Kitchen Prescription with Kelsey NixonI'm back in the office again to answer your questions and provide solutions to solve your kitchen woes. Let's tackle "car dinner", investing in kitchen confidence, and how to take the overwhelm out of recipe organization.
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Hi, everybody. I'm Kelsey Nixon and this is Kitchen Prescription, the podcast you listen to and you don't know what to make for dinner today? Is episode seventy six. Kitchen Office Hours. About once a month, I hold Kitchen Office Hours to answer your questions that I collect from Instagram and within my Recipe Club membership. And when asking for questions, I remind you that it can be anything related to cooking or the kitchen. Really just anything that might make it easier for you to get dinner on the table. You guys submitted some fantastic questions this week, and I can't wait to dive into those. But first, let's kick off the episode by discussing three recipes you could throw on your meal plan for the week as you plan ahead and give yourself the gift of deciding just once what you'll feed yourself and or your family for dinner this week, rather than facing the dreaded question of what am I making for dinner tonight every single day at five pm. So this next week we officially welcome April, which is so wild. I genuinely can't believe how quickly we are flying through this calendar year. But this also means that we've wrapped up our month of five ingredient recipes, but I wanted to remind you that all of those recipes live indefinitely in Recipe Club. So each month we add at least five new recipes to our Recipe Club library, but as a member, you have access to the entire library as long as you have an active membership, So that's hundreds of recipes, and we have all of our five ingredient recipes categorized in there if those are really good fit for you. So while we're wrapping up a month of five ingredient recipe ideas for March, they're still all in them membership. Now, each month we focus on a theme in Recipe Club, and this next month, our focused is all about recipes that are meal prep friendly. So while the new recipes we are adding are still great weeknight dinners, we've also broken them down in a way that you could prep them in a advance to have them for lunch throughout the week or dinner for your busiest nights. It also makes them amazing like meals on the go as we head into like the heart of busy extracurricular season with dance competitions, at baseball tournaments and choir concerts. So enough about that, let's talk about a few ideas of what you could make for dinner this coming week. The first recipe that's on my meal plan is my honey baked ham and Swiss sliders because it is my favorite leftover recipe to make post Easter. I love these sliders. They are super duper kid friendly. They are so delicious and really easy to make. I typically serve them with a salad and some fruit and no one complains about it. It also feels pretty different, like than the Easter meal lineup. There's like a slice of apple in them, and there's some mustard. Oh, They're so so so good. It's my favorite like post Easter meal and I can't wait to have it on Monday. The next recipe making is lemon jelled chicken with couscous. And this is one of those recipes that we created to be really good for meal prep. So you likely won't be meal prepping this weekend because it's Easter, so I imagine you've got plenty to do in the kitchen, but you could make this recipe. You double it, have it for dinner one night, stick them in the fridge and have them for easy lunches or quick dinners to grab later in the week. But it's so good. It's got like this delicious yogurt sauce. I love Israeli couscouse. It's the bigger couscoose, but it almost makes like a Greek type salad with a really simple sauce in dressing and it's just perfect for spring. And then finally on my meal plan is my chopped kil caesar with salmon. And this was inspired by an exciting collaboration I am doing. This week. I had the privilege and honor to be on my friend Shae McGee's YouTube series called Around the Table with Shay and it is I mean, Shae is world class designer, Like we're talking Netflix show, so New York Times, best selling design books, incredible design services. She's just the best. Chances are you know who she is and you adore her as much as I do. My favorite thing she puts out is her Lina Target. But Shye and I went to college together, we go way back, and she was kind enough to have me as a guest on her new YouTube series that's all about entertaining and cooking. So we make my chopped kel Caesar with salmon, and so it's top of mind because that comes out this week, and so I'm gonna make it for my family. I love this recipe so much. It is best caesar dressing to make from scratch that does not require anchovies if you know, you know, some people don't mind thrown it, and anchovy is a classic ingredient in caesar dressing. But you know, I'm just not gonna buy. I'm just not gonna do it. And so I came up with a delicious caesar dressing that doesn't require it and is so fingerlooking good. It like so so so good. So chop kel Caesar making that this week in honor of my collaboration with Shee. And that's it. There are your recipes for the week. You can find and print them all in Recipe Club individually or in our weekly meal plan with easy to follow shopping lists that are broken down by recipe. I create a Recipe Club to kind of fix all of the things that drove me crazy about getting recipes online. So when you use our membership, you'll never see any banner ads. There's no long blog posts or drawn out stories. It's just the recipes you need to help you meal plan quickly and get dinner on the table with as much ease as possible. All right, let's jump into the back half of the podcast and officially open up kitchen office hours. We are going to tackle three