Cook Once, with Cassy Joy Garcia

The keys to finding a way to balance this home life, this work life, and still wanting to put a healthy, wholesome meal on the table for my family comes down to understanding that I'm not going to have a perfect system to stay organized, but how to prioritize in the margins and to lean on the system throughout the week.

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Welcome back to another episode of five Journeys podcast, Live like youe Matter. Our guest today is Cassie Joy Garcia, a New York Times bestselling author of Cook Once, Dinner Fix, Cook Once Eat All Week and Fed and Fit, as well as the creative force behind the popular food blog Fed and Fit. Eager to share her healthy living secrets with the world, she started Fed and fit in 2011. She lives in San Antonio, Texas with her husband and two children. Welcome, Cassie Joy. We're excited to have you here.

Very excited to have you.

Thank you so much.

Shout out to Lexi, who introduced us. Thank you, Lexi. All righty.

So how do you manage a business and put dinner on the table? How do you balance that?

Imperfectly is how I balance. It's a mess. It's absolutely pure chaos in a really lovely, wonderful way that I know I'll miss it one day for what it is. I have an amazingly incredible husband who's just an incredible dad. So that goes a long way to, to have a great support system. But what it looks like is I, you know, we have a four year old, a two year old and a nine month old now and we, Austin and I both work and we both own our own businesses. That's my husband. And we go to work for. I'm usually here around four hours a day. So I work essentially 20 hour weeks that I'm physically here at our studio office and then I run home and, and then go to juggling babies and making lunches and picking up messes and making d and trying to put dinner on the table from a joyful heart and that they don't do it perfectly. But that's the intention, you know, to bring peace and calm and this family experience around the dinner table is so important to me. And the only way that I found that that's possible is by way of A system is by way of staying organized when and if possible. And also before kids, right. We would think about planning our week and I would say, oh, I'm going to carve out Sunday afternoon is when I plan my week. I write everything down in my calendar and that's a luxury I just don't have these days. You know, there's no time that I can predictably say this is when I do my planning. And so the planning and the organizing is in the margins. You know, it's when the kids have run outside and they're jumping on the trampoline with their dad and the baby's asleep, they're like, oh, I've got 15 minutes, I'm going to write down my plan for the week.

Woo. That's a lot of time.

That's a lot, a lot of time. Yeah, exactly. And don't blink and don't waste it, Take advantage of it. And so I would say that the keys to, you know, finding a way to balance this home life, this work life and still wanting to put a healthy, wholesome meal on the table for my family comes down to understanding that I'm not going to have a perfect system to stay organized, but how to prioritize in the margins, when to stay, when to get all of my ducks in a row and to lean on the system throughout the week. Because if I, and there are plenty of weeks that I leave it up to chance that I come home and it's 2:30, 3:00 clock and I was like, I have no idea what's for dinner. You know, there's plenty of times where that happens and we figure it out. But I feel better, more relaxed and like there's a semblance of control or constant in the chaos. If I've already made a plan and I'm just, I'm just tipping over the dominoes.

I actually find the hardest part of meal planning because I. So we have four kids and I would say I'm pretty anal and we have help, thankfully. And the thing that I find the hardest is we have a whole freezer full of meat and chicken, except at 2:30 or 3:00 clock if I have not taken that meat out. We are not having meat that night because it's frozen. I think that's the hardest part of meal planning. And those are the nights when I'm like, how about tofu peeps? Because it's not a bad option. No, not a bad option. Or if it's Monday, hopefully you've caught something on Sunday. So yeah, I Find that the hardest at 3 o' clock in the afternoon. If I haven't planned it, that's when I'm so behind the eight ball because of meat and I'm not going out at that point to get it. Like, if we don't have it, we're done.

I'm with you. The cake is baked, so to speak.

Yeah.

So how your kids are younger than ours. You're in a way earlier stage, which just different, I guess. So is there any particular equipment that you prefer? Do you do the instapot? What's kind of your go to things or go to. What are your top three meals that you think are kind of the easy part?

