fill in the blank recipes | Healthy Stacey – Paleo Recipes by Stacey Clarke

Steel Cut Oatmeal Recipe

November 25, 2013

Ingredients to my morning oatmeal

Hi again. So I just left you hanging on my last post about this incredible new way of cooking. (I know you were all dying to know what happens next – who needs Breaking Bad when you have Stacey’s health blog?)

A couple of years ago when my best friend and I were in the mood to bake, we started perusing the Internet for cookie recipes. We found that with every cooking blog or website, we inevitably found dozens of comments under the recipe that stated how people “loved it!!” but…

Instead of pecans, they used walnuts

Instead of pudding, they used pumpkin

Instead of chocolate chips, they used beef and peas (okay, maybe that’s from an episode of Friends)

Basically, when most people follow a recipe, they really recreate an entirely new recipe so it works to their taste and convenience.

This made me think: Why doesn’t somebody just provide guideline recipes to cooking and baking? We all like convenience. If we can avoid shopping for ingredients we would never normally buy, that would be GREAT. We all just want to make something that tastes good and is good for us without being a master chef. Well, the luxury of having my own blog is that I can be that “somebody.”

In my world, recipes should always be:

Easy to understand
Not take hours to prepare
Include substitutions
Or open the table to reader’s ideas for substitutions
And above all, HEALTHY! (can’t forget, this is a health blog)

With the 8-ish years of cooking I have under my belt, here are some basic rules I have learned about cooking – with or without a recipe:

Survey what I have in my kitchen before I assume I need new ingredients
Base the meal off of a few key ingredients (i.e. kale and chicken)
Use less at first and then add (i.e. olive oil, seasoning, sugar, butter)
Taste as I go
Almost always default to Extra Virgin Olive Oil vs. butter, canola or vegetable
Always default to the lowest cooking time – I would rather undercook and check 5 more times than overcook
Onions and garlic go first because they take longer to cook
Opt for seasoning and herbs over salt to add flavor (if I can, I try to avoid salt all together)
Keep the basics on hand. To me that means extra virgin olive oil, vegetable stock, fresh lemons, onion, garlic, a growing collection of seasonings (I can’t live without cinnamon, cumin, lemon pepper and cayenne pepper) and fresh herbs like cilantro or rosemary if at all possible (they always make the meal fresher)
Know what herbs pair well with what food – here is a great chart on meat and herb pairings; here is one on vegetable pairings.

Now that we’ve got that covered, time for a fill in the blank “recipe”! Let’s kick it off with a meal that doesn’t get much simpler: Breakfast! Now, I’ve always been an oatmeal girl. It is full vitamins, protein, calcium and fiber and its warm and gooey texture feels so good in my stomach first thing in the morning. Over the years, my oatmeal has matured because I realize that oatmeal is only as healthy as its parts. I am a HUGE fan of steel cut oatmeal for its taste, texture and additional health benefits (the oats are less processed; which means more nutritional value and a longer digestion process). I used to be hesitant to buy it because the package says that it takes 30 minutes to make. However, if you’re just making it for one person, it only takes 10. Plus, there are also Quick Cooking Steel Cut Oats that only take 5 minutes. (Trader Joe’s and Bob’s Steel Cut Oats are two of my favorites).

Morning Oatmeal

(Serves: 1)

Ingredients:

Steel Cut oatmeal
________ Milk (Almond, Soy, Rice, Flax, Coconut)
________ Seeds (Chia Seed, Flax Seeds)
________ Topping (banana, apple, pear, dried apricots, dried cranberries, cocoa nibs)
________ Seasoning (cinnamon, nutmeg, cardamom, cocoa powder)

Directions:

Pour ¾ cup of ____ Milk into a stovetop pan
Bring to a boil
Pour ¼ cup of steel cut oats into pan and stir a bit
Turn heat down to medium-low
Cook for about 10 minutes, checking in a few times in between to stir the pot
Add ______ topping when there’s only a couple minutes left (it should be softer texture that doesn’t feel gritty when you test it)
Add _______ seeds at the very end and turn off the stovetop.
Pour into a bowl and sprinkle with _________ seasoning for a photo finish.

