Sunday Dinner with Coach Dan

Okay. Hey, everybody. Happy Sunday. Welcome to Sunday Dinner with Dan. I am an organization coach, and I'm really happy you're here. Sunday dinner with Dan is hanging out. We're going to make some food every Sunday and talk about preparing for the week coming ahead, or a way to reduce stress or anxiety, whether it be in the kitchen or out in the world, with everything you've got to do throughout the week. We're talking about it today. I wanted to talk about simplicity, and I wanted to teach you a really simple recipe.

Tuna poke. And it is sushi grade tuna with sushi, rice and poke bowls are put together with fresh ingredients. Nothing is cooked except the rice. And it's a really easy, simple, delicious meal to throw together. And I'm gonna show you how to do it. And then after that, I'm gonna talk to you about some ways that you can simplify your life. Dial down a little bit, and maybe make this next week a little bit more enjoyable for yourself. All right, so one thing I wanted to say was, starting off, one of the tips I like to always drive home is safety.

Right? Being safe in the kitchen is really important. So I love these flexible cutting mats. They're really inexpensive. You can get them at the dollar store. You can get them in packs with different colors. So you can use one for meat and one for poultry. This one's for veggies. They usually come with a little veggie in the corner, but it wears off. So these are great, but they slide all over the place. So when you do put them down, just put a damp cloth on the counter underneath, and that way you'll have a real steady cutting surface that stays in place.

All right, so I have already prepared the sushi rice, and I think I might have done a live on this already. But rice is a great thing to start with. If you're uncomfortable with the instant pot pot, it's a really, really simple recipe. It's always the same amount of water or broth, two rice, and then whatever else you want to add. So this was just sushi rice, sticky rice. It was one cup of rice, one cup of water in the instant pot, seal the lid. I put salt in this, seal the lid, and four minutes, and just allow it to sit if you want.

Or you can let out the steam and then get to town. So this is our sushi rice. So that's how you do it. Oh, and rinse the rice in the instant pot. That's another real important. Look how sticky. It's so sticky. CC marks is very helpful. And Luke says, hey, Dan. Hey, Luke. I'm glad it's helpful, CC. So, yes, safety sticky rice. Rinse your rice first when you put it in the instant pot. And I like to do that in a clear deli container and just let the water run out. I use a spoon. You want the water to run clear.

So it's kind of a relaxing technique for you. So do a relaxation rice rinse and let me know how it goes. Oh, also, I will put the recipe in the comments after the life. So check back and, and look for the recipe if you're interested in making this. Okay. So we did safety, a little safety. We did rice. Let's talk tuna. So we gotta get the tuna going first. And you want to make sure you buy sushi grade tuna, and it's available all over these days. So this, we just want to make sure. It just is marked sushi grade.

This was frozen. Most of the sushi grade tuna is frozen. You can go to whole foods and get, you know, really, really good sushi grade, or, that was from Aldi, and it's absolutely delicious. And Aldi also sustainably sources all of their seafood. So Luke is watching with his dad, his father in law from the nursing home. Oh, that's awesome. Tell your father in law I said hello, and make this for him when you visit him next. He'll love it. All right, so one thing I do with the sushi steaks, you know, they'll come generally like this.

I like to slice one slice down the center, and, oh, always start with, with sharp knives. In the kitchen, a lot of knife blocks come with this, and it's, you know, people assume it's for Sharpie, but nobody really knows how to use one. So this is how you want your knife, at a 20 degree angle from the, from the steel, and you want to just pull back. And the important thing to mention is whenever you're sharpening knives, you want to go all the way to the tip, and you also want to start all the way at the back, and you want it one clean motion, 20 degree.

20 degree, 20. You've seen people do all different kinds of fancy stuff, and blah, blah, blah, and they put their elbows out. That's fine, but this is all you need to do. Same results, and maybe clear the area. All right. Sharpened knife tuna to the side. I'm going to slice down the center of the tuna steak first on both pieces. This will give me nice cubes for the poke. I don't know if any of you have had poke before. Poke originated it's a hawaiian recipe. It's become pretty popular in the US.

I see it on a lot of menus. When you're going through your tuna, you want to clean it up just like you would if you were removing fat from the steak. But there's lines that run through the tuna that are a little bit tough. And if you remove as many of those as you can, your tuna poke bites will be silky. All right, so now we're getting ready to get our dice on. So we just want to. I like to find kind of one natural line in the tuna, like this here. And then, you know, it'll give me some really good cubes and slice through like this.

