WHAT I ATE TODAY | Beef, Veggies, and The Best Slow Cooker Chicken

You can hear them in the morning. If I don't let them out early enough. They start telling me about it. Good morning, girls. They run straight to their food. Welcome back to another video. Today is gonna be a what I eat in a day. And normally my mornings are pretty straightforward. I just jump right into it. My kids are all homeschooled, so they're here with me first thing in the morning. And we all kind of usually wake up together. My two-year-old is actually still asleep, so that's kind of nice. But the rest of us are up and I usually get up, make my cup of coffee, and then figure out what else we're gonna eat that day. Today I thought it'd be fun if I did a what I eat in a day because it's gonna be completely unplanned. But yesterday I stocked up on my groceries for the week. So right now it's Monday morning. And so we're heading into a new week, but I have my fridge full of food. So I'm gonna go ahead and just show you what I eat on a daily basis. It's unplanned. It's gonna be really easy. It's just Monday. So we're just gonna have just normal stuff in the house. Hopefully that gives you some good ideas and motivation for yourself. The lighting's really weird in here right now. It's looking really stormy outside. I'm just getting my coffee made right now. I have been doing a ton of Nespresso, little espresso pods for the past few years. But recently I changed that because I just felt like it was too overstimulating. And so I've gone back to just regular old drip coffee. So there's the classic setting, and then there's the rich one. My local coffee shop or one of them, they actually have like a coffee chart with all the different coffee colors, and they ask you what color you want your coffee. So if you own a coffee shop, you need to take note because that's very important here. Yesterday it was Sunday. So on Sundays, Sunday afternoons or Sunday evening is when I'll usually get my groceries for the week, or at least the bulk of my groceries for the week. I haven't made it to the farmer's market yet, which is where I'll either stock up on meat in bulk, or I'll just buy some seasonal vegetables and fruits. But this is a sprouts order. So I just got some bacon, wild caught cod. I have a few different varieties of lettuce and some kale. I always stock up on a couple heads of cabbage because I love to make cabbage slaws and salads, a little bit more lettuce and green beans, limes. I love tons of just vegetables and fruits that I can keep in the fridge. Even if I don't have any solid plans for them yet, if I have things like cucumber, then I know I'm gonna end up throwing it in something. So typically what I'll just do is whatever's on sale or whatever is fresh right now is what I'll buy. And then I'll kind of meal plan and pick what I'm gonna do with it later. Then I always make sure to have tons of berries. They're super anti-inflammatory and just full of antioxidants. So even though they're like an extra little thing that aren't gonna fill you a ton, they're gonna fill your body full of so many nutrients. So I never leave those out. I'm a huge fan of all my yogurts and cottage cheese products. So I have some organic coconut milk yogurt, and then I have regular Icelandic plain yogurt, which I love. It's super high fat, super high protein. It's by Painterland Sisters. So if you see that near you, you have to try it. It is my absolute favorite yogurt. It's really thick, almost thicker than a Greek yogurt. And it's called Skyr, I think is how you pronounce it. It's Icelandic. I love that. And I love full fat cottage cheese from Good Culture. That's a really nice pasture raised one. And I'll just top that with things like peaches and berries or nuts. Sometimes I'll even put a little hemp seeds on it. Anything like that is just so nourishing and filling. And then I like to have a few things that I'll just throw in my freezer. I love sweet potato fries. It's super quick for the kids. If they need something quick on the side of lunch or on dinner, then I love having those ready to go in the fridge. My husband loves mush for breakfast. Those are good, quick little grab and go things. And then this is my favorite peanut butter. And sometimes for dessert, I'll pair it with a little bit of Lily's chocolate chips right in it. And it kind of tastes almost like a white chocolate fudge. Other than that, I just stocked up on a few different kombuchas and poppies for the kids. Those are such a treat for them. So I grabbed them a couple just because it's a hot time of year. And yeah, a few odds and ends, but this is my grocery shop for the week. It's pretty similar to what I usually buy. I also got some salmon, but I'm gonna be getting some of that later this week. So I just got one filet and that's everything I bought this week. The kids have had their first breakfast. We