Roasted Chicken Recipe

Posted on May 16, 2012, 9:27 pm, by broccolicupcake and received No Comments ».

I’ve been using The Fresh 20 meal plans for the last two weeks and loving them.  This week, roasted chicken was on the menu. I have a few recipes I like to use, but The Fresh 20 had some new twists I hadn’t tried.  I decided to blend their recipe with my own and made three chickens instead of two.  The recipe is included below, but first I have to say, the best thing about roasted chickens is that there are a million ways to use the leftovers.   Here are just a few.

  1. Pull the meat off the bone and store it in the fridge for quick snacks during the week.
  2. Use the refrigerated meat to make sandwiches or pack with a yogurt dipping sauce for school/work lunches.
  3. Make homemade chicken salad.
  4. Freeze some of the meat for quick dinners.
  5. Make chicken fried rice.
  6. Make homemade chicken stock with the left over bones.
  7. Roast some veggies, add some chicken stock and your leftover chicken and you’ve got an easy soup.
  8. Toss the chicken in with pasta, veggies and drizzle with olive oil, sea salt and black pepper for an easy dinner.
  9. Set up a pita stuffing bar using leftover chicken, veggies, cheeses, lettuces, etc.  This is an easy summer dinner idea when it’s too hot to cook!

And now for the recipe…

Roast Chicken Ingredients:

  • 1-3 whole, pasture raised chickens
  • 1 tablespoon olive oil or expeller pressed coconut oil (per chicken)
  • 1 teaspoon sea salt (per chicken)
  • 1 teaspoon black pepper (per chicken)
  • 1 tablespoon rosemary (per chicken)
  • 1 clove of garlic, pressed (per chicken)
  • 2 cloves of garlic, whole but peeled (per chicken)
  • 1/2 lemon (per chicken)

*For a variation on this recipe, try stuffing each chicken with a sliced green apple and 2 tablespoons of real butter.

Directions for Roasting a Chicken:

If you’ve ever wonderd how to roast a chicken, this is probably the easiest way I’ve found.  I think it’s even easier than using the crockpot because you can cook several chickens at one time.  Preheat the oven to 500 degrees.  Remove any neck or liver pieces from the chicken cavity then rinse and pat the chickens dry.  Place them in a large roasting pan or on a baking sheet lined with aluminum foil.

Next, mix the oil, salt, pepper and rosemary together and rub down the outside of each chicken.  Stuff the cavity with the garlic and lemon.

Roast the chicken in the 500 degree oven for 15 minutes.  Reduce the heat to 450 degrees and roast for another 15 minutes.  Reduce the heat again to 425 degrees.  Baste the chicken with pan drippings and continue roasting for 30-40 minutes.  If you are roasting more than one chicken, it may take a little longer for them to cook all the way.  The chickens are done when the internal juice runs clear and the temperature is at least 160 degrees between the thigh and the cavity.

Remove the chickens from the oven and allow them to sit for 10-15 minutes.  I use my hands to pull all the meat off the bones and I store it in BPA freezer baggies or in glass containers if I’m putting it in the fridge.

If you’re planning to make chicken stock, transfer the bones and any remaining seasonings like the lemon or garlic into your crockpot and get started.  If you don’t have time to make the stock, you can freeze the chicken carcass and make your stock another day.

What’s your favorite use for roasted chicken?

 

 

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Green Your Car Wash

Posted on May 14, 2012, 9:21 pm, by broccolicupcake and received No Comments ».

Have you guys seen all the pins on Pinterest with ideas for fun summer activities?  I think washing the car made it onto almost every list.  So what did we do on Friday to take advantage of the beautiful weather?  We washed the car.  The good news is I have some great tips on making your at home car wash a little more eco-friendly.  The really good news is that our car washing experience was a comedy of errors so while you’re picking up green car washing tips I think you’ll also pick up a few laughs.

Step 1 of the green car wash is to completely empty out your car.  If you find things you forgot you had, consider putting them in the donate pile.  Make a separate pile for recyclables like empty water bottles and a third pile for trash.

Next pull out all the carpets, shake them off and sprinkle them with baking soda.  We let it sit while we worked on the rest of the car so the baking soda could do it’s thing and absorb any unwanted odors.

