 Hey, this is Michelle Goetzinger here and I'm with the Frustrated Foodie and today we're going to learn about essential oils and how to cook with essential oils and why they're good for you. So my guests today are Steffi Lazaro and Rachel Coyle and they're going to tell us a little bit about essential oils. We love cooking with essential oils. You know, Rachel and I use them every day in our everyday life at home. They're good for so many different things, but we especially love cooking with them. It's a lot of fun. And what's really awesome about essential oils is that you get the freshness and the flavor just as if you were using the best herb or spice or plant, whatever the case may be. You get that in this little tiny bottle. So all wrapped up in this little bottle, you get really, really good flavor and it packs a powerful punch. So essential oils are actually 50 to 75 times more powerful than herbs. So when you use an essential oil, you need just a little tiny bit. And just to give you an example of that in this little bottle of oregano, there's 250 drops in here. And if you were to cook a huge pot of pasta sauce, you would use one drop to flavor that entire pot of sauce. So it's really cool. I just have a couple, well, not a couple, this is quite a few. Not all the ones that are ingestible, but a lot of them, we're going to post an e-book that you can see all of the different oils that are ingestible that you can cook with. But in the back, I have bergamot, cassia, lavender, thyme, on guard, marjoram, black pepper, cardamom, cumin, frankincense, white grapefruit. And then in the front, I just wanted to tell you a little bit about these because these are the ones that I use most commonly in my cooking. So I talked about oregano. Oregano is a powerhouse antibiotic. We've used oregano in our home as a, instead of antibiotics for six years, not as long as we've used essential oils. So it's a really, really good one to get into your system. Clove. Clove is a really, really awesome oil. On the ORAC scale, if you're familiar with that, it's a scale that measures the antioxidant levels in food. Clove is over a million in the essential oil form. So it's really, really good to get into your body. I love cooking with clove, so many good properties and good things in there. Spearmint. I'm going to let you guys smell spearmint. I'm feeling just a little bit nervous and spearmint gives me like a calm energy. So I'm going to smell some spearmint, too. Oh, that does smell good. So then we just have our four oils that we're going to be using in our dishes today. We have lime and ginger and wild orange and lemongrass, and we'll talk about some of their properties in a little bit while we're making our food. So why don't you tell us what we're making today? We are going to make a coconut milk soup. We're going to make a Thai peanut sauce, and we're going to make a honey glazed carrots. Great. And we're going to do it two different ways. We're going to do it with meat, and we're going to do the vegan version as well. So you can see both of them side by side. Yep. All right. Go ahead. So we're going to get started chopping up our veggies for our soup. That's the first thing that we're going to do. So if Michelle, if you want to cut, we're going to do the vegan option and the chicken option. So half of that onion can go in one pot and half in the other. And then we can dice up our red pepper. Okay. Do you want the onions diced, or do you want them in like rings or anything? They can get diced. Nice and small? Yes. Okay, great. Yes. Or a little beggar if it would take less time so that you're not crying. No, I'm fine. I'm fine. Okay. So we're going to look at these onions, and when they have a little bit of brown on them, it doesn't go for just like another minute, we're going to add the chicken stock then. We'll turn off the heat back here just a little bit. Okay. I think this one's actually ready to add the chicken stock. So this is going to be our chicken, and this is going to be our vegan in the back. So we have to always remember so we don't mix them up. So we're going to add the chicken broth here, this one, I wonder, could you turn the heat up a little bit more on this one? We'll just let that saute just another minute. It looks like this one's going to go on faster. We'll add our chicken broth in here, put the pan a little bit, and now we can add all of our other veggies. Okay, and something I forgot to do, the chili paste is actually supposed to go in when the vegetables do. So remember that if you make it at home. We're going to do half of a tablespoon in each one because remember we split our soups. So the carrots, I think, can come out, can be done, I think. I think they're about done. All right, so I'm just going to test it to see. They are pretty good. Some people like them more soft, so you can leave them a little while. So we'll just strain these, especially if you have young kids, those softer root vegetables sometimes are easier, that you are easier. Yeah. Okay, so we have our carrots