Yes, I would say the meals that I tend to lean on the most are going to be. I do love my instant pot and I think that to own an instant pot and use it is to love it. You know, it is. I've owned pressure cookers in the past and I've owned slow cookers. I still own both of those. But there's something really satisfying about an instant pot because the buttons are just really easy to understand. I love the timer, I love everything about it. So I do. I lean on the instant pot a lot. And I'll use that to make a roast or to put. I'll put a pork shoulder in it or I'll put a bunch of chicken breast in it and make shredded chicken. And that's really my key for the week is what I do is to your point, I. If I get behind on defrosting my protein, my animal proteins during the week, there's no catching up. Right. Because you can't. I'm not going to speed, defrost something. But if I pre cook, let's say five pounds of chicken and I shred it on a Monday, I intentionally take unflavored, unseasoned shredded chicken for two more meals and put it aside and then I use that to mix and match into things. Because shredded chicken, I could use that to make tacos one night and taco seasoning on it, I could use it to mix in and make some sort of a really yummy casserole. If we're going to have company over something bigger and filling, use it to sprinkle on salads. And so I would say that the instant pot, because of the ability to cook down proteins really quickly and efficiently, is something I lean on a lot, especially when it comes to shredded protein. So I'll shred beef, I'll shred pork, and I'll shred chicken and I found that that kind of protein is really versatile and able to use across a bunch of different mediums. So I'd say that's a big go to in our house. We do. We do a lot of tacos. There's a book called Dragons Love Tacos. I'm not sure if y' all know it, but my girls, they love that book. And so when I ask them and I leave it open, I. And I make sure I've got taco shells just in case. But I say, what do you want for dinner tonight? And it's 99% of the time it's tacos. And so we do. We do a lot of tacos. And tacos is just whatever you can fit in the shell. And they like building their own. There's really. We'll do softer, crunchy ones. So those are a lot of the ones that we make a lot. And then we do the occasional pasta night. I'm a big fan of minimizing food waste for a number of reasons. Um, it. It's friendlier on the budget. It's friendlier on my time to just go shopping for the one off thing that I actually don't need. Um, and it's definitely better for the environment. And so what I do is like, let's say if I'm making tacos, it's a taco night. And I cut up a quarter of a purple onion, or they call them red onions. I call them purple onions. I cut up a quarter of a purple onion and I have 3/4 of it left. What I will do with that onion is I'll put it in my little veggie drawer. Bowl. I have a bowl in my refrigerator of leftover random vegetables. And so maybe if I have three cherry tomatoes I'm going to end up not using, or a few carrots or an extra zucchini here or there. Everything goes in the leftover veggie bowl. And then once a week, I make a meat sauce, a red sauce that I serve with noodles for our family, where I cook down all of those leftover vegetables as a way to make really good use of it. And so those are kind of the meals that we make over and over again at home.

I think what's really poignant about what you just said is because you just so you just literally glossed over something that I don't do. And I'm not sure if other people do, but that is such an amazing organizational hack, which is just have a bowl in your fridge for stuff that you don't want to Lose in the fridge.

Right.

Because we have these drawers and we have two vegetable drawers. No. Okay. Just for the record, we feed a lot of people. So we have 1, 2, 3. We have 3 fridges, a bunch of freezers. So stuff gets lost. Right. So I'm thinking, okay, if we had a bowl for the stuff we want to keep track of, that would make life a lot easier.

Yeah. Yeah.

But, yeah, to have a place to keep track of the work in progress, that for you, seems like. For you, it doesn't seem, like, amazing, but for me, it's like, oh, I never really thought about that. Sounds kind of basic.

It is. Well. And it's such a satisfying feeling to just take that bowl out of your refrigerator and use it all in one swoop or give it a quick chop and be done with it versus what I. And I know the pain because I live the pain versus opening the veggie drawer. And you're like, oh, gosh, there's a half a carton of mushrooms, and they're goopy now, like, they're done, you know, that you forgot about.

We have chicken, so everything goes to the chickens. Well, except for chocolate, citrus, and avocado, but everything else goes to the chickens. But I also, like. I love the idea of a bowl.

Yeah, I think it's great.

It's the wayward vegetables bowl.

Yeah. So what is the cook once method?