usually can't get away with having just one breakfast, but either need to have two breakfasts or a snack before I cook the main one. So I'm getting started on that now. And I'm gonna eat this too for my main meal, for my breakfast this morning. And so I'm gonna make just a normal kind of egg and sausage bowl. So a little bit of a scrambled egg bowl, but I'm gonna make a homemade pico de gallo to go on it. Cause I love just having the fresh tomatoes and everything. It's so much better than store-bought. I'm gonna use one of these heirloom tomatoes. And then I also have some cilantro here, one onion, which I would rather use a white onion, but mine aren't ready. So I'm using a yellow, just a sweet onion works great here. And then you could use a jalapeno, but I'm gonna use a poblano pepper. And then of course I've got some of my eggs for my chickens and they're nice and tiny cause we have silky chickens. So they leave really tiny eggs. So I'll use a lots of these. We need to use them up anyway. And then I'll make some sausage in the air fryer and I'll probably grate up a little bit of raw cheddar cheese too, and kind of make a little bowl out of everything. The first thing I'm doing to make this really easy pico de gallo is I just have a lime and I ended up using the juice of two limes. I'm using a little bit of poblano. This is a smaller one and I'm actually excited because I'm growing these in my garden for the first time this year and I can't wait to make this again with it. I've never had a pico de gallo with poblanos. I always thought that you had to roast poblanos first and peel them, but it turns out that you actually don't have to according to what I've read. So, and it was really delicious. So I think it's right. So I just chopped that up and I love that it's more mild than a jalapeno. This was perfect for me and the kids cause they don't like a really spicy salsa at all. They can always detect the heat. So I like to have it just really mild that way even my youngest ones can eat it. So I'm just slicing up a little bit of this heirloom tomato. I love making little sides or sauces like this that can go on top of anything cause it just adds a bunch of micronutrients and it gives you more water content and makes your meal more filling and delicious. So even if it's something really basic like eggs that I know we tend to get tired of just by going to the garden or a farmer's market and grabbing a few basic ingredients, we can turn it into something that makes our meals just that much more fantastic and adds a little variety to our meals. So I love just adding simple things like this. It's nothing fancy, but it's delicious and it's seasonal, which I love. So I have all my ingredients in here and I just add plenty of my Celtic salt to this and lots of lime juice. And the longer that sits in the fridge, the more flavorful and delicious it gets. And you could use this for breakfast on your scrambled eggs. You could use it on a salad even with like some pulled chicken or rotisserie style chicken. And it's just delicious for pretty much any meal. Now to make my eggs, I'm using a little bit of shredded raw cheddar cheese and I like to buy it in the block and then I'll shred it myself. So I'll usually just shred up the whole block and put the rest of it in the fridge and kind of prep and make sure that it's ready to go. And then I'll just whisk some eggs in a little bowl. I don't add anything to it, not even milk or half and half. I used to always do that to try to make them fluffier, but then I discovered I actually like a more dense egg. I don't like it when they're super light and fluffy or watery. So I'm just gonna go ahead and add those to my preheated cast iron griddle. This is my favorite because nothing sticks to it. And so I'll just put that in there with a little bit of butter and I just kind of push them around. I don't like to scramble them too much. I like them to almost be like an omelet and kind of stuck together. That's my favorite and leave them in nice big chunks. And then I'll just put that on my plate, top that with a little bit of cheese and wait for my sausage that's cooking in the air fryer or oven and wait for that to be done. And then I also decided just to throw a simple piece of toast on the side with a little butter again, just more healthy fats, more amino acids. And normally I would make sure it was sourdough. My homemade bread is my favorite, but sometimes, you know, life happens and you just need to do something in a pinch. So at least opting for organic or sprouted bread from the grocery store is gonna be better for your body. So breakfast is ready. This looks absolutely delicious and the salsa smells so amazing, or the pico. So I have two pieces of sausage. This is pork sausage. It's an all natural one, no nitrates or anything. And then I have my cheese and scrambled eggs. And then I decided