Another thing I like to do when I'm prepping, if I'm going to slice, I slice it all this way, then I flip it, then I slice it all the other way. If you use that technique when you're slicing, it just makes things a little bit more organized. You're not all over the board with half of it diced and half of it not done. I'm going to go through. I'm going to strip all the tuna down in the same amount of thickness. That's another good reason to do this. As you can see across the cuts, you want everything to look uniform.

It doesn't have to with this, but making it look uniform is just another way to make it look pretty. Your poke can look pretty. I get so excited about tuna. I get pretty excited about food. Okay, so we've got our slices here. Now I'm gonna go with the dice, and I'm just gonna finish up these. And I like to get them all in a row going this direction. Line em up. We'll do them in little batches, and then you just slice them into little cubes this way. Oh, so good. They look so pretty. One thing I love about cooking is when I even get myself excited.

Cause it looks so good. I've been doing it so long, and I still get excited. Look at these. Like, they're just, ugh, delish. So what we're gonna end up doing with the tuna is marinating it. And it can be refrigerated for a couple hours if you want to strengthen the flavors. And it can be eaten right away if you're really, really hungry. All right, so I like to pull out any pieces that I see. These, these, uh, those pieces like that. I see the white running through there. I like to remove any of those because they're kind of tough.

When brennan was here, brennan from Cadre was here. With the Cadre van, we made this meal, and it was so good, and he made some spring rolls, and we had, like, a collaborative dinner making experience. It was really fun, but as I was eating it, I got a couple of those tough bites. Okay, so now we're gonna put the tuna in the bowl, and we're gonna get our marinade. Oh, no, wrong bowl. This is my serving bowl because I want it to be pretty. All right, this is the tuna dice in this bowl. All right, so for the marinade, we want, I'm going to eyeball this, but again, the recipe is going to be in the comments after the lie.

So I'm using tamari. Tamari is a brewed soy sauce. It's gluten free, and it's got a little bit more deep, bold, distinct flavor than soy, but the same soy will work. If you can do tamari, great. You want a little bit of heat. So sriracha, you can use sriracha, and a little squirt of that, a little bit of rice vinegar, a little bit of that. And a lot of recipes don't call for this, but I love to use hot sesame oil, and a lot of the asian markets will carry this. I also used. I love using as a condiment on any stir fries.

And just a tiny little bit of this, just a few drops. Give it nice flavor and nice heat. And there's one more thing that I like, and that is hot pepper flakes. It's a good shot of your spice drawer. Do you want to see my spice drawer, you guys? I love my spice drawer. I'll do a live on this spice drawer and how I put it together and where you can get everything to have your own. I really will. Okay. A little bit of hot pepper flakes. Oh, and these are so fun too. So you want some sesame seeds, and I love these tuxedo sesame seeds.

They're black and white, and I like to give just a little sprinkle of that in there too. So this is how easy this recipe is to put together. It's so simple. And so you're gonna stir this up together, and you're just gonna let it sit here for a little bit until we get everything else together. And as you're mixing it, you know, you can kinda tell, like, oh, I think I want a little bit more soy, or you can give it a taste. Oh, my gosh, it tastes so good. Ooh, the heat from the sriracha, the sesame oil.

I love sesame oil. And then the. The little tuxedos. Oops, there's one thing that I forgot. I told Brian I wasn't going to walk away from the camera, but I lied. Okay, Mac, you want some green onions, and preferably ones that have been around a little less long than these. Okay? And when you do your onions, when you do your green onions, you can have a little bit of both, a little bit of green, and a little bit of the white, but slice it on a bias, which means instead of just slicing right across the onion, just move your knife like this and get a diagonal chop, and you'll see how.

See how much different, you know, they look. It's just a little bit more intriguing to the eye. And, you know, a lot of culinary tricks are all about that. They're about taking really simplistic methods that are really pretty and sparking the eye and sparking the interest. We eat with our eyes as much as we do with our mouth, our nose, all of the senses. And so that's my little talk about my onions. So I do want to add a little bit more to this before we move on, just to. It looked a little bit dry, so just a little bit more.

