Healthy WEEKDAY Family Meals DONE in 30 minutes! ⏱️

Broccoli is one of my family's favorite vegetables. So today I'm gonna make two different recipes that are just gonna kind of highlight this beautiful broccoli that's coming out of my garden, or at least starting to come out of the garden. I have this one that came out today, and then I just have some more broccoli that has been in my fridge that needs to be used up anyways. So I'm gonna pair these together, and I'm gonna start today by making a soba noodle bowl. So this is one of those things I love to make that's kind of like healthy fast food at home. I have some baby bok choy that I'm gonna do with it, and so I'm just gonna go ahead and I'm gonna slice the ends off of these and rinse them. I like to slice the ends off first, that way I can get all the little dirt bits that are usually stuck down in there. Broccoli is also a cruciferous vegetable, so it's full of nutrients and fiber. I'm just gonna go ahead and take the leaves off of this baby bok choy. You could use a baby bok choy or just regular bok choy, but I just like to go ahead and peel the leaves off so I can really get down to the core, and go ahead and give those a rinse. And then I'm gonna rinse this broccoli that I got out of the garden this morning too. This is such a beautiful, thin, stemmed broccoli. I can't remember the variety of it, but I'll definitely grow this kind again. It almost reminds me of broccolini, which I love. Broccolini's the kind that has the really thin spears. That's always yummy to eat too, and you could use that in this dish too if you happen to have it, but I'm just gonna go ahead and use regular broccoli. And I love cruciferous vegetables because they're loaded in nutrients, but they're also loaded in fiber, so it's gonna keep you really full and satisfied. This is a great dinner any time of week, and it also makes excellent leftovers for lunch. Just make plenty. So we can leave the bok choy whole like this, and we're actually gonna roast these in the oven, and we're gonna use it to top these soba noodles. I'm gonna go ahead and give all this broccoli that was in my fridge a good rinse along with the bok choy. I line my baking sheet with parchment paper, and I'm just gonna cut and dry off the bok choy. That way they're not too wet. Anytime I'm roasting something, I try to make sure that it's pretty dry, otherwise it's not gonna crisp up like I want it to. And then I'm gonna put the broccoli on the other side. It just makes everything go so much faster when they all kind of cook the same and at the same rate. So I'm gonna put it all in here. And then I like to take just a little spray of my avocado oil. I love this one in the bottle. I got it at Costco, and it's just 100% pure avocado oil. So you can just take this or drizzle of avocado oil and just rub it all over. Spray it really well so that it gets nice and roasted. And I'm just gonna season it with a little bit of salt and some pepper. I'm gonna keep it really simple because most of the flavor is gonna come in the form of the sauce here. So I have this all seasoned up. I might even throw a little bit of garlic powder on just for a little extra flavor. So I'll just do a little sprinkle of that. And then I'm gonna pop this into the oven at 375. And you don't wanna do it too high. If you do it too high, it's gonna tend to burn the leaves of the bok choy. So I'm gonna do it at 375 and just do it for about 12 to 15 minutes until it's kind of light and golden and just starting to crisp right around the edges. So while that stuff is in the oven baking, I went ahead and I got a pot of water on the stove and I'm bringing that to a boil so we can cook those noodles. But right now I'm gonna start on the sauce. And the sauce is one of my favorite parts. So the first thing I'm using is a little piece of ginger. I'm gonna use some of this and some garlic to make our sauce along with some coconut aminos, which is basically like a gluten-free or soy-free soy sauce, but it's a little bit sweeter too. So it almost reminds me of a teriyaki sauce. So I'm gonna go to mince up some garlic and then I'm gonna take a spoon and go ahead and peel the skin off of this ginger. It's really easy to peel ginger that way. So if you just take your spoon and start rubbing it up against the skin, it will really easily just start to expose that flesh of the ginger. So I have some water that's boiling now. So I'm getting ready to add in my soba noodles. There are brown rice and buckwheat noodles. So they're completely gluten-free and whole grain. So I love that. So if you can find them, they're great, but usually regular stores will always have some kind of rice noodles, so you can use those too. So I'm gonna go ahead and add these in along with a little bit of avocado oil just to keep them from sticking because buckwheat noodles tend to stick like crazy. So you wanna make sure that you stir them and use a little bit of oil in your water. Once my water was at a rolling boil, I went ahead and drizzled in some avocado oil. And I also threw in a little bit of salt too just to help flavor those soba noodles. And then I just stirred those in. And when I'm cooking them, I like to stir them pretty much the whole time. They only take seven minutes, but I like to stir them the whole time and I'll use a fork and a little spatula spoon to kind of break it up. After that, you'll just strain them off and give them a rinse with cold water and this helps them not to stick together. So then I just put a little more avocado oil in my skillet and we're gonna make the sauce now. So I added in ginger and our garlic that we already minced and grated. And then I'm gonna add in that coconut aminos and that's how much I love it. I'm on my second bottle right now. So you can see that I always have this stocked in my house and we go through it