#36: How to turn your ordinary family meals into extraordinary meals with speed, ease, fun and yum with Linda Lederman

So I teach meal planning, meal prep, how to cook, and then how to serve those meals with fun and games and clever conversation with your family. Because if you're not having fun with your family, you're kind of missing the point.

Hey, Coach, my name is Lindsey, and I'm here to help heart-centered women like you build the money-making coaching business of their dreams. I've been coaching since 2019, and this pod is about So much more than building your business. It's about using your gifts to build a life and business you're 100% obsessed with. I went from working 50+ hours a week as a first grade teacher to building a sustainable business that replaced my job salary and gave me back 30+ hours a week of my time. Tune in to join the ride and learn from other coaches and experts along the way. Hello everyone. Welcome back to the Aligned Coach Podcast. I have a super interesting guest with us here today. So if you are a returning listener, get ready because it's going to be such a fun interview. And if you're a new listener, welcome for the first time. So I'm your, I'm your host, Lindsey. You probably already know that. And then I have Linda here with us today. Linda is a kitchen confidence coach, and I'm going to let her introduce herself because I'm very interested in this topic. So welcome on, Linda.

Thank you much. So I am a kitchen confidence coach and I can explain it a little bit if I tell you the name of my business. Okay, the name of my business is Balaboosta's Secret. Now you may be saying to yourself, what the heck is a balaboosta? Yes, it's an old-fashioned Yiddish term that means a woman who makes a fine home. Now I am not a Martha Stewart fine home person by any stretch of the imagination. I'm more put your feet up on the furniture, relax, have your friends come on, don't worry about putting a coaster under your glass. We're here to have fun, enjoy each other, make some memories, make some laughter. So, my Kitchen Confidence Coaching business teaches busy people how to incorporate that mindset in their daily dinner routines. So, I teach meal planning, meal prep, how to cook, and then how to serve those meals with fun and games and clever conversation with your family. Because if you're not having fun with your family, you're kind of missing the point.

I love this so much. Can you say the word bala de busta?

Bala busta. B-A-L-A-B-O-O-S-T-A. Bala busta.

And it means that you—

a woman who makes a fine home.

You make— a woman that makes a fine home. And I'm looking at your home behind you. So like, if you're listening, Linda and I are like on video right now and we can see each other. And she has this beautiful home from what I can tell, with like this, like this huge— these huge open windows that look out into the green forest. And she's got her plants and you You are a balabusta, Linda. I can already tell you. I can feel it.

Thanks.

Yeah, that is gorgeous. Where do you live? Like, what part of the world are you in?

I'm about an hour outside of New York City. So I do live in the woods. It's great. It's a great community. But if I want the hustle and bustle, I can get on a train and be in New York in under an hour.

Wow. Yeah, I can tell it looks beautiful. Your home looks so inviting and serene. From right here. Thanks. Yes, yeah, you're so welcome. So how in the world did you get into kitchen confidence coaching? Like, how did that journey unfold for you?

Sure, I started out as a lawyer, which is not nearly as exciting as being a kitchen confidence coach.

That's like the total opposite of—

Total opposite. Yeah. It's creativity in a different form. True. And I started my motherhood journey later in life than most people, and I took a break from law, and as my kids started growing up and we'd have playdates, I'd see the parents of their friends giving them a Subway sandwich for dinner in the car or not knowing how to cook or not know— raise your hand. Everybody's been there, but I don't recommend it as a daily diet. And a lot of these parents didn't know what they were doing in terms of kitchen confidence. And it was just easier for them to just grab something. And it wasn't important for them to make the memories that I think are really so magical and so important. And studies show that if you do sit down for a family family meal, your children do better in school, they have better social skills, better communication skills, and they're happier. So who doesn't want that for their family? So I kind of took it upon myself to, to start teaching it. And as a funny aside, I used to be a really horrific cook. So, yeah, so when I was in high school, my mother was a boring, boring, boring cook. And so I said to her, as high schoolers will do, "Ma, your cooking sucks." I hope I can say that.

Definitely.

