5-Ingredient Healthy Recipes in 15 Minutes

Don't you think that healthy eating has become so complicated and that's because at the end of the day someone is trying to sell you something. Could be a book, a new diet plan, new superfood, or a magic pill. But at the end of the day healthy eating should be simple. Today I'm going to show you five different recipes using five different ingredients that are really simple yet tasty. So a lot of you have been commenting online that I have gained weight. Yes, I'm gonna come clean. I've gained about six kilos since this whole pandemic slash lockdown happened. I'm currently not in my home country. I am stuck in Australia and I didn't know that six months down the line I would still be here. I've always known that my body is susceptible to weight gain and I've always been very conscious of that in terms of the food choices that I make. But I'm just not used to this level of inactivity where for the last seven months I've only really been able to go outside just to get groceries. In any case I've been trying my best to eat healthy and eat clean. Now, what does that mean exactly? It means eating very simple food with limited ingredients and limited seasoning. So unlike what you think and what you might see here on YouTube, my day-to-day dishes are actually quite boring. Unfortunately, I can't really post about those much because someone would rather click on a video that says the best grilled cheese ever versus beans, tomatoes, chicken and arugula, for example. It's just not as sellable. Each of the five following recipes are made with five different ingredients. These ingredients are not set in stone. You can interchange them. They're also cooked very simply with some pantry staples that you might have lying around at home, showing you that healthy food doesn't need to be the most exciting thing in the world, but it can still be quite tasty and made with affordable ingredients. For our standard pantry ingredients we will be using some salt, pepper, fish sauce, olive oil and vinegar and some butter. For our first dish, our five ingredients are chicken thighs, scallions, white beans, garlic and tomato sauce. The first thing we want to do is cook the chicken. In your hot pan on medium heat, heat one tablespoon of extra-virgin olive oil. Make sure it's spread all over properly. Place your bone-in chicken thighs, skin side down, season with salt and reduce the fire to medium-low. You're gonna want to cook this for about 10 minutes, so quite slowly, uncovered and then 10 minutes covered, just on one side, making sure to check it frequently just so that it doesn't burn. This will render the fat in the thighs and crisp up the skin. After 15 to 20 minutes, flip them, cover and cook for a further 10 minutes or until cooked. In another pan, saute two cloves of sliced garlic until tender, not brown, before adding your rinsed and strained beans. Any beans will do. Toss everything together, add in your tomato sauce and a little bit of water. Reduce it gently and cook for 15 minutes on low heat. Make sure to season it with salt. When ready, place your beans on your plate, the chicken and our fifth ingredient, some sliced scallions. Finish with some salt and pepper. For our second dish, we have broccolini, chicken thighs, eggs, lemon and mustard. Remember the chicken we just did? Well, it's the same chicken. While that's cooking, get another pan out, place one teaspoon of oil, get it nice and hot and give your broccolini a good char for about three minutes, then flip them around a little bit and then add in some hot water. It'll help create steam which will then cook the broccolini slightly faster. When the water is gone, toss in half a teaspoon of butter and some salt. Honestly, any vegetable you like to saute will work in this dish. So don't stop yourself just because you can't find broccolini. For our eggs, boil some water, place in some cold eggs and cook for seven minutes before plunging into an ice bath. We are looking for an almost hard-boiled egg here, but still quite jammy in the center. Let's quickly make our sauce. Some red wine vinegar, Dijon mustard, lemon juice and olive oil slowly incorporated while beating. We're just looking to bring this all together. Place your broccolini on the plate, top with some chopped chicken, your sliced egg and drizzle with your dressing. Season with salt and pepper if needed. For our third dish, we have pumpkin, coconut milk, shrimps, garlic and ginger. Get your pan out on medium heat, heat up your olive oil, fry your garlic and ginger until you see a little bit of browning, usually about three minutes. Toss in your pumpkin and cover with water and some coconut milk. Simmer this together until the sauce thickens slightly and your pumpkin is really soft. At this point, you want kind of like the natural fats that are in coconut milk to separate just a little bit, so it really brings in more of a fatty feel in your mouth, which is quite delicious. Season this with some fish sauce. At this point, you can add in your shrimp and cook them for about five minutes. This is perfect alone, but if you really want some white rice, go for it. Just remember that one portion of rice is actually not one cup, but half a cup. I'm sorry to break the news. Okay, I have a huge announcement to make. If you are not following me on other social media platforms and you probably don't know that I recently launched an app called Rebel. It is absolutely free, 100%, no hidden fees. It's available on both iOS and Android. So what can you find on that app? Well, we've shot with my team over the last couple of months almost 200 workout at home videos. We also have really healthy recipes that you can try out and things like guided meditation. So anything you need, everything you need, all in one app and all 100% free. So if I were you, I would click the link in the description below like now and download Rebel on your phone. You have nothing to lose. When you're on the app, no one's gonna ask you to pay for anything. It's literally a library of videos that we've shot in the Philippines with Filipino coaches that hopefully bring value to your life and will hopefully help you start your own fitness journey. Okay, back to our recipe. For our