The Cook & The Coach Blog

Chocolate Coconut Fat Balls

9/5/2017

Here's a little treat for ya!! We posted about these in our Instagram stories earlier last week but here's the recipe again. They were SOOO good and honestly tasted just like a Girl Scout Samoa...seriously...I couldn't believe it. Don't be fooled, these are NOT protein bites and to be honest, most of the ones you find on Pinterest aren't either because the fat is higher than the protein....so we'll just call these like they are: Chocolate Coconut Fat Balls.

These will make a great little treat to help you curb your sweet tooth! You don't have to be worried about crappy ingredients which is nice. But... there's always a but, right? I would advise that you are aware of the calories and limit yourself to 1, max 2 per day! Well that's unless you are working your tail off to gain weight, then go ahead and eat all 1,600 calories, maybe!

MACROS- This batch made 8 balls.
200 cal/ball
14 g of fat
13 g of carbs
6 g of protein
3 g of fiber

Ingredients

4 tbsp melted coconut oil
2 scoops chocolate shakeology
1 1/4 cup shredded coconut, 1/4 cup set aside for toasting
1/2 tsp of vanilla
2 tbsp cocoa powder
Pinch of salt

Directions

Melt the coconut oil in a saucepan or microwave.
Add the remaining ingredients and mix thoroughly, making sure there aren't any dry spots. If overly dry you may need to add a little almond milk a splash at a time.
Roll out into 8 evenly portioned balls, roughly a little more than an inch in diameter.
In a small saucepan, add a 1/4 cup of the coconut and toast over medium heat. Stir frequently in order not to burn. Should take around 8 minutes or so. The coconut will start turning tan and you will smell it. Once done remove the coconut to small plate or bowl.
Roll the balls in the toasted coconut, you may need to press it into the balls a bit.
Attempt to put them in the fridge for 30 minutes before eating... but I'll understand if you decide to eat at least one before they go in there.
Store in the fridge! Enjoy!

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Deconstructed Egg Roll

7/30/2017

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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!

Ingredients

1 pound pork sausage
1 small onion, diced
1 red bell pepper, diced
3 large carrots, sliced
3 tbsp minced garlic, roughly 3 cloves
4 green onions, sliced
1 small head of cabbage, grated or sliced, roughly 5 cups
1 inch of ginger, minced or 2 drops of ginger essential oil
1 tbsp toasted sesame oil
1/4 cup tamari, coconut aminos or low sodium soy sauce
2 tbsp coconut nectar or brown sugar (optional)
1 tbsp siracha (optional)

Directions

In a large skillet or dutch oven add the sausage and cook over medium heat until cooked through.
Remove sausage from the pan leaving the drippings behind. Add the carrot, bell pepper, ginger, and onion and cook for 8 minutes until carrots begin to soften and onion is translucent.
Add garlic, cook for 2 more minutes.
Add the cabbage along with all the other ingredients, cook over medium heat for 5 minutes stirring frequently.
Cover, and reduce heat to medium low and simmer for 15 minutes stirring once or twice.
Serve and eat as is if you are wanting a low carb meal or you can serve over the top of some prepared rice. Garnish with a little cilantro and enjoy!

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Ham, Lentil and Pea Soup

11/15/2016

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Cooler temps equal soup season! Although we are staying in warmer climates this winter we have still seen temps dip into the 40's at night and not get much past 60 during the day. I know, I know it could be so much worse. This year I guess it is all about perspective and it is cold to us!
We are also in a season of trying to save some money and our food budget is one area where we can save some money. Soups are a great way to stretch your dollar, get loads of nutrition, all without starving yourself.

Just in case you aren't convinced on soups yet, they are also super easy to make. This one could easily be a crockpot meal where you just throw everything in and forget about it. Also when we make soup, we always have leftovers, which means even easier, healthy meals for days.

Ingredients

3/4 pound ham, cubed
1 tbsp olive oil
1 large onion, diced
3 large carrots, peeled and diced
4 stalks of celery, diced
2 tbsp minced garlic
1 cup dry lentils
1 cup dry split peas
1 tbsp dry thyme
2 bay leaves
8 cups water or chicken broth
Salt and pepper to taste

Directions

You can cook this a number of ways. We used our pressure cooker but you could use a large pot on the stove top or a slow cooker. If you are using a slow cooker, just throw everything in for 8 hours on low and you should be good.
If you are using a pressure cooker or stove top start by adding your olive oil and sautee the onion, carrot, celery, and garlic for 6-8 minutes until everything begins to soften.
Add the remaining ingredients and cook as directed. Your lentils will likely be the thing that takes the longest, roughly 30 minutes on the stove top or 18 minutes in a pressure cooker.
Serve and enjoy!