Okay, good. So I said it was terrible. And she goes, okay, big shot. She brought me The Joy of Cooking. And she said, each week, one day a week, you have to cook something. Tell me the recipe. I'll get you the ingredients and you cook it. Well, I was horrible. Everybody boycotted my meals. And after 3 weeks of trying this, they banned me from cooking in my house. So banned. I was banned. And then one time for holidays, I thought I'd redeem myself. And I made a cake, which my family promptly used as a doorstop. So my skills were really not good. And I'm not one to take defeat. So I said, okay, I'm going to learn how to cook. And I started looking at cookbooks. I started taking continuing ed courses on cooking. I joined a lot of cooking programs and I basically taught myself. And now I have over 1,000 cookbooks. Most recipes I don't file, but I use for inspiration. And now I can share that wisdom with people who don't have to get 1,000 cookbooks.

Wow, I love that story so much. So I too relate in the fact of I'm not a natural, but natural, I'm not naturally like calling, you know, I'm not gifted in the kitchen basically, like does not come natural to me. And it does, it may like, it's easy to slip into the habit of like giving your kids like chicken nuggets or something, you know, because you know that they're going to eat it, right? That's what they want to eat. And it's just easier right now. I will say though, that I like, I find that whenever we all sit down for a meal and we enjoy it, we'll go around the table and talk about like what we're grateful for, like what was our favorite part of our day, like those, we remember those moments, you know, and like it does make a huge difference on even like immediately after because my kids are 4 and 2. So like they're still very young. But we try to like converse with them a lot and like have, you know, conversations and stuff, even though they're still young. But we— it makes bedtime easier. It makes bath time easier after, you know, after dinner. Like, if we've had that— like, it's almost like we're closing out our day. It's like we come to the table and we're closing out our day.

And another, another benefit of what you're describing is if your kids are distracted and engaged in conversation, they're more likely to eat what you cook, and you'll have less picky eaters because they're not bored and looking at their plate going, I don't want to try this. Yep. It's awful. But if you're talking with them, and I promote a lot of games to play, games that you can play with a 2- and 4-year-old at the table. So it's not, it's not, doesn't have to always be learning lessons at the table because things can be really fun and you learn a lot about your kids in the process. So I think that that engagement that you're talking about is really valuable for, for kids to learn to try different foods without even objecting to it.

Yeah, yeah, that's so good. I love that so much. So okay, so you were a terrible cook, your family boycotted you from the kitchen. They're like, no more. And you were just, you're like, no way, I don't take this for an answer. I don't take no for an answer. I'm gonna get better at this. Did it take a long, like, so what, so did you ever think about going into like culinary school or like making a career out of it?

No, because I always knew I was going to be a lawyer. So that was on the front of my thoughts, but I like to entertain. And so it helped me to want to cook for my guests. It was more economical for the most part and really very satisfying to do that. So my cooking journey really started with a combination of entertaining, and then as I got better and learned how to experiment, learn how to be more freeing with my ingredients, it expanded from there.

Oh, I love it. Yeah. So you primarily work with other women or other families that are busy and that are trying to figure out how to make mealtime more engaging and taste better, right?

Absolutely. And, and what I like to say is I like to have dinner stress-free, speedy, filled with yum and fun.

Mm, yeah, I love that. How does someone like find that to be a priority though? Like honestly, like I'm thinking like how, how do you in your business, like, how does that become a priority for the women that you work with? Because I'm like, yeah, of course I want my kids to be better, to like eat better. But I'm like, hmm, like, maybe I could just do it myself. Or like, what is like the turning point for the women that you work with? There's— I say women, but I guess it could be—

it could be anybody, but it's mostly moms or women because they usually have that responsibility. And they usually reach— I call it their dinner demons point. Because come 3 o'clock, 4 o'clock, and all of a sudden you're Your younger kids are going to get hangry. What's for dinner, Mom? What's for dinner, Mom? And you haven't a clue. And day after day of not having a clue wears on you in the short and in the long run. And at some point, usually a light bulb goes off and says, can't just somebody give me a couple of hints? You know, I need some clues. So people get to a frustration level or they learn what other people are doing and say, geez, I wish I knew how to do that. You want to fill in the gaps in your education or your skill level or your parenting toolbox at some point.

Yeah, yeah, I love that. I've been using the app because that was me. I was like, I don't know what to cook. I give up.

I don't even know.

And then my husband would be like, what's for dinner? I don't know, Daniel, what are you cooking tonight? Like, you know, always.