 With the car completely emptied out, it’s time to vacuum. I hooked the shop vac up to an extension car and got to work.  As I was vacuuming I kept noticing a really rotten smell.  It was garbage day in our neighborhood so at first I thought it was all the trash cans out on our street.  Then I wondered if it was something that had spilled in the car.  But the odor was traveling with me as moved.  That’s when I realized it seemed to be coming from the shop vac.  The smell was getting bad so when I finished vacuuming out the car I asked my husband to come check it out. I’m so glad I didn’t look myself!  Apparently, our shop vac is the best mouse trap in the world.  According to my husband, it captured an entire family of mice that got in, but couldn’t get back out.  I won’t go into any more detail (and I’ll spare you a photo) but I’ve never been so grossed out in my life!

Once we recovered from the mouse situation we were ready to start cleaning and DISINFECTING the interior of the car.  We went with our stand by, a spray bottle with a 50/50 mix of white vinegar and water.  Our seats are leather and this seemed to work really well.  We did a little spot test first to be sure.  If you’re seats are cloth, sprinkling them with baking soda and vacuuming is another good option.  For the dusty dashboard I used a dry microfiber cloth.  It was a great tool for getting in the vents and around all the details of the dash and it was a good job for our 4 year old.

Our next target was the interior carpeting.  It had multiple stains including a recent smoothie spill that hadn’t been cleaned very well.  We mixed up a batch of one part kosher salt, one part water to make a paste to help scrub out the stains.

Here’s a before pic of one of the stains.  We scrubbed it with an old hairbrush after letting the salt paste sit for awhile.

Here’s the after photo.  The stain isn’t completely gone, but it’s much better!

The final step was washing the outside of the car.  We chose pure castille soap to give our van a green clean.  Here are a few other tips for making the washing part a little more eco-friendly.  If your husband and your neighbors can stand it, park the car in the grass (just for the car wash).  The water will filter into the grass, which reduces waste and actually helps filter the water.  Another tip is to prepare two buckets.  One for soapy water and one for rinse water.

Here’s my little guy manning the rinse bucket.  He was in charge of the clean sponges we used to rinse the car and followed after his big brother and I who were using the soapy water and a sponge to give the outside of the van a good wash.  Using the two bucket system saves water because you aren’t running the hose the entire time.  You really only need it to fill the buckets and give the car a quick rinse to start so you aren’t rubbing around chunks of rock or dirt when you wash, which could scratch it.  You can empty and refill the buckets as needed.  One suggestion, supervise the kids if you let them man the soap bucket.  My oldest son poured the soap all by himself and I learned that you really only need a capful.  He used about a cup full and we had a really hard time rinsing all the soap off.  The hot sun was drying the soap onto the car faster than we could rinse it.  It was quite a scene as I worked to chase down the soap streaks with a clean sponge and eventually the hose (I know that defeats the original idea of the two bucket system) before the sun could bake them onto the car.

The final step is vacuuming the rugs that you sprinkled with baking soda at the start of your car wash.  I don’t have a photo because I had to go to the local car wash and pay $3 to use their vacuum.  I wasn’t getting near the shop vac once I knew what had been in it!

So, that’s it.  Our green car wash was a bit stressful with the mice infested shop vac and the soap that wouldn’t rinse.  It didn’t leave as much time for water fights as we had hoped.  But the car is clean and we still have the whole summer ahead of us to test the fun factor on all of the Pinterest activity lists.

Is a car wash on your summer bucket list?  What activity are you most looking forward to over summer break?

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How to Kill Weeds Naturally

Posted on May 11, 2012, 8:58 am, by broccolicupcake and received No Comments ».

I have to start with a confession.  We used to be those people who got our yards sprayed.  What they sprayed it with, I honestly don’t know and I didn’t want to find out.  It was something my husband insisted on after 2 years of trying to grow grass in Tennessee and finally investing in sod.  He didn’t want the weeds to take over and our money to be wasted.  I know the man on the spray truck used to tell me it was safe for our dogs and our kids as long as we waited for it to dry, but that never really made me feel better.

