Hi, everybody. I'm Kelsey Nixon and this is Kitchen Prescription, the podcast you listen to when you don't know what to make for dinner. Today is episode one hundred and twenty Hacks to help with dinner. Anyone getting ready to head out for spring break? Our system for a few more weeks, but I'm starting to hear about friends and family that have plans and their spring breaks are kicking off now. In fact, we're getting a little, let's call it a spring break preview this weekend where my sister and her family are headed to Palm Springs for their spring break. So we're gonna drive out and meet them for the day and it'll be fun. My kids can swim, see cousins, and we'll get just a taste of spring break. So it's not technically our spring break, I will say we are having insanely gorgeous spring weather and I am soaking it all up. We came off of two weeks of lots of rain, and now it's green, and it's warm, and it's blues. It's just beautiful. So my husband turns forty this week, which is kind of exciting. I turned forty about six months ago, so I am older and wiser, but that means I have some fun things planned that I'm looking forward to this weekend. It includes some surprises, but I am not going to share in the off chance that he actually listens to this podcast. But we did go out to dinner last week for date night, and I was talking about what do you want for your fortieth and neither himri or big party people. We kind of went on a small trip for my husband's fortieth a couple weeks ago with friends from high school, and then I actually wanted to have a little solo trip a couple months ago. And one thing he said he did really want to do and I love this is he's said, one of my favorite things is just eating at a good restaurant. I love to eat at a good restaurant. And as we have been in the thick of raising kids the past couple of years and building a business, it's date nights happened far and few between, and so it doesn't happen. And we lived in New York City for ten years, so we were constantly eating out New York because there were so many great restaurants, and we still have access to lots of good restaurants but he said, to celebrate forty, I want to do forty restaurant meals to celebrate forty. And obviously a restaurant meal constitutes something bigger than an in and out burger, but going and sitting down and having a proper meal together over the course of the next year. So we're gonna make a list and kind of check it off, and it'll be just a little thing we do to I guess both celebrate turning forty this past year. So there you have it. Another exciting thing this week is it's not that exciting, but it's just it's really just kind of silly. Is I had a real go viral, probably the biggest real I've ever done, over baked potatoes. And we've been laughing all weekend about how who knew that potatoes would be the thing that people are most interested in? But it's this I use for doing baked potatoes where you cook them in a half the amount of time and they're a million times better. And yeah, I went viral this past weekend and naturally we had baked potatoes like this, and I was talking to my kids about it, and really, it is so simple. My kids can impact my eleven year old or no, he's twelve. Oh my gosh, you guys, he's almost thirteen. I can't believe this. He was like, well, I could do that. I'm like, exactly, you could do that. So we're gonna chat a little bit today about some hacks like this to help with dinner, because this really is such a great hack and I am so thrilled that millions of people are seeing it right now and hopefully it's going to lead to some easy weeknight dinners. But first, let's get into a few recipe ideas you could throw on your meal plan for the upcoming week. Since it is birthday week for my husband, we have a couple of his favorites, starting with this tortellini with lemon and dill. It's I've got a couple of TORTLINI recipes that are really popular in recipe Club. But the reason I like tortellini is you can either buy a cheese filled or meat fish and so it's it's a hardier pasta dinner, which can turn it into truly a one pot meal. And this lemonon dill is this delicious springy cream sauce. I usually add peas to it as well. Give it kind of a spring touch and a bunch of fresh parmesan. But the story behind this recipe is so great. My mom's dad, my grandpa Kent, years ago, entered this recipe in a magazine competition and he won, so in his retired years he did this and the aversion of the recipe he entered is this totaline with lemonon dill. So it's always got like a soft space in my heart. And it's also the very first thing I made for Robbie when we met, the first time I cooked for him. This is what I made him. So what a way to celebrate forty. Next on the list are chili lime tacos. My family loves these. They are made with ground turkey or chicken. I've been buying shirt ground chicken more than lately, just because it's got a little bit more flavor. But if your by ground turkey, this recipe is perfect for that. It's very Trader Joe's friendly. You certainly don't have to get all the stuff at Trader Joe's, but you can, and it's very easy to pick this stuff up. But yeah, it's like a ground meat taco, but it adds you add some tomatoes, and some iced chilis and they are just about as easy as tacos get. So that's gonna happen on Tuesday for us. And then we are sticking with the Mexican theme because that is my husband's favorite type of cuisine, and we are making a crispy sheet pancake sadia. And this is like the thing. It's perfect for game day or if you have a bunch of tween boys show up to your house after school hungry. Make this. It's kind of like a what do you call that? Oh my gosh, something supreme at taco I don't know, you guys, I'm not It's not because I won't eat Taco bell, but I just don't know the menu, crunch wrap supreme, something like that. Basically, you make a big old casadia with lots of delicious stuff inside cheese, beans, onions, and peppers, and then you fold it all up and you crisp it up in the oven and then you cut it up. It's really it's a great way to do a cacda for a crowd, and it's a great thing to make for easy weekendight dinner too. All right, there are your recipes for the week. You can find and print them all in Recipe Club individually or in our weekly meal plan that has easy to follow shopping lists broken down by recipe. Recipe Club helps you access family tested recipes that are quick and simple, and you can get them on your phone or computer without being bombarded with banner ads, long blog posts, or drawn out stories. That was my biggest complaint as a mom raising kids as I was trying to cook for my family is that A I couldn't figure out where it'd saved all my recipes, and b once I figured out where they were, it was just annoying to cook from them. So I really have very intentionally built recipe Club to be a space