Or you say, what do you want? And they say, I don't know. And you're like, well, that was helpful.

Yeah. Oh my goodness. Oh, it's a whole thing. So we started using this app and it would tell me what's for dinner. But here's the thing that I've ran into it. It's like, it's not very kid-friendly. Like, it's like a lot of quinoa and like beans and stuff because we're vegetarian. And I love it. Like, I am totally into it. But the kids are like, they're not going to eat quinoa, you know. So that's kind of—

I'll tell you, I am a pescatarian. I eat fish, but I don't eat meat.

Okay, okay.

My, my family eats meat, so I can cook for them some things. I modify it to cook for myself because I don't want to be making multiple main dishes every night because that's just way too much work. So it's really doable, vegetarian, to make it family fun and easy and quick. And there's a lot of tricks you can do to make it faster and make it delicious. I'll give you a couple examples. Okay. So, let's say you're cooking something with rice. Let's say you're roasting tofu and you're going to be putting it over rice and bok choy. Let's just use that as an example. I'll keep it vegetarian. So, the next day— oh, so what you would do is you would bulk cook your rice. In other words, make, let's say, twice as much as what you're going to need for your meal because there's a secret there. The secret is if you want to make fried rice one day, you need to do it with day-old rice. Mm-hmm. So you make rice, or you can use the rice to stuff peppers with for dinner, or rice and beans, whatever you want to make with your rice. But make enough so you have leftover for another meal. The next night or two nights later when you want to make a dish with fried rice, your rice is already done. So you just got to season it, and when you're cooking in your wok or your pan, and then you're going to throw whatever proteins you want to add to it. So batch cooking is great for vegetarians because you can batch cook your grains, you can batch cook your roasted vegetables, You can— I make a big salad at basically when I come home from the grocery store. It's the only thing I prep. And to save your salad for a week, take— I use a big Tupperware, line it with paper towels, put your salad in there, but don't do tomatoes, don't do cucumbers because those are watery vegetables. Okay. When you're done putting all your greens and your carrots or your purple carrot cabbage, whatever you want to make it nice and pretty, put another paper towel on top. Okay. You cover it up with your Tupperware top. It will last for over a week. So think about that. You can make salads during the week for lunch. You can use your leftover protein on a salad for dinner or second night. If you're making tacos, you've got your salad to put into your tacos. You're not cutting up your lettuces and everything else in between. Think of the time you're saving by just that one little organizational tip.

I already feel like I've, I've had like 15 minutes shaved off of dinner making every night, like just between the rice, because we eat rice at least 3 times a week.

Of course. And are you making it from scratch every time?

I have a rice cooker, but it still requires you to rinse the rice, you know, measure it out. It's still like a 10-minute process.

So double it or triple it at one time. Rice will stay fresh in your refrigerator for a while. So cook it once and then season it twice the next time.

Yeah. So whenever you heat it up, are you like putting it in the microwave? Are you putting it on the stovetop with a little bit of water?

Depends what I'm cooking. Depends what I'm cooking.

Oh, yeah. I love this. I love that. And salads, too. Like, that's such an easy lunch thing. So I make a bulk of it in the beginning of the week. And then for lunch, you can have salad, throw some chickpeas in it or whatever, maybe some leftover rice, and you have like a burrito bowl. Like, what?

And then you use it as a Buddha bowl with different grains and beans the next day. So it's— and one nice thing that I like to do is I make my own salad dressings because they're really, really simple. They take minutes, not even. And you're going to put them in leftover salad dressing bottles. You have anyway, so you don't need any more equipment. And then you— there you go. And then you can change the flavor of your food by just adding some of your salad dressings because often it could be a marinade. So you can have, let's say you have a ginger miso dressing, very kid-friendly. We make it a carrot ginger miso dressing so it's a little sweeter. So you're cooking with that one day. You could marinate your tofu in it another day and bake it. Put it on your potatoes, whatever you're doing. So you can use that dressing in multiple ways also. And you're varying, you're cooking the way you always cook, but you're changing the flavor dramatically by using a different dressing or sauce on it.

Yeah. Oh my gosh, I love this so much. And you know what? After you said it, I think I should call myself a pescatarian because I do eat fish sometimes. So I guess it is. So we do, because we almost have gotten bored with just like the beans all the time and like, you know, the vegetarian options. And like, let's be honest, the fake meat stuff.