Over the last few years, we went from getting our lawn sprayed, to only getting it fertilized with a natural fertilizer, to not doing anything at all (except on our own.)  We finally realized that the lush, perfectly manicured suburban lawn wasn’t worth the risk.  And in one short season, the Tennessee heat turned our back yard into a full blown weed field.  When the grass is cut you honestly can’t tell, it just looks green, and it’s soft enough for the kids to run around barefoot.  So no big deal, until this spring.  We have a new weed.  It’s wide, it grows tall, it spreads like crazy and it’s covered in incredibly sharp prickers.  Everyone one of us has ended up soaking a foot or hand in an Epsom salt bath trying to work one or three out from under our skin.  In the interest of a fun, barefoot summer, I had to find a way to rid our back yard of this weed.  But the question was how?  I still didn’t want to introduce chemicals into the yard.  I did a little research and decided to try two natural weed killers, boiling water and one of my favorite household tools, white vinegar.

Below are the results of my experiment.

Vinegar as a Natural Weed Killer:

Slightly discolored edges 24 hours after vinegar treatment.

I’ve heard the easiest way to tackle a bunch of weeds with white vinegar is to put in one of those pump bottles with a spray hose attached.  I didn’t have one handy so I just carried several jugs of white vinegar into the backyard and started pouring it directly onto the weeds.  I’d say I hit each one with anywhere from 1/4 cup to a full cup depending on it’s size.  There was no immediate change in the weeds but the next day the edges started to turn brown and black.  Over the course of 3-5 days several of the weeds I treated with white vinegar began to shrivel up and after about 10 days many of them were gone, but not all of them.  Some of the bigger weeds, or those that didn’t get doused with as much vinegar, seemed to make a come back and required a second vinegar treatment.  Next, I tested the vinegar on some less hardy and less aggressive weeds and it worked much better.  They seemed to shrivel up right away and by the next morning they were brown and easy to pull out of the ground.  My final theory is that white vinegar works best as a natural weed killer for smaller weeds or those growing in flower beds or sidewalk cracks.  It takes a lot of white vinegar to tackle bigger weeds with deep roots and often requires several treatments before they’re totally gone.
Boiling Water as a Natural Weed Killer:

Almost totally brown 24 hours after boiling water treatment.

This seemed to be the most effective natural method for the giant weeds covered in prickers.  The minute the boiling water hit them they started to shrink and wilt and within 5-10 minutes they started turning black around the edges.  It was easy to keep track of which weeds I’d already treated because there was a noticeable difference in them. By the next morning, all of the weeds treated with boiling water were completely shriveled up and brown. Within in 3-5 days they were totally brown and crispy and there were no more prickers to worry about.  Within 10 days they had completely disappeared.  None of them needed a second treatment.  The only negative is that the boiling water killed the grass around the weed and left small brown spots around the yard.  But after a week or two those started to fill back in.  Boiling water also worked well on smaller weeds in the flower beds and cracks in the sidewalk. I could usually pull the weeds treated with boiling water after letting them sit for about 10-15 minutes. Just be sure not to treat anything to close to a plant you love.

My conclusion – boiling water works faster and gives better overall results as a natural weed killer.  I used a tea kettle to boil the water and carry it to the backyard so the biggest negative is that it was time consuming.  The vinegar worked, but not as consistently or as quickly and it took a lot of vinegar to get the job done.

How do you kill weeds naturally?

 

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Real Food Recipe: Crockpot Vinegar Chicken

Posted on May 9, 2012, 3:00 am, by broccolicupcake and received No Comments ».

I shared a photo of my crockpot vinegar chicken on Facebook a few weeks ago and several people asked for the recipe, so here it is.  This meal was inspired by the shredded vinegar chicken at our local Whole Foods.  My attempt to guess at the recipe was unsuccessful, in the sense that it tasted nothing like it, but it was still delicious.  It fed all four of us for dinner and lunch again the next day.  This is a real food recipe that you can prep in under 10 minutes and let the crockpot do the rest of the work while you go about your day.  I served it with quinoa and green beans cooked with expeller pressed coconut oil, sea salt and black pepper.