just to throw a little bit of buttered toast on the side. This is the Dave's Killer one. This is the whole grains and seeds. I normally make sourdough bread when I'm eating bread, but I wanted to grab this over the weekend because I just didn't have time to throw together sourdough yet. So I'm gonna have one piece of that on the side with a little grass-fed butter and another cup of coffee. And that is breakfast today. Looks amazing. Okay, so I had breakfast and that kept me full all morning. All I had was a little bit more coffee and now I'm just drinking some electrolytes. These are my element. I love the orange one. That's my favorite. So I'm gonna drink all of that while I make my lunch. And today I'm just gonna make a really easy lunch. I'm gonna throw together a little bit of leftovers. I love combining like leftovers with new stuff. So I'm gonna take some leftover meat that I have from butcher box that I cooked yesterday and had for lunch. And I'm gonna kind of reuse those today and put them in a salad. And then I'm gonna do some of my favorite homemade salad dressing. It's so healthy, but it tastes delicious. It's addictive. And then I'll probably do a little bit of fruit on the side and just kind of throw together a lunch. Usually my lunches are either leftovers from the day before or I just take stuff that's in the fridge and kind of throw it together and just make sure there's plenty of whole foods and different variety of things just so that I have good energy throughout the day. So I just have this extra dressing bottle that I actually got from a restaurant one time and I'm gonna use that to make my homemade dressing. So for that, I'm gonna get some olive oil and apple cider vinegar. And then I'm also gonna use some fresh garlic cloves and you can either do one or two depending on how spicy you like your dressing. I'll probably just do maybe two cause these are kind of small actually. So I think I'm gonna do two cloves today. I'm gonna use this kind of olive oil. It's an American made one and it's cold pressed and super high in polyphenols and everything. So I'm gonna use about a quarter cup of, or no, about a third of a cup probably of olive oil. And then for my apple cider vinegar, I'm using this one. It's organic and raw with the mother. I usually buy the Fairchild one because it's not diluted. So you don't wanna spend a bunch of money on apple cider vinegar that's just diluted with water. So I'm gonna do about a quarter cup of apple cider vinegar. I added in a splash of filtered water just to help dilute it a little bit. So now you can see it's kind of murky. That's cause you have the oil and then you have the vinegar in the water. And then I'm gonna add in some salt. This is my favorite, the Celtic sea salt. I love it cause it's a nice hydrating salt. It has a lot of water content, so it's easy to absorb. And also a lot of people say that pink salt gives them headaches. I'm not exactly sure why, but I definitely know that that's a common thing. So if you find yourself getting headaches a lot, definitely don't stay away from salt, but make sure you try a good quality salt. I love any kind of Celtic salt or sea salt. You just wanna make sure you're watching out for the quality of it. You don't want a bunch of toxins and impurities. So try to find a quality one. And I'm just gonna add in a good pinch of salt while making a mess. This is not the best bottle for that. And then I'm just gonna add in a little pinch of pepper. You don't want too much pepper because the garlic cloves are already gonna make it have a little bit of heat, but it's mostly just for flavor. And then I like to take my two garlic cloves and I'll crush them to pop them out of the shell or the skin. And then I'll just use my microplane. You could use a knife and just really finely mince it or use a garlic crusher. I have lost my insert to my garlic crusher, so I can't even use that anymore, but I'm gonna use my microplane and it works great. So you just wanna make sure that you're getting it out of its little casing. So I'll just take my knife and kind of crush it and just lean on it and then it'll pop out like this. And then you can just take it along the edges and microplane it really fine and add that into your dressing bottle and shake it up. And it's as easy as that. Oh, I forgot. Sometimes I'll add in a little squeeze of honey too. I'm out of my squeezy bottle of honey, but I have this raw unfiltered honey. I love to use just local honey, but I didn't have any right now. So I like this one. It's free from pesticides and antibiotics. So it's from wild hives. I thought that was pretty cool. So I'm gonna use a little bit of this just to sweeten it up a little bit because I feel like greens always could use just a little bit of sweetness and it makes them go down so much easier. And actually now I just thought about it. It was also really