In The Kitchen With Dan

Hi, it's Dan Cunningham, and I am a life organization and culinary coach right here on Cadre. If you haven't met me before, and if you have, welcome back. So I love to check in every Sunday and teach everybody some tips, some tricks, some healthy recipes, quick recipes. I love to save people time and money in the kitchen. And one of the main reasons I love to do that is because so many people have anxiety, and they get anxious when they think about cooking in the kitchen or, you know, making a meal for people or even just throwing something together really quick.

So many people. In fact, as I was working as an organizer, one of the main difficulties people experience with disorganization is running their kitchen properly so that they can prepare healthy meals, you know, on a regular basis. Just not, you know, once in a while, a little prep, a little planning, always helps in the kitchen. It makes cooking more fun, more enjoyable. And all in all, you end up much more healthy the more you eat at home and choose healthy ingredients for yourself. So today, I'm just gonna run through some tips and tricks for you.

They're all over the map. So this is kind of a potpourri day, and we're not gonna be doing any actual cooking today, but always check in, because usually I'm throwing something together really quick. Barbara, hello, and welcome another Cadre contributor. And if you haven't checked out any of Barbara's videos, you definitely want to do that. Thanks for checking in, Barbara. It's great to see you. So I'm going to get started. The first tip and trick I'm going to talk about, it's so funny because it's kale.

And I laugh because so many people don't like kale. Become kind of this joke in the, in the food industry about healthy eating and kale and how everybody just can't take it. So here's one way. And I myself, I went to a restaurant once, and I had a Caesar salad that was made with kale. And I thought, oh, you know, this can't be that bad. It was so hideous. I did not like it at all. And I'm not sure, maybe they didn't do this, but kale loves to be massaged. So if you're cooking with kale, and I'm going to teach you a really quick recipe that you might want to try, give kale a try.

If you haven't, massage the kale with seasoned oil and put whatever seasoning you want on it. You can use lemon zest or, you know, seasoned salt or garlic or whatever you like, and they come in a bunch of different varieties, too. These we have, we call them where I'm from in Michigan, kale Mizzou chips. So, anyway, that's kind of a little funny name for our, for our kale chips here. But massage your, your kale with oil and whatever flavor you want, and then put it in an oven at 350 and just let it dehydrate a little bit, and it shrinks up into these crunchy little chips.

Try it. Get some kale. Put some olive oil in there, rub it together. Kale loves to be massaged. And then throw it in, get all the moisture out of it, and it makes these really tasty, healthy kale chips. So give it a try. That's one, one thing that I wanted to pass along. Luke, it is great to see you, and it's always good to see you in the live. And Barbara says, let my kale sit in the dressing. Yes, yes, yes. Kale loves a little help. So that might be why people don't like it. All right, I'm going to move on from kale.

I'm going to talk about reviving stale bread. So everybody will pull a loaf out, I'm sure, at some point in their life, and it's a little beyond fresh. So this is a way to freshen it up. So, to revive stale bread, you wet your hands with water, and you wipe the. And this works for a whole loaf? Doesn't really work for or rolls. Just wet your hands and rub the loaf with water, and then put it in the oven at 350 for about five minutes, and it'll revive your bread, and it'll be a little bit more fresh feeling and tasting.

Okay, so we talked about kale a little bit. We talked about bread. The Dan chuckle. I'll tell you what I have had. You know, when I talk about, when I talk about struggles in my life, I've had so many. I suffered from depression and anxiety as a child. I was in therapy at first, at 16 years old. So, anyway, I say all that because laughter has been so important for me in my life. And it's something that I've always, even since I was little, I loved to make people smile, and it makes me smile. So, I don't know, I just end up being.

I ended up, you know, at this point in my life, really acknowledging and celebrating the importance of laughter and smiling and sharing that with other people. I do an experiment when I walk by people really often, and it's the smile experiment. If you look somebody in the eye and just smile I'd say 99% of the time, you get a smile back, and it just, just to see somebody smile back. There's so many of us now that just pass each other on the street with our heads down. And I love doing this, especially at the store or, you know, if I'm on a walk in the park or whatever, everybody's so ground focused, you know, or they're in their device.

And so if somebody's walking along, I love to just crack him a smile. And I learned that from Richard Gere. He talked about that in an interview I think he had with Barbara Walters. And I just loved the idea. I thought it was so cool. So I call it my smile experiment, and I encourage you guys to do it, too. Spread a little smile and a chuckle. All right, so I'm going to talk about storing herbs a little bit. So there are two herbs that I happen to buy a lot, parsley and cilantro. Of. I buy them because cilantro is really difficult to grow.