So the cook once method, it's kind of like what I described with that shredded chicken. It's the idea of combining batch cook principles with meal prep. So those two worlds are pretty distinct, and they're pretty different. Right. The batch cookers of the world, what they will do is they will make a whole bunch of carnitas. I'm Hispanic, so I think about carnitas a lot. We make a whole bunch of carnitas, and we're like, we're gonna eat carnitas all week long, Right? We're gonna eat carnitas tacos all week. I've done it. Nothing against it, but that's kind of the batch cook world. And a whole bunch of beans, and this is what we're eating all week. And then the meal prep people, in a kind of specific sense, they tend to make their five breakfasts, their five lunch, and their five dinners all week long. And it's sometimes the same dinner, but you rinse and repeat every single day, and you get all of that done. And what I have found, though, is that what was missing from both, Both of those worlds are trying to get ahead, because they don't have time necessarily to cook throughout the week. And what I found, though, is that folks who don't like leftovers and who prefer to eat different meals throughout the week, they're kind of left out of both of those worlds. Right, because you have to like leftovers or you have to like eating the same thing over and over again. And. But I like the idea of the time saving and the budget saving available for both of those if you're able to be really organized with your groceries. So what cook once does is we combine those that allow for some fresh meals along the way. So, for example, you will prep anywhere between one and three components of your meal in advance. So let's say for the week, it is, like I said, the chicken breast. We're gonna. I'm gonna cook five pounds of chicken breast, and I'm gonna shred it. I'm also going to cook five pounds of broccoli. I'm gonna roast them all in one swoop, and I'm going to make a whole bunch of roasted sweet potatoes. Three very basic ingredients. And then what we're going to do is take those cooked components and mix and match them throughout the week into totally different dinners that we cook and make serve fresh. Right? So I take my cooked shred, my shredded chicken, my roasted broccoli, and my sweet potato, and I mix it together with some sort of a buffalo sauce, and I bake it into a casserole one night for dinner. It's a fresh meal. It's not leftovers. And it's different from the loaded sweet potato, barbecue sweet potato that I'm going to serve the next night. And so that's kind of the idea is to be able to also have my cake and eat it too. It's an ongoing theme, but I want to be able to have a fresh meal that didn't take me a lot of time to pull together that is friendly on my budget that allows for me to be in and out of the kitchen in 15 minutes during the week.

Do you feel like you have picky kids?

I have. I have very typical children. I think I've got kids that they go through phases every. Every kid. Or. I mean, I have two. Well, my youngest is eating now, but I essentially have two real data points, so that's not much. It's a data set of two. But I would say they go through phases of. They love something. They love blueberry. Blueberries make their world go around. And then the next day they're like, I don't want to see another blueberry I'm offended that you put a blueberry on my plate and that never happened.

I hate blueberries, Mama. How could you even say that? I never eat blueberries. Right, right. Okay.

Except for yesterday. Those.

Exactly. Yeah. And so they go through those cycles. But I would say that for the most part, I've tried really hard to cultivate no pressure around the dinner table with my children, which has kind of created these really curious little eaters. And if they decide that they woke up one day and don't want blueberries to say, okay, like, then don't eat the blueberries. And I save them for the next day when they probably like them again. But sometimes they're picky and sometimes they gobble everything up. It really depends.

Have you read the book French Kids Eat Everything?

No, I haven't.

It's such a great book. It's about a woman who moves to France with her American children and just the complete and utter culture shock that occurs. But within the construct that in France, the French kids eat everything and there's no complaining about food, and you eat what you're given and you don't snack in between meals. It's a very different approach to food than Americans have. And just this transformation that occurred in her life as a result of moving to France with her husband, who was French for something like two or three years. And she talks about this window, this magic window before kids turn 4 and get opinions that unfortunately, we only made with our very youngest because my kids were grown by the time we got to this book. But it talks all about the youngest kids. Give them a huge range, give them everything, and don't make any noise about anything because they'll eat everything until they're like three, three and a half, and then they start to get opinions. But if you ingrain in them before they get opinions, you're further ahead of the eight ball than being behind the eight ball, depending on how it goes. So it was such an interesting read, and that's how we started to talk about whenever you go places, you're going to try everything, because you never know. Try it 15 times in every form, and that tells you whether you like it or not. You can't say you don't like broccoli after eating it once. It's not enough, Right?

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I love it.

How do you sneak in healthy choices for your kids? Or is it just, this is the food we eat?

I'm pretty much in the camp, this is what's for dinner, or this is what's on the menu. And my. I have found that when my girls are involved in making dinner, they're far more likely to want to eat it. And so, for example, if I have. One way that I like to introduce new foods is in a slaw, because I know that my girls love slaw. They love, like, a matchstick, something with carrots and some herbs and some citrus, some cabbage, those kinds of things. And we'll serve that as a really yummy, crunchy side. They love those kinds of vegetables. And so what I like to do to introduce some variety there is I will put something like jicama, for example. I'll cut up the jicama. They'll watch me do it, and then I will put that into the slaw, and then it's in something that they're familiar with. And then they're. They're really curious, and they'll try it in there, and I'll ask them what they think. And by helping me mix it and by adding the pinch of salt here and there, they're just far more invested.