like crazy. It's so good. Now I just added in a splash of veggie roth and I'm just gonna simmer that for just a couple minutes and it turns into kind of a thicker teriyaki sauce texture. And then I added in those soba noodles that we had rinsed and our roasted broccoli and bok choy and just toss it together and you can see how delicious and rich that sauce is. There's so much flavor in here just with simple ingredients. I just top it off with a little bit of sesame seeds and that is a delicious dinner or lunch. I do have written recipes that I've tested on my website. So you can go there and get the exact measurements for this. So tonight for dinner, we're having a delicious roasted broccoli soup and it's not one of those soups that's loaded with a bunch of cheese and dairy. It's actually gonna be a really light soup and broth based and we're gonna add some brown rice to it and it has the best flavor even without all those things. So I think it's a really interesting soup and I think you guys are gonna really like this one. I made it the other day and my seven year old son came up to me later that night and he said, mom, do we have any more of that broccoli soup? You guys know that I'm a huge fan of just filling up my pot each week with a vegetable soup. So this is another one of those and I'm just gonna put it in the fridge. We could eat on it for dinner or for lunches, snacks, anything. It's just good to have a nice hearty vegetable based meal in the house that we can just eat on. And I'm actually gonna do something different today. So instead of using just vegetable broth or just bone broth or chicken broth, I'm actually gonna use the two together. So I'm gonna make this soup mostly just vegetable broth based, but then I'm actually gonna add in a little bit of bone broth to give us some of the collagen and the added benefits, but keep the flavor mostly the vegetable broth because I don't always love the flavor of a really strong bone broth soup. So if you do, you can do that. You can do full bone broth or you could do full vegetable broth or a combination like I'm gonna do. So you can just kind of play around with it depending on what your taste buds are, but either way, it'll still be really nourishing and good for you. But bone broth is great for your gut. It's really good for the lining of it. And so I'm gonna go ahead and use a little bit just to get that into our diet. And then I'm also gonna add garlic and usually I add just a regular sweet onion, but today I only have a red onion in my house, which never happens. I always have tons of onion, but today I only have red. So let's pretend it's a shallot. For my family of six, I like to use about one cup of brown rice in the soup. And so I'll do about half an onion as my ratio for onion to rice. And then I'll do about four garlic cloves that are just minced. I try to mince them pretty finely so they kind of melt into the soup. So I just chopped up my onion and garlic and now my pot is heating up here and I'm gonna go ahead and add in a little bit of grass-fed ghee. Ghee is just clarified butter. I like this one. It's completely grass-fed and made with pink salt. So I like that versus just regular salt. So I'm gonna use this as the base of our soup today instead of olive oil or avocado oil or even butter. You could do any of those, but ghee is really good for you. And it's also lactose-free. So if you have issues digesting lactose, then this is a great option for you. I'm gonna go ahead and get a little spoonful of this and add that into my pot. So once your ghee or butter or oil is nice and hot, I'm gonna add in my onion and my garlic and just get those sauteing until they're nice and soft. You don't want them too brown. And then we're gonna add in that cup of brown rice and let that toast for just a minute or two, then top that up with water and cover it and cook it just like you would on the package directions. And in the meantime, we'll get our veggies going. I just have a baking sheet here that I lined with parchment and we're gonna do the same thing we did with our roasted broccoli earlier. I'm gonna roast it the same way, around 375, but I'm gonna do it a little bit longer. We're gonna do it for about 20 minutes. That way, once it's in the soup, it's nice and soft. We don't really want it to have as much texture as it did earlier. It had more of a bite and a little bit more of a chew to it still, but we really want our broccoli to be nice and soft for this soup. And I like to roast it versus boiling it. You can boil it, that way it's really just easy in a one-pot thing. But I love the flavor that roasted broccoli has. I think just that little bit of brown that it gets really adds a lot of flavor. So I'm gonna roast mine. It's just as easy because I can put it on a parchment-lined baking sheet and just put it in the oven for a few minutes while my rice is cooking on the stove. And then we'll kind of all marry it together and get those flavors going. I'll get this roasting in the oven for about 20 minutes. My rice will cook for about 20 minutes. Then we'll put it all together in the pot. It'll cook for about 10 minutes longer. And within 30 minutes, you have a delicious, healthy, filling broccoli soup. Whenever I have really big chunks like this one, I'll just go ahead and take my knife and kind of break it up a little bit. That way it roasts a little more evenly and there's more brown bits on each little piece. After I've trimmed all of my broccoli, I go ahead and put that on my parchment-lined baking sheet and spray it with a little avocado oil and then just do a little sprinkle of salt and pepper just to make sure it has good flavor before we add it into the soup. And then I like to roast it for about 20 minutes until that's nice and golden. And this is going in my oven while I have my rice simmering on low on the stove. And