Healthy RV Cooking with ‪@Rvlove‬ | Stuffed Mushrooms & Pork Meatballs

What's up guys? It's Kris with Irene Iron Fitness and today I'm going to share a couple of healthy recipes with you to bring to your next in-home happy hour. Keep watching. So Aaron and I are at an RV park and today we're going to go spend a little cocktail hour with our friends Mark and Julie Bennett from RV Love. Now Aaron and I have been traveling for almost a year. We've run into Mark and Julie a few times throughout our travels and today we're finally going to go over to their RV, a beautiful renovated CC, and we're going to get a tour and we're going to do a little happy hour together. And doing happy hours in your house is something I strongly encourage because you can control what you're eating, you can control what you're drinking, and honestly the conversation is a whole lot better because you're not yelling across a bar table. So two recipes I'm going to share with you today. One is going to be pork meatballs and the second is going to be stuffed mushrooms. So the meatballs are going to be very easy. All we're going to do is mix the ingredients together, form them into balls, and then carry them over to Julie and Mark's to bake in the oven. This is a 95% lean ground pork which is awesome. Always try to find a lean version of ground meat and this is going to be really important for our happy hour because we need to add in protein whenever possible. Most happy hours consist of a lot of carbs, a lot of fats, and a lot of alcohols. So if you can bring in a high protein that's lean you know you have something that you can nibble on and feel really good about eating. We're going to have a lemon. We're going to use the zest and the lime. So when you zest it you just use a microplane and you want to go around the lemon and get just the yellow part off. If you get too deep and you get the pith which is the white part it can get really bitter and unpleasant tasting. I have one egg that I'm just going to lightly break up the yolk and get a nice little light beating on it. Next we have some spices. I have salt, pepper, oregano, and red pepper flakes. I have garlic very finely chopped, shallots finely chopped, feta cheese, and some ground oats. Now I'm using some ground oats. They're gluten-free as my binder in the meatballs. Typically you could use just a regular old bread crumb but Julie does practice gluten-free in her diet as she has a slight intolerance so I'm going to accommodate her and make her happy and use some of these oats. So what I'm going to do now is mix all of this together. I'm going to mix it well and then I'm going to form into evenly sized balls. So let's get mixing. All right I'm on my last ball here. So what I did was I took my total weight of all of my mixed ingredients and I divided that number by 16 because I want 16 balls. That will be four per person and that ended up being 1.56 ounces per ball. Next for our stuffed mushrooms, the first thing I did was I took mushrooms and you want to just take the stem, break it off. You want to clean the mushroom free of dirt just using a dry paper towel. Put these caps in a container. These are all cleaned caps with the stems removed. Then you want to take these stems and you want to chop these into a fine dice. We're going to use this as part of the stuffing in the mushrooms. All right so I'm just going to do a little bit of salt and pepper to season every layer and next I'm going to put in the garlic because the onions and the stems have been going for a few minutes and they're starting to soften up and smells really good in here. So in goes the garlic. You always want to be careful not to burn your garlic. Just give that a minute and then we're going to throw in our spinach and our parsley and the cheese that I'm using is Romano. It's like a Pecorino Romano. We're just going to use a couple of tablespoons in the stuffing and then we're also going to save a little bit to put on top to sprinkle. So this is where you can really make stuffed mushrooms healthy and scale back the cheese because a lot of stuffed mushrooms are loaded with cream cheese, parmesan cheese, really loaded up. It tastes good. It's gooey and delicious but you don't need it. You end up eating that and feel heavy and weighed down. Just a little bit of cheese will give you that nutty salty flavor that cheese that you crave but you don't need to go overboard on it and this is the beauty of cooking your own at home is you can control it. All right so in goes the spinach. Regular old baby spinach. I just chopped it up. I'm gonna do a couple tablespoons of these ground gluten-free oats. We're gonna reserve some of the oats to put on top so when you sprinkle the stuff on top it gets nice and crispy in the oven and then same deal with the