where it's to find the recipes that work for weeknight cooking, get them on the table a little easier. And we just got our wildly popular recipe binders back in stock, which means it's a great time to take advantage of our Bundle, which is a recipe binder where you can store all of the recipes you make most often, plus an annual membership to Recipe Club, where you're going to get hundreds of weeknight recipes, literally recipes designed for busy weeknights. So if you're looking for a complete system to help you get dinner on the table more regularly. Take advantage of this. You save twenty bucks when you get them together, and it really can be life changing for dinner time. All right, let's jump into the back half of the podcast and discuss hacks that help with dinner. Like I mentioned earlier, this week, one of my favorite kitchen hacks went viral on Instagram, which is always a bit thrilling, But part of the reason it was so thrilling was because it's genuinely a hack I use frequently to get lunch or dinner on the table for my family and myself, and ultimately it makes my life easier. So I wanted to take just a few minutes with you this week to chat about a few hacks that do make it a bit more manageable to get dinner on the table. We'll kick it off with the hack that's currently being shown to millions of people, and that is my potato hack. So here is the story of how this went down. A couple months ago, I actually shared about my favorite. I was on a kick of doing baked sweet potatoes with lunch, and I would top the baked sweet potato with either cottage cheese or black beans and or Greek yogurt and avocado. Like I just was on. I was doing a baked sweet potato at least twice a week for lunch, and it still is so delicious to me, but it can be annoying to bake a whole potato. It usually takes forty five minutes to an hour, and you I don't know if it's really done and then anyways, so I started cutting it in half and dousing it in olive oil, salt, pepper and placing it face down on a sheet pan and cooking it for about twenty twenty five to thirty minutes, and it cooked so much faster, and everything got crispy on the outside with it all being pillowy soft on the inside, and it's like, this is brilliant. So then I added a few more recipes to recipe club. I get Mediterranean sweet potato and a sweet potatoes with black beaan an avocado, where it's like, oh, these are this is such a It's so easy that if you're working from home, you can definitely make this for lunch, but this also could be family dinner. So that was that it's kind of taken off a few months ago. But then as we were looking at Saint Patrick's Day, I really wanted to do a fun potato recipe for my family. So I thought, let's do like a baked potato bar, or like a big snackboard supper with baked potatoes where everyone can load them up with chili and sour cream and cheese and chives and all the good stuff. And I thought, well, there's no reason this shouldn't work for a recipiece potato the same way it works for a sweet potato. So I did it, I filmed it, It worked great, and I think I think we're at six or seven million people now have seen this. So that is something a potato, whether it's a sweet potato or it is a rested potato, it's like a blank canvas for flavor, and especially if sweet potato is gonna have a pretty decent amount of nutrients in there that are pretty durn good for you. And I find that, I mean, what kid doesn't like a potato. I just had to explain to my kids is what French fries are made from. But my kids love it too. It's filling, they're super inexpensive, so if you're looking ways to bulk up dinners. While groceries are so crazy expensive, potatoes are such a great way to do that. And having kind of this whole potato barthy, I'm like, my gosh, we should do this at least once a month. My kids thought it was so fun and it was genuinely so easy. It's actually a great like clean out the fridge meal as well, because you could do this with gosh, if you had some shredded chicken, you could throw it on there. You could do like a cheddar broccoli situation on there. There's all sorts of stuff you could do, but that is one thing. Do not disregard the potato hack, where you take that whole potato, you slice it in half, you spray or drizzle it with olive oil, lots of salt and pepper into a four hundred and twenty five degree even for about twenty to thirty minutes, and you have got yourself a base for a really delicious lunch or dinner. So that's first up. First up on hacks that help me. Next is to embrace five ingredient recipes. We've been doing this thing in Recipe Club this month called make It easy March, where we've been focusing on really recipes that do just make your life a little easier, but a lot of five ingredient recipes, a lot of Trader Joe's hacks and costco hacks, things like that. But when I've overwhelmed and I feel that my mind might explode and I need things to be as simple as possible, that's when I go to these five ingredient recipes along with thousands of rest Peak club members who agreed their hands down our most popular recipes, and I started sharing them on Fridays on Instagram, these five ingredient Friday, and it was a huge hit. And seeing how many people really engaged with it and save those posts taught me that I'd kind of struck a chord with this five ingredient thing. And the honest truth is, I love to cook, right like. I don't always want super simplistic, basic recipes, but sometimes that's all I can handle. And I would so much rather make a five ingredient recipes for myself and my family than drive through Del Taco. And so if I know that I've got the ingredients on hand for a couple of five ingredient recipes, I just feel better equipped to handle those extra busy nights. So we started to build a five ingredient library of recipes within the Recipe Club membership so that our members could have a bunch of different ideas, and now we have close to fifty of them in there. But I want to offer up a few tips when it comes to cooking with only five ingredients, because, like I said myself, and I actually think a lot of our members too, they're pretty good cooks, right, and so you don't want something to not taste great. So there's a couple of things to keep in mind, because five ingredients really is not that much. But I do want to have a little disclaimer here. I do not count. I give myself a few freebies. I don't count salt, pepper, olive, oil, butter. Those don't count, okay in regards to those. The first rule of making five ingredient recipes taste great is to not skimp on basic seasoning. Salt and pepper go a long way, And I learned this in culinary school way back when, especially when you're using the right salt and pepper, when you're using kosher salt and cracked black pepper, it goes a long way. You go to Roost Chris and you get a delicious steak. You know what they've used