here. This is super simple. We're just going to put a little bit of olive oil. Normally at home I'll use butter, but we're trying to do the vegan option here. But you could do coconut oil or avocado oil, really, whatever you want. And we're going to do some salt, and we're going to do a spoonful of honey. Some people like it a little sweeter. My kids like it a lot sweeter, so I'll usually just do a drizzle. And then we're going to add five drops of wild orange. We like to call this the sunshine oil, because it smells like sunshine when you open it. If you get six or four, it's not a big deal. We'll just stir that up. So you can use ginger ops if you have the double- Yep, yep. Yep. And it's really whatever you like. Even if you add in more after, like you think, oh, I'd like to have a little bit more of that, it doesn't matter. Wild orange is definitely not one of the most potent oils, so it's not like oregano. Okay. It's not one that's going to, you know, it's not going to ruin the dish if you add a little too much. And that is it. That's it. Awesome. That's our family's favorite veggie. Okay, so we're just going to let that go. I think another five or so minutes. Let me show you. The chicken's really cooked well. But this one back here isn't boiling. Now, do we want to stir and then simmer? Yes. Yes. Yeah, we can do that. Okay. And you're going to just, if you're doing the chicken option, you're going to want to make sure that chicken is kind of broken up in there because it does have the tendency to clump, kind of clump together, okay. So we're just going to place a lid on top of it and then put that to a simmer. All right. So we're going to make an easy Thai peanut sauce. I'm going to do, I'm really good at this. This was a challenge for me to actually come up with the amounts because I am definitely like a scooper and throw it in, taste it, scooper and throw it in. So I'm going to do about half of a cup of the peanut butter, okay. And then we're going to do about two teaspoons of soy sauce. So this is a gluten-free soy sauce. You can also use coconut aminos if you like that, so we'll do two teaspoons. This is really a recipe that you can, you know, taste again and again sometimes. This is one of my favorite things to make and I'll find at the end after I've made it. I'm not hungry for dinner anymore because I have tasted and tasted and tasted. Okay, so we're going to do, does everybody like heat? A little bit of heat. We're going to do a little bit of sriracha, squirt of that and you can add as much as you want. We're going to hold off on the fish sauce until the end so that it stays vegan for Michelle and we're going to do a tablespoon of honey, which again I'm just going to kind of eyeball and turn it on low. You want to be careful because this will thicken up pretty quickly and we're just going to add water to make it the consistency that we want. The heat is really just to kind of blend everything together. We don't need to have it on for very long. So we are going to add two drops of lime. We're going to add four drops of lemongrass and four drops of ginger. Out in there, but that's okay. All right, and it is getting a little bit thick. So we're going to turn off the heat and we're going to add water until we have the thickness that we want. You might like it more creamy so that you can kind of drizzle it or you might like it thicker so that it's more of like a dip. It kind of looks like it's not going to come together, but then it all does. So this looks pretty good here. I'm just going to give it a little taste. We will take out some for Michelle and then we'll add our fish sauce. So that will give it another layer of flavor and this is a teaspoon of fish sauce. And again, I taste and taste and you can add or do whatever you want. You really can't mess it up because if it gets too thick you can just add more water. Okay, so we'll put that towards the back and then that will go with our chicken. We've already made some chicken. To dip in that, that will heat up for later. Yikes, I'm sorry. Don't worry. Is your foot okay? Yeah. I didn't get cut at all. Wasn't recorded. Sorry. But you guys, you can get the carnage. That was a hip. Don't cut yourself. Yeah, I'm just making sure. Okay. Okay. We'll get you guys. And then a can of coconut milk goes in each one. Shake it up or anything? Oh, I probably should. Yeah, especially since we're splitting it. It's a good thought because the fat will be... You put one can in each one? Yes. It doesn't matter. It's so pretty. We are doing a whole can, so it doesn't necessarily matter, but it's going to shake it. Okay, there's that. That looks so good. That broth, that vegan broth is so nice and creamy looking. Yeah. Looks really good. Okay, we'll give them a quick mix. Which one was for... That was yours, yep. This one is the chicken. All right, and the vegan option back here. And then we're going to add our oils. So we're going to do four drops of ginger. Some people like to put them on a spoon first just so it catches the extra drop you don't put any more