Don't go there. I can't go there.

We tried it when we first transitioned last year and I'm like, we just, they're not as good for you.

You're talking about like the Impossible Burgers and stuff. Yeah, it's processed food.

It is all processed. If you look at the ingredients, you're just eating junk again, you know. So we've just mostly been on, you know, just all vegetables and very whole foods and stuff. But, um, but, um, we found this restaurant. It's been so bad. We should just make this at home because we would like save like $70 every time we go eat there. But it's like fish and crab and shrimp. And I'm like, oh, it's so good. So I guess I should call myself pescatarian now.

So you could make those shrimp really very quickly. Yeah. I put it with very little fuss because, you know, if you have young kids, cleanup is something you want to keep to a minimal at all possible. So you can make a sheet pan dinner with fish. You can toss your shrimp in whatever salad dressing or marinade you wanna do, or just garlic and herbs, whatever you want, put it on a sheet pan, cut up some vegetables, and roast them on that one pan. You've got a full meal. You'll use your leftover rice from the day before. And it'll take you 15 minutes and you've got a delicious dinner that you didn't pay $70 for.

Yeah, oh my gosh, I feel so inspired already. Like I'm gonna go to Publix as soon as we hang up. I'm gonna go get some fish. I'm feeling so inspired. How do you— okay, so what's coming up for me right now is, okay, if I want to be more intentional about my children and about what they're eating and they're consuming, because I have this like lingering mom guilt about all the chicken nuggets that my daughter eats. My son, he's good. He'll eat whatever for the most part. But my daughter who's 4, she's very— I don't want to say picky because I don't want to put that label on her. She's a little more particular. So how do you kind of get her to branch out? Like, what do you, what do you recommend?

Engage her in the process. So you can do a bunch of things. I'll give you a couple ideas at once. Say, what color do you want to eat for dinner tonight? Pick a color. Yeah, so maybe she'll say purple, so you'll make an eggplant dish. Maybe she'll say red, so you can do something with the tomato sauce. So let her get engaged in the process. That's one way to do it. Pick a color. Another thing is you can go to the farmer's market or the grocery store and say, let's find something we've never tasted before and look for a recipe that's really, really easy, and let's see how it comes out. Let her pick out the dish, but it's got to be something she hasn't tried before, something that you could obviously have eaten before. But let her say, I want to try this. You know, I don't know if you've ever heard of Alice Waters, but she's a very— she's a restaurateur from California who started the local food movement many, many years ago. And what she did was she grew vegetables for her restaurants and was very popular. And she also had a lot of kids who were very reluctant to eat them. So she engaged the school system in the process. She said, give me your kids, they're going to plant my vegetable gardens, they're going to harvest it, and then they're going to cook it. And every one of those kids ate the broccoli and the zucchini because they had a vested interest in it.

Yeah.

So give your kid a vested interest, no matter what age. Let them help you cook. You know, they could do the seasoning, they could do whatever you can think of. All of a sudden it becomes theirs and they're very proud of it and they will definitely try it.

Such a wonderful idea. And I could like easily open up like a cookbook that we have or even go to the app that I've been using and say, hey, why don't you find what you want to cook?

I do that with my kids now sometimes. And my kid— my kids— I have a 15-year-old and a son who just turned 19, and I do have all those cookbooks. So I say Pick out something, you know, or pick out 3 recipes and we'll combine them and figure out how it goes. So, and of course my kids at this point help me cook, um, but start your kids young. Start them young because if you don't teach them young, they won't appreciate it, they won't have the skill. And then the question is, how do they pass it on to their kids? How do they pass those meaningful moments, those skills on, if you haven't given them to them?

Yeah, I love that. So much. And I just like, I want her to appreciate— I think I say I talk about my daughter just because she's the one that's like more reluctant. I want her to like appreciate vegetables and fresh food like the way, the way that we do. And so I'm like, well, was it genetic somewhere? Like, was it like a gene that skipped her and she just like genuinely doesn't like the flavor of it? I don't know.

She's just at the age. She's at the age.