on that steak, No fancy seasoning, really good salt, really good pepper and butter. It does sometimes we over complicate things or we assume they have to be more complicated to taste great. It's just really important to season with those basics. And it's important to season and taste as you go. So I keep a little seasoning station near my stovetop with salt, pepper, and olive oil that I can easily reach for. I also keep avocado there avocado oil there now too. And this is how chef cooks, Honestly, when you when I went to culinary school, they would get everyone got like a little plastic bowl of kosher salt, and your pepper was there too, and your oil. And it's like, this is how it's you build upon flavor. So when you are cooking with just a few ingredients, you got to make sure you're not ignoring the foundational things that establish flavor and what you're cooking, which is that salt, pepper. Second, you want to figure out a few core shortcut ingredients that you can rely on for quick dinners. So this applies to hacks in general, but also five ingredient recipes because if we're only doing five ingredients, you got to have some key players that pack a punch when it comes flavor. So some of my favorites include Jarred Marin Air sauce. And it should be no shock to you if you've listened to this podcast before that I hold one of these Jard Marin airsass Marinara sauce is high above the others, and that's REOs. It is far and away the best. It does tend to be one of the more expensive ones, but I am telling you it is worth its weight in gold, and if you get it at Costco, it's not too bad. Pesto and I really like I'm just mentioned Costco, but my favorite Jarred pesto actually is the kirklum Brand pesto, and that I would say is a widely held opinion. So if you're a Costco shopper and you have never bought their kirklum Brand pesto, I highly recommend it. But pesto can be so great for not only like tossing it on its own with pasta, but using it is a spread on a sandwich or even like I make my baked z D all the time, and if I don't have fresh basil on hand, I'll just add a tablespoon off the pesto in there, and it just adds, because what pesto is is it's it's basil, and it's oil and parmesan cheese and nuts and it's a lot of different flavors. Going on a rotisserie chicken definitely a hack for me. I mean, that's the easiest way to get a five dollar protein into your family. Farrow is another one. We do a lot of grain bowls here and Trader Joe sells a ten minute quick cooking farrow and a little blue bag and it's a whole grain. It's so flavorful. I find it chewier and more filling than a traditional rice, and it's a great base for grain bowls or to serve alongside, like you could make honestly, you could make a really simple dinner out of cooked farrow sliced rotisserie chicken and a bag salad, and like, that's not what I want to eat every night, but I'd eat it and it would taste great. It would taste great. So these are some examples of ingredients I kind of always keep on hand in my pantry that are all almost a cue for an easy dinner. I want to mention two more just because I use these recently that were just that they were a que for I don't know what to make for dinner. Oh, I can do this. I keep a jarred curry sauce in my pantry. I like the Trader Joe's one that is their yellow curry because it's not too spicy for my kids. It's super delicious when you pair it with a can of coconut milk, and it's just if as long as I've got some veggies to throw in there and some sort of protein like some chicken, and I got rice, I got dinner. I got super simple dinner. Similar to that is a tarayaki sauce. And there's two that I like. I like the very very tarayaki that you can get at any grocery store, and I also do like the Trader Joy soyaki one as well. I always go for the low sodium version of that, but it is talk about a ton of flavor captured in one bottle. But same thing that same formula of some veggies clean out your fridge, whatever it is, add some protein over rice or noodles, and you have yourself dinner. So make a list of, honestly, some of those shortcut ingredients that you know your family likes that can be a cute for dinner. And look, I know that we all want less processed foods, but I feel a lot better about something like a jarred sauce when I am adding fresh veggies and protein to it. I can live with that any day. I can live with that. That's just fine. So let me give you some examples of how like some of these shortcut ingredients turn into dinners. I just did it with the tariaki sauce and the curry, But like the Marinera sauce, spaghetti and frozen meatballs with a jar of REOs great. And those frozen meatballs could be meatballs that you made and you did a double batch of and you have extra, or they could be the frozen meatballs from Costco. Doesn't matter. The creamy tomato pasta a die have in recipe club with sausage and spinach. That's a fine and green recipe that people really love. I usually do it with tortellini, so it's a little heartier, but by adding the Italian sausage in there and the spinach, I am, you know, hitting some protein and some really good greens. My sheet pan chicken palm so simple. And the thing that makes it so simple is because of that Marinera sauce, the pesto. I have another tortellini dish in recipe Club called Creamy Tortolini with pesto and tomatoes. It is definitely one of our top five recipes that people cook. It looks so good too, it like it's so pretty. It used grape tomatoes and little mozzarella balls and pesto with a little bit of heavy cream. When you have yourself dinner a tomato basil soup with grilled cheese sandwiches. So I will sometimes buy even the boxed tomato soup and add about a quarter cup of pesto to that to make it really really rich in flavor. And then I'll make grilled cheeses to go alongside that and to dip in that. It's a very simple dinner. And then we mentioned the rotisserie chicken. I talked about how you could just serve it sliced alongside farrow and a back salad mix. But you could also add that rotisserie chicken to an existing salad mix and make like an Asian cashew crunch salad where you add add a mommie and carrots and cucumbers, clean out your fridge. Whatever. You could make a nice, big, hearty salad. You could add some sort of noodle or rice to that to make it more of a grain bowl a rotisserie chicken. It also is an easy way to a tortilla soup, barbecue chicken sliders. Shred that chicken up, toss with some barbecue sauce, served on Hawaiian rolls, you have yourself dinner. And then yeah, I mentioned farrow because it really is like my favorite grain and oftentimes I'll do just clean out the fridge, green bowls and farrow is our base and it's delicious. The last thing I'll say about five ingredient recipes, which really are such a great hack is think about five ingredient fancy, don't discount adding a few finishing