And when I go in with this, I just do a little bit more of each of the soy and of the rice vinegar. I do like those two flavors to be balanced. The rest is up to you. How hot you want it, how sesame flavored you want it. But that was pretty good. That's what you're going for right there. This is the poke. That's it. Now we're gonna do the bowl. So, this is what you pay all the big money for. I want to teach you a couple more tricks. All right, I'm gonna. I'm gonna divide this in half just for lesson purposes.

But there are a couple different ways to make a cucumber slice look really pretty. One is you just move across the cucumber, taking slices, leaving about an inch consistent stripe around the cucumber. And that way, when you slice it, you get these. You've seen them at the salad bar. Nothing new, right? But that's just it. An example of how, you know, slowing down and taking a minute to make food look better does the trick. Another way is to take a fork and dig in to the skin and drag the fork down.

And don't be afraid to dig in there. I almost chipped a tooth grinding it together there. All right. These I like, I like even better. You go all the way around. Yeah. One thing I like about making this is that it's. Everything is fresh. It's so easy. Like, I've done it all right here. It's really easy. It's. It's generally really inexpensive. Tuna is a really inexpensive, grade type, type of fish to work with, and it's usually really easy to find, too. So let's see what these look like. It might have been a little too rough.

You know, so you get this kind of. I really think I was a little too rough on you. Sorry. Maybe I go in this way. Yeah, that's more pretty. That's more better. So those end up looking kind of like sunburst. Okay. All right, so there you go with some cucumber. We talked about the scallion, cutting it on the bias, making it look a little bit more pretty. And we talked about the cuke two different ways to cut it. A lot of times in poke balls, the cucumber will be cubed. It's easier to eat that way.

The rings are the way I assemble mine. The rings are kind of more on the side as a. As a garnish, but I'll show you how we do that. And then I take these and I turn them into slices for the bowl. And maybe I'll do, like, triangulars. Yeah, that's what I'm going to do. Those look purdy. All right, so there's my cukes. We've got avocado to work with here. Clean my board off a little bit. One thing that I like to coach is keeping an organized, clean work area. People get stressed when they cook because everything's everywhere and they don't stop and just take a minute to clean up and chill.

It makes it all so much more relaxing. And if you plan ahead, planning. If you plan ahead and get your ingredients together, it's a method called mise en place. Everything in its place. It's a french culinary term, but it applies to so many different areas of our life. Everything in its place, getting everything together. So the misen plus method is doing this, getting all of what I needed together so that I could stand here and hang with you and not be flying all over the place with a messy kitchen.

So take a minute. Look at the recipe. Read through the entire recipe. Usually, recipes are written in the order, the ingredient. The ingredients are listed in the order they are used, and in the description. That's something to think about, too. Gather all the ingredients you need for a recipe. Read through the entire recipe first. Make sure you have all the measuring, you know, utensils and everything that you need. So. And do that before you even start. Read through the recipe all the way. Before you even start getting all the ingredients out, because that way you'll know, like, do I have all this stuff?

Do I have everything? Not only the ingredients, but do I have everything I need to make the recipe? When picking out an avocado, you want to make sure that that little knot at the end, if it comes off, this is brown. If it's bright green, it's not ready yet. Another way, the best way, this is the way that I like to test the ripeness, is just pressing my thumb just real gradually, because I don't want to mess all the avocados up for the other people. But just press slightly against the avocado, and if it gives a little bit, you'll know.

Also color, bright green. It's not done when it's really brown, and if you press against it and your thumb just goes right through, don't get it. But you want them firm. But to give a little bit. And brown and a brown little belly button. Start at the belly button with your knife. Put your knife straight in, and until you hit the pit, you feel the pit, and then turn the knife toward you. And gradually circle around the avocado until you meet back at the little belly button. And then you give it a twist like that.

Ta da. The best way to get a pit out is to take the knife, strike the pit on the side, and then turn the pit, keeping it in the knife. Push your thumb against the knife like that until the pit pops out. If you want, you can put this in water and grow an avocado tree for real and just get it in. Well, maybe I'll add that to the recipe at the end. How to make your avocado tree. Okay, so prepping the avocado for the poke. I'll use that half later. Brian will not eat this, so this is all mine. And maybe the neighbors, I can get them over.

We're gonna play music with the neighbors tonight. I sing. Brian plays guitar. Jeff is a drummer. And so we all get together tonight, and we're gonna play some music, which is pretty exciting. Another thing I like to do when I cook. I don't know if you've seen it, if you can see it on camera. And Brian and I do this when we entertain. Well, it's always full. We have silverware that we use every day in the drawer, but we also, I've collected over the years, silverware that I keep in this. When people come over, we grab it, we plunk it down on the table.