questions today here on the podcast that will hopefully be helpful to you. I also typically do a weekend Q and A on Instagram, so if I'm not answering a question you have submitted today, you can always send me a DM a follow up and submit your question during one of my weekend Q and a's and hopefully I'll get to it there. Okay, our first question number one from Julie. She says, we are entering the we are never home stage of the school year and it's by far the hardest, hardest time for me to make dinner. Do you have some tips for families who are super busy this time of year or do I need to accept that we are just eating dinner in the car for the next two months. I've got three suggestions here. The first suggestion is to eat dinner earlier, bump up dinner to write after school and if you can't call it that because it just is hard for you to wrap your mind around like a four o'clock dinner, call it dinner whatever, but bump it up. So if you're able to adjust your work schedule or your family's schedule. So, because my kids always come home from school and they are starving and they immediately want a snack during this chapter, this time when things get so crazy, if I can plan enough in advance to have a nice, good, hearty meal when they get home from school, it's better for everybody. And then that what would have been your after school snack can be a pre bedtime snack. So try that. If that's not going to work, let's talk about some other things. Grazing dinners. I got to come up with a better name for this, but this is what I call them in my head. If you've got people coming and going from your house all afternoon and into the evening, consider making a grazing dinner that can sit on the stove and people can come and get it when they're home. Think of like chili and corn bread is so fallish, but we were doing a bunch of this for fall baseball. Or like tortilla soup with chips and salsa or curry that can be in a brazier like on the stovetop on a really low heat, or it could be just turned off and they could turn the heat on, like if you've got teenagers coming home to eat and then you serve it over rice. Same thing with sturfry. You could do like a baked ZD which is so great that you can just pop in the microwave and reheat it. And also baked ZD if you make it, pull it out at like four o'clock and have it out, it's that residual heat, it's going to stay warm for a couple of times so or at least two hours. So crazing dinners think about what can I make that people can dish up on their own as they come and go, or like you may be taking you know, two of your kids to ballet and art class and drama the first half of the night, but it overlaps with your husband and your son who are going to baseball or basketball, and so they're going to be able to eat dinner together, but you're not going to be We all are putting these pieces of the puzzle together, and whether we like it or not, we live right now in a culture where we are busy as families. We are so busy as families. But I refuse to give up dinner. I refuse to let go of the ritual of dinner. I would rather figure out how to make it work amongst this culture of crazy. The other option is just to reduce the crazy, right And every season I say I'm going to do it, and every season I end up still feeling crazy. So it is what it is. Suggestion is, let's just talk about car dinners. Okay, you might just have to have dinner in the car or at the studio or at the baseball field. If that's the case, we all know that you can only have so many hot dogs from the Little League Snackshack me as a as a late or drive through dinners before you just like start dreading it. So you want to think about some meal prep friendly dinners you can take with you. I suggest getting some segmented containers you really like I love the rubber Maid Brilliance ones, and then finding some recipes that work well for this. In fact, this has been such a problem in my life, the car dinners and the eating at the baseball field and the dance studio that this next month in Recipe Club, I specifically developed six new recipes that will work well for this. In fact, they're so specific that I actually took pictures of them all in these containers so you could see exactly how I pack them up. As I was doing that, I also put down, like I put together a formula for a great prep ahead dinner and t that into a cheat sheet. So that's all coming out in the coming days. But the recipes were specifically an Italian subsalad, which something like this is so great is if you can have like some sort of salad that's got some cured meats, that's got some cheese, that's got some sort of veggie, some sort of protein or like bean, and then it can kind of marinate in whatever vinaigrette or sauce or whatever, and it just gets better the longer longer it sits. And then what I like to do is in the segmented container, I put some sort of greens. So whether it's like in this Italian subsalad, I do some shreaded romain, but you could do kale. And then when I'm ready to eat it, I toss the greens with that kind of marinated salad and it's so delicious to me. So that's one of the recipes. I've got a pineapple fried rice, this lemon dilled chicken and cuscus that I just talked about. I separate the chicken from the couscous, and the couscus kind of sits and marinates. A keen wa sweet potato bowl. It's got black beans, it's got a lime basil vinaigrette. That will change your life. Working rice bowls with pickled veggies. The one thing I want to say is you'll want to think about cold versus warm, And some of you are gonna be pickier about this than others, Like I don't mind eating a fried rice. Cold does not bother me. My family absolutely not, Like that's never gonna happen for them. So if you are sensitive to that as you think about meal prep friendly recipes, if it's got to be warm, if it's supposed to be warm, then you might want to look at