 Welcome back to my home and welcome back to another what we eat in a day. So today is going to be a bit centered around just kind of recouping. We went through a sick week this past week and so I feel like I'm focusing more on just eating a lot of really good nutrition and making sure that we are rebuilding our systems after being sick and all of that. So I am starting my day out with some lemon lime water just to get good and hydrated. I'm probably going to try to drink electrolytes as well and even give some to the girls. So I'm sipping on this and I just got these cute little heart shaped straws that I've been loving. I have not gotten ready. You can see I just got water on my shirt but I have not gotten ready at all today. I just threw a hat on. This is the shirt that I woke up in so we're going to try to get breakfast accomplished and then probably get ready for the day as well. I grabbed this at the grocery store last night and I actually had two of them. I drank one last night. I got this one and I have another type of one that I want to take later today. This one is called Wellness Rescue. It's by Vive Organic and it's like basically a wellness shot. This one is oil oregano ginger and elderberry and whoo you can really really taste the oregano in this but I will admit after I took this last night I felt a lot better so I think it is definitely worth getting and using. So I think I'm gonna go ahead and do this along with my water and then we are going to do some waffles up for breakfast and I've been wanting to get waffles done. You all know that a lot of times I prep them for the freezer but I want to show you guys how you can do freezer prep kind of along with your day. You don't need to have an entire day for freezer meal prep or for prepping a whole week of food, a weekly meal prep. You can kind of prep things as you're going and that's really what I want to show you is how you can make prepping and being prepared with your food for your family kind of a lifestyle. So we're going to make up some waffles and we're going to make extra to pop into the freezer. So these you have to shake up before you take them because a lot of the goodness settles in the bottom but since I had one of these last night I know how bad they really are. If you are not an oregano person which most people I don't think like oregano in huge quantities then you yeah. Cheers wellness. I'm gonna get better. I'm gonna get better. I am getting better but I just want to make sure that it leaves and stays away. Let's say thank you to ButcherBox for sponsoring this week's video. ButcherBox sources their meat from farmers and fishermen who meet the highest standards for quality. You choose your box and delivery frequency. They offer five boxes, four curated box options as well as the popular custom box so you get exactly what you and your family love. ButcherBox ships your order frozen at peak freshness and packed in an eco-friendly 100% recyclable box. Their delicious high quality meat is 100% grass-fed beef, free range organic chicken, pork raised crate free and wild caught seafood. You all know that I'm always looking for a great deal and the average cost is less than $6 per meal. Right now ButcherBox is running their Nuggets Burgers and Dogs deal. New members receive one pack of gluten-free chicken nuggets, six grass-fed burger patties and one pound of uncured hot dogs in their first box. You won't want to miss this deal so click on the link in the description box to get your hands on your first box. If you all are completely new around here then you may not know but I make a lot of gluten-free friendly recipes and this is one of them. I will leave the recipe that I was inspired by in the description below but this is a great almond flour waffle. It's a really quick and simple and we did use all natural local to us maple syrup on top of these but you could also make your own maple syrup or pancake syrup with a sugar substitute if you are trying not to eat very high carb. And then I like to keep a nice stash of frozen orange juice in the freezer so I just mixed some of that up to go along with our breakfast. Okay I'm about to go get ready for the day but before that I'm going to go ahead and put this beef stew freezer meal into the crock pot so it can simmer all day and I get so many questions about how I take things out of the freezer and reheat them or like how I cook a freezer meal. So this here I actually got out of the freezer last night and I let it in the refrigerator overnight and I was hoping actually it would fall a little more than it has. It's pretty frozen still so I'm probably gonna run a little hot water over it just to soften it up enough that I can dump it in here it's gonna slow cook it's gonna thaw in there it's gonna be fine so I maybe should have left it in the refrigerator last night and then when I got up first thing this morning left it sit on the counter to thaw out a little bit more so for the next time I do this I probably will do that but for now I'm just gonna pop it right in here and that will help part of dinner be prepared when it's time to start making dinner. Alright so I took a shower I washed my hair which if your mom you know that that always makes you feel better