cheese and lastly just a little bit of fresh parsley. I'm also going to bring some parsley to put on top for a garnish and I love parsley. It just it's so fragrant and it smells so fresh and clean like a garden and it just gives that freshness to any dish that you use it with. So give this a mix. The cheese and the oats is just gonna help bind everything together. Just gonna turn my heat off and let this cool down so I can put it in my to-go container and we are ready to rock. I got my bag packed up. We're ready to go. We're gonna walk over and we're gonna finish it off at Mark and Julie's. All right so here we are inside of Julie's beautiful kitchen. Thank you so much for having me here. Oh you're welcome. We just got done doing a full walkthrough of her and Mark's coach so we'll link that video here. Check out the full tour and now we're on to the apps and I did all the prep work before in our van and now we're gonna do the fun part and assemble it and eat it. Great it means you're not gonna mess up my kitchen. I know, I know. It's okay you can do whatever you want. I get to go do dishes tonight when I go home. No that's Mark's job. So the first thing we're gonna do is get these mushrooms in the oven. So what are we making here? We're doing stuffed mushrooms and we're also doing pork Mediterranean meatballs. So we're gonna get these mushrooms oiled up. We're just gonna use a little bit of olive oil. Now the thing when you're cooking healthy you always want to limit the oil that you're using. Okay so you want to do it sparingly and just do a dab, do a brush and then really just like rub it around with your hands. So this is going to be the first step. We're gonna get all these mushrooms lightly oiled up and we're gonna pre-cook them in your oven which I'm really excited about. It's actually a convection microwave oven but it works just as well as a regular oven I found. So good. We have a convection oven in our van as well but I haven't really fully utilized it to the full extent so this might encourage me to use ours a little bit more. Our first RV had a convection oven and it took a while for me to have the courage to use that as well but once I started there was no looking back. All right so we're gonna pop these in. I think I mentioned the oven's convection microwave is at 325 Fahrenheit and we're gonna pull these out and we'll keep going once these are ready. All right so the oven just beeped. We're gonna pull out these mushroom caps. They smell really good. And while these mushrooms are being stuffed we're gonna bake our meatballs on the same platter. So the meatballs, if you want to take that off, yep. I already pre-mixed them and rolled them. Those are pork. Chris, you're so organized. And those are like a Mediterranean pork meatball. They're 95% lean which you can see I'm trying to keep the overall calories down of everything we're eating. I appreciate that. So that you don't have guilt while you're eating it. Like this is fun and your guests won't even know that you're making things healthy. What we did with those meatballs is instead of using bread crumbs I took some gluten-free oats and I mixed those up so that you could have your gluten-free in them. And those oats are also going to be used in the mushrooms when we sprinkle them on top. So making little healthy swaps like that where again you won't even notice. I like making meatballs with oatmeal instead of bread crumbs. Yeah give it a wipe. Well that's great because I try to, we both try to eat gluten-free where possible. So any little changes like that we can make I sure appreciate. So the meatballs, it's pork, there's salt, there's pepper, there's a little red pepper flakes. Not too much, I didn't know how much spice you guys like. We like a bit of spice. Okay so hopefully you'll pick up a little heat. There's lemon zest and lemon juice, there's the oats, there's one egg, oregano, and feta cheese. Just a little bit of feta and what the feta does is gives you a nice little salty pop and it also makes the balls more moist because when you are using a lean meat if you just have like a big hunk of lean meat it can be a little boring and a little bland and dry so adding in a touch of feta makes it fun. And remember like just because you're eating in and doing something at home doesn't mean it has to be like gross. Like you still want it to taste good, you still want it to be satisfying. So you pick and choose what you put in as splurges. So we're gonna put these in the oven now and while these are cooking we're gonna stuff those mushroom caps. Okay let's get into the stuffing. Cheers! All right the meatballs are in. We're gonna stuff our mushrooms. This is our stuffing so this is it's shallot, garlic, those gluten-free oats, parsley, and mushroom stems. So when you make these