easy to use like one of those squeeze tubes of garlic paste. So if you don't have a microplane grater, just get a little squeeze tube of garlic from a grocery store and that's gonna work perfectly in a ton of different salad dressings. All right, and there we go. Okay, I pretty much always have meat in my fridge. So I have a big dish this week and I have a little bit of leftover meatballs and then a few pieces of, I think they're sirloin tips. So little steak bites. And all I did was I cooked them on my griddle. I got it really hot and then put a little bit of avocado oil and some grass fed butter and cook those up and kind of fried them until they're really nice and tender and lots of salt and pepper. So they're just delicious, flavorful steak bites. I love buying meat at my local farmer's market but I know it's not available to everyone obviously and you guys always ask me where you can find good quality meat. So I've been testing out ButcherBox for myself and I'm really enjoying it. I think it's just as good as the meat that I can find here locally that's grass fed and really good quality. So it's definitely comparable and I am loving it. I've tried chicken, ribs, steak, ground beef. And now next I'm trying the bacon and salmon because I love wild caught salmon. So I'm gonna heat up some of these steak bites and then I'll put them on a bed of lettuce with that dressing I just made and a few other things. I am also gonna throw in one little mini cucumber just to add a little bit more crunch and some more water content and fiber. I love the mini ones because I feel like they have such great texture. They're like a little bit crunchier than the regular cucumbers I feel like. And I'll just add a little bit more dressing to the cucumber so it has flavor and a little bit more pepper too because I love really peppery cucumber. And then I also have this jar of organic stuffed green olives. So I'm just gonna take a couple of these out of the jar if I can get it. I'll just use my fingers. And I love the flavor that olives give and they're really good for you and they're actually fermented. So they add a nice little fermented gut boost and of course good fats from the olive. I top it with all of that delicious really tender steak. It's like perfectly cooked too. I love it this way. Just a little bit red in the middle and it's super buttery and tender. And that's a huge bowl of greens, vegetables, and meat. And then that really good gut boosting dressing with apple cider vinegar and olives. So tons of good stuff in there. And then on the side, I love to have fruit with my lunch. So I'm having a red apricot and just a regular apricot. They're in season right now. I'm gonna have two of those on the side. I also like to take a lot of tinctures and different supplements that are more natural. And so one of the things I've been taking lately up here in this jar are some Brazil nuts. These are raw and organic and they're really good if you have any issues with thyroid or you're just low in selenium. They're great for that and all you need is one. So I like to have one and they don't taste very good. So what I do is I just grab a few, few dried cranberries with one Brazil nut and that takes care of all my selenium for the day. Okay, so that is lunch today. It's really simple, wholesome, and healthy. And it doesn't have to be complicated. I love to make just quick lunches like this sometimes. That way I can focus on things like dinner that the whole family eats together and we all wanna share the same kind of dish. But sometimes just for lunches and stuff, it can be really easy and simple and use a lot of leftovers. That is so easy to do on a daily basis and make sure that you're eating plenty of healthy things. I also focus a lot on getting certain nutrients like amino acids from the beef or trace minerals from things like shrimp and shellfish or nuts. And then of course eating seasonally with a little bit of seasonal fruit. This is just like a perfect, quick, and easy lunch that's gonna keep me full for the rest of the day. Really good. Tonight for dinner, I'm making a meal that we are obsessed with. My kids have been begging me to make it again already. And I love it because it's just a really easy summer crock pot meal. So you don't have to make it in the skillet. You can make it mostly just in the crock pot, especially if you have one of those crock pots or instant pots where you can saute it first. Thinking about this, I should have made this in the instant pot because I could have sauteed the mushrooms in there. But anyway, so you can saute mushrooms. I just sliced up some portobello mushrooms or baby bella mushrooms, I can't remember. And I just saute those in a little bit of avocado oil and butter. And then at the end, I'll salt them just so that all of their liquid kind of stays in there and cooks out versus if you salt them