Everybody grabs what they need. You're not washing clean silverware that you've used to set the table, you only are washing what people have pulled out. It's a great system, and it's really good, too. Even if you don't have other silverware on the side that you use daily, this is a great method for busy families. Throw your silver in a pot on the counter. Everybody can grab it, and there's no freaking out about where stuff is. So the avocado, I just talked all the way through that, but I sliced it down and then across to make my little chunks, and I just take a spoon, and I run the spoon along the skin.

Oh, I picked a perfectly ripe one, and it all just plops right out in chunks that only half of made it to the bowl, but. Okay, there you go. Avocado. Okay, you guys ready? Brian and I wrote a song once, and we called it daddy. It was three cords, and it was three cords of fun. Okay, here's how you assemble. Poke. Get yourself a pretty bowl. I like to put my rice in something, a bowl that I like the shape of. We have these. We happen to have these little fiesta cups. I love those. I take the bowl and the rice.

Hey, you came out earlier. Oh, there it goes. Okay. Make yourself a little rice dome. Right? Okay. And now we're gonna fill in. We're gonna do our poke first. And since the tuna's the star of the show, kind of like to do it on two sides, but we'll see. All right, and this is what I've prepped to go in. This is edamame. These are soy beans. They're like lima beans, but they're soy. And we've got our cukes that we sliced a bunch of different ways. We've got shredded carrots. I just ran these through the food processor.

You can use a cheese grater and use that to shred your carrots and avocado. And then if I want a little extra, I'll put a little more seeds on top to make it purdy. Okay. So I like to build using, like, cut my. Like, it's a painting, you know, I love to build these balls so they look really pretty. And so you put a little carrots here, put a little edamame here, and I think I am just going to do the tuna on the one side. And then we've got our avocado here, right? And we've got a cuke. We got to save room for the cukes.

Here's a little cube. And then we're just going to fan out three of our little pretties on the side here. Right there. Okay. And then I like to take just a little bit more of the sesame seeds. Just sprinkle those on top. And you can go like this. If you. You want to have more fun. If you hold spices, like, if you have dry spices, can you see people doing spices like that? It's to make the spice kind of dissipate down over the meal. That's why people lift spices so dramatically. There you have it.

Tuna po k ready from Coach Dan. I really hope you guys make this. It's a great recipe to throw together. Again, it's really inexpensive, it's quick. I did it in this amount of time. It's really healthy, and I can't wait to chow it down. But before I do, I want to talk to you guys about some different things we can do. Moving through this next week, the dust has settled. After the crazy season we just came out of. Decorations are down, probably a little bit more. As time goes by, resolutions have been made, and we're kind of back into the groove, back into the normal groove.

And a lot of times, resolutions are forgotten, goals are moved to the side, and we're right back in the same rut. So if that has happened to you, jump back on track. Pull your goals out. Take a look at them. So many times, right around this time of the month, people are bailing and you don't have to, so you screwed up or whatever. Jump back on track and check Cadre. This app is loaded with resources for you to get back on track and to reach out if you need help. So, back to the week and keeping things easier, right?

Like easy simplicity. So one way to simplify your week is to plan your meals. So plan a time when you're going to go to the store, make a list, and think about the meals that you want to prepare that week. And that means identifying how many meals you need to prepare. If you know I'm going out to dinner on Thursday, I have a work meeting on blah blah, look at your calendar. Determine what days of the week you need to prepare meals, and maybe some of those will switch around. But say, I purchased the things that I need for three easy meals this week.

And moving forward on all of my lives, on both Wednesdays and Sundays, I'll talk about different methods and different recipes to save you tons of time and money so you can focus more energy on the things that you like to do. This is assuming that you don't want to spend a lot of time in the kitchen, like me. All right, so plan your meals, make a list, go to the store. Keep tuned. Subscribe to me here. I will keep giving you tons of good information about really easily put together freezer meals.

We're going to talk about instant pot stuff. I'm getting so excited. The second thing to do to simplify is to declutter. So look around. Actually, tomorrow I'm going to be doing tomorrow's clean your desk day. So I'm gonna be on tomorrow talking about cleaning your, your work area and different ways to do that. So, but with that in mind, declutter. You do not have to make it a whole home project. Declutter your sink area. Declutter your desk. Declutter the living room play area for the kids. A way that I love to recommend to do this is to take a laundry basket and walk the house and just scan the house for things that belong somewhere else, need to be ditched, need to be donated, need to be returned to the store and start breaking those things down, moving that stuff closer to the door of your, your home to get a mill.