fourth dish, we have sweet potatoes, canned tunas, eggs, sour cream, and chives. I love this one. I literally can eat it every day. Grate your sweet potatoes. In a bowl, mash your strained tuna. I'm using a spicy one here and mix that with your eggs and sweet potatoes until a paste forms. Heat some oil on medium heat, place in your mix, and cook on low until the bottom is set, about eight minutes. Flip and cook for another five to eight minutes. Basically, you want this to have a shape of like a big pancake or a rosti, if you know what that is. This gets topped off with a little bit of sour cream, some chopped chives, salt, and pepper. A little bit of fish for our final dish. Do you like that rhyme? Here are the ingredients you need. Frozen peas, kale, lemon, basa filets, or any kind of fish really, and almond milk, or any kind of milk really. Heat up some oil in a pan on medium heat, toss in your peas, cook down for two minutes before adding some chopped kale or whatever dark leafy green that can be cooked. Cook this down together for about five minutes before adding any of your milk. Season this with some salt and then simmer until slightly thicker. Now, this won't get like really creamy and thick, but it should slightly thicken up. For our fish, I'm gonna use some basa filets, but really, as I said, any fish filet will do. That goes in a hot pan with some hot oil and butter. I flipped this around the three-minute mark, or when I started noticing a nice brown crust on my fish. Obviously, depending on how thick your filet is, the cook times will be very different. But one thing's for sure, make sure to season your fish. To serve, place your greens on a plate, top with your fish. Make sure not to throw this away. You want to keep all that butter and oil and just place it back in. And then squeeze on some fresh lemon. Season that with some salt and pepper, only if needed. Finally done. All in all, that took me about an hour and 45 minutes to cook. Keep in mind that I was shooting everything by myself as well. So if I wasn't shooting anything, each of these dishes, from prep to cooking time, would probably have taken 10 to 15 minutes at most, which is what I think healthy eating should be. It should be fast, convenient, and if you look at it, it's all kind of like the same style of plating. Very rustic, very using whatever ingredients were part of the five ingredients for each of these dish... dishes. Okay, so we're going to start with the sweet potato and tuna cote-en-cote torta. Get a little bit of that sour cream. Really simple type of ingredients. If you don't have sour cream, it's fine. You can put yogurt. If you don't have yogurt, it's fine. You can do without the yogurt completely. All you need really are eggs, tuna, and some sweet potatoes to make this dish. Next I have our shrimp pumpkin curry. If you don't have pumpkin, you can use squash. If you don't have squash, you can use sweet potatoes. If you don't have coconut milk, you can use broth. Like literally the whole point of these dishes is that you can sub anything out. So simple, really kind of fatty because of the coconut milk that's in there. That's rendered out and left to split a little bit. And even just garlic, ginger, and fish sauce really brings the dish together. If I had ten other ingredients to add, I would. Kaffir lime leaves, a little bit of citrus in there, a little bit of vinegar, a little bit of sugar would take it a long way. But just as is, if you really want to stick to the rules of just five ingredients per dish, it is really delicious. So during this whole process, I don't want to hear anyone in the comments saying things like, oh, well, I can't make that dish at home because I don't have this or I don't have that. The whole point of this is to show you that if you have, if you like, for example, look at this dish. It has beans. If you don't have these white beans or butter beans or cannellini beans, cannellini, I don't know if that's the proper way to say it. You can use lentils. You can use mung beans, mung go. You can use whatever kind of beans within that family will work just as fine. So that's the whole point. If you don't have chicken, use whatever protein you have and just make it work. Let's try this. Chicken's really moist, tender, not hot anymore because I was taking pictures of everything. Beans really simple, but so hearty. Like you finish this whole dish. It's a lot of food. Next, we have our chicken and broccolini. If you don't have broccolini, use regular broccoli. If you don't have regular broccoli, use pechay. If you don't have pechay, use Chinese broccoli. If you don't have Chinese broccoli, use whatever like thick green vegetable you can find. I'm sure you'll find something. That with a little vinaigrette really brings everything together. The eggs is just for an extra touch of protein if you want to try to eat high protein. Eats more like a salad, which is quite nice. This would be really good with like zucchini or asparagus as well. Last but not least, our fish. So again, and I don't want to sound like a broken record, use whatever fish you have available. Whatever fish, especially if you're trying not to spend too much money, use whatever cheapest fish you can find in your area. And you can do this dish quite easily at home. If you don't have kale, you don't have to use kale. Kale here is quite easy to get. So I'm just using the ingredients that I have around me. But if you're in the Philippines, you can use any kind of like green leaves, any dahon. Dahon ng silik would be perfect for this kind of dish. It won't get as creamy as if you were to add cream. The cream is just slightly fattier and a little less healthy than using just the almond milk that we use. If you don't want to use almond milk, you can use dairy milk also as well. Tasty, simple, healthy, and easy to put together in a very short amount of time, which was the point today. Now, will this dish be as good as a pizza? Or as a fried piece of pork belly? Of course not. That's why we need to change our perspective of food and look at it purely as something we're using to fuel ourselves versus something to entertain us. But if we can do it in a way that is also pleasing to the palate, then we've won. Peace out.