and I ran and got water out of our Berkey filter we have it in our basement just because I don't really have a lot of space I want to take up up here for our Berkey water filter so I refilled our water dispenser in the refrigerator and I've got the water rolling I'm about to use I've been loving this it's called the Fixer and it's from EOS and it's their medicated lip ointment and it's just I don't know it's so soothing and I feel like when you're sick you're always fighting with your lips just being dry and everything the Sun is starting to come out it's been a little bit of a cloudy day hmm that feels so good on my lips I didn't really put a whole lot of makeup on or anything just letting my face breathe did my skincare so before I make some lunch I'm going to take this second this is not sponsored or anything this is just literally me trying to get better and trying not to be sick but I got this one and this one is a little bit similar to the the one I took earlier and it is their elderberry and ginger and it doesn't have the oregano that was like the worst part was the like swat drinking that down so I think this one's gonna taste a little better so let's give it a try it does however have black pepper and turmeric so I don't know it may have a little bit of heat oh oh wow heat it does have I did not realize it was gonna be that spicy oh my goodness oh if your grocery store has these I do recommend them though because I feel like every time I take one for the next like two hours I feel such an uplift in how I'm feeling so I definitely think that there is something to them working oh my goodness now that we've managed that so I was had a little bit of a different plan today I was going to do some bell peppers and I've had a pretty big stash of canned tuna just from like Costco runs and stuff like that so I want to find ways to use it but I just forgot that I have some leftovers of some pulled pork in the refrigerator so I have some baby bell peppers I was gonna do kind of some like tuna melt bites but since I've got this pulled pork I'm going to go ahead and stuff the baby bell peppers with that put a little bit cheese on top melt that down and I also want to use some of the butcher box bacon that I didn't use for breakfast this morning to make a really yummy broccoli salad so we are going to have a veggie loaded lunch I feel like all of the good nutrition and just refueling our body will be so helpful and the girls really love those baby bell peppers as much as I do so let's get preparing this meal and digging in using my salad spinner to wash smaller veggies and fruit and it just makes it a little bit easier and quicker to get the water off of them and I love using bell peppers I know there's a big trend of using them in replacement of bread to make sandwiches right now but I personally prefer to kind of roast them or cook them just to soften the outside shell it makes it a little bit easier to eat and a little more palatable as you can see I used our cast iron skillet and it just popped it into the oven basically until it was all heated through the cheese was melted and the bell peppers were softened a bit and then I started in on making the broccoli salad it was really just an easy throw together broccoli salad I just use my fingers to pull apart the broccoli into small bite-sized pieces I chopped up some bacon and then to make my sauce I used a little bit of avocado mayo some everything but the bagel seasoning I buy that in bulk because we use it for so many things and then a little bit of honey mustard and I just stirred that all together and poured it over top of the salad mixture okay so normally whenever I make broccoli salad I put cheddar cheese in it but this time I wanted to give it a little bit of a different flair so I'm gonna go ahead and put some feta crumbles in with this here it's a very simple salad today but it's gonna help us get some green veggies in and taste yummy so I am about to make my afternoon cup of coffee and there's something that I have been wanting to do and I decided you know what today is the day with fall getting closer one of my absolute favorite drinks is something called a dirty chai so normally you can order like a chai latte which is chai tea with spices and all the goodness but a dirty chai I used to work in a coffee shop and we used to make these all the time and this was like my go-to every single day I worked in the winter time I would make this you basically are taking a regular coffee espresso latte and you are adding the chai spices to it to give it that extra little spicy feeling so it's really like the ultimate fall coffee drinks so I was looking online to find my own chai spice blend and I really didn't find anything that I liked the ingredients of but I did find a recipe on Pinterest to make my own a spice blend so that's what we're gonna do Erin's I got a few ingredients for what I'm going to be making for dinner tonight and I made myself I'm about to actually pull the last piece off but I made myself a little cricket label for my spiced chai spice I always feel like this is the most fun part is pulling the transfer paper off I love this so much and now I think whenever I redo my coffee area back there which I'm getting