too early, it just kind of gets soupy. So I'm gonna let those cook down until they're nice and brown and caramelized. And then I'm putting that over some chicken thighs and I season my chicken thighs with garlic powder, salt, and butter, and then a little bit of pepper too. And I just pour the mushrooms over the top of that. And I'm gonna let that slow cook for about four hours until it's nice and falling apart. And in the meantime, I love having a little latte or some kind of hot beverage in the afternoon. Sometimes it's just hot tea, but today I'm making a matcha latte. You can do this in a Nutribullet or any kind of blender. And I just do a little bit of steamed warm whole milk, a dash of maple syrup, and then my matcha powder. And I just blend that up and it's the most delicious frothy goodness. And it gives me so much sustained energy and mental clarity for the rest of the day. So I'm finishing off dinner. I have the chicken that's been slow cooking for just a few hours. And now I'm gonna kind of finish up the sauce. So I have a little bit of half and half here. You could use heavy cream or milk. And then I'm gonna add in a little bit of arrowroot powder. This is basically just a thickener, kind of like cornstarch, but a little bit of a healthier version. So I'm gonna use a little bit of this and I'm gonna whisk it right into the cream. That way it is really smooth and doesn't become chunky when you add it into the chicken broth juice. So I'm gonna put that in. And then I have a little bit of Parmesan. This is pre-grated. I just grabbed it one day really quickly from Sprouts, but it doesn't have any extra powders or anything they use to kind of add to the cheese to powder it. It's just pre-grated, which isn't the best, but it definitely works. So I'm gonna throw this in cause I need to use it up. And then I'm gonna serve all of this over a little bit of fresh zucchini and squash that's coming out of the garden right now. Cause we have a bunch of it, a bunch of different kinds, yellow zucchini, regular zucchini, and multiple kinds of squashes. And they are so delicious. So we've been eating a ton of them. I just really simply saute it in a little bit of butter and sometimes oil, like avocado oil, and just do a little bit of salt and pepper, garlic. And instead of serving something like this over rice or pasta, which you can definitely do, it's delicious. I'm gonna use some of that summer produce and just saute a whole bunch of squash and zucchini and serve the chicken and mushroom sauce right over it. I'm using about half a cup of half and half. And then I'm just adding in, I think around a tablespoon and a half of arrowroot powder just into that cold half and half. And I'll just whisk that with a fork. And that way it dissolves in there. And then when you add it in and it hits that hot chicken, it instantly starts to thicken it and makes the most delicious and easy cream sauce. This is such a great hack for making like Alfredos and stuff in the crock pot. It just makes it come together really quickly. And you can see after just about five minutes, it thickens up so beautifully. And then I top it with that Parmesan cheese and it thickens it more and turns it into a delicious chicken and mushroom Alfredo sauce. My zucchini and squash, delicious, amazing. Look at that. So I'm gonna go ahead and turn the crock pot off and get my zucchini and squash cooking now. So I'm gonna use the zucchini. This is a crooked neck squash. These are some of my favorites, bro. And then just regular squash. And then I also have some yellow zucchini. I don't know if I have any ready to pick today though, but probably by tomorrow. So I'm gonna go ahead and take these and just cut them up and get them sautéed over really high heat in a little bit of avocado oil. And I'll add a little bit of butter just to give it some extra flavor. And then I'll serve this delicious chicken Alfredo sauce that we made in the crock pot right over the top. This is amazing, you guys. It's gonna be delicious. Whenever I'm sautéing the zucchini, I just like to let it sit in the pan for a little while without disturbing it or stirring it too much. That way, all the little brown bits that you get when your pan's really hot and the vegetables start to release those natural sugars get caramelized and then you end up with a nice really brown exterior and amazing flavor. So don't just stir it all the time and leave it to kind of steam. Even if the pan is pretty crowded, you can still just kind of leave it and it will form that really nice brown crust. Then you give it a little toss and each little piece will get a little more of that brown crust. So that's a little tip if you're trying to get some good flavor into things like squash and zucchini. Definitely don't just try to steam it. Make sure you get some brown bits on it. That way you get really good flavor developed.