Sunday Dinner with Coach Dan

Hello there. Welcome to Sunday Dinners with Dan. I forgot when I was welcoming you to. I was so excited to tell you about what I'm cooking today. So welcome, everyone. I love to check in on Sundays and share a recipe or a tip or trick in the kitchen and then show you a little cooking magic and share some insights, have some discussion about planning, organizing your week ahead so we can maximize all of the joy that we have in our life. If you don't have enough joy, learning how to cook healthy meals for yourself could be an experience you're missing out on.

So I want to get started today and just share a really easy recipe with you. It is healthy. There are only four ingredients, not counting salt and pepper. And it's something that I think most people enjoy and especially with the grilled cheese sandwich. This is tomato soup with four ingredients. Homemade things that you probably have in your house already and very easy to pick up if you don't. So we're making tomato soup. This is the best canned tomato that you can buy. It's San Marzano's and they're a product from Italy.

Hey, everybody checking in. Hey. Hey. Good to see you. I love it when people share in the comments. Oh, Lord of Mercy. Sorry about my camera. A little fumbly today. All right, we're going to carry on. So tomato soup, San Marzano tomatoes are the best you can get. They're product of Italy, but make sure that they say they're from Italy. A lot of the tomato brands will claim they are, you know, San Marzano style or. But make sure you're getting the right ones. Okay. The next ingredient is onion. We've got bullion, chicken broth.

You can buy the box, you can buy the cubes, or you can use this. It's better than bouillon. I love better than bouillon soup bases. They come in many flavors and I love using these. And then this recipe originally called for butter. And I'm going to tweak it just a little bit and remove the butter and use just a little bit of olive oil. Olive oil is a healthy oil. It's recommended as one of the healthy oils that we can have when we're really watching our health. And avocado oil is another omega fatty acids, threes that you get in salmon, those are all omega three.

Those are all healthy, healthy fats that we want in our diet. So I'm going to remove the butter and use extra virgin olive oil instead. So we're going to get started. Let's slice it up. So when cutting the onion. I always like to slice through the root first. Let me put you down on the board. So find your root and slice right through that until you've got half and half. Starting with a sharp knife is always good. And learning knife skills is always really good. For this, we're just taking that very end tip off of each, the opposite end of the root end, and then give it a peel so fumbly today.

And then we're going to slice this as fine as we can. And I'll show you how I do it. I take the palm of my hand, and I push down on the onion, and then make one slice through, keeping your hand up off the onion, your little fingers. And then I make slices towards the root. And then I go like this. See, with the knife, you want kind of a rocking back and forth. You don't need to pick the knife up to do this. You can just keep the tip of the knife anchored on the board. We'll do another palm look in, get yourself a slice through.

You're going to do five or six slices across. And then watch the tip of the knife. It never leaves the cutting board. And it really allows me to keep the pressure on the vegetable as I'm slicing it. All right, so we're going to get the fire on the pot and get the onion in with some olive oil, about a tablespoon of olive oil, and get our onion in the pot. And we're just going to let that simmer in that pot until the onion is translucent. So you'll see they turn a little opaque in color. And at that point, we're gonna add our tomatoes.

All right, you guys are gonna see it here first. This is a brand new opener. I'll see how it works. Not so well so far. What's it doing? Look at that. That's pretty slick. Well, it takes a lot longer than I would with my hand, but other than that, I love it. Come on. Come on. You can do it. Come on. You're almost there. It's like a slug. Hi, y'all. Was there? Are you there? Oh, look at that. Look at that. That's great. Okay. It takes a little time, but if you're struggling with, with your hands and moving around or it's early in the morning, that's a winner.

All right, we're gonna put tomatoes in with the onion. Thank you. We're having a little problem with our camera mount today. My apologies. All right, so the tomatoes are in, and we're going to stir those around with the onion. Get that incorporated tomatoes. Yum. And next, we are going to add some of the chicken stock. Now, if, if you've got the box broth, you don't need any more liquid. But if you have, if you have the bouillon, you just put in about a tablespoon and you're going to need a little bit of water.

Again, if this is a box or a, you know, that's already incorporated. All right, now the next step is to blend. This is an immersion blender. This is a really, really good kitchen tool to have. It's great for sauces and soups. And the thing I like about it the most is you can put it right in a pot that's cooking and stir away, anchor it at the bottom and then just start cooling up off the bottom a little bit. And you're mixing this up until it's tomato soup consistency. Another reason I love making my own is that you can have it chunky, you can have it smooth.