ready to redo for fall I'm going to do like cinnamon and probably cocoa powder and do the same kind of lettering on it but either way this is gonna be so much fun and I actually did make myself a cup of coffee with this and it tastes so delicious so I will be sure to write the little recipe below in the description box for what I mixed together to make the spice up so I have some fun news we actually had a butterfly come out of its chrysalis if you guys remember I think in the last video or possibly the video before that I was telling you all that we had gotten some caterpillars my mom accidentally cut down a dill plant and there was a bunch of swallow tail butterfly caterpillars and some of them have escaped and we haven't ended with as many as we started but we've had a butterfly this week and I posted about it on Instagram so you guys can go over there and follow me if you want more like daily update type things but it was so beautiful we're pretty sure it was a male that was one of the first questions that the girls had was is it a boy or a girl and so from what it said online a lot of times the males have more orange to them and the females have more blue so that's definitely was very orange and it was just so beautiful and we left the little enclosure open which some of you were asking for the link for that so I'll try to remember to link that below and we went inside after we looked at it and came back out and it was gone so it really just flew away on its own we didn't have to take it and try to get it out of the enclosure to release it or anything just flew away and it was such a neat experience for the girls especially with homeschooling to see the whole process of metamorphosis and just to talk about it and how amazing it really is anyways I'm gonna go ahead and get started on dinner here in a little bit and obviously the main dish is made for me with the beef stew so we're just gonna make up a quick side dish and then I have something kind of fun as a little sweet treat after we are done I don't know if it's because it's the time of year where it's probably the freshest but this asparagus was so delicious we could not stop raving over it it just turned out so so yummy I just drizzled a little bit of avocado oil over it I used my favorite veggie seasoning which I will try to leave linked below because you guys need to try that it is so good I put it on all of my veggies if you watch my videos often you know how much I love using that buttery steakhouse seasoning and then I topped it all with some mozzarella and after the asparagus was ready and out of the oven I dished up our soup and I put the asparagus on some little plates and then I chopped up some fresh parsley just sprinkle across the beef stew I was talking about I decided to make some hot chocolate I know it's a little bit of a weird time of year to do that but my daughters love hot chocolate it's one of their favorite treats and I decided it would be fun to make because we haven't made it for a while and a little side note these cups are my grandmother's tea cups she used to have a huge wall of them at her house and she's since passed away but I love using these and I just think it's so neat that I have three daughters and I ended up with three of these cute blue tea cups so on special little occasions like this I pull them out for us to use enjoying their hot chocolate that dinner was so delicious that's one of Corey's favorites is to do either roast or a beef stew like that and I just think it's such a yummy meal especially going into fall and I'm thinking more about comfort foods and cold weather foods since we live here in central Pennsylvania there is a lot of cold weather a big portion of the year so I'm always looking for foods that will warm us up I am enjoying a nice little dirty chai and I didn't mention this earlier and maybe in the next video because I'm gonna be drinking this is like my favorite fall and winter coffee combination is a dirty chai but I will try to remember to show you my chai syrup that I use you can get it on Amazon and it's just really good and it's a good combination with that spice I made it's just perfect I think that the black pepper in that spice is what really brings the warmth out and gives you that good spicy flavor that is kind of different than a lot of other cinnamon type drinks anyways we are on the recouping mode I'm definitely feeling a lot better than I did the last couple of days so I'm glad about that and I'm so thankful you guys could hang out with me today I hope that you subscribe if you're completely new and as always leave a comment below I read all your comments and try to get time to respond to as many as I possibly can and don't forget to check out butcher box the information and the link is in the description box especially if you've been thinking about it or maybe have been wanting to have a meat subscription or something where you're having meat come right to your door and this is the best quality we love butcher box and have used it for a long time and I know that you'll love it as much as we do so I'm going to go ahead and get the girls and nighttime routine started and just start to wind down from the day and I'll see you guys in my next video