Jump to Recipe

Happy 4th of July! I hope you had a great weekend. But, if you did, you might be struggling a bit now. If you're like me, the week after a holiday can kick you in the butt. So this week I've kept the show really short and have focused on a meal plan to get you through the week.

I've heard often about how having an accountability buddy can help keep you on track. Recently, I had a real life experience with this when I worked on a bit project for my website with my Dad! I'm going to tell you a bit about that experience. And, our guest this week is, you guessed it, my Dad! We're talking about that big project that we did, a series called Homemade Sausages (Without Special Equipment). If you've ever thought about making your own sausages, he is the expert and the perfect person to walk you through it. The details about his easy skinless sausage method are over here so you can read through those too.

When we're thinking of trying something new, we often waste time thinking about it or worrying about how it will work. If the new thing isn't expensive, it's worth our time to just jump in instead of spending too long thinking about it. On this episode, we talk about how I've jumped into meal kits, and how the experience has been going. Our guest this week is cookbook author Emily Paster from WestofTheLoop.com. She has recently done a series all about cooking lamb and we talk about why lamb isn't as popular in the United States, the benefits of eating it, and how to start trying this protein if you're new to it.

Grilling is a tasty summer tradition. But, did you know that it also can save you a lot of time? Find out how, and get some delicious and simple grilling tips along the way. Our guest this week is Katie Jasiewicz from KatiesCucina.com. She's a grilling and meal-planning expert with tons of great tips to share with us. Check out her Grilled Lemon Garlic Snapper recipe to get your grilling inspiration started!

We can often feel a lot of pressure to do certain things, like cook and bake, and to be great at them too. But when we're short on time, how do we trim these things from our lives while also not feeling guilty or like a failure for it? Our guest this week is cookbook author Emily Paster who has written an article in TASTE magazine about a recent chocolate chip cookie controversy. At the heart of it is this sense that not only do we have to bake, but we have to bake in specific ways or risk being a failure there too. Perhaps not surprisingly, she and I come out on the, "Less perfection, less stress, we're not failures" side of this coin.

We all have parts of our homes that we wish were less cluttered. It's just a big time investment to actually deal with it. This week though, I cleaned out my kitchen and I'm inspired to tell you what an impact that bit of time that I spent had on my week. Doing a big job can help save you time later, and that's what food prep is about too. I'm not a big food-prepper but my guest this week, Tamika Gardner, baby food expert and author of The Big Book Of Plant-Based Baby Food, certainly is. We talk about her strategies for feeding young children, and about how food prep helps her out.

Have you ever wanted to try a certain something new but thought it was too fancy or too expensive? That's happened to me recently, but then when I actually looked into it, it turned out that it was much more in reach than I thought! Sous vide is one of those things, and so I'm delighted to be talking with the President of the International Sous Vide Association, and wonderful cookbook author, Jason Logsdon of AmazingFoodMadeEasy.com. He explains what sous vide cooking is, and how it can make our weeknight meals easier than ever!

Are you at the grocery store more often now than you have been in the past year? My world is opening up a little bit and I'm tending to stop at the store more instead of doing grocery delivery. It, therefore, feels like the right time to share grocery shopping tips! In this week's episode, I give you my 5 best grocery shopping tips to save you time. And then there's a 6th tip: Why not try out meal kits and save yourself a ton of grocery shopping time? To that end, I talk with Xylina Jimenez who has just started using meal kits. She fills us in on why she started and on how it's going. Hint: She loves it!!!

If you're at all like me, there are changes you'd like to make to your diet, but it often feels daunting. This week I talk with Carolyn Ketchum, the cookbook author and blogger behind the keto blog, All Day I Dream About Food, to get her tips about the best places to start when reducing carbs. I also talk about letting go of perfectionism when trying to adjust your diet.

If you're at all like me, then even though you do meal-planning every week, and even though you have a system, it's still often really tough. So weird. But it's true, right? On this episode I dig into some of the reasons that I find it so hard to decide what to make. I'm not giving many answers here, but I'm narrowing in on figuring out what's going on, that's for sure! Our guest this week is Gillian Behnke from Mom Camp Life. We talk about her hectic schedule and her organizational system for getting dinner on the table. And we talk about perogies. Just because.