And up here in the north, you know, we have a short growing season. So I always buy my cilantro instead of trying to grow it. I think I tried once, and I got, like three little crusty leaves out of a whole batch. My thumb is not green. My shirt is green. My thumb is not green. Buying cilantro and parsley, store it in your refrigerator like you would fresh flowers. Put the cilantro or the parsley. You want to snip the ends with scissors just as it comes in a bunch. Just snip the whole batch off at the end and put it in a glass of water and cover it with a ziploc bag or plastic bag, whatever.

If you want to get really, really great, you'll, you know, take a rubber band and attach the bag. I just dropped the bag over. This acts as a greenhouse almost. I mean, it's, it keeps these herbs so fresh. I just pulled some parsley out. I was going to show it to you, but it was a little past good viewing. But it had been in my fridge for a month. A month. And there was still a lot of the batch that was still usable. So it's a great way to store, store those two herbs. Parsley, cilantro like to be stored like flowers in the fridge in a glass of water with a little bag over them.

Oh, cilantro. Cilantro is really good in spanish cuisine and mexican cuisine. Lots of cilantro. It adds a really great fresh flavor. A lot of people don't like it, and it's a genetic thing. I learned that from 23 andme. I don't know if you guys are familiar with that, but the DNA test kits that are popular, there is an indicator, a DNA indicator in people that think that cilantro tastes like soap. So if somebody says they don't like cilantro, they're probably not just saying it because they don't want it or want to taste it.

They probably just really genetically don't like it. So anyway, enough about cilantro. If you need to peel tomatoes, this is a really quick way. Just plunge them in boiling water for 20 seconds and pull them out and plunge them in ice water. And that technique is called blanching. Now, the 20 seconds is really quick for tomatoes because you just want to get it hot enough for the peels to come right off. And they will. If you plunge them in ice water for five minutes and then pull them out, the skins will peel right off.

Really easy way. If you need to peel tomatoes, I suggest canned sand. San Marzano, it's a little slow today. San Marzano tomatoes canned are really good if you got to go with the hand variety. So that's a, that's a quick shortcut, too. Oh, Luke, Attica, I love your messages. Thank you so much. Thank you, Barbara. And I love cilantro, too. I really do. It's so good. All right, this is another time saving tip. Prep ahead smoothies. So, so many folks love healthy smoothie in the morning. You can make them with low fat yogurt and fruits.

And, you know, nobody's a stranger to a smoothie, I'm pretty sure. And a great way to make sure that you can get one of those in the morning and save yourself some time is prep ahead. Everything, the things you can freeze, freeze the things that you can't put in the fridge and put yourself together some smoothie bags or kits. That way, in the morning, you don't have to measure out all the individual stuff. It's all ready to go. Blend it up and you're good to go. So prep ahead smoothies. Keep that in mind.

All right, so here are some great ideas for breakfast burritos in the morning. Breakfast burritos are great. You can get tortillas in all different varieties and sizes. You can do whole wheat. You can do low carb. It's a great vessel for getting our food right. Excuse me. So if you're going to make one burrito, make ten, and set yourself up a little burrito making stand or whatever. Do your eggs, do whatever you like in your burrito. Make it up, make a bunch, and then roll your burritos up, wrap them in foil or, you know, your wrap of choice.

You can even gather them in a glass container to keep in the fridge or the freezer. And these are great. You want to microwave them. If you do that for about a minute and a half for a frozen burrito, and you'll be ready to go. Really great. Quick thing to grab when you're heading out the door. Eat it on the way. I took a road trip with my uncle, and his wife was from Mexico, and they loved making homemade tortillas. But when I climbed in the van for this road trip, they had a cooler in the back, and it was filled with burritos, all different kinds, like peanut butter and jelly.

And they had breakfast and they had, you know, lunch burritos. Anyway, I just thought it was such a cool way to travel and have a variety of different things all there ready to roll. It saves so much time. They didn't have to pull over only for gas. Got a little tired of burritos. But they do stop and do one really nice dinner. So instead of stopping all the time and just picking up little bites as they go, they keep the burritos in the cooler, and then they stop and have a really nice meal. So I loved that travel method, and I think it's a great.

Burritos are great. Grab and go for the morning. Here's another breakfast tip. But bacon is good all day long. If you're doing just a single batch of bacon just for you or a smaller batch, just take a couple pieces, wrap it in paper towel, and microwave it until it's crispy. It's usually like three minutes, not even sometimes. But the great thing about that is there's no mess. Bacon, all the grease just goes in the paper towel. You unwrap it, you're good to go. I do this a lot for recipes. Frying a whole pan of bacon is kind of a pain sometimes if you just need a little.

