HIGH PROTEIN LOW CALORIE MEAL | why I make this cauliflower fried rice on repeat!

If you too are working on the skill set of building higher protein, lower calorie meals, then you're gonna love this recipe because I'm showing you how to make a fried cauliflower rice that is loaded with veggies, high in fiber, packed with protein, lots of volume, comes together in 15 minutes, and is absolutely delicious. But first, if we have not met, I'm Dani Spies. I am a health eating psychology and weight loss coach, and I love to make healthy eating feel easy. Now, the best thing about this recipe is that you are using everyday ingredients. A lot of these ingredients are coming straight from the freezer, and it takes very little prep. So all you really need to do in advance is chop up a few vegetables. I've already cut up half of a white onion. I've got a bit of fresh garlic, two cloves of garlic, some fresh chopped scallions for finishing. And then I do wanna chop up some bell pepper because I like to put a little bit of fresh pepper in there as well. Now, for me, whenever I'm cutting peppers, I have found the easiest way to do it is to cut off what I like to call the pepper cheeks. We don't need the whole pepper, about half of it. And then I cut the pepper into strips, and then you just rotate, come around the other way, and then you've got a nice little chopped pepper. Now, I know because of past videos and comments that you have all left in the comment section that many of us are working towards some health and fitness goals right now. As I've shared before, I turned 50 this year. I've been working with a fitness coach the last few years, and a big part of this journey has been trying to increase my protein intake. Now, here's the thing. Increasing protein, to me, is not really that hard, but what is hard is increasing protein intake without increasing overall food intake, which is why I love recipes like this that are high volume, a little bit lower calorie, but also high in fiber and the protein, so it keeps you really satisfied. You get like you're eating a nice big bowl of food, and you just feel content and happy when you're done eating. Okay, so once you've got the base ingredients prepped, this all happens at the stove, so this truly is the kind of meal you could pull together on a Tuesday night when you think you don't have time to cook or when you think takeout would be faster, because this is actually faster. Okay, so I have two pans here. One is gonna be for the main show. That's where we're gonna make the cauliflower rice, and then I have another pan here where I'm going to make my eggs. I like to scramble the eggs on the side, and then I just add them in at the end. So we're gonna get both of these pans preheating to like a medium, medium-low heat, specifically the eggs. Remember, if you want nice fluffy eggs, low and slow is the key. I'm gonna spray both of these pans with a little bit of non-aerosol cooking spray. You never wanna use aerosol on nonstick pans because that will ruin your pans, but non-aerosol, fantastic option. And then for my eggs, I've got two eggs, two whole eggs here ready to go, and I'm going to add to this a half a cup of egg whites. Now, I always buy and recommend you buy your egg whites pre-separated, right? It's just a lot less waste, and it's super convenient. I personally, as somebody who is working to maintain a little bit of a higher protein diet, love egg whites because they're so convenient. They're basically pure protein, and if you buy them pre-separated like this, you can use them in all sorts of recipes. I use them for pancakes, French toast. I put them in my oatmeal. You name it, I love egg whites. Okay, so let's grab a fork, and we'll whisk this together. Also important to note, whole eggs are fabulous. They're super nutrient-dense. They are very good for you, and if you don't want to do the egg white thing, you could just use more whole eggs. That totally works as well. The eggs and the egg whites are the main source of protein in this recipe, but if you wanted to bump the protein even higher, you could do a little shredded chicken. You could do ground beef. I mean, really any type of protein that you had left over in your fridge, you could add to this rice when it's done. Okay, let's give them a little seasoning, a little salt, a little black pepper. Okay, while those are starting, we're also going to start the rice. So the first thing I do here, I probably didn't need to spray that pan, actually, because I'm gonna use a little bit of toasted sesame oil. Toasted sesame oil is a flavor bomb. A little bit goes a long way, so you don't even need a tablespoon. I would say a couple teaspoons is really all you need, but it really creates a great base flavor because it's nutty and it's loud. It's got a really good flavor, so don't skip the sesame oil if you have it. Then we're gonna get some veggies going for the rice. I've got a half of an onion here. This is a white onion. That sizzle lets you know that your oil's ready to go. And then we've got a little bit of garlic as well. Two cloves of chopped garlic. All right, I'm just gonna let this go just a minute or two. You want for those veggies to soften a bit and to become translucent. So we're gonna let that happen. Now