• Simple seasoning works well! Complicated marinades can be great but are not necessary. If you’ve got salt, pepper, and some lemon. You’re good to go.
• The broiler or a hot oven is your friend. Quick, high heat cooking works really well for fish because it doesn’t dry it out.

The recipe I am sharing with you today is a great example of both of those rules. Just a little seasoning and a super quick, hot heat and dinner is ready! This recipe is so easy and so quick that it is perfect for those evenings when you get home late and aren’t sure what to do for dinner. Other than having the ingredients on hand, it requires no pre-planning, since you can cook the fish from frozen, yes frozen! And anyone can make it! Really!

I love this recipe because it is so simple and so versatile. It can be used in fish tacos, in salads, or as the main course. You can top it with salsas, pestos, or leave it plain. It really can be whatever you and your family want it to be.

In addition, I have found this to be a successful fish dish for those who are just trying fish for the first time or are not the biggest fans of fish because it does not have a strong fish flavor and can be topped with lots of things to make it more appealing.

So try it out (recipe below). I think you’ll really enjoy it and I’d love to hear what toppings you enjoy the most!

And now for the special announcement…

I am so excited to announce that I’ll be launching a 10-Day Cooking Challenge on September 23^rd. If you are someone who would like to be cooking more but just can’t seem to get started or if you find the kitchen overwhelming, this challenge is for you! I’ll help you to make your kitchen more usable, food shopping less stressful, and cooking more enjoyable. Give me 10 days and I will help you to learn how to cook quick, delicious, healthy meals that will leave you happy, satisfied, and not overwhelmed!

If this sounds fun and/or intriguing, click here to learn more!

Print

10-Minute Flounder Bake

Prep Time 2 minutes minutes

Cook Time 10 minutes minutes

Total Time 12 minutes minutes

Servings 4 -6

Author Jessica Braider

Ingredients

• 6 frozen flounder fillets
• ¼ cup grated parmesan
• salt and pepper
• Optional toppings: pesto salsa, chopped vegetables, olive tapenade, really the possibilities are endless.

Instructions

• Set your oven rack 4-6 inches from the top of the oven. Turn your broiler on high. Line a baking sheet with aluminum foil and spray with cooking spray. Lay frozen fillets on the baking sheet and sprinkle with a little salt and pepper. Sprinkle the tops with parmesan cheese. Put in oven and bake for 10 minutes, or until the cheese starts to bubble and get brown in spots. Remove from oven and serve.

<p>The post 10-Minute Flounder Bake & The 10-Day Cooking Challenge first appeared on The Balanced Kitchen.</p>

These muffins are simple, flexible, and delicious. They are wonderful as a side dish with a cold summer soup, like gazpacho (here is a great, super simple recipe), or with a big salad. They’d be wonderful with a light chili made in the crock pot, so your house doesn’t get too hot. And they’d make a great addition to a barbeque or picnic.

The trick to these muffins is to soak up some of the moisture from the zucchini (or any other summer squash you want to use). Summer squash contain a ton of water and if you skip this step, the muffins may come out sort of soggy. So make sure to grate your squash first and wrap it up in paper towel while you do the first few steps. That way, you can just dump it in when the time is right.

As I said, these are very flexible. If you wanted an extra kick, you could mix in some minced jalapeño and add more minced garlic. Not a fan of feta? Try grated cheddar, parmesan, or monterey jack. Want a more herby flavor? Dried oregano or basil would be delicious. You can really make these whatever you want them to be!

So next time you look down at that zucchini languishing away in your vegetable drawer, pull it out and throw together a batch of these. You won’t regret it!

Print

Savory Zucchini Corn Muffins

Course Side

Prep Time 10 minutes minutes

Cook Time 20 minutes minutes

Total Time 30 minutes minutes

Servings 18

Author Jessica Braider

Ingredients

• 1 medium zucchini or other summer squash grated and patted dry (about 1 ½ cups)
• 1 ¼ cup cornmeal
• 1 cup flour
• 2 Tablespoons sugar
• 4 teaspoons baking powder
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1 clove garlic minced
• ½ cup onion chopped
• ½ cup corn fresh or frozen
• 1 cup milk
• 4 tablespoons butter melted
• 2 eggs
• 3/4-1 cup crumbled feta
• Optional add-ins or modifications: minced jalapeño dried oregano, dried basil, grated cheddar, parmesan, or Monterey jack.

Instructions

• Grate zucchini and wrap it in a paper towel to dry.
• Preheat oven to 350 and grease two muffin tins.
• In a large bowl, whisk together the cornmeal, flour, sugar, baking powder, and salt.
• With a large spoon, stir in the minced garlic, chopped onion, corn, and grated zucchini.
• In a separate bowl, lightly whisk the milk, melted butter, eggs, and cheese together.
• Fold the wet ingredients into the dry.
• Distribute the batter amongst 18 muffin cups.
• Bake for 20 minutes. Remove muffins from muffin tins and let cool on a cooling rack.