So that's a good tip for recipes or just folks who are wanting to make a quick blt just for them. Okay, this one I love. I talked about this all the time in, and, you know, fresh herbs are not cheap sometimes, and sometimes you only need a little bit. Now you have all this fresh herb that you purchased, and you don't want it to go to waste. So you chop em up, you prep em, you know, you wash em and chop em just like you did in your recipe. And you get out an ice tray. If you still have those, if not, you can get them at the dollar store and you can get them in a bunch of different sizes now, which are really fun.

But you take your herbs, you put them in the ice tray. Now you can fill these with water or with oil. Oil for sauteing and the water for soups and sauces and other things like that. So freeze those herbs in your ice cube trays. And the great thing about it is once they're frozen, you can get them out of the ice cube tray and throw them in a bag. Mark the bag, date the bag, and then you've got fresh herbs to use in your recipes whenever you need them. Grab and go. So it's a time saver. It's a money saver.

And who doesn't smile about those two things? Saving time and money tell you time, you don't get it back. The more you can save, the more you can spend time on doing the things you love to do and hanging out with your family and friends instead of working away in the kitchen for hours and hours. Okay, so here is a great tip for marinating. Use orange juice and marinades. The acidity in the juice is a great tenderizer for protein and it's such a great flavor. So if you can research, you know, jump on Google and research, do a Google search on marinades with orange juice and see what comes up.

A bunch of different flavors, a bunch of different varieties. I use orange juice in an authentic mexican carnita recipe that I'll share with you guys, I'm sure on some, some live coming up ahead and it's absolutely delicious. The sugar in the orange juice helps create a really beautiful caramelization on the meat. And so anyway, think about orange juice when you want to marinate your, when you want to marinate your protein. General rule on marinating, at least an hour in the fridge. You don't want to go over 24 ever because the meat, the protein will start burning, breaking down, and it'll change the texture of what you're eating.

So I talked about blanching before when we talked about tomatoes, peeling tomatoes, blanching. The technique that I talked about is plunging food into boiling water, pulling it out after 1 minute, one to three as a general rule for blanching, and then plunge it in ice water. What it does is it brightens up. I don't know if you've ever been at a party and you've seen a crudite, which is a veggie platter, and everything looks bright like the broccoli just looks beautiful and everything looks different.

It looks better. It's been blanched. Broccoli especially. You can tell it just pops out the color, and it's a quick process, so you're not boiling out any of the nutrients, but it just, it really gives it just a tiny little head start and makes everything look beautiful. So think about blanching different vegetables like broccoli and cauliflower, carrots and different things that you might want on a veggie tray. It really makes things look so much prettier. They do that a lot in catering. You'll see that a lot.

Let's see. What do I want for my last one? What do I want for my last one? Okay, how about frothy milk? Right? You don't have a milk frother. I had one person say, what's, what would you use frothy milk for? Anytime you go to Starbucks or any coffee place and you hear there, there's huge shooting steam in your coffee and getting the milk frothed up. Right. You can do that at home. And here's a quick way. So. And I gotta find it again. Where the heck was it? In my notes here. Oh, here it is. Make delicious frothy milk.

So you fill a jar halfway, a jar, like a jam jar or a small mason jar, cover it tightly with the lid, and you want to shake it up until it gets really foamy. And then you put it in the microwave. Take the lid off, no metal in the microwave. Put the glass container in for 30 seconds, and it should double in size. And then you've got frothy milk to pour in your morning coffee. Little dust of cinnamon you can blow past everybody in the Starbucks line, honk and wave and sip on your own homemade morning coffee.

Okay, you guys, so we've got a bunch of lives coming up this week. You can check the schedule on the Cadre app or online. So if you haven't been to the website, you're just on the app. Right. It's Cadre IO. And so I encourage you to stop back all week. There's lives all week long, all different topics, and I encourage you to interact here on Cadre two. So give me a thumbs up on this video. If you liked it, there's a thumbs down, too. We love to hear your feedback. So if you have any comments, if you have any tips and tricks in the kitchen of your own, whether you're watching this live now or you're watching it on a playback, we always get the comments.

So leave a comment below. And also, if you want to subscribe, you can get more of my content. And you can also save this video, click save, and that way it'll keep it in a little file for you so you don't have to dig through all the lives to find this one. So again, we love your feedback here. There's a community forum here also that you can go and just share your tips and tricks or your health related knowledge, get answers to questions, let us know what you want to see more of. And it's a great place to communicate with everybody here at Cadre.

So I thank you so much for tuning in today. It's been really fun, and I hope all these tips and tricks, or at least some of them, help you save some time and money in the kitchen. So that's it for today. That's it for now. And don't forget to pop back in and see me and everybody else right here on Cadre. Have a good day.