Long ago my dear fake great-grandmother Nestle Toulouse left her life in the old country behind to come to America with nothing but her cookbook and the dream of wasting people’s time with unnecessary personal stories no one wants to read before recipes.
This cookbook is a collection of the various recipes I’ve tried over the past year. It’ll be updated as I try more recipes and its going to be an ongoing process in general so check back for updates. Its going to be very informal and more in the style of how i would do it if i was just telling you the recipe personally. It’ll be divided by food like chicken, ground turkey, breakfast etc. The sides and salads will be basically anything not including the meat in it even if its something that you might consider a main course and the dinner section will be the meat and side cooked as part of the same recipe.
Most of these recipes i found on instagram accounts or just google searching stuff like “air fryer chicken recipes” and looking through recipes. Most of the recipes will be aimed at being higher protein lower calorie versions of meals. This involves a lot of swapping out higher calorie ingredients for lower calorie alternatives like using nonfat greek yogurt for creamy things and 0 cal sweeteners. Be careful with greek yogurt because it doesn’t handle heat well and seperates so you’ll want to generally add it near the end or after cooking. If you want to cook with the regular higher cal ingredients feel free but these recipes will usually use the low cal alternatives. There are some in here that are not low cal especially desserts that i made over the holiday seasons. Ill be completely seperating the low and high cal dessert sections.
This is all about compromise. This is gonna be more calories than plain chicken rice and brocolli but its much more satisfying and easier to become a lifestyle change that lasts long term. On the flip side its not going to taste exactly the same as the regular versions filled with tasty sugar and fats. The key is to accepting this and getting into the mentality of letting it be close enough and getting your brain to associate it together enough to scratch the itch for it while you gradually get used to eating lower calorie versions and it becomes more normal for you. Just remember that contrary what the idiots in the comment sections of instagram say its okay to indulge a little and at the same time learning to make low cal versions of desserts isn’t going to suck all the joy out of life.
I tend to kind of yolo it when i cook and just kind of throw things together for my vegetable sides and roughly chop everything and just kind of pour however much looks good when im adding spices. So the amount of spices in the recipes isnt exactly what i added. Experiment around and see what amounts you like.
Exact cooking times may vary depending on specific brands and preference. Crockpots vary a lot based on how big it is and how full it is. My air fryer tends to need to cook a lot less than the recipes call for. Cooking times will usually be based on how long it takes on my appliances.
I usually do my major cooking on weekends and buy enough meat for the week and freeze the leftovers. Most of the time the meat and sides are decoupled and ill mix and match throughout week. My meals usually consist of meat, a bunch of cooked vegetables and sometimes an extra side.
Like 90% of the meat i cook is chicken or ground turkey. A lot of the recipes originally called for a different kind of meat but all the ground meats i subbed ground turkey and the rest i subbed chicken. Lots of the recipes should still work with different meats if you want a different kind.