What do you put in your oatmeal? Does anybody else have any ideas for the fill-in-the-blanks?

Cooking is Scary…NOT!!!

November 23, 2013

How We Will Cook Together Part I

Has anybody noticed all the food porn out there lately? From Food Network to Pinterest, cooking has become the sexy chore, a skill to be desired, and a little bit…intimidating. If you didn’t already notice, any pictures I post of food are taken by my trusty rusty iPhone camera (see below). Despite my attempts to find the right lighting (making food look pretty is so much harder than it looks), they are far from food porn. But I kind of like it that way.

I don’t want you to look at my blog, pine over the recipes, look at the ingredients and then never actually make the food. I want you to see cooking the way I have learned to see cooking. As an incredibly rewarding experience – I mean, I get to create healthy, whole and delicious food, and then eat it! (Mind *BLOWN*)

I got bitten by the cooking bug about 8 years ago. At the time, I was working at a fancy pants country club; my days were filled with ladies who lunch and my nights with cocktail parties and lobster bakes. I spent a lot of time in the kitchen; observing the chefs chop onions, steam deep pink salmon, boil flown-in lobster and drizzle truffle oil atop pretty much everything. I couldn’t help but be inspired by the art of it all, and how it never failed to amaze people. And why wouldn’t it? I mean, it’s art that tasted so very good.

Soon I began to watch Food Network religiously. I’d make it a point to stop by the cookbook section every time I was in a bookstore. And I’d always be the person taking pictures of food instead of people at parties (sorry Mrs. Solberg!).

My valiant attempt at food porn using a Thai Sweet Potato Veggie Burger recipe from one of my favorite blogs, Oh She Glows

The bigger I built up cooking to be, the more intimidated I became by it. It was something I could look at, but not touch. Real cooking was a craft that only a chef could champion, or a full-time housewife (I was far from either). I thought to myself, maybe one day I’ll have the time and the resources to cook, but not now, not while I’m in college, or not until I have a family to cook for.

The funny thing is, I may have been obsessing about food, but I sure wasn’t eating it. I was in college at the time and consumed with being as healthy as possible. At the time, “healthy” to me meant low calorie and skinny – low calorie instant oatmeal for breakfast, one slice of deli turkey on one piece of whole wheat bread for lunch, a lean cuisine for dinner, and raw carrots and Diet Coke in between all meals to try to fill my never-ending hunger.

Then, I turned vegan.

I got a hold of the book “Skinny Bitch” and got so incredibly inspired that the change happened almost overnight. The author told me that I could be skinny and healthy, and eat ALL I WANT. My previous notions of what I considered to be healthy got an extreme wake up call. Veganism wouldn’t allow me to eat my food from a frozen box or a deli counter. It required me to cook.

And cook, I did. Steel cut oatmeal with rice milk and flax seeds, grilled and marinated tempeh rolled up in a wrap stuffed with spinach and sautéed onions, mounds of vegetable stir-fry peppered with seasoning and Thai-baked tofu. I got into it, and I absolutely loved it.

Today, I am no longer vegan, but so proud to announce that not a week goes by without fresh home-cooked meals on the table. I learned a lot from those days because veganism really forced me to use my imagination and find flavors outside of meat, cheese and eggs.

What it really looks like when I cook

I stopped veganism for a number of reasons, but I am still a big advocate of others doing it – if they have the time and they do it right. Honestly, for me, I love food so much that it’s hard for me to turn down a bison steak on a special night out or a beautiful veggie-filled and feta-sprinkled omelet on a Saturday morning.

The biggest thing I realized was to take my expectations for cooking down a notch (or 10). Veganism forced me into it; it offered the simple truth that if I wanted to eat healthy, I would have to cook. But the act of cooking made me stay. I do still find myself obsessing over recipes, following their direction as if it is a scientific formula. But then I snap myself out of it and remember how much more fun cooking is when I just go with it.

With that, I’d like to declare a new kind of recipe. I call it…

To find out what it is, wait for my next post 🙂