so it all kind of comes together at the same time. So I love when meals do this. So I just fluff my rice a little bit after it's done cooking and then after my broccoli is done cooking, I'll take my wooden spoon and I'll actually give it a smash right there on the baking sheet. And this helps it to have the right texture when you add it into the soup. In this particular soup, I actually prefer the chunkiness of it. I've tried hitting it with an immersion blender before and the texture just wasn't right. So just keep this one nice and rustic and use your wooden spoon. Then I went ahead and added in a little bit of my bone broth and my veggie stock and finish it off with a good amount of pepper just to give it nice kick. And then I just spoon that into a bowl and topped it with a little bit of my Pecorino Romano. And that is basically like a sheep's milk Parmesan. I like to use that, I love the flavor and it's really easy on digestion compared to cow's milk. So I love Pecorino, but you can also use Parmesan. So since cranberries are still in season, we're still on our cranberry orange kick. I wanted to find a new way to use it and I think I've done that. So my kids love little fruit snacks or gummy things like that, but I'll be honest, I don't hardly ever buy them. I decided I'm gonna try making some on my own because recently I picked up some beef gelatin. If you're not familiar with beef gelatin, it's basically just like collagen, but it will gel. So I love to put, this is the collagen I use actually. I put this in my smoothies and you can put it in coffee and stuff too. It's a multi-collagen. So it has collagen from different kinds of sources like fish and beef. But then I also picked up this pasture-raised grass-fed beef collagen. And I was trying to figure out different ways to use it. And I thought, well, one of the best ways to use it is probably gonna be in gummies because we love that kind of thing. My kids love it. And so I thought this will be a really healthy way to use it. Beef gelatin is good for your hair, for your nails, for your gut, for your joints and your bones. There's so many different things that it's good for as long as it's good quality. So I picked up a few of these little molds. You can get them really cheap. I got a four pack of these for under $10. So I'm gonna fill these little molds up and I'm gonna use some cranberries, some little cuties, which I always have in the house for the kids. And they're just great for snacks. I love them too. And they're in season right now. And for that, I'm gonna use three of these cuties. So the first thing I'm gonna do is I'm just gonna zest it because we want all the flavor from that zest. I'm just gonna use my little microplane. I use this thing all the time. I love it. And if you don't have a microplane, you could probably use a cheese grater or you could even just take a little paring knife and kind of peel the skin off of that and then mince it up. After you zest your three oranges, you're gonna wanna give them a little roll to release their juices. And then I like to use a citrus squeezer or a lemon squeezer and I'll just juice those straight into my glass measuring cup. And inside of my glass measuring cup, I already put about a quarter cup of water and that's gonna be the liquid that we cook down our cranberries in. And then we're also gonna add in a good amount of maple syrup because that's what's gonna give these a good flavor and good sweetness to counteract all the tartness from the cranberries. So once they're in your pan, you wanna go ahead and pour in that mixture that we just made. And we're just gonna heat these up for a few minutes until they start to burst. After the cranberries have bursted and have released some of their juice into the liquid, you can see some of the red starts to come out. Then I'm gonna put this in a high-powered blender. I'm using a Vitamix today. You can use a Nutribullet. You could probably even use a food processor and just puree it. And you can also go ahead and add in the orange zest here so it gets blended and there's no chunks of orange in the gummies. I love it because not only are you not wasting, but the orange oil in the peel has so many nutritional benefits. So this is just great to use. Okay, so now that this is like a berry syrup, I'm gonna go ahead and put it back in the same glass measuring cup I used earlier and we're gonna whisk in that beef gelatin until it's completely dissolved. I like to whisk in my beef gelatin about one tablespoon at a time to avoid any clumps from forming. You wanna make sure that it's a nice, smooth consistency. So whisk pretty quickly. You can get your kids in here to help. This is a great activity to get kids in on because it's so simple to make and they'll think it's really fun to fill all the molds. I did a couple and my daughter did a couple and I found that the best way to do it is just to pour some in and just like you would if you were making homemade chocolates, use a bench scraper and just scrape it in until all of the little mold cavities are filled. This is really a fun snack for the kids, but it's also a fun snack for yourself. And I love it because grass-fed beef gelatin is, like I said, it's basically the same thing as collagen. It's a super bioavailable amino acid blend that our bodies can really use easily. So this is great for your brain health and so many different processes in our body. So I love being able to get this in in a really fun way. After you've filled all of your mold cavities, and I'll leave these linked down below. That way you guys can find the ones I used. You just wanna pop them in the fridge for about an hour so that the gelatin can solidify and set up. And then you can just pop them out of those silicone molds. And I like to keep them in a little glass container in the fridge to snack on anytime.