The other day I got to thinking about how this whole love of cooking and creating dishes came about for me. These days I love to be in the kitchen making food from scratch that I know is not only going to be tasty and delicious but also healthy and nutritious… see what I did there 😉

But it wasn’t always like this for me. In fact I hardly ever spent time in the kitchen growing up, I can remember plenty of times when my mum would ask my older sister or I to come help her in the kitchen and we would always make some sort of excuse not to go in there, we even struggled with making the salad each night because neither of us wanted to stand around chopping up a cucumber or shredding lettuce!

At that time I didn’t really care about what was going in my mouth and where it was coming from. Sure we ate most of our meals at home, cooked by my mum but there was also the trips to the fast food joints and ordering lunch or buying snacks at the canteen or vending machines from school (makes me SHUDDER at the thought!)

University was much the same, most of my meals there came from one of the Cafes on campus or from the shopping centre (mall) close by that we would drive to for lunch or just because we wanted to hang out. 

I spent the first couple of years of my uni degree in Perth before I moved by myself to Melbourne, which if you don’t know are basically on opposite sides of the country. It was the first time I had ever lived by myself and it soon became apparent to me how badly I didn’t know how to cook! I lived off what we call 2 minute noodles in Australia, the American equivalent of ramen and things like canned tuna, canned veggies, canned EVERYTHING! Breakfast would be things like melted cheese on toast with a glass of store bought orange juice… not even freshly squeezed! And lunch would again often be eaten at uni and dinner would be much of the same.

Thankfully I had some friends of the family who lived (still live) in Melbourne at the time so I managed to get in some home cooked meals, even though those were most likely cooked in vegetable/canola oils etc.

Of course like I said back then it didn’t really occur to me that this was bad or that I was doing something wrong. I of course jumped on the whole low-fat diet and would feel so proud of myself every time I sat in a cafe and ordered “a skinny latte please” which later became “a soy latte please”… DOUBLE shudder!

It wasn’t until I met Joe that things started to change. When we first started dating we found out that we both loved Jamie Oliver’s work (still do, even though I wouldn’t make a lot of his recipes now) and one of the first cookbooks I ever got, which Joe actually bought for us to use was a Jamie Oliver one. We weren’t living together then but when Joe would come to visit me at my parents house some nights we would sometimes make dinner together using recipes from that book or the same at his parent’s house. It was something fun that we did together and we both really enjoyed it.

After we got married and started living together we continued to do some home cooking, most of the time it was me doing the cooking but on some weekends we would cook together. Of course it definitely was not paleo and we would still go out and eat at Subway and McDonalds and we would still eat frozen fish fingers from a package and microwave dinners and low-fat yoghurts and ice-cream for dessert.

It wasn’t until we moved to America that a shift in the way we ate happened. First up the first thing we heard about before going there was HFCS, people told us it was in EVERYTHING (YES!) so we decided we were going to avoid that as much as we could… even though we were still using things like canola oil in our cooking. After that I happened to stumble upon the I Quit Sugar Program which was started by Sarah Wilson. It was the first time I had EVER read anyone talking about how low-fat was actually bad for us and that canola and vegetable oils were NOT the healthy oils we had all been told they were (by the way vegetable and canola oil was the first thing I got rid of in our kitchen after the sugar). I started doing my research and came across people like Nora Gedgaudas and Chris Kresser... eventually I found Melissa and Dallas Hartwig’s blog Whole9 and did the Whole30 program. I also started reading books, the first which was Robb Wolf’s The Paleo Solution and well it just snow balled from there!

Anyway a few nights ago I remembered the first ever recipe I made with chicken. I’m pretty sure it was one of the first things I ever made! I can’t recall where I got the recipe from, If I made it up myself or saw it one of the cooking shows I used to watch obsessively… yes I was obsessed with watching cooking shows, still am to a certain extent and Joe would always joke that our cable only needed two channels, the sports for him and cooking for me!

The first time I made this dish I made it SUPER simple, no seasonings other than a bit of S&P and just very basic. I couldn’t remember the last time I had made it but thought it would be fun to make it again and add a few other things to it. I still kept it pretty simple but it took me right back to those days of when I first started to cook 🙂

Lemon Oregano Chicken

Ingredients:

• *600gm/1.3lb boneless skinless chicken breasts (preferably pasture raised), cut into even sized pieces.
• 1/2 