We definitely found that with our. At least our youngest making black bean dip. Yeah, she's our expert in. For our taco nights. We. Our black bean dip has. She has to have the right. She does everything. She puts in the salt, the lemon, whatever she needs to. And she's the expert, so she has to try it out.

She's responsible for black bean dip.

So where did you start? Like, what's a good. Is it just like you said, grab an instant pot and do some chicken or beef as a starter, or the sweet potatoes? What's the. What's a good place to. If we want to go down, Use your method, which sounds amazing. Where do you start? What's a good place to begin?

That's a great question. I would say the place that I recommend folks start, especially if they're not confident yet in the kitchen. If they're feeling intimidated by the idea of cooking a meal from scratch, I say start with what feels the easiest. Let's say if you pick up a book, like one of my books, in my last book, I have a duck recipe in there. If that's really great. But if that intimidates you, please don't start there. Don't start with the duck.

I love duck.

I was gonna say I like duck.

Duck is. I would put a plug in for duck. Cause you cannot screw duck up. You can cook it to death. It's still moist. There have been times, you know, we start our duck at 450 and then lower it to like 325 after, you know, 30 minutes, 40 minutes. But there have been a couple times that I maybe didn't lower the heat. And two hours later I was like, oh, four letter expletives. I completely forgot about the duck and it's happy. So my argument is do a duck because you cannot screw it up.

That's true. I'm with you. I'm with you.

But finding the duck is harder.

That's true. Finding a good duck is hard, sometimes challenging. And collect that. You know, folks, also, if you find the duck and you pay a lot of money for the duck, know that you're going to get at least two cups worth of duck fat out of that duck if you have some sort of a pan to collect the renderings and that, that saved, that's a jar of ghee, you know, don't have to buy, you know, next month. So there's a lot that you can do with the duck. But. But what? I. But I want to bring that stress level down in the kitchen for folks who are just getting started. And so I say start with really familiar ingredients. Go to the ground beef section, choose something that you feel really confident and comfortable with, something that looks like a taco and something that looks like a salad, you know, and start, start with what looks familiar. Try this out, try, cook, cook three pounds of ground beef, crumble it down, divided up into two different meals, and start there. How can I use this? Ground this cooked ground beef into two different dinners that I'm going to make fresh this week? I have, I obviously I have ideas and books, but go to your own ideas. What are the types of dishes that you really enjoy and you really love? Do you really love a stuffed potato? Right. I really love sweet potato with some sort of a crumbled protein on top of it and cilantro and coconut milk on top. Like, you can kind of start to piece together your own week based on the foods that you really, really love. And then by having that basic protein already cooked, you're. You're doing this, you're doing the cook ones thing. And then as your confidence starts to build and you're like, wow, I really got this. Then roast a whole chicken. Go for it. You know, try it. It's like, what's the worst that could happen is you wind up with a little bit of crispy chicken skin, which is not the worst thing in the world.

I love crispy chicken skin. I cooked my chicken the breast. First time I ever cooked a chicken, I was in my 20s. I had just moved out of my mom's house and I call my mom and I'm like, mom, there's no breast meat on my chicken. And this is before cell phone, so we couldn't FaceTime and she's like, turn it over, stupid. I was like, what? She's like, turn it over. I had cooked it breast down, not realizing that it mattered. It was like the juiciest breast. And since then I always cook it breast down. But it was because of mistake the first time.

That's hilarious. My mother in law, my father in law grew up on a turkey farm and he, the way that they took these turkey farmers cook their turkeys was breast down, upside down because it made the breast even more moist.

Yep.

Who knew?

That's how I cook my chicken now. Right. Happy mistakes. But I was panicking because we had like 10 kids over, my roommate and I and I was like, I'll cook a chicken. Couldn't find the breast meat. I was freaking out.

What's the most common mistake people do when they start with your method or when they start in general?

I think we take on too much. I think the biggest mistake that folks make and I. And again, I know it because I feel the pain personally is we take on too much too soon. It's kind of like the, it's the January 1st feeling where you're like, this is the new me.

I could do it all.