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Classic Lemon Vinaigrette

8/25/2016

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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;

Avoid "Low Fat" dressings! Low fat usually just means high sugar or as one of my favorite memes out there states, Low Fat = Chemical Shit Storm!
Try to find dressing with fewer ingredients. Most salad dressings should contain a vinegar and an oil and maybe some seasonings. Avoid artificial colors, sweeteners, and flavors.
Avoid veggie oils, canola and soyben are the big ones used in cheap dressings. These easily oxidize and will likely cause inflammation in your body. Not to mention most canola is genetically modified.

Sound like a lot of work to follow those rules? Well the easy solution is to buy some of those base ingredients and keep them on hand so you can make your own dressings. Here is a simple one to get you started.

Ingredients

1/2 cup extra virgin olive oil
1/4 cup red wine vinegar
1/4 cup lemon juice
2 tbsp raw apple cider vinegar
1 tbsp dijon mustard
1 tbsp raw honey
Season with salt and pepper

Directions

Combine all ingredients other than the oil in a blender and mix until well combined.
Drizzle the olive oil in slowly over the course of 30 seconds while the blender is running.
Serve over your salad, and store the extra in the fridge. This should be enough dressing to last an entire week at least.

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.

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Enchilada Stuffed Sweet Potato

5/30/2016

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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.

Ingredients

4 medium sweet potatoes
1 1/4 lbs of ground beef, we use the organic beef from Costco, if you buy by the pound, just scale the spices up or down.
1 medium onion, diced
3 tbsp of diced garlic
Peppers, choose any that you like, we used bell peppers because we had them, but you could use poblano, jalepeno, serrano. A combination of some of sweeter pepper and savory pepper would be my recommendation, You'll want about 1-2 cups diced total
2 tbsp of grassfed butter
3 tbsp of tapioca starch
Approximately 1 cup of chicken stock, add 1/2 cup at a time until you get the consistency that you desire
6 oz can of tomato paste
1 tbsp of dried oregano
2 tbsp chili powder
1 tsp of cumin
1 tsp of coriander
Pinch of cayenne pepper (optional)
Salt and pepper to taste
1 avocado, cubed
Cilantro

Bake sweet potatoes in a 425 degree oven for roughly 45 minutes. I usually wrap in aluminum foil to make clean up easier.
In a large saucepan or skillet add your butter, then add your beef, onions, peppers and garlic. Cook for 10 minutes or until the beef is browned.
Add the tapioca starch and stir for a minute to let the starch soak up all that good fat in the pan.
Add in the remaining ingredients and let it simmer for 15 minutes or longer. Feel free to add more or less liquid to make the sauce thinner or thicker.
Top with cubed avocado and cilantro and enjoy!

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Paleo Cream of Asparagus Soup

5/18/2016

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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.

Ingredients

1 cup of asparagus, we used leftover grilled asparagus. You could use raw
1 can of coconut milk
2-3 cups of broth depending on how thick you like your soup, we used chicken but if you wanted it to be a vegan dish you could use veggie broth
1 tbsp onion powder, or you could use 1 small onion diced - we were out
2 tsp garlic garlic powder, you could use 2-3 cloves of garlic, I was on a powder kick since I didn't have onion
Salt and pepper to taste
1 tsp of olive oil

Directions

If you are using whole onion and garlic, saute that first in a saucepan with a little olive oil for a few minutes to soften.
If you are powdered onion and garlic, add everything to a saucepan and simmer for 30 minutes.
Add all the ingredients to a blender, be careful if you have a blender that isn't vented that you remove the top circle piece and cover with a towel. The steam needs to come out somewhere otherwise you have a huge mess and potential burns.
Return the blended soup to the saucepan and simmer as long as you would like. We simmered for about 22 minutes. I know that because I did my 22 Minute Hard Corps workout.
At this point season if needed. We needed a little more salt and I added some more broth because it had reduced a little too much.
Drizzle with a little olive oil and enjoy!

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Lemon Ginger Shrimp and Zoodles

5/5/2016

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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.