ingredients or touches to really amplify a basic recipe. A squeeze of lemon on top, crumbled feta or goat cheese on top, chopped cilantro, parsley or nuts. They really go a long way, and chances are you have some of them on hand, even like I did. I did this at stir Fry the other day with the the Tariocy sauce from Trader Joe's, and you know what I had at the end. My girls actually asked for them sesame seeds, just a few sesame seeds on top, and it like instantly elevated the dish. And my girl they call them sesame sprinkles. They thought they were great. Okay, Finally, my last tip for hack a hack to help with dinner is you're not gonna like it. I'm telling you right now. You do not like this. I'm gonna tell you. Got to make a meal plan and if you really hate meal planning, make someone else in your house do it. But having a predetermined plan for what you plan to feed you and your people, truly is the ultimate hack to making dinner feel more manageable. And the sooner you accept that, and guess what, that is never gonna change. It's ever gonna change unless you get super wealthy and you just have a chef that lives with you and they make all the decisions. You have to feed yourself and if you're caring for anyone for the rest of your life. So if there's any system worth investing in, it's determining a system that works for basic meal planning and at least making the decision. It's a plan, it's not a promise. So if like life gets in the way and you don't make the sheet pan chicken palm on Tuesday like you'd plan, fine, make it on Thursday. It's just it's to make the decision once about what you're gonna have every night of the week versus asking yourself every single day can really relieve such a weight off your shoulders. And I feel so passionately about that, so passionately that I created a whole company around it. But it's been life changing for me and for many of our members and Recipe Club as well. All Right, finally, let's finish with the Weekly Gimme five Number one, my essential calendar. This makes it on this list at least twice a year, maybe three times a year, but it is my favorite paper calendar. It is organized by season, winter, summer, spring, fall, and so I can see multiple months at a time, and it is where we put all of the family travel, all of the kids' activities, big events, and I just flipped the page from winter to spring and found myself filling it out and being like, this is such a good siss. I love having this product in my life. This really does organize and simplify things for everyone in my family. So Essential Calendar and Kelsey ten gets you a discount there. So search Essential Calendar Co And use that code Kelsey ten and you'll get ten percent off number two. You know how your kids like certain things and then they decide they hate them, Well, that has been us for a couple of veggies lately on my kids, like baby carrots. For years that was my go too. Now my kids hate them. Makes no sense, but I have got them eating cucumbers like they are going out of style. And I'm convinced it's because of this ten dollars tool in my kitchen. It's actually eight dollars but less than ten dollars tool. It's a crinkle cutter and it is almost like this handle. I'n't think you know how to describe it. It's like got these wavy a wavy blade, but it's a very mild blade. Like my five year old is cutting her cucumbers this way, but it just makes it gives the shape of the veggies this really fun kind of scalloped look. And I don't know if it's a texture thing or what, but they are so in to veggies that are sliced with the crinkle cutter, and now they actually demand it quite frankly. So I'm using that thing all the time, and I swear it's got my kids to eat more veggies lately, So I'm a huge fan of that. Number three, I included my Glow Beauty hair brush. I really love my brush right now, and I the reason it made it on the list is because I've been using this brush, I don't know, maybe twelve to eighteen months. It was a company that launched this, and it's got like wire bristles, but it's soft. It like my daughter said, it feels like a backscratch on your head. It is the best brush ever. And the reason it made the list this week is because I had to order another one because we have two at least two, but I've got two daughters, a five year old and an eight year old, and now the five year old is demanding your old br We're always fighting over the brush, and I was like, oh my gosh, I'm just gonna because I don't like it when they take it out of my bathroom because it's the only brush I want to use. But Penny's cute. She's been brushing her hair every night like Rapunzel, and it's the only brush she wants to use. So I just ordered another one. They're an awesome, awesome company, small startup, female owned. Love it my favorite white T shirt. Okay, everyone's having their spring sales and I'm trying to not get too wrapped up in it because I did a big wardrobe refresh in the fall. But one thing I did order is I ordered five five of my favorite white T shirt because I'm finding that if I am wearing a sweater or a sweatshirt, I always like having like a little pop of white, like a crew neck popping out of the top. I like to layer them under jackets and cardigans. And I got this. I kind of tracked this down after doing some research. It's an old Navy one in the fall, and I bought one and it's now the thing that I'm like digging through the laundry to be like, ugh, I can't believe it's dirty again, and every time the laundry is done, I reach for that. It's it's my favorite. So I finally just bought five of them. They were seven dollars, so it's not like it was a huge investment, but it really is just a great shape and weight of shirt. And then finally, one of my favorite small business owners, Sarah of shop Plane Jaane, is having a big moving sale. So I love Plane Jaine. They are are family's favorite pajamas for kids and adults. They're my favorite pajamas, and they're having a huge moving sale. I have never seen stuff priced this low. It's so good. It's so good. I had to really restrain myself from buying everything. But go check it out. Shot Plan Jane. Their moving sale is happening, and I'm excited for her to begin a new chapter and give yourself some pajamas. All right, that's it for today. Make sure you're subscribed to the podcast that you never miss an episode. This podcast is always meant to be a quick twenty to thirty minute listen while you map out your own meals for the week, and to support helping you set up a simple dinner system. If you're looking to finally get a system in place, join us in Recipe Club, and, better yet, snag that bundle where you can save twenty bucks when you get the binder and an annual membership. Thank you so much for listening today. I'm so glad you're here. Until next time, happy cooking. I am Kelsey and look forward to chatting with you next week