I think that a lot of it is just like the behavior and she just gets to say no, and it's like something that she can just like, nah, don't want that, you know, because I have found out that she'll eat corn at school or she'll eat macaroni and cheese and like all these things that she refuses to eat at home, she's been eating them at school. And I'm like, mm-hmm.

So here's another thing you can do. You can make it a game. Say we're only allowed to say no 2 times at dinner tonight, and you have to say yes 3 times if you want an extra no. What are you gonna say yes to? What are you gonna say no to?

Oh, I like that.

Yeah, play games of all kinds at the table.

I love this. This is so good. Yeah. Okay, so for the mom, the busy mom who is like working and she's like, I don't even know where to start, what would you tell her to start with? Would you tell her to start with like kind of meal planning, or like what— where would you tell her?

Like, even before that, I'd say know what you have. See what you have in your refrigerator, see what you have in your pantry, see what you have in your freezer. Odds are you got something that's been sitting there for a really long time. See what you're really going to use, see what you don't want to use. Once you know what you have, you can decide what you can do with it. So maybe try to find one or two recipes to use ingredients that you haven't used a lot, or to use your favorite ingredients. Start small and work your way up. So know what you need, know what you have, and know how to use it. Those are like 3 cornerstones, but just do each one in small steps, and you'll be surprised how fast you will get better at what you do. Another thing to do is a little bit on your kitchen organization. Let's say you're a Taco Tuesday person, and every time you go make your Taco Tuesdays, you can't find that cumin if your life depends on it. And, you know, or you go out and buy garlic again because you don't know if you have any, and then you— whoa, I got 5 of these. So that's part of knowing what you have. But what you can do is group seasonings and spices that you use together often in a little bin. So now you're not looking all over your drawers for it. You just take out the bin with everything that's needed for either your Mexican cooking or your Taco Tuesdays or your Asian cookies. Keep it together. So again, you're shaving little bits of time off of the things that usually take up a lot of time that you don't need to take up a lot of time.

And that makes it more enjoyable.

Absolutely. You're done easy. Everything's organized. And you know, like, you know how you clean a closet once in a blue moon, or my once in a blue moon, but when you do it, you keep on going back and opening the door and oohing at yourself? Well, it's the same. It's the same thing with your spices in your refrigerator and your freezer.

I love that. I feel like, so this is kind of off topic, but I feel like you would be practicing like feng shui in your home or something. Do you? Yeah.

So because I was kind of opening up those spaces.

Yeah. Like getting just more, um, have creating the space. And it's the same way in your kitchen, like feng shui of the kitchen, right? Like just making it more enjoyable to look at and be in and like experience it instead of it being a chore, you know, because that's how it feels for a lot of us, especially with all kids. Yeah. It feels like a chore. Yeah. I like, like, I think that one of the things for me personally that's made dinnertime a lot easier and so simple, getting out all of the ingredients before I start cooking. So just like putting all of the ingredients on the counter and just having them there. So I'm not like going to look for the garlic whenever I need it. Like, it's all right there. And it's such a simple— like a simple thing, right? Just getting the ingredients.

But it's a good stress reducer. You know, get all your— read your recipe if you're following a recipe. And at some point, the goal is to get comfortable enough where you don't need a recipe and you feel like you know what you can substitute. If you're missing that cumin, what else can I use instead? You know, the goal is to get to that point where you know how to substitute. But if you're using a recipe, Read the whole thing first so you know what is coming next. Then, like you say, get your ingredients out. If you know, if you're trying to do a little bit of tiny meal planning and you know you're going to be using onions more than once a week, cut up a bag of onions at one time. It doesn't take you any more time to cut them up at once, but it does take a lot of time to cut them up day after day after day.

Every single day. Yeah. Such a good, such small tweaks that make a big difference. Yeah, love that. Okay, so whenever your clients come and work with you, do you work with them? Like, do you have like products? I'm just curious, um, because I'm sure that some of the listeners are curious. Do you work with them like, do you have like digital products, or do they come and like meet with you personally in like a one-on-one session? How does that work?

