not sure if the flavors are similar but the main ingredients are close, I think. This salad would totally be an awesome everyday dinner salad throughout the summer. The smokey char from the romaine pairs perfectly with freshness of the avocado and tomato. The blue cheese rounds it and will help it earn it's spot in your weekly meal rotation. Hope you enjoy this salad.
 I found this on Pinterest and made this when Dan was out of town a few years ago but haven't made it since. I've told him about it...and raved about it...but he thought it sounded weird so we never tried it again! UNTIL last night :) We buy whole chickens at Costco because they're so cost effective and delicious. We then stick them in the freezer to use at a later date. Earlier this week Dan took one out of the freezer and was going to throw it in the crockpot, but then forgot about it...which gave me the perfect opportunity to cook something for him for a change! Plus, it gave me a chance to prove him wrong and show him that this is actually a delicious way to cook chicken. Win-win! Here's the original recipe: Jamie Oliver's Chicken in Milk It's pretty simple...but here's what I did: 1. Preheat the oven to 375 2. Season the chicken with salt/pepper. Brown the entire chicken in 3 tbsp of butter & 2 tbsp of coconut oil. Brown one side and then use a tongs to flip it and brown every side 3. Put all these ingredients into the dutch oven with the chicken.
4. Bake for 90 minutes Wa-lah!!  I also figured I'd throw in this sweet picture...just because. A boy and his dog. They're so sweet!!  Lemon and Herb Chicken Breast Medallions with Roasted Sweet Potatoes in a Bourbon Cinnamon Sauce3/23/2015 
Do you ever have that night where you've been chasing around and crazy from 4:00-8:00 and finally realize that you haven't given dinner a thought yet? Well that situation is how this dish was born. Chicken medallions is just a fancy way of saying I was too lazy thaw chicken breasts so the only way I was going to get them to cook through completely is to chop them up into smaller pieces. The sweet potatoes were an easy side and so was the steamed broccoli. Don't worry the bourbon sauce doesn't taste like bourbon it actually gives it a bit of sweet flavor.
All together this meal took 30 minutes to make from when I pulled the chicken out of the freezer to when we were sitting at the table. Super easy and packed with some good flavor. Hope you enjoy it!!! To stay up to date on all of our new meals that we share on Mondays, just add your email address below.
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Download Recipe Card for Roasted Sweet Potatoes with Bourbon Cinnamon Sauce So this is our first #MakeANewMealMonday recipe and dinner idea. The idea behind this hashtag is twofold: we want to try some new stuff and have gotten into a rut with food and we hope to help you out with some new meal options too! So what can you look forward to? Most of the recipes we will post will be healthy, made from scratch meals. Sorry no shortcuts here, we eat real food. A majority of the recipes will likely be dinner type meals that you can scale up or down depending on how many you have to feed. Some meals will be kid/family friendly, some will be a little bit more sophisticated for the adventurous types. I can't promise that all of them will be crazy delicious because they are going to be brand new creations for us too, and sometimes you don't get it quite right the first time. We will post these recipes on our Facebook Page, The Cook & The Coach on Mondays so feel free to follow us over there. If you want to make sure you get all of these recipes delivered to your inbox just plug your email address into the section below and we will email you once a week with our recipe from that week along with any other blog posts we put out. This first meal was a bit of a throw together meal but it turned out pretty tasty. This dish had a bit of a Moroccan feel to it. We had a rotisserie chicken in the fridge so it made this pretty easy to throw it together. Depending on who you are cooking for, you can either keep the spice level on the low side or really kick it up.
 Download Recipe Card If you've followed us for a little bit you've seen us use some fun hashtags to connect some of our posts. I wish I could say that we did it for you guys but the truth is, doing #weirdvegwednesday or #weirdpushwednesday kept us accountable to go out and try some new veggies and it made us think of new ways to do push ups. If it helps you great. So often we can get stuck doing the same things over and over and our decisions become mindless. I think a lot of people that eat unhealthy foods don't do it necessarily because they enjoy those foods incredibly, but because it is a habit and it is easy. So with that we have a new hashtag and we hope it will help bring some creativity to your meals. #MakeANewMealMonday Why Monday??? Well because we like alliterations when it comes to our hashtags, that's it. For the next 52 weeks my goal is to come up with a new, fun, healthy recipe that we will try out and we will share with you. We would love it if you used the same hashtag to tag your posts. You don't have to type up full recipes unless you want to, but use the hashtag as motivation to try some new meal ideas. It will also be a great resource for everyone to use to go find inspiration to try some new things. We will post these recipes on our Facebook Page, The Cook & The Coach on Mondays so feel free to follow us over there. If you want to make sure you get all of these recipes delivered to your inbox just plug your email address into the section below and we will email you once a week with our recipe from that week along with any other blog posts we put out.  I'm not sure if there is anything better than the combination of maple and bacon. If you disagree, you are wrong!!! Laura spotted someone else post about making a meat ball with these flavors so when she wants food I feed her. I have to say these turned out pretty fantastic and even though they are loaded with bacon and maple syrup they are still a pretty healthy meatball. Hope you guys enjoy!
 This meal is brought to you by the Suedbeck pantry!!! One thing that has changed around our house is having quality ingredients around so that we can throw together healthy meals from things we have laying around. Yeah it might take a little more creativity but that's fun right. This recipe was actually inspired by a recipe we have on our 5 Day Clean Eating Guide that we use with our Clean Eating Groups. If you want more information about those feel free to click CONNECT and reach out to us whichever way you feel the most comfortable.
I have to apologize for the photo, I know it isn't the prettiest dish we have ever made but it was pretty darn tasty! Our sister-in-law asked us to HEALTHIFY a chicken and rice casserole...and she gave me a pretty blank slate, so I hope she likes this version! For those of you not from Minnesota or from a Scandavian descent, a casserole is usually made from noodles or rice, some sort of meat, cheese and usually cream of "something" soup. The veggies are typically hard to find and the processed food is usually a staple.
In an attempt to healthify the recipe, the swaps that we made was "riced" cauliflower and instead of creamy soup we used coconut milk. Then we loaded it up with some chicken breast and tomatoes. Although the cauliflower rice on it's own doesn't have the same taste as rice, when combined in a dish like this it takes on almost the exact same texture. Plus there is a enough flavor in a dish like this that you really do lose that cauliflower taste. 
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