in the egg pan, I'm just gonna start to scramble my eggs. And I have learned throughout the years, if you want your scrambled eggs to be light and fluffy, you don't need to add oil. You really don't even need to add butter. You just have to cook them low and slow. Keep them low and slow, and you'll get beautiful, fluffy eggs just like this. And I'm not gonna let them go too much because they're gonna be sitting in the hot pan, which is also gonna allow them to keep cooking. So we're just gonna shut that off. We'll set it on the back burner, okay? Okay, so as these veggies are softening, I also wanna show you that the other vegetables I used for this recipe, I used this medley of frozen vegetables. So truly, this is like a very convenient recipe. You don't need to have a bunch of fresh produce sitting in your fridge. This is a combination of green beans, corn, peas, and carrots. But you can really use any combination of frozen veggies that you like. As a matter of fact, this is what the bag looks like that I bought. And you'll notice these are not organic. This is just like a bag of frozen vegetables. I like to always remind myself that you do not want to let perfection be the enemy of very good, okay? So you don't need to buy organic vegetables to be eating your veggies. Okay, so my onions and my garlic have softened. They're a little bit translucent. So into the pan is going to go those frozen veggies. This is two cups. And again, it could be any frozen veggie medley that excites you. And I also have that bell pepper that we diced up as well. So we'll just let that go for a couple of more minutes. I'll give that a stir. I mean, it's already so pretty and so colorful. And the beauty of this recipe is that it's basically a bowl of vegetables. So you get a lot of volume. You're going to get a lot of nutrients and you're also going to have plenty of fiber. The other thing I want to show you is that the cauliflower rice that I'm using, again, this is frozen. So I buy this right at the freezer section of my grocery store. It's so convenient. You don't have to worry about any produce going bad in your fridge. And we're going to need about four cups today. Usually what I do, four to five cups. Usually what I do is I just take it out of the fridge and let it sit on the counter while I'm getting everything ready. And that pretty much defrosts it alone, but I already had some going there. But if it was frozen, that would be fine too. You could toss it right in there frozen. And if you didn't want this to be such a light recipe, you could certainly use regular rice as well, or you could do 50-50. Maybe do half jasmine rice and half of the cauliflower rice. So as always, these recipes are, my recipes are very flexible and you want to use them and adapt them to whatever your goals are or whatever chapter or season of life you are in, okay? So we're going to toss this together. One of the biggest questions that I get, I've noticed since I started doing more high-protein recipes, is people ask me, you know, how do I increase my protein intake without eating too much fruit? And I totally get that because I don't think it's that hard to eat more protein, but I do think it can be tricky to find the balance of then eating less of something else, right? Because you got to think about it. If you're eating more protein, you can't eat high protein and high carb and high fat. You got to create that balance, right? So focusing on vegetables is a really easy way to balance that out, right? Add more veggies, add more protein, and you can make some really beautiful satiating meals. All right, as they start to cook, you can see that the frozen edge is off of them. They're getting tender. The pan is super colorful. Can you see this thing? I'm going to add in my cauliflower rice. So anywhere between four to five cups of the rice. And again, this could also be regular rice if you wanted it to be, or it could be a split of the two. And then we're going to do a few tablespoons of a low-sodium soy sauce. If you can't do the soy sauce, you could also sub in some, what is it called? I'm just going to eyeball this. It's about a quarter cup that we're doing, maybe a little less. Tamari, you could do tamari. All right, so let's mix that, get everything incorporated. You want to get all of the soy sauce distributed throughout. You really don't need to add a lot of salt to this recipe because the soy sauce has a lot of sodium and it really adds a lot of flavor. So we'll just let that go. Once you've got everything mixed together, you can just pop a lid on this and let it cook for five, eight minutes. Really, the name of the game is just for it to heat through. Let me look for a lid. Now, as I was grabbing my lid, I realized I never added the ginger and the ginger is a key player here. So we're going to add it in now. I love buying this minced ginger in a jar. I used to always do the fresh ginger, but while it's easy enough to deal with, it is a little bit time consuming. This is a dream. It's already minced up. It's all ready to go. So you leave it in your fridge and you can just scoop it up. Actually, what I'm going to do is make a little hole so I can get it into the pan. Ideally, you would have wanted to add this with your onions and your