Straight From Our Kitchen: Complete Meals June 2016

Welcome to the first installment of a new feature you’ll find on allstrengthtraining.com, where we’ll be giving you the recipes and cooking instructions for meals that Christine and I use ourselves.

Up today is a relatively simple combination of grilled chicken breast, roasted red potatoes, and steamed broccoli.  Doesn’t sound like much, but one of the biggest takeaways we hope you get from this feature is that eating healthy, performance- and physique-friendly meals doesn’t have to be complicated.

Ok, here we go!

Cafe Mocha Grilled Chicken Breast

Chicken breast can be a challenging dish to keep interesting, because even some of the best seasonings can get a little bit stale if you use them all the time.  I was looking for something new and remembered that the combination of coffee and cacao had come up in a steak dry rub that we had tried a while back, and it was fantastic.  I couldn’t find the original recipe so I dialed up my friend Google to see what I could find, made a couple of small changes, and came up with this:

• 3lbs boneless, skinless chicken breast (we use frozen Perdue chicken breast from Costco because they’re a bit thinner and cook better on the grill than thick pieces, but you could easily use thick breast and just butterfly it before you put the dry rub on)
• 3tbsp coffee grounds
• 1tbsp raw cacao powder (we have Nativas in our cupboard but any 100% cacao will do)
• 2 packets of Truvia (we were out of pure stevia powder but a pinch of it would work just as well)
• 1tbsp paprika
• 1tsp cinnamon
• 1tsp cayenne pepper
• 1tsp salt

I just added all of the dry ingredients into a small Pyrex dish and mixed it by putting the lid on and shaking it.  I used paper towels to pat all of the chicken dry, then put them in a big glass dish and added about 1 1/2 tbsp of the seasoning mix and mixed it with my hands until everything was covered well.  I let it sit while I heated up the grill (I do 5 minutes on high heat).  Then I dropped the heat down to medium and did 5-6 minutes per side on the chicken breast, then let it rest for a good 10 minutes on a cutting board before trying to cut it.  Don’t cut it right away or you’ll let all of the juice run out of it and you’ll just end up with dry chicken.  Use a food thermometer if you’re not confident it’s cooked through all the way and it should temp at 165 degrees.

Parsley Roasted Red Potatoes

This has been my go-to for potatoes of any color for a while now.  Pretty sure that my inspiration for using parsley as the base herb for the seasoning was from the time I spent in high school working at a buffet restaurant where they had sliced parsley potatoes as one of their sides.  Granted, I don’t soak them in a tub of butter/lard/margarine/whatever they were using but the 16-year-old version of me remembers them being awesome and I was never wrong about anything when I was 16.

As a note, you may notice that most of the recipes use pretty big batch sizes because we go through a ton of food at our house.  You can scale these up or down pretty easily if it’s just for you, or if you aren’t looking to get 10 meals out of a single dish.

• 5lbs red potatoes (or Russett, or yellow, or purple, or whatever color floats your boat)
• 1 1/2 tbsp grass-fed butter or extra-virgin coconut oil
• 2tbsp dried parsley
• 1tsp dried basil (optional but I like the combo of this with the parsley)
• 1tsp garlic powder
• 1tsp sea salt

Preheat your oven to 400 degrees.  Cut your potatoes into wedges – cut your potato in half, then cut that in half, then cut that in half.  Boom, WEDGED.

Melt your butter or coconut oil in a small dish, then add the dry spices and mix.  You can coat your potatoes one of two ways:

1.  Put your potato wedges in a large bowl and pour the seasoning mix over top, then mix and coat with your hands.  Then transfer to a baking sheet (we’ve begun putting a sheet of parchment paper on the baking sheet first lately as it keeps the bottoms from burning and it speeds up the cleanup when you’re done)
2. Be lazy like I am and skip the bowl all together.  I just throw the potatoes onto the parchment paper as I’m slicing them and then pour the mix over that once I’m done, and mix with my hands.

Roast at 400 degrees for an hour (less if you’re not doing 5lbs of potatoes, but they should pierce easily with a fork).

Steamed Broccoli

Not going to lie – we do mostly frozen broccoli from Costco because it’s a) cheaper, and b) I hate trimming fresh broccoli.

Put a sauce pan on medium high heat on your stove top and let it heat for a minute or two before you add the broccoli.  NOTE: if you’re doing fresh broccoli, add a little bit of water to the bottom of the dish, just enough so that the bottom of the pan is coated with water (1/8″ maybe?  Just don’t drown your broccoli).  Get the water to start bubbling before you add the broccoli.

You can add whatever spices you want, but this is what I used:

• 2lbs frozen broccoli
• 1/2 tsp cumin
• 1/2 tsp sage
• 1/4 tsp garlic powder

Put a lid on the pan and steam it until it pierces with a fork but don’t let it get soggy.  Somewhere around the 8-10 minute mark seems to work the best but it depends on how much you’re making and how hot your stove top’s burners are.

Viola!  Done.

Please comment below and let us know what you think!  I’d like to make this a recurring monthly feature so if there’s anything specific you’d like to see, let us know, and if you like what you see, please share with your friends!