February 2020 – the nutritional reset

In my last post, Top 10 Reasons to Love Your Leftovers, I blogged about how leftovers are the BFF of any busy person wanting to eat healthily. A pressure cooker (or slow cooker for that matter) is an indispensable tool for the busy cook. Why? Because:

it’s fantastic for cooking big batches,
the recipes that work best in it are usually suitable for freezing,
it requires very little supervision while working it’s magic,
and the “delay start” and “keep warm” functions give you a lot of flexibility around preparation and serving times.

So for the cook who is short on time and under pressure, here is my Under Pressure Menu, a day’s worth of delectable recipes made in a pressure cooker. And you can easily adapt them for a slow cooker if you prefer. All the dishes keep for up to four days in the fridge or you can freeze them for future use.

I hope these recipes spur those of you who have an Instant Pot languishing on your shelf to whip up a batch of yummy chocolate oatmeal, wild rice & mushroom soup or Thai chicken curry. Feel free to share the recipes with your family and friends. Better still, I encourage you to recruit two friends and each of you whip up one dish and then swap. You’ll get three meals for the effort of one! Sign up here to receive the recipes – it’s time to thrive under pressure!

Under Pressure Menu

Breakfast: Pressure Cooker Chocolate Steel Cut Oats (cacao is a natural mood booster and helps regulate appetite – what better way to start your day?)

Lunch: Pressure Cooker Wild Rice & Mushroom Soup (I serve this up with some baby spinach or kale stirred in just before serving – it’s a great way to amp up your intake of dark, leafy greens)

Dinner: Pressure Cooker Thai Chicken and Vegetables (this curry is vibrant with colourful veggies – if you like it spicy like I do, some organic Sriracha, like this one by Simply Natural, is a must)

Join The Nutritional Reset community here to receive this month’s menu today (as well as each month to come)! And read on for some nutritional tidbits about a few foods featured in the recipes…

I was at the Yoga Warrior Winter Reset Retreat last weekend to “dish the deets on detox” and a few themes came up whenever talk of cooking arose. One was that no one has any time to cook and the other was how much everyone loved their Instant Pot. So with that and Valentine’s Day coming up, I feel it is time to confess my own love affair … with leftovers! And since I am usually cooking just for two, the Instant Pot and leftovers go hand-in-hand!

But I actually plan for leftovers. In fact, leftovers are a meal planning secret weapon to make my life (at least my cooking life) easier. And when providing meal planning services, you can bet that leftovers are a part of the plan for my clients too.

Leftovers get a bad rap. Even their very name makes them seem like discarded, lonely old things that no one wants. But, to me, leftovers are pure gold! As they should be to any time-pressed person out there who wants to eat healthy food. And isn’t that most of us? So, to explain my attraction to leftovers, I’ve put together my top 10 reasons why you, too, should love your leftovers!