An often-overlooked part of weight loss struggles is amount and quality of sleep. Are your poor eating habits causing or worsening your sleep or vice versa? Do late nights drive you to the freezer for ice cream or the pantry for a bag of chips or cookies? Do your early mornings cause you to reach for the sugary food and excess coffee? Did you know on equal diets and work out regiments those who sleep 7-9 hour lose more weight than those sleeping less than 7?

Here are my quick easy and healthy recipes I’m making today:
I love the aromatics that come off of the herbs I chop on my board!
I’m a little weird..as much as I love the smell of fresh basil, I don’t like the taste of it.. ☹

As summer is now in full swing and we can start to gather with friends and family again, it is time for lighter meals that are bright, vibrant, flavorful and pair with a nice white wine. This dish is one of my favorites because it is so easy to  prepare even for a large group of 6 or 8, because it has essentially 3 components and it also allows you to feature great summer produce like squash. In this recipe I used bone in skin on chicken breast because the hard seard, crackling skin on chicken gives such a nice roasted flavor and leaves them meat tender and unctuous without adding a lot of unneeded butter or oil. For the Pesto I love to use Pine nuts or Pingole’s because they are so buttery and smooth when roasted and then pureed, which makes for a great texture to the sauce.

Thai cuisine has always been a go to of mine when it comes to explosions of flavor, from the shear depth and overwhelming umami flavors of Shrimp paste paired with the uplifting floral notes of lemon grass or the insane saltiness and incredibly pungent aroma of fish sauce paired with Thai basil and coconut. These flavors represent just a handful of the incredible array of spices and herbs Thai cuisine has to offer.

As is true with all good paella, the place to start is with a good sofrito. Sofrito; is the spanish name for the of the slowly cooked combination of chopped garlic onion and tomato which is reduced  slowly until the onions and garlic have lightly caramelized and turned translucent and the liquid from the tomatoes has almost completely evaporated leaving you with a flavor packed paste to start your paella off in the right direction. This serves as an important first step in the process and allows your paella to have a deeper more complex flavor profile which is especially important for our low carb variation because the cauliflower rice takes much less time to cook than a traditional rice paella would. Since the cauliflower rice cooks quite quickly it is important to coax as much flavor from your ingredients as you can before adding your cauliflower.

Tired of all that bacon grease splattering all over you, your stovetop, and your counters? Yup, so was I. I also hated having to clean up all that bacon fat! Let alone getting burned by the rogue grease flying all over the place

When I think of low carb recipes, I think of a lot of cheese, cream, and oils that are typical of a Keto type of diet. While eating a low carbohydrate diet is a great way to burn off excess fat in the body by instigating ketosis, dairy is known as one of the most inflammatory foods out there. There are many excellent fats we can use in place of dairy such as nuts, animal fats such as tallow and lard, and even avocado