something like that Italian subsalad or even the quenoasweet potato bowls with the lime based vinegar. More like sality based stuff or bowl based stuffed. But if you're at home and you're just popping in and out, it's really easy to take that fried rice and pop it in a skillet and heat it up in two minutes. So just something to think about. But that's my best suggestions for surviving the We're never homestage of the school year. Okay. Second question is from Ruby A. She says, I've never considered myself a good cook, but I want to change my thinking and start feeling a bit more confident. Part of it is that I have the same old, crappy kitchen stuff from my idea that I got in college, including the knife I use every day. It's so dull and seems it seems like you say the first thing to invest in is a good knife and maybe a cutting board. But I literally have no idea how to buy a knife, and I don't want to spend a ton of money if I don't have to. What's your advice? Great question, so let's talk about this. First of all, Ruby, you're so right. If you were wanting to get some some things in the kitchen that are going to help you feel more confident, investing in a knife and a cutting board is a great place to start. And I love that you mentioned both the knife and the cutting board because I think they kind of go hand in hand. That is like a system, right. So a sharp knife is always better than a dull knife. So if you have a good, a well made knife, you might not need a new knife. You just need to sharpen it. And there are two ways you can approach this. You can actually take it somewhere to get it sharpened. Any of the stores like Serla Tobb or Williams Sonoma, even your local hardware shop will like sharpen knives. So you need to sharpen it. And if you have an old knife that's like not good quality and you're like, no, I hate this thing, you might want to invest a nicer knife. And what's great about those nicer knives is they're gonna last forever as long as you maintain them, and they're gonna hold their edge a little longer. I also have a great at home sharpener that I recommend that is so fantastic. In fact, I'm gonna look it up and I'm just gonna tell you guys the brand. I did a ton of research on this and I went back and forth. You can use like a honing steal. You can do that. You can get like a wetstone, which is how I learned how to do it in culinary school, but that is really hard. There is a product it's called the work sharp You two kitchen knife Sharpener. I think it's forty or fifty dollars on Amazon, and it is awesome. It is kind for me. It feels like a fool proof way to sharpen your knives. And if you have good knives that are just dull, get that get that sharp knit every couple of months and you are gonna find that slicing, dicing, chopping, everything in the kitchen feels a little easier. If you're in the camp where you're going to buy a new knife, maybe you're a Ruby and you're like, it's time. I'm telling you now, rubyt The brand does not matter, it's what feels best in your hand. So you might want to consider taking a nice skills class like at Serlotote. I used to teach these classes for years, and I like to have taught them for about two years, but it was many years ago. And one of the best things about taking a knife skills class is you can try so many different brands of knives and see what one feels best in your hand. Because a small, petite woman myself who barely tops out at five to one is likely going to prefer a different knife from a dude who's six ' five and has like huge hands, right, Like, it's totally dependent on you want something that feels comfortable, like a larger gentleman. Might I want a blade that's ten inches, but I only want a five and a half inch blade. But taking a class will really help you kind of define what might be the best fit for you. Okay, cutting board, two options here. I have consistently recommended the same brand of cutting board for years, and I still it's the one I reach for all the time. But my sister Kylie, she has recently she doesn't like that cutting board. She's like, Nope, I need another recommendation, And so I'm gonna offer two options here. I really like the Epicurean cutting boards. They are made of a wood composite. They are very lightweight and kind of thin. They store easily, and you can put them in the dishwasher. I love them. I've probably got eight of them. Love them. My sister can't stand them. She doesn't like how they feel when you chop on them. So if you don't want that and you want a bigger board or a still a wood board. A booze board it's spelled bos is like the classic cutting boards that you've seen on Cooking Show. My best advice, though, is get it bigger than you think, because having a larger work surface is going to make your life so much easier. So I would say minimum is thirteen by seventeen inch, but get it bigger than you think. And if you want the big fat wood boards, look at a booze board. If you want a thinner board that you can pop in the dishwasher, look at Epicurean. If you want like a plastic board, like a gelboard, I would either look at Material Kitchen or Oxo makes a great one. Okay. Third question from Steph B. I have needed a system for organizing my recipes for years. When you came out with your recipe binder, I was excited and bought one, but now I'm overwhelmed about putting it together. I can't seem to let go of my current binder slash stack of crumpled recipes, but it also drives me crazy every time I go to cook. How would you suggest that I transfer everything over? Let's talk about how I would do this. First of all, you have mentioned that it feels overwhelming, So I would bundle the task with something that feels fun, light and easy, like having the office on in the background or listening to a podcast that will just get you a little more excited about the project. And I would set aside at least an hour to do