You really have a lot of control over the consistency. And then I just kind of press down on the tomatoes that are still a little chunky. I like mine smooth, generally. All right. All right. Now you have tomato soup. You can season this with salt and pepper. You can put in any herbs that you like. You can use basil or oregano and season this how you like. Oh, my gosh, that tastes so good. I'm going to put in a little salt and pepper. So that's it. It's about as healthy as you could get. It's a great soup recipe to have in your collection.

And it's super easy. It's inexpensive. And who doesn't like tomato soup? I'm sure there's some of you out there. Maybe give this a try. You might, you might enjoy it much better. So that's the recipe. Let's talk about organization in the kitchen. Last week, a question was posed to me, you know, how does healthy cooking, how do healthy cooking and organization relate to each other? And, you know, maybe if we're more organized in the way we cook, the way we, the way we shop for food, the way we organize our kitchen physically, if we're more organized, you might have to cook and might enjoy it a little bit more.

So here are some tips that will help you out. If you're not comfortable in the kitchen, if you're not up for cooking, if it makes you anxious just to talk about it, here's some things to do. First, pretend you're walking into a restaurant, and what do you order? Like, what do you like to eat when you're out and not cooking. When somebody else cooks for you, what do you like? Determine that and think about recipes that might be easier than others. Less ingredients is usually a little bit easier. But if you like chef salads, when you go out, just take note of what's on the salad and look at that and see, hey, is this something I could make?

So when you're ordering things or eating other things, eating things that others have prepared, think about what it is that you really like. If you're cooking things you like, then it's usually more fun. So also, before you start listing what you need to get at the store, think about what you already have in the house. And if you can't identify what you have in your kitchen, then check in. And I'm going to be doing some tutorials on kitchen organization and that may help get you started. So identify what you already have in your home when you're looking at the recipe and then make a list for the store or everything else that you need.

Now you can get as detailed as this grocery shopping. You can make your list to correspond with the way the grocery store is laid out. And if you think about it, next time you're there, you walk in. Produce might be right there, and then there might be the meat department or the bakery. And you usually follow the same path in the store. If you don't, this system will really help you. Sometimes when I don't have a list or I haven't paid paid attention to that method, I'm all over the grocery store like a pinball and wasting a lot of time.

And sometimes I like that. I like to grocery shop. But if you're wanting to get things done efficiently, that's a great method. It might be a little much to start with, but it really does help to make your grocery list correspond with the way that the grocery store is laid out. The other thing that I recommend is you have your list, you're ready to go into the store, set the intention that you're going to go in. It's going to be a relaxing experience and get your mind right. A lot of times when we're ready to enter a space that we aren't comfortable in, we're already expecting it to be an awful experience.

Change your mindset and just take a minute. Take a couple deep breaths, grab your cart and go in for what you came for. Now, when it comes to actually cooking the recipe, get all the ingredients together first and have everything set before you cook. And that will help your experience along. When you're running around the kitchen looking for all sorts of different ingredients or items that you need to cook the recipe. It can make it less enjoyable, more frustrating. So get all your ingredients together.

They call it mise en place. Everything in place. And that's a cooking term. You can use that to impress your culinary friends to get everything together and then start cooking. The one thing I forgot to mention is your cooking equipment. Make sure that you have what you need to make the recipe. And if you don't, I love to recommend. If you're not into spending a lot of money on kitchen equipment, I love to recommend resale stores or thrift shops who love to pick kitchen equipment. There are a lot of people get rid of those things that are perfectly good because they haven't used them.

So I always love to recommend that. The immersion blender is a perfect example. Now, if you don't have the immersion blender, you can still make this recipe. You just make it in your blender after everything was heated up, you pour it in the blender, put the lid on, put a towel on so that the hot liquid doesn't burn you coming out, and, and you'll be good to go. So there you go. You've got a really easy recipe. It's got four ingredients, probably you've got this, most of them already, maybe some.

Try this. Try this recipe and see how you do. And, and tune in next Sunday for Sunday dinners with Dan and we'll talk more. I hope you all have a fantastic week. Eat healthy, stay healthy and smile right here on Cadre. Take care, everybody.