Hi, everybody. I'm Kelsey Nixon and this is Kitchen Prescription, the podcast you listen to when you don't know what to make for dinner. Today is episode one hundred and twenty Hacks to help with dinner. Anyone getting ready to head out for spring break? Our system for a few more weeks, but I'm starting to hear about friends and family that have plans and their spring breaks are kicking off now. In fact, we're getting a little, let's call it a spring break preview this weekend where my sister and her family are headed to Palm Springs for their spring break. So we're gonna drive out and meet them for the day and it'll be fun. My kids can swim, see cousins, and we'll get just a taste of spring break. So it's not technically our spring break, I will say we are having insanely gorgeous spring weather and I am soaking it all up. We came off of two weeks of lots of rain, and now it's green, and it's warm, and it's blues. It's just beautiful. So my husband turns forty this week, which is kind of exciting. I turned forty about six months ago, so I am older and wiser, but that means I have some fun things planned that I'm looking forward to this weekend. It includes some surprises, but I am not going to share in the off chance that he actually listens to this podcast. But we did go out to dinner last week for date night, and I was talking about what do you want for your fortieth and neither himri or big party people. We kind of went on a small trip for my husband's fortieth a couple weeks ago with friends from high school, and then I actually wanted to have a little solo trip a couple months ago. And one thing he said he did really want to do and I love this is he's said, one of my favorite things is just eating at a good restaurant. I love to eat at a good restaurant. And as we have been in the thick of raising kids the past couple of years and building a business, it's date nights happened far and few between, and so it doesn't happen. And we lived in New York City for ten years, so we were constantly eating out New York because there were so many great restaurants, and we still have access to lots of good restaurants but he said, to celebrate forty, I want to do forty restaurant meals to celebrate forty. And obviously a restaurant meal constitutes something bigger than an in and out burger, but going and sitting down and having a proper meal together over the course of the next year. So we're gonna make a list and kind of check it off, and it'll be just a little thing we do to I guess both celebrate turning forty this past year. So there you have it. Another exciting thing this week is it's not that exciting, but it's just it's really just kind of silly. Is I had a real go viral, probably the biggest real I've ever done, over baked potatoes. And we've been laughing all weekend about how who knew that potatoes would be the thing that people are most interested in? But it's this I use for doing baked potatoes where you cook them in a half the amount of time and they're a million times better. And yeah, I went viral this past weekend and naturally we had baked potatoes like this, and I was talking to my kids about it, and really, it is so simple. My kids can impact my eleven year old or no, he's twelve. Oh my gosh, you guys, he's almost thirteen. I can't believe this. He was like, well, I could do that. I'm like, exactly, you could do that. So we're gonna chat a little bit today about some hacks like this to help with dinner, because this really is such a great hack and I am so thrilled that millions of people are seeing it right now and hopefully it's going to lead to some easy weeknight dinners. But first, let's get into a few recipe ideas you could throw on your meal plan for the upcoming week. Since it is birthday week for my husband, we have a couple of his favorites, starting with this tortellini with lemon and dill. It's I've got a couple of TORTLINI recipes that are really popular in recipe Club. But the reason I like tortellini is you can either buy a cheese filled or meat fish and so it's it's a hardier pasta dinner, which can turn it into truly a one pot meal. And this lemonon dill is this delicious springy cream sauce. I usually add peas to it as well. Give it kind of a spring touch and a bunch of fresh parmesan. But the story behind this recipe is so great. My mom's dad, my grandpa Kent, years ago, entered this recipe in a magazine competition and he won, so in his retired years he did this and the aversion of the recipe he entered is this totaline with lemonon dill. So it's always got like a soft space in my heart. And it's also the very first thing I made for Robbie when we met, the first time I cooked for him. This is what I made him. So what a way to celebrate forty. Next on the list are chili lime tacos. My family loves these. They are made with ground turkey or chicken. I've been buying shirt ground chicken more than lately, just because it's got a little bit more flavor. But if your by ground turkey, this recipe is perfect for that. It's very Trader Joe's friendly. You certainly don't have to get all the stuff at Trader Joe's, but you can, and it's very easy to pick this stuff up. But yeah, it's like a ground meat taco, but it adds you add some tomatoes, and some iced chilis and they are just about as easy as tacos get. So that's gonna happen on Tuesday for us. And then we are sticking with the Mexican theme because that is my husband's favorite type of cuisine, and we are making a crispy sheet pancake sadia. And this is like the thing. It's perfect for game day or if you have a bunch of tween boys show up to your house after school hungry. Make this. It's kind of like a what do you call that? Oh my gosh, something supreme at taco I don't know, you guys, I'm not It's not because I won't eat Taco bell, but I just don't know the menu, crunch wrap supreme, something like that. Basically, you make a big old casadia with lots of delicious stuff inside cheese, beans, onions, and peppers, and then you fold it all up and you crisp it up in the oven and then you cut it up. It's really it's a great way to do a cacda for a crowd, and it's a great thing to make for easy weekendight dinner too. All right, there are your recipes for the week. You can find and print them all in Recipe Club individually or in our weekly meal plan that has easy to follow shopping lists broken down by recipe. Recipe Club helps you access family tested recipes that are quick and simple, and you can get them on your phone or computer without being bombarded with banner ads, long blog posts, or drawn out stories. That was my biggest complaint as a mom raising kids as I was trying to cook for my family is that A I couldn't figure out where it'd saved all my recipes, and b once I figured out where they were, it was just annoying to cook from them. So I really have very intentionally built recipe Club to be a space