Ingredients

3/4 lb of raw shrimp
1 large carrot cut into matchsticks
1 red bell pepper cut into matchsticks
1 medium onion cut into matchsticks
3 garlic cloves, minced
1" piece of ginger, peeled and minced
1 tbsp of extra virgin olive oil
1/4 cup broth of your choice or water
1/4 cup lemon juice
3 small zucchini cut into zoodles using spiralizer
1 tbsp dried parsley or 1/4 cup of fresh parsley, chopped
Salt and pepper to taste

Directions

Prep all of your veggies ahead of time. Once you start cooking it goes pretty quick.
In a wok or large skillet add the oil then carrot, onion, pepper, ginger and cook for 5 minutes or until the onion starts getting a little translucent.
Add the garlic, parsley and shrimp and cook for an additional 3 minutes. Stir regularly.
Add broth, lemon juice, zoodles and toss for 2 minutes until everything is coated and the zoodles start to soften.
Season and serve! There will likely be some liquid in the bottom of the pan, feel free to drizzle your food with this or let it be.

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Paleo Carrot Cake Muffins and Orange, Maple Keto Coffee

10/7/2015

Carrot cake is straight up my jam! Hands down, best cake! I love the sweet and spice! I would eat it all the time if it was available.

Given my new gluten free life, I have had to make some sacrifices and cake is one of them. Just this past weekend at my nephews birthday party I was forced to pass on the delicious Mickey Mouse cake. As hard as that was I was just glad I didn't have to say no to carrot cake. That would have just been tough. Avoidance has been my main course of action. Recently though I just had a craving for carrot cake. Maybe it was the fall weather but something made me think of it and that led to a google search... "Gluten free carrot cake recipe"

Low and behold I found a really good one and we had all the ingredients so I decided to do some baking. I usually don't bake, that is more Laura's area of expertise! Measuring is tough! I did it though and this muffins turned out awesome! The recipe that I found and tweaked was on a website, Primarily Inspired. Hats off to Kelly for the inspiration for this recipe! We just did the muffin/cupcake recipe but she has an icing that goes along with these too if you want it to be even more desserty, that's a word right???

The following morning Laura was scrolling her IG feed and stumbled across a pic from a local coffee shop and how they do a Orange, Maple Latte. She tried hard to convince me to drive 30 minutes to go get a coffee. I fought hard and told her I would just make her one instead. Since we don't really do dairy either we opted for a "keto coffee." Although given the maple syrup in it, we probably can't call it a "keto" coffee but oh well you get the idea, it has butter in it and other delicious things. This was super simple and super tasty. I have no idea how it compares the the coffee shop latte but we will do this again. It paired perfectly with the carrot muffins too. Pure breakfast bliss!

Paleo Carrot Cake Muffins

Ingredients

2 1/2 cups grated carrots (about 3-4 large carrots) - I used a little less than the original recipe and this was still a lot of carrot - Eat your veggies!!!
8-10 pitted medjool dates finely chopped by hand or in a food processor
4 eggs
¼ cup melted coconut oil
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
½ cup coconut flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
2 teaspoons cinnamon
½ teaspoon ground cloves
pinch of salt

Directions

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.
Grate the carrots using a food processor or box grater and set aside.
Chop the dates. If using food processor to "chop" the dates pulse 3-4 times, enough to chop but not too much that it turns into a giant date ball.
In a separate bowl combine the dry ingredients (coconut flour, spices, baking powder, salt) and whisk to evenly incorporate the spices.
In a mixing separate bowl, add in your chopped dates, eggs, coconut oil and vanilla. Beat mixture well.
Add dry ingredients and stir until combined.
Fold in the grated carrots.
Fill muffin batter to the top of each muffin pan and bake for 25-28 minutes or until inserted toothpick comes out clean.

Orange, Maple Keto Coffee

Ingredients

1 large cup of coffee
1 tbsp grass fed butter
1 drop of orange essential oil
2 tsp real maple syrup

Directions

Add all of your ingredients to high powered blender. Blend on high for 15 seconds, making sure that the seal on the blender top is not super tight and you allow the steam to release. If you don't do this bad things happen. You've been warned.

Chocolate Coconut Fat Balls

Ingredients

Directions

Deconstructed Egg Roll

Ingredients

Directions

Ham, Lentil and Pea Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Classic Lemon Vinaigrette

Ingredients

Directions

Enchilada Stuffed Sweet Potato

Ingredients

Paleo Cream of Asparagus Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Lemon Ginger Shrimp and Zoodles

Ingredients

Directions

Paleo Carrot Cake Muffins and Orange, Maple Keto Coffee

Paleo Carrot Cake Muffins

Orange, Maple Keto Coffee

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