this, put it on your calendar, set an alarm. Then I would take your existing binder sash pile of recipes and go through them one by one and create three piles. I'd create a pile of recipes that you use regularly, recipes that you don't use regularly but you know you want to keep that might include like some holiday recipes, recipes you know you're never going to make again, basically the trash pile. After creating those piles, you are going to transfer the recipes you use regularly to your new beautiful binder, and you're going to keep the recipes you don't use regularly but you know you don't want to throw them away in your existing binder. And you're now going to call this your index binder. And this is where you put things that you know you don't want to toss, but you know you don't need them for every day cooking. After doing this, you're going to throw the other stack away. Once you've seen the recipes that you use regularly, you want to divide those up into some categories and organize them accordingly. So you might be a person who loves sheet pan recipes, so it might be worth it to have a whole sheet pan category. You might be someone that just wants to separate them by lunch, dinner, breakfast suites. However, it's going to be different for every person, but categorize them. I do want to recommend having a place in your binder for new recipes to try. In my binder, the one that I sell, I include a pocket folder for this. That way things don't get out of hands. So whether someone hants you a recipe on a post it note book club, or you print one off from someone's food blog, or you screenshot it and print it out from Instagram, you put it in the pocket and after making the recipe once, if it is a hit, then I will put it in our template and add it to my binder. So that is kind of the approach I take. If you are a visual person and you would like all of the recipes to look consistent, you can slowly start to tackle adding your recipes into the template that we offer so that everything looks cohesive and like they're all pages out of a cookbook. But I would not think that you have to do that all at once. I would first get the recipes in the binder that you know you want, and then I would tackle the adding them to the template project later. I think it's two separate sit downs, all right. Finally, let's finish with the weekly Gimme five. These are five things that made my life easier or more enjoyable this week. First up is an electric crape maker Robbie. My husband's birthday was this week, and his favorite breakfast of all time is crapes. And it's really unfortunate that I have been terrible at making them, so I finally bought a gadget to help me do it more successfully. It had almost five thousand reviews on Amazon, and it's basically just like an electric round griddle, and it really did make it so much easier. So I'm so glad I finally bought it and we can use it for kind of special occation breakfasts. Next is a recommendation that came from my sister who is currently vacationing in Hawaii, and it was raving about the Setaphil Daily moisturizer. It's like an SPF fifty, but she she's really sensitive skin, and she has been texting me all week saying, you've got to get this. It's so great super moisturizing. The shape and size is perfect for travel or for like keeping in your car or in your person when your head to do a baseball game or something like that. And I just love that it's such a trusted brand. So I picked that up and I'm really excited to make that part of my spring and summer routine. Oh. I've been so into the Geometry House bar towels. It's slightly smaller than their kitchen tea towels. They are my favorite microfiber kitchen towels for doing everything from drying dishes to wiping down my countertops to I know I'm not supposed to say this, but pulling stuff out of the oven. I just love them. But I'm so into the slightly smaller size the bar towels, and they're so great to have us like a little gift to give people. So I went to a sample sale for them this weekend. And totally stocked up on bar towels. Next is this really fun female owned brand, small business called Young Wild and Freedmen, and they sell these sensory kits that are Plato slime. I say, notice slime, but love the Plato. They are so cute, you guys. And we've had a couple of like spring rainy days, and on those rainy days, this is the first thing I pull out, and I love supporting this company. They are amazing. You've got to check out Young Wild and Freedman. It's probably too late for Easter, but you like birthdays, Oh gosh, I should start buying these for birthday gifts for people. And they have them all different price points, so they're really great. Check out check out that brand. And then finally, the fifth thing on my Gimme five list this week is I ordered a fresh pair of my favorite fifteen dollars sunglasses from Amazon. I have given up on expensive sunglasses because I live with children and I lose things, and so I have found the holy grail of sunglasses. They are the best. I always get asked about them and I'm like, they are literally fourteen ninety nine on Amazon. So I'm ordered a new pair of those ready for that spring sunshine and hopefully they'll take me all the way through summer. Thanks for listening you guys. Make sure you're subscribed to the podcast so that you never miss an episode. This podcast is meant to be a quick twenty to thirty minute listen while you map out your meals for the week, and support helping you as you build your own simple dinner system. Next week, we'll be chatting about how my formula for meal prep is really helpful and it's helping me during the super busy time, everything from my favorite containers to the recipes. I really appreciate you guys listening today. I'm so glad you're here, and the until next time, happy cooking. I'm Kelsey and look forward to chatting with you. Next week's exciting