where it's to find the recipes that work for weeknight cooking, get them on the table a little easier. And we just got our wildly popular recipe binders back in stock, which means it's a great time to take advantage of our Bundle, which is a recipe binder where you can store all of the recipes you make most often, plus an annual membership to Recipe Club, where you're going to get hundreds of weeknight recipes, literally recipes designed for busy weeknights. So if you're looking for a complete system to help you get dinner on the table more regularly. Take advantage of this. You save twenty bucks when you get them together, and it really can be life changing for dinner time. All right, let's jump into the back half of the podcast and discuss hacks that help with dinner. Like I mentioned earlier, this week, one of my favorite kitchen hacks went viral on Instagram, which is always a bit thrilling, But part of the reason it was so thrilling was because it's genuinely a hack I use frequently to get lunch or dinner on the table for my family and myself, and ultimately it makes my life easier. So I wanted to take just a few minutes with you this week to chat about a few hacks that do make it a bit more manageable to get dinner on the table. We'll kick it off with the hack that's currently being shown to millions of people, and that is my potato hack. So here is the story of how this went down. A couple months ago, I actually shared about my favorite. I was on a kick of doing baked sweet potatoes with lunch, and I would top the baked sweet potato with either cottage cheese or black beans and or Greek yogurt and avocado. Like I just was on. I was doing a baked sweet potato at least twice a week for lunch, and it still is so delicious to me, but it can be annoying to bake a whole potato. It usually takes forty five minutes to an hour, and you I don't know if it's really done and then anyways, so I started cutting it in half and dousing it in olive oil, salt, pepper and placing it face down on a sheet pan and cooking it for about twenty twenty five to thirty minutes, and it cooked so much faster, and everything got crispy on the outside with it all being pillowy soft on the inside, and it's like, this is brilliant. So then I added a few more recipes to recipe club. I get Mediterranean sweet potato and a sweet potatoes with black beaan an avocado, where it's like, oh, these are this is such a It's so easy that if you're working from home, you can definitely make this for lunch, but this also could be family dinner. So that was that it's kind of taken off a few months ago. But then as we were looking at Saint Patrick's Day, I really wanted to do a fun potato recipe for my family. So I thought, let's do like a baked potato bar, or like a big snackboard supper with baked potatoes where everyone can load them up with chili and sour cream and cheese and chives and all the good stuff. And I thought, well, there's no reason this shouldn't work for a recipiece potato the same way it works for a sweet potato. So I did it, I filmed it, It worked great, and I think I think we're at six or seven million people now have seen this. So that is something a potato, whether it's a sweet potato or it is a rested potato, it's like a blank canvas for flavor, and especially if sweet potato is gonna have a pretty decent amount of nutrients in there that are pretty durn good for you. And I find that, I mean, what kid doesn't like a potato. I just had to explain to my kids is what French fries are made from. But my kids love it too. It's filling, they're super inexpensive, so if you're looking ways to bulk up dinners. While groceries are so crazy expensive, potatoes are such a great way to do that. And having kind of this whole potato barthy, I'm like, my gosh, we should do this at least once a month. My kids thought it was so fun and it was genuinely so easy. It's actually a great like clean out the fridge meal as well, because you could do this with gosh, if you had some shredded chicken, you could throw it on there. You could do like a cheddar broccoli situation on there. There's all sorts of stuff you could do, but that is one thing. Do not disregard the potato hack, where you take that whole potato, you slice it in half, you spray or drizzle it with olive oil, lots of salt and pepper into a four hundred and twenty five degree even for about twenty to thirty minutes, and you have got yourself a base for a really delicious lunch or dinner. So that's first up. First up on hacks that help me. Next is to embrace five ingredient recipes. We've been doing this thing in Recipe Club this month called make It easy March, where we've been focusing on really recipes that do just make your life a little easier, but a lot of five ingredient recipes, a lot of Trader Joe's hacks and costco hacks, things like that. But when I've overwhelmed and I feel that my mind might explode and I need things to be as simple as possible, that's when I go to these five ingredient recipes along with thousands of rest Peak club members who agreed their hands down our most popular recipes, and I started sharing them on Fridays on Instagram, these five ingredient Friday, and it was a huge hit. And seeing how many people really engaged with it and save those posts taught me that I'd kind of struck a chord with this five ingredient thing. And the honest truth is, I love to cook, right like. I don't always want super simplistic, basic recipes, but sometimes that's all I can handle. And I would so much rather make a five ingredient recipes for myself and my family than drive through Del Taco. And so if I know that I've got the ingredients on hand for a couple of five ingredient recipes, I just feel better equipped to handle those extra busy nights. So we started to build a five ingredient library of recipes within the Recipe Club membership so that our members could have a bunch of different ideas, and now we have close to fifty of them in there. But I want to offer up a few tips when it comes to cooking with only five ingredients, because, like I said myself, and I actually think a lot of our members too, they're pretty good cooks, right, and so you don't want something to not taste great. So there's a couple of things to keep in mind, because five ingredients really is not that much. But I do want to have a little disclaimer here. I do not count. I give myself a few freebies. I don't count salt, pepper, olive, oil, butter. Those don't count, okay in regards to those. The first rule of making five ingredient recipes taste great is to not skimp on basic seasoning. Salt and pepper go a long way, And I learned this in culinary school way back when, especially when you're using the right salt and pepper, when you're using kosher salt and cracked black pepper, it goes a long way. You go to Roost Chris and you get a delicious steak. You know what they've used