in than you mean to. The way that I cook, I don't really care a whole lot, and these aren't... It's not going to ruin it one extra drop. Which is that oil? This is lemongrass. Okay. So lemongrass is one that it's definitely not as easy to find in the store, so it's a good option to use an oil for. And then this is lime. So we'll do two drops of lime, we've got three in there. Okay, give it a good stir. Now it's okay that it looks like it's curdled, there's nothing wrong with that, it's just how coconut milk is. Yep. Oh, I can smell it. It smells so good. That's the lemongrass I think it's been in. Yeah. It really gives it that fresh lemongrass flavor. Boy, I'm excited to try the vegan too. That looks really yummy. It almost looks creamier than the chicken. Wow, that's cool. Yeah, I smell the lemongrass too, it smells really good. We cheated a little bit and we heated it up, chicken, you know, put it on skewers right now. All right, so what we did with this chicken, I just put it in a cast iron skillet with some avocado oil, you could use whatever oil you want, but I just browned it. So we did that beforehand. I browned it with some garlic, salt and pepper and that's it, just brown it up. So we're going to put it on some skewers. So you really could just use a fork and eat them like that, but this is really kid-friendly. So if you have children, obviously you teach them about the points of the skewer and stuff and the chicken needs to be a certain temperature if you're going to skewer them and stuff, but it's really great if you have young children that want to be in the kitchen with you. You can just have them make these fun little things while you're working. So we're going to eat this with the peanut sauce. Thai peanut sauce here with the lemongrass, ginger and lime. And then we have our vegan option for the Thai coconut soup and our chicken option, which also has lemongrass, lime and ginger. And then we have our honey glazed carrots and with our wild orange, yeah, and our chicken skewers. So this was the fish sauce, this was the one without fish sauce and this is the one with fish sauce. Excellent. So some people, they get nervous ingesting essential oils, but actually we ingest essential oils a lot of times in very small quantities. Like the cilantro we use for the soup today is for the garnish, there's essential oils in there. So anyway, if you ever get nervous about whether you can ingest an essential oil or not, on the bottles that we have, there's a supplement fact on it. And you just simply have to check for that supplement fact, just as you would check the back of a food box to see, you know, what is in it. But one thing that you want to make sure when you're cooking with essential oils, you want to make sure that you're looking for two things, purity and potency. And so a company or a brand that you're looking for really should have a good third party tester. So a lot of people don't realize that in the United States, there's really no governing body for essential oils. So that means there could be fillers or things in there that should not deter you from trying to cook with essential oils. You just want to make sure that you have a good reputable brand and that you're not going to some off-the-shelf store and trying to buy the cheapest oil that you can find. And not that price point is a determining factor, but really looking for that good third party tester and a reputable company. Right. Great. So now we are going to test some stuff ourselves. So everybody go ahead and grab your soup and you want to try it. Do you want the one with a lot of cilantro or a little bit of cilantro? I'll take that. I'm sorry. I went really crazy all the help. Cheers guys. Cheers. It's been great. Yeah, thanks for having us. Oh my goodness, that is so good. That's terrific. It's really good. Who would have ever thought it's such a simple soup? Oh man. Yeah, it's really fast to put together. Very good. And it's not too spicy. No, not at all. It could use a little bit more spice maybe. You could even kick it. Yeah. I mean depending on what you want. Depending on what your spice threshold is, mine's usually pretty low and this is very little spice. I was surprised because I thought with the chili paste and the sriracha, you know, it might be tough but it's really good. Okay, that's what we're going to try. I'm going to try that. You're going to try mine? I'm going to take one bite of this. I kind of want to try it too. I wonder which one is really creamy. I love it. Is there a big difference between the two? It's creamier than the regular chicken broth and I'm surprised by that. I do like that second one. I like it a lot. That's great. Yeah, that's terrific. They're both really good but I do really like them. They're both really good. And the vegan option. Well, great job ladies. Thank you. It's been fun. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. Hey, thanks again Stephanie and Rachel and thanks again for watching the Frustrated Foodie and I can't wait to see you next time. Have a great day.