The third thing you can do to simplify is look at your wardrobe. The less you have to dig through, launder, fold, put away, store, the less time you are going to have to spend on it. So do you really need, like, this dramatic, huge wardrobe? I'm going through this process right now myself. I'm looking at the things I wear mostly. I usually, during the pandemic, we learned we really didn't need a lot. And coming out of that, I'm learning that I'm dressing in different ways. My roles are different.

Take a look at what roles you play and match your wardrobe to that. And start looking at, for instance, me. I have tons of suits and ties, and I may wear a few, but it's not happening like it used to. So all that stuff's gonna go so I can have that room for something else. So decluttering your clothing, we can talk further about real sink your teeth in ways to do that. And I'll talk about that moving forward, too. Fourth thing you can do to simplify your week is say no. It's okay. And no doesn't need an explanation.

So if you are overloaded, you are not in the mood. You don't have the energy, you don't want the responsibility. You just need a break. Say no. Give yourself the permission. It's okay to say no. And no is a complete sentence. Just know I'm good. Thanks. I'll catch you next time. Whatever. So saying no is a really good way to give yourself some time back. The other things, there's three more. Look around for paper clutter. This is a really easy method. Again with the laundry basket or a box. Grab something to contain the.

Our dog jack, see, tapping on the table. That's so funny. What does he want? So where was I? Oh, paper. So grab a box, roam the house, gather up all the paper. Again, you don't have to do the whole house. You can just do, I'm going to get all the paper in the kitchen gathered together and it's a really good thing to do. While you're sitting in front of the tv or, you know, listening to music, there's, you know, some kind of dial down thing to do in the evening. It can actually be relaxing to dig through it and purge the stuff.

All the junk mail, all the old magazines, all of the things, receipts and things that are cluttering your home that you do not need around. Use your phone camera for receipts and things that you need to keep. Put them in your notes and label them with what they are. That is one of the biggest tips I can give people for paper clutter. We do not need this paper. And the more you can digitize, the better. I also coach to go old school when it comes to lists, so I'm not 100% one way or the other. Both have their benefits.

So think about the paper clutter in your house and how that's making things more difficult. Searching for I have to find this receipt or I have to find this or that or whatever it can. It can really pull us out of the groove. So another way to simplify is to own less. So, you know, the less you have around, the more, the less you have to keep track of, to move, to store, to clean, to tend to. So really think about the activities that you carry out now. I used to ski. I used to ski a ton of and I had skis and cross country skis and poles.

And I don't ski anymore. I may in the future, but I'm certainly not going to do it in the next month or two. And skis that I had when I was in my twenties, I will outdated. So get rid of that stuff that you're not using in your life now. There's always going to be an opportunity to re accumulate something that you are going to need. But if you golfed and you haven't in 20 years and you're holding on to the clubs that grandpa gave you because the blah, blah, do yourself a favor, give yourself that space back and donate those to some place that can use them.

And then the last thing I want to talk about is slowing down. Slow down. I walk through life and I get so caught up and having to be somewhere. It happened today. I missed a really good friend of mine's choir performance because, you know, I just couldn't get it together. And I didn't pay attention when she told me where it was. So I was rushing and aggravated. I mean, I was sped up for a reason, but. But really, when I thought about it and thought, okay, Cindy's not gonna hate me, we're gonna meet for lunch.

Still slow down, dig in, realize what's important, which is my husband, Brian. Just slow down and quit rushing through life. When you make that decision consciously, when you sink into slowing down, you'll notice how many people around you are flying around for no reason. No reason at all. There's no reason to rush through the grocery store just to get back to the car sooner. So slow down and gain some awareness around that to see if you can catch yourself speeding around for no reason. It's a fun practice to do.

And the more you become aware of how much you're rushing around for no reason, the more you'll learn to slow down and sink into tuna coquetry with your family. Thank you guys so much for being with me tonight. I'm so glad you found your way to Cadre. Tell everybody about the Cadre app, the Cadre family, what we're doing here, and because there's going to be more and more and more. So thank you, guys. I love my Cadre family. And I will see you tomorrow where I'm talking about cleaning your desk, so we'll see you then.