on that steak, No fancy seasoning, really good salt, really good pepper and butter. It does sometimes we over complicate things or we assume they have to be more complicated to taste great. It's just really important to season with those basics. And it's important to season and taste as you go. So I keep a little seasoning station near my stovetop with salt, pepper, and olive oil that I can easily reach for. I also keep avocado there avocado oil there now too. And this is how chef cooks, Honestly, when you when I went to culinary school, they would get everyone got like a little plastic bowl of kosher salt, and your pepper was there too, and your oil. And it's like, this is how it's you build upon flavor. So when you are cooking with just a few ingredients, you got to make sure you're not ignoring the foundational things that establish flavor and what you're cooking, which is that salt, pepper. Second, you want to figure out a few core shortcut ingredients that you can rely on for quick dinners. So this applies to hacks in general, but also five ingredient recipes because if we're only doing five ingredients, you got to have some key players that pack a punch when it comes flavor. So some of my favorites include Jarred Marin Air sauce. And it should be no shock to you if you've listened to this podcast before that I hold one of these Jard Marin airsass Marinara sauce is high above the others, and that's REOs. It is far and away the best. It does tend to be one of the more expensive ones, but I am telling you it is worth its weight in gold, and if you get it at Costco, it's not too bad. Pesto and I really like I'm just mentioned Costco, but my favorite Jarred pesto actually is the kirklum Brand pesto, and that I would say is a widely held opinion. So if you're a Costco shopper and you have never bought their kirklum Brand pesto, I highly recommend it. But pesto can be so great for not only like tossing it on its own with pasta, but using it is a spread on a sandwich or even like I make my baked z D all the time, and if I don't have fresh basil on hand, I'll just add a tablespoon off the pesto in there, and it just adds, because what pesto is is it's it's basil, and it's oil and parmesan cheese and nuts and it's a lot of different flavors. Going on a rotisserie chicken definitely a hack for me. I mean, that's the easiest way to get a five dollar protein into your family. Farrow is another one. We do a lot of grain bowls here and Trader Joe sells a ten minute quick cooking farrow and a little blue bag and it's a whole grain. It's so flavorful. I find it chewier and more filling than a traditional rice, and it's a great base for grain bowls or to serve alongside, like you could make honestly, you could make a really simple dinner out of cooked farrow sliced rotisserie chicken and a bag salad, and like, that's not what I want to eat every night, but I'd eat it and it would taste great. It would taste great. So these are some examples of ingredients I kind of always keep on hand in my pantry that are all almost a cue for an easy dinner. I want to mention two more just because I use these recently that were just that they were a que for I don't know what to make for dinner. Oh, I can do this. I keep a jarred curry sauce in my pantry. I like the Trader Joe's one that is their yellow curry because it's not too spicy for my kids. It's super delicious when you pair it with a can of coconut milk, and it's just if as long as I've got some veggies to throw in there and some sort of protein like some chicken, and I got rice, I got dinner. I got super simple dinner. Similar to that is a tarayaki sauce. And there's two that I like. I like the very very tarayaki that you can get at any grocery store, and I also do like the Trader Joy soyaki one as well. I always go for the low sodium version of that, but it is talk about a ton of flavor captured in one bottle. But same thing that same formula of some veggies clean out your fridge, whatever it is, add some protein over rice or noodles, and you have yourself dinner. So make a list of, honestly, some of those shortcut ingredients that you know your family likes that can be a cute for dinner. And look, I know that we all want less processed foods, but I feel a lot better about something like a jarred sauce when I am adding fresh veggies and protein to it. I can live with that any day. I can live with that. That's just fine. So let me give you some examples of how like some of these shortcut ingredients turn into dinners. I just did it with the tariaki sauce and the curry, But like the Marinera sauce, spaghetti and frozen meatballs with a jar of REOs great. And those frozen meatballs could be meatballs that you made and you did a double batch of and you have extra, or they could be the frozen meatballs from Costco. Doesn't matter. The creamy tomato pasta a die have in recipe club with sausage and spinach. That's a fine and green recipe that people really love. I usually do it with tortellini, so it's a little heartier, but by adding the Italian sausage in there and the spinach, I am, you know, hitting some protein and some really good greens. My sheet pan chicken palm so simple. And the thing that makes it so simple is because of that Marinera sauce, the pesto. I have another tortellini dish in recipe Club called Creamy Tortolini with pesto and tomatoes. It is definitely one of our top five recipes that people cook. It looks so good too, it like it's so pretty. It used grape tomatoes and little mozzarella balls and pesto with a little bit of heavy cream. When you have yourself dinner a tomato basil soup with grilled cheese sandwiches. So I will sometimes buy even the boxed tomato soup and add about a quarter cup of pesto to that to make it really really rich in flavor. And then I'll make grilled cheeses to go alongside that and to dip in that. It's a very simple dinner. And then we mentioned the rotisserie chicken. I talked about how you could just serve it sliced alongside farrow and a back salad mix. But you could also add that rotisserie chicken to an existing salad mix and make like an Asian cashew crunch salad where you add add a mommie and carrots and cucumbers, clean out your fridge. Whatever. You could make a nice, big, hearty salad. You could add some sort of noodle or rice to that to make it more of a grain bowl a rotisserie chicken. It also is an easy way to a tortilla soup, barbecue chicken sliders. Shred that chicken up, toss with some barbecue sauce, served on Hawaiian rolls, you have yourself dinner. And then yeah, I mentioned farrow because it really is like my favorite grain and oftentimes I'll do just clean out the fridge, green bowls and farrow is our base and it's delicious. The last thing I'll say about five ingredient recipes, which really are such a great hack is think about five ingredient fancy, don't discount adding a few finishing