Both, right? During COVID I'm doing, uh, one-on-one virtual classes, and I can tailor it to whatever somebody wants to do, whether they want to learn meal planning or meal prep or a handful of recipe recipes or how to make a meal that's tied into a topic that they can talk about. I do a lot of that. There's a lot of silly holidays during— this is a great one for little kids. So, there's silly holidays every day of the year and you can plan a meal around it. For instance, there's a holiday in California in a little town called Chicken Boy Day. And you say, what the heck is a chicken boy? Well, there used to be a marketing agency and they had a big, big statue on top of their building of a half a chicken and half a boy. And the town loved it. It was just one of those kitschy big displays. And at some point, they either moved out of town or they went out of business. The building was sold. They were going to take down the statue. Well, the town was in an uproar because it had been there for so long and everybody loved it. So they put it in a park and they made a Chicken Boy Day. It's a certain day in September and they have it. So one of the things, if you find out, you can find them on my website when I post these, If it's Chicken Boy Day, you can make a chicken and then you can make conversation around it. And you can say things like, what about your childhood would be something you'd want to pass on to your kids? Is there a toy, a game? If you were half human and half animal, what would you be? You could tie whatever conversation you want into quote unquote celebrating Chicken Boy Day. And then of course you're going to make a chicken, or obviously it's not a good example for vegetarians, but you get the idea. You'll make— maybe they have Tofu Day, Tofu Boy. Um, well, you get the idea.

Into like the shape of a chicken, so you kind of make it look like a chicken. Yeah, I think that's just really cute though, and it does, it gets you out of the boring, "Oh, how was your day today?" and "What did you learn?" You know?

I'll give you an easier one. So April is Poetry Month. So one day in April, I announced to my family, "You all have to come to dinner with a poem." Well, since I have teenagers, you can imagine the groaning and the—

Oh, I can only imagine.

—going on. It was, you know, I had to put on my suit of armor for that one, but I said, "No, you have to come down with a poem." And anything counts as a poem, and you can do this with a 2- and a 4-year-old, because a poem can be a nursery rhyme, it could be an ad jingle, it could be anything you want. So my daughter wrote a poem about how I hate poem. My son brought down a rap song that was totally offensive, and my husband actually— my husband actually wrote an offensive rap song. But we laughed our rear ends off at dinner. It was the most fun dinner on the planet. You could do it with limericks, you could do whatever you want, and we celebrated a silly calendar. Wonder Day.

I love that so much. That's so good. Yeah, I can only imagine what my husband would bring to the table.

It was not pretty.

But it's a memory, right? It's a memory. And it's fun. Yeah. And anytime that you can laugh with your family, you're, you're just increasing that, that love and just the bond that you have with one another. Another. So it's totally worth it. Yeah. Love it. Love it so much. Okay, Linda. So I heard that you, I heard you mentioned your website and it sounds like you kind of release things on there. Such as like ideas and inspiration and things. Is that right?

And I'm at, yes. And I'm also probably about another month or so. I'll have up a, um, a meal planning digital program that people can access. So if you do sign up to get my newsletter from my website, you'll get the heads up when the program is live. Love that.

And that's where you'll be releasing like each, like meals to cook each day or like inspiration for meals each week and things.

Uh, I'll be teaching actually on how to meal plan, how to meal prep, how to do these fun and games at the table. The idea is for— and I also do meal plans. People ask me, you know, can you give me a vegetarian meal plan for a week, 2 weeks, you know, or 3 weeks? And I can do that, and I do give those to clients. But the long-run goal is for you to be able to do that for yourself. Yep.

Yep. So that you're not dependent on looking at that, and you can kind of use your creativity and you use your own inspiration and, and what's in your pantry, right? That's what you want and need. Yeah, that's, that's so good. Okay, awesome. So where can they find you? How can our listeners connect with you?

And yeah, okay, so my website is balaboostasecret.com. B-A-L-A-B-O-O-S-T-A-S-secret.com. I have a Facebook group, Easy Weeknight Dinners for Busy Moms, so you can join there and you'll also get notices of things that I launch. If they want to contact me directly and work with me, it's easy. I'm Linda@balaboostasecret.com. Love it.

So simple, so easy. Thank you. I think I'm going to go join your Facebook group right now. I love it. Okay, everyone, go and connect with Linda. Go join the Balaboosters group. And let's see how creative you can get in the kitchen and how fun you can make it. So thank you so much for coming on, Linda. I have genuinely enjoyed this conversation.

As have I. Thank you for having me. Thank you.