<p>The post Savory Zucchini Corn Muffins first appeared on The Balanced Kitchen.</p>

I also love them for how versatile they are. You can use them on their own as a side dish or include them in a huge variety of dishes including omelets, pastas, grain salads, pizzas, quesadillas, wraps, grilled cheese/paninis, stir fries. And you can flavor them in various ways–salt and pepper, indian spices, chili powder, parmesan, nutritional yeast, soy sauce, and bread crumbs are just a few of our favorite ways to have them.

Roasted vegetables are also often a great entry point for picky eaters. The reason for this is that roasting brings out the natural sugars in the vegetables, which makes them sweeter and, therefore, more appealing to those who are more resistant. If I am working with a client who is trying to feed a very resistant eater, the vegetables that I most often recommend starting with are potatoes, sweet potatoes, cauliflower, and broccoli because they seem to be the most accessible for tentative tasters. Potatoes and sweet potatoes can be sold as “like french fries” and dipped in ketchup and cauliflower and broccoli can be “trees” that a giant is eating or can be loaded with parmesan.

If you’ve never roasted vegetables, give it a try! And if you have, see if there is a way you can change it up to make it more exciting. I think you will be very pleasantly surprised!

Print

Roasted Broccoli

Course Sides

Prep Time 10 minutes minutes

Cook Time 15 minutes minutes

Total Time 25 minutes minutes

Servings 6

Author Jessica Braider

Ingredients

• 1 large head of broccoli cut into bite-sized stem pieces and florets (or a bag of pre-cut broccoli)
• extra virgin olive oil
• salt and pepper

Instructions

• Preheat oven to 425. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper.
• Toss broccoli with 1 tbl olive oil and sprinkle with salt and pepper.
• Spread evenly on the baking sheet, trying to have a single layer.
• Roast until just tender, about 10-15 minutes.

<p>The post Roasted Broccoli first appeared on The Balanced Kitchen.</p>

So this week I want to share a new favorite in our house, a minestrone that takes advantage of the spring vegetables that are abundant at this time of year. I love this recipe because it is so quick to throw together, can withstand extra time in the slow cooker if needed, is chock-full of vegetables, and tastes like spring. My kids love it because it is cheesy, colorful, has noodles, and they can pick and choose their favorite veggies as they make their way through their meal.

Give it a try! I think you’ll really enjoy it.

Print

Slow Cooker Spring Vegetable Minestrone

Course Dinner, Slow Cooker

Prep Time 10 minutes minutes

Cook Time 4 hours hours

Total Time 4 hours hours 10 minutes minutes

Servings 10

Author Jessica Braider

Ingredients

• 1 sweet onion diced
• 2 garlic cloves minced
• 2 stalks of celery diced
• 3 carrots peeled and diced
• 1 large can 28 oz of diced tomatoes
• 2 15 oz cans of cannellini beans, drained and rinsed
• 4 cups stock chicken or vegetable
• 2 cups water
• 1 tablespoon dried basil
• ½ teaspoon salt
• pepper to taste
• 8 oz noodles small shells, elbows, etc.
• ½ lb asparagus spears stems removed and cut into 1-inch pieces
• 1 cup of frozen peas
• 1 6 oz bag of baby spinach
• 1/3 cup grated or shredded Parmesan plus more for topping

Instructions

• Place the onion, garlic, celery, carrot, tomato, cannellini beans, stock, water, and basil into the slow cooker. Give it a good mix. Cook on low for anywhere from 4 to 7 hours.
• About 15 minutes before serving, add the noodles and asparagus and give it a good stir. Then, 5 minutes before serving, add the frozen peas and spinach. Stir in the Parmesan cheese. Taste for seasonings and add more salt and pepper, if you need it. Serve immediately with additional cheese on top.

Notes

This recipe makes a lot of soup! If you don’t like your noodles getting too soggy in leftovers (personally I kind of love them when they get mushy), then you can cook the noodles separately and add them as you want them.
If you want to make this with whole wheat noodles, then add the noodles in 20 minutes before the time is up, rather than 15.

<p>The post Slow Cooker Spring Vegetable Minestrone first appeared on The Balanced Kitchen.</p>

I am currently co-teaching a cooking class to a group of 6-9 year olds. Our goals have been helping all of the kids to gain confidence in the kitchen, introducing them to new healthy foods, and exploring new foods and food preparations.

Over the course of the past weeks we have been working with them to be open to trying new foods, even if the foods being offered are ones that they would normally be resistant to eating. We have done this in a few ways.