ingredients or touches to really amplify a basic recipe. A squeeze of lemon on top, crumbled feta or goat cheese on top, chopped cilantro, parsley or nuts. They really go a long way, and chances are you have some of them on hand, even like I did. I did this at stir Fry the other day with the the Tariocy sauce from Trader Joe's, and you know what I had at the end. My girls actually asked for them sesame seeds, just a few sesame seeds on top, and it like instantly elevated the dish. And my girl they call them sesame sprinkles. They thought they were great. Okay, Finally, my last tip for hack a hack to help with dinner is you're not gonna like it. I'm telling you right now. You do not like this. I'm gonna tell you. Got to make a meal plan and if you really hate meal planning, make someone else in your house do it. But having a predetermined plan for what you plan to feed you and your people, truly is the ultimate hack to making dinner feel more manageable. And the sooner you accept that, and guess what, that is never gonna change. It's ever gonna change unless you get super wealthy and you just have a chef that lives with you and they make all the decisions. You have to feed yourself and if you're caring for anyone for the rest of your life. So if there's any system worth investing in, it's determining a system that works for basic meal planning and at least making the decision. It's a plan, it's not a promise. So if like life gets in the way and you don't make the sheet pan chicken palm on Tuesday like you'd plan, fine, make it on Thursday. It's just it's to make the decision once about what you're gonna have every night of the week versus asking yourself every single day can really relieve such a weight off your shoulders. And I feel so passionately about that, so passionately that I created a whole company around it. But it's been life changing for me and for many of our members and Recipe Club as well. All Right, finally, let's finish with the Weekly Gimme five Number one, my essential calendar. This makes it on this list at least twice a year, maybe three times a year, but it is my favorite paper calendar. It is organized by season, winter, summer, spring, fall, and so I can see multiple months at a time, and it is where we put all of the family travel, all of the kids' activities, big events, and I just flipped the page from winter to spring and found myself filling it out and being like, this is such a good siss. I love having this product in my life. This really does organize and simplify things for everyone in my family. So Essential Calendar and Kelsey ten gets you a discount there. So search Essential Calendar Co And use that code Kelsey ten and you'll get ten percent off number two. You know how your kids like certain things and then they decide they hate them, Well, that has been us for a couple of veggies lately on my kids, like baby carrots. For years that was my go too. Now my kids hate them. Makes no sense, but I have got them eating cucumbers like they are going out of style. And I'm convinced it's because of this ten dollars tool in my kitchen. It's actually eight dollars but less than ten dollars tool. It's a crinkle cutter and it is almost like this handle. I'n't think you know how to describe it. It's like got these wavy a wavy blade, but it's a very mild blade. Like my five year old is cutting her cucumbers this way, but it just makes it gives the shape of the veggies this really fun kind of scalloped look. And I don't know if it's a texture thing or what, but they are so in to veggies that are sliced with the crinkle cutter, and now they actually demand it quite frankly. So I'm using that thing all the time, and I swear it's got my kids to eat more veggies lately, So I'm a huge fan of that. Number three, I included my Glow Beauty hair brush. I really love my brush right now, and I the reason it made it on the list is because I've been using this brush, I don't know, maybe twelve to eighteen months. It was a company that launched this, and it's got like wire bristles, but it's soft. It like my daughter said, it feels like a backscratch on your head. It is the best brush ever. And the reason it made the list this week is because I had to order another one because we have two at least two, but I've got two daughters, a five year old and an eight year old, and now the five year old is demanding your old br We're always fighting over the brush, and I was like, oh my gosh, I'm just gonna because I don't like it when they take it out of my bathroom because it's the only brush I want to use. But Penny's cute. She's been brushing her hair every night like Rapunzel, and it's the only brush she wants to use. So I just ordered another one. They're an awesome, awesome company, small startup, female owned. Love it my favorite white T shirt. Okay, everyone's having their spring sales and I'm trying to not get too wrapped up in it because I did a big wardrobe refresh in the fall. But one thing I did order is I ordered five five of my favorite white T shirt because I'm finding that if I am wearing a sweater or a sweatshirt, I always like having like a little pop of white, like a crew neck popping out of the top. I like to layer them under jackets and cardigans. And I got this. I kind of tracked this down after doing some research. It's an old Navy one in the fall, and I bought one and it's now the thing that I'm like digging through the laundry to be like, ugh, I can't believe it's dirty again, and every time the laundry is done, I reach for that. It's it's my favorite. So I finally just bought five of them. They were seven dollars, so it's not like it was a huge investment, but it really is just a great shape and weight of shirt. And then finally, one of my favorite small business owners, Sarah of shop Plane Jaane, is having a big moving sale. So I love Plane Jaine. They are are family's favorite pajamas for kids and adults. They're my favorite pajamas, and they're having a huge moving sale. I have never seen stuff priced this low. It's so good. It's so good. I had to really restrain myself from buying everything. But go check it out. Shot Plan Jane. Their moving sale is happening, and I'm excited for her to begin a new chapter and give yourself some pajamas. All right, that's it for today. Make sure you're subscribed to the podcast that you never miss an episode. This podcast is always meant to be a quick twenty to thirty minute listen while you map out your own meals for the week, and to support helping you set up a simple dinner system. If you're looking to finally get a system in place, join us in Recipe Club, and, better yet, snag that bundle where you can save twenty bucks when you get the binder and an annual membership. Thank you so much for listening today. I'm so glad you're here. Until next time, happy cooking. I am Kelsey and look forward to chatting with you next week