Exactly. I'm gonna go on a five mile walk every morning and then I'm gonna come home and I'm gonna do a roasted chicken every night and I'm gonna do all of these things and we make some too many changes all at once. Because when one thing gets hung up or life doesn't go according to plan, well, you don't know how to recover the entire plan. Right. And so I think that going doing a little bit at a time. Adding in, if you do not cook a single dinner all week long, you don't cook anything in your home. Start with one night. Say every Sunday night I'm going to make myself something. I'm not going to just start make cooking three days, three meals a day, seven days a week. But every Sunday dinner, I'm going to make myself something nice. And I say start small, build the muscle like you would when you're training for a marathon. Right. You start off small and you work your way up in increments. And I think healthy habits, especially when it comes to time in the kitchen, are no different.

That's awesome. Really good point.

Yeah. I always Say to people, have some kind of win. You know, you're either a fell swoop kind of person or you're an incremental person. If you're incremental, you're going to need to make deliberate small changes, have a win, and then build on that. If you're a fell swoop. And you need to change everything because if you eat out once, you're never going to cook again. You need to honor how you do lifestyle change and have some compassion. You're going to screw it up. You're going to cook the chicken breast down, you're going to screw it up.

But the thing is, if you cook it, most of the time, you'll eat it. Whether it tastes good or not, it's yours.

So there's a couple things that I've cooked that I'm like, oh, no, I'm not eating that. But that's pretty rare. Usually if I cook it, I eat it.

Yeah. So it's different. Yeah.

The kids might not eat it, but they can make eggs. Yeah.

Okay.

So Ting, can you talk about the difference between your books? You have the cook once eat all week and then the cook once dinner fix.

What's the difference for people or where should people start?

Yeah, I would say it depends on what you like. So cook one seed all week. The way that that one's organized is it. I do those three big components. I do a protein, a starch, and some sort of a vegetable. And we cook those three components all at once and on a prep day. So cook one seed all week requires about two hours on a prep day, let's say if it's a Sunday afternoon for some folks, and then you assemble those into three big dinners throughout the week. Okay, cook wants dinner fix. I answered the mail. I listened to our readers and the folks who are buying the book and loving it, and they said, gosh, I love this. And I wish I could mix in a few more proteins and I wish I could have some side dishes accounted for. And I wish I didn't have to do a prep day at all. And so with cook one's dinner fix, we took away the prep day and turn and pared it down into pairs of dinners. So it would be two ground beef dinners and two chicken dinners that work together and share a similar protein. So that, let's say if you're doing four home cooked dinners a week, you can do a chicken pairing and a beef pairing and overlap them. So you're not eating chicken all week long, you're eating beef and chicken and Alternating. So a way to provide a little more variety. I also made sure we had really great side dishes with all of those meals. And cook One's dinner fix and cook one seat all week. I kind of left side dishes up to the imagination. Imagination. I remember folks writing in, they're like, wow, these buffalo avocado boats are great. But what do I serve it with? I was like, I don't know, whatever you've got in your fridge. What do you mean? And so I learned it's good to give the full picture the full plate. So we did that in Dinner Fix. Another difference in dinner Fix is I also have a chapter for seafood which is far more doable if you have just two dinners versus three. So an example of a seafood dinner series would be we're gonna roast an entire filet of salmon and have roasted salmon one night with some roasted asparagus and fingerling potatoes for example. And then save the other half of it. Everything is designed so you cook twice as much protein than you need on night one. So you have intentional leftovers of just the protein and then you we take the rest of it and turn them into the best salmon cakes the next day or whenever you're ready to have that salmon again. And then we also have a vegetarian chapter in Cook One's Dinner Fix for folks who are looking for veggie based meals.

That's great. Where can people find you?

I've kept it pretty simple. My website is fed&fit.com f as in Frank E D A N D F I T. And then it's the same on social media, Instagram, YouTube. I have a Fed and Fit channel that highlights how to make essentially dinner time much easier on you. And then we have a weekly free newsletter. There are about 70, 000 people newsletter every week and I send them a menu for the week and folks are really loving that. And so if you're looking for meal inspiration and easy dinners and things that work well together like I talked about, like you can make twice as much chicken and use it in two different meals. Our meal plans are written that way. So that's a free resource we give out to our readers. So if you go to fedandfit.com you can sign up for the newsletter and get those resources for free.

This has been great. Cassie Joy, thank you for joining us. I'm going to close out the show. Thanks for listening to another episode of the Fun Journeys podcast, Live like youe Matter. Our guest today is Cassie Joy Garcia and she is the author of Cook Once Eat all week and cook once dinner fix and fed and fit. Thanks Cassie.

Thank you so much.

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