garlic, but this will just also go to show you that at the end of the day, you just keep moving forward. You just make it work. So we'll mix that in there and as this cooks, that ginger is going to permeate throughout the whole pan. Okay, just make it happen. Then I'm going to pop my lid on. And really from here, we're just letting this cook to heat everything through. So we've got a lid. She barely fits. We're going to make it happen. There we go. Now, for those of you who feel like you have a hard time increasing your protein intake, because I know that a lot of people struggle with that. You're like, how in the world can I possibly eat that much protein? I want to just show you how easy it can be, right? So this recipe, I think the way it stands, if this was going to serve four people, has about 12, 14 grams of protein per serving. But say you wanted to get to that 30 grams of protein base. So this little bit of chicken, this is 85 grams of chicken, which is three ounces of chicken, delivers just under 30 grams of protein. So it just goes to show you that with a little bit of attention or a little bit of intention, you really can easily boost your protein intake. And this doesn't have to be chicken. This could be ground beef. This could be any type of leftover protein that you have hanging out in your fridge. Anything you love. You could even just do more eggs or more egg whites if you wanted to have the meal reach that 30 gram baseline, which is what I personally try to do. So I am going to toss this in. I'm going to toss this in now, since it's not really heated up yet. And you know what? While we're at it, we're going to toss our eggs in too. So we've got our eggs that we've already cooked. I'm going to break those up. Well, let's get them in and then we'll break them up. So that's the combination of the eggs and the egg whites. I always just cook them on the side and then add them in. But this is a really great way to show you too, if you wanted to make this recipe for meal prep, you could do this cauliflower base with all of the veggies, cook it, have it hanging out in your fridge. And then when it's time to eat, just like pick your protein party. Go, hmm, do I feel like adding eggs? Do I feel like adding chicken? Do I feel like adding pork? Do I feel like adding beef? Do I feel like adding tofu? Do I feel like adding edamame? Edamame, great source of plant-based protein, right? So many options. So like, I always tell myself, and I'll tell you the same thing, is like, don't make it harder than it needs to be. Let it be easy. Notice how your brain will argue sometimes to make things harder than they need to be. And if you're like, that's not me, more power to you, because I'm telling you right now, that is me. So we want to let it be easy. Okay, just look how beautiful this is. Feels like this makes me so happy. I mean, I made this while chatting with you guys and I don't even think we've hit the 10 minute mark yet. It's so quick, it's so easy. This is the kind of meal you're pulling from your freezer. This is gonna be in your house faster than it would take you to pick up the phone in order from the local Chinese joint, okay? So once everything is heated through, which you can see mine is, it's steamy, it's dreamy, it smells like heaven. I like to finish it with some fresh scallions, which I chopped up, just like a nice, mild onion flavor, has great texture. And then some toasted sesame seeds. This is actually a combination of sesame seeds and sea salt. So I just like to sprinkle that over the top as well. And my darling, we're gonna dish this up and we're gonna give it a taste. How good does it smell? It smells so good. Okay, I mean, before anything else, I feel like we need to just discuss how beautiful this pan is. It's just like, so beautiful. If you wanted, you could divide this up into four, put it into some meal prep containers, you're ready to go. But if you're just gonna serve it, you can put this right out on the table, let everybody fill up their bowl. I added that little bit of extra chicken in there, so we've got the eggs with the egg whites and the chicken. So we've got a nice protein-packed meal, so much color, lots of fiber, tons of vegetables, and seriously, just so satisfying. I probably have enough in here, but I feel like I want one more scoop. Okay, then of course, if you wanted to, to your own personal bowl, you could do like a little extra scallion over the top, a little extra sesame seed over the top. If you wanted to, you could even do a little extra soy sauce, whatever turns you on. But come on, how gorgeous is that? How easy was that? And how excited are you to make this? If you enjoy easy, healthy, high-protein recipes like this, make sure you take a moment to subscribe to the channel and like this video and head down to the description box below because I have a protein playbook if you are interested. It's 100% free, and I'll leave that link for you as well. As always, I thank you for watching. Let me know what you guys want to see next, and I will see you next week with some more clean and deliciousness. Cheers. Oh, I didn't even taste it, I didn't even taste it. That's rude. Mm, mm, chef's kiss, so good. It's amazing how such a simple meal can be so delightfully delicious.