Ingredients:

  • 4 organic chicken breasts
  • 3 tablespoons of expeller pressed coconut oil (if it’s not expeller pressed you will taste the coconut)
  • 1 onion thinly sliced
  • 2 bell peppers (red, orange or yellow) thinly sliced
  • 3 tablespoons of raw honey
  • 3/4 cup apple cider vinegar
  • 1 1/2 cups of chicken broth
  • sea salt and black pepper

Directions for crockpot vinegar chicken:

Put all of the ingredients into a large crockpot starting with the veggies and ending with the chicken broth.  Cook on high for 4 hours then on low for approximately 2 hours until you can shred the chicken easily with a spoon.

The finished product will look something like this.  Serve with whatever sides you like.  We went with quinoa and green beans, but a side salad would be great and easy.

Cross your fingers and hope your family enjoys it.  At least that’s what I do at dinner time :)   Luckily, this meal was a hit!

Do you have a favorite crockpot recipe?

 

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Food Based Healing

Posted on May 7, 2012, 3:00 am, by broccolicupcake and received No Comments ».

Have you guys ever heard of food based healing?

I recently read Crazy Sexy Diet by Kris Carr, a food warrior who used the healing powers of a plant based diet to manage cancer.  Her story ignited my interest in the topic, which sounds a lot like the famous quote, “Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food.”  But what exactly is food based healing and how can we apply it to our own diets and ailments?

Scott Bailey, owner of Healing Hands Wellness and Massage in Nashville shares the answers to these questions in this guest post…So what is Food Based Healing? 

Well the simple answer is that by eating the right foods most diseases can be reversed. The real secret is using the very specific foods for the specific disease. Kiwi is quick to help reverse asthma.  I have seen and heard of hundreds of cases of reversing this unnecessary disease by following the asthma food protocol and several have taken just one week to reverse. I am privileged to have been trained by Jeff Primack. Jeff has tested these protocols with thousands of people and after 10 years of fine tuning, published the “Conquering Any Disease”, book, from which are the protocols that I teach.

At the core of this program are fruits and vegetables, medicinal mushrooms and tonic herbs that help to reverse diseases. They contain Phytochemicals that help to unlock the body’s endocrine system. Most of us don’t get enough phytochemicals in our regular diet. Phytochemicals hide in the cellulose fibers of seeds, stems, skin and rinds of fruits and vegetables we eat and most of those parts we throw away.  This is why in this program we use a 3-horsepower blender to break out the phytochemicals and micronize the seeds, stems and rinds.  Juicing is not the same because it discards the very important parts, the fiber, in which God intended us to eat and where the phytochemicals are.

I believe the main reason why the three killer diseases are at epidemic numbers is that our traditional diet is very low in Phytochemicals. Our health depends on us returning back to nature and discovering where these Phytochemicals are most concentrated and consuming them as often and as much as possible. So here is where the smoothies come in. By blending our fruits and vegetables and micronizing them with a 3 horsepower blend we can get more phytochemicals in our diet faster and easier. You may be wondering by now, “what do these smoothies taste like?” grass, hay? No. If they did we wouldn’t be able to get thousands to drink them daily or even twice. Jeff worked very hard and tasted hundreds of recipes before coming up with 95 recipes that are in the “Smoothie Formulas” book. These smoothies taste great.

The smoothies for specific diseases include:

Accelerated Weight Loss that is Healing for your Body, Allergies, Anemia, Arthritis, Asthma, ADD, Poor circulation. Cancer of all kinds, Chronic Fatigue, Colds & Flu Virus, Digestive Problems(constipation, IBS, ulcers), Depression, Diabetes 1&2, Eye & Vision problems, Heart Disease, High Cholesterol. Infertility, Insomnia, Kidney Stones, Menopause, Osteoporosis, Prostrate issues, Sexual Problems, Thyroid Problems.

If you live in Nashville, or in driving distance, and you’re interested in learning more about food based healing, check out Scott’s upcoming class and tasting and register online.

Food Healing and Taste experience at Healing Hands Wellness and Massage

411 East Iris Dr Nashville, TN 37204 in Berry Hill

May 12, 1:00 PM – 3:00 PM

Cost is $20 and seating is limited so please reserve your seat today by calling 615-292-9270!

www.healinghandswellnessmassage.com

If you have questions about food based healing or if you have experience with it please share in the comments. I will be attending a class at Healing Hands Wellness and Massage this summer and will definitely follow up and share what I learn.

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