1)   As a class we all agreed that we would try very hard not to use words such as “gross” or “yuck” and phrases such as “I don’t like it.” We talked about how we didn’t want to make anyone feel badly about their tastes and also about how sometimes when you hear someone make a negative comment about a food it can influence how you then taste the food.

2)   No one is ever forced to try a food and they are always welcome to quietly spit it out into a napkin if they don’t like it. This created a sense of safety and, amazingly, everyone has tried everything we have made!

3)   We have been exploring flavor and food. Over the course of a number of classes we have played with a base ingredient and then added different flavors to make different dishes. For instance, with yogurt we made a sweet yogurt dip and we made a tzatziki. With chickpeas we made hummus and maple-roasted chickpeas. By doing this, the kids have begun to understand the power of preparation—that even a food that may not normally be a favorite can become delicious if it is made differently than we are used to.

So this week we decided to push them a little bit! In the first class one of the questions I asked was: what are your favorite foods and what are foods that you either are not so sure about or that you don’t enjoy eating? Almost everyone in the class named spinach as their least favorite food. So this week we made two recipes with spinach.

In order to try to make everyone comfortable we sat down together before cooking and I laid the groundwork. I reminded them of the ways that we had explored making foods taste differently, I reminded them about how we taste foods and respond to them, and then I told them with a lot of enthusiasm about the dishes we were going to make using spinach: a mock-mint chocolate chip ice cream and pesto for mini-bagel pizzas.

Some kids were quite nervous to be working with spinach, but they all remained engaged and open. The mock-ice cream was an easier sell because it was such a fun and novel idea, but the pesto was definitely a stretch for some kids. As we made the pizzas with the pesto, I gave each kid control over how much pesto they wanted on their pizza, and to my surprise everyone was willing to have at least a little bit. They were also invited to taste the pesto before they spread it on their bagel. It was wonderful to see their faces as they tried the dreaded spinach in both of its forms and discovered that they LOVED it.

I’m not expecting the major spinach haters of the group to suddenly be willing to eat steamed spinach at the dinner table, but I do hope that this experience will help to take at least some of the fear away and that perhaps they will be a little bit more open when they encounter spinach the next time.

There were two lessons that really came home to me in this experience. One was the power of setting the scene for trying new foods. By remaining pressure-free and fun about it the kids were able to feel in control and, therefore, remain open. The other was importance of trying different methods of preparation. If you’ve got a spinach hater, or even if you don’t, I highly recommend this spinach pesto recipe as a fun way to use this healthy leafy green vegetable!

Print

Spinach Pesto

Course Sauce

Prep Time 5 minutes minutes

Total Time 5 minutes minutes

Servings 8

Author Jessica Braider

Ingredients

• 6 ounces baby spinach
• ½ cup walnuts
• ½ cup parmesan
• 1 clove garlic
• ¼ cup extra virgin olive oil
• salt and pepper to taste

Instructions

• Place all the ingredients into a food processor and process until it forms a paste. Taste for seasoning.
• Use as a pizza base, in sandwiches, or on pasta

Notes

If using for pasta, save a bit of the pasta water to help to mix the sauce into the pasta

<p>The post Spinach Pesto and the Power of Preparing Foods in New Ways first appeared on The Balanced Kitchen.</p>

Now when we think condiments our minds immediately go to ketchup, mayo, and mustard, which are fine, although should probably be used sparingly due to added sugars, etc., but what I’m talking about here is condiments in the wider sense. I mean the oils, vinegars, grated cheeses, spices, pickles, and sauces. These are things that I often have on the table at dinner so that my kids can make their meal their own. This allows them to gain some control over what they are eating, it can make it fun, and it can help them to mask some of the flavors they might not be crazy about.

When I offer these, I try as much as possible to truly let them have the control and do it themselves. This gives them a sense of independence and excitement about making their food. I do have to confess, though, that when it comes to salt I often have a hand hovering over to swoop it out of the way when it gets to be too much.

Here are some ways that they have used condiments in recent meals:

• Parmesan cheese on almost anything—roasted or sautéed vegetables, pastas, meat, etc.
• Paprika on vegetables, risottos, stews, soups
• Soy sauce (extra) on stir fry
• Olive oil and balsamic vinegar on salads, veggies, potatoes, and meat.
• Oregano on pastas and pizzas
• Cinnamon on yogurt, waffles, and pancakes
• Salt and pepper on almost anything.

So next time your little one starts to dig in his or her heels about the food on the table, before you get to the tension, deal making, begging, pleading, cajoling, and insisting, try light-heartedly offering some toppings to experiment with.

<p>The post Condiments: The Gateway Drug of Foods first appeared on The Balanced Kitchen.</p>