you take the mushroom stems off and then chop them up and put them in the stuffing. And a trick when you're stuffing your mushrooms always start with the little guys first because that way if you run out of stuffing you fill as many mushrooms as possible. So next we're gonna add on some topping. So in here we have pecorino cheese which I forgot there's a little bit of that in the stuffing as well. I knew I was forgetting something. And then more of those oats. So traditionally in these if you weren't gluten sensitive you would just use panko breadcrumbs because panko is really good and crispy and golden and delicious. We're using the oats. Okay. So in order to make these a little bit more golden so we're just going to take a little oil, mix that together. You might need a little bit more but the goal here is to get those oats a little moistened so that when they're under the broiler they get crispy and brown and delicious because you always eat with your eyes first. I don't know I'm smelling with my eating with my nose first right now it'll smell so good. A little more. Take a little and sprinkle it on each little mushroom cap and then we're gonna pop these back in your convection oven and because everything's cooked through, the mushrooms are cooked through, the stuffing I cooked already in my skillet. Okay. The goal is to warm everything through and get a nice brown crust. So if you have a broiler this is a great time to use your broiler. So on our convection we have a browning option button so we're going to try that today. Let's test it out. No I have not tried that before so this will be a good experiment. Can you guys smell the meatballs back there? Oh yeah. I think the boys are getting hungry. Oh wow. Okay so let's switch spots here and we're gonna transfer these meatballs onto a serving plate. They look really good and when I rolled these into balls I portioned them all out into the same exact weight. I use my scale when I portion out my meatballs. That's precise. But look how pretty they are. Yeah very pretty. And it's all about presentation and they cook evenly. So I brought some parsley with. We can throw some fresh parsley on top. Okay so our meatballs are ready and we're going to set those aside. Okay so we're just transferring these back to the oven plate and this is a really good example of what cooking in an RV is like where you're constantly rotating things. You're using the same equipment even if you're using a little convection microwave in a van, a class b, class c. It's the same type of cycling process. This is also going to make you much more popular in campground and happy hour. Yeah exactly. So pop those in. Okay we're going to do the broil brown and just watch it because you don't want them to burn. And it should only take a few minutes. I'd say like three to seven minutes somewhere in that zone. Just keep an eye on it. And then once those are done we're all ready and we'll show you our final spread. Okay so the mushrooms are done. That's the final piece to our puzzle. Getting hungry. And let's transfer these to... do you have one more serving plate? I do. Okay we're gonna transfer these to a plate and then we have our meatballs. Julie had a very nicely stocked pantry which I talk about often is having a pantry stocked to be able to put together something quickly. Thank you. So this was a happy hour for us but it turned into become a dinner. Yes it has because it's a good thing. And not only like if you end up having to feed for a larger meal but if you have a lot of people we found some great items to fill out the spread. So we got kalamata olives, we have some artichoke hearts, we have beets with feta sprinkled on top, we have domatas which are grape leaves stuffed with rice and seasoning, and we sprinkled that with some lemon juice and some lemon zest. We have cucumbers. We have so much here I forget what we put out but we have cucumbers, some oregano, and that's a really great tip for like just pickling some cucumbers. It tastes like really crisp fresh pickles. And we have the meatballs, we have the mushrooms, and we have wine. We have great company, we have great laughs, and we've had a lot of fun doing this. It's been awesome. It's been really fun. So next time you're talking about a happy hour do it inside your home or your RV and shock yourself how much fun you'll have. Save some money, eat healthier, have fun doing it, and I hope you try it out. Check out my blog IreneIreneFitness.com for the recipes for the meatballs and the mushrooms. I'll also put in some serving suggestions for the sides that we did and we'll see you next time. Check out RV Loves blog too in the meantime. Get to know them. They're great peeps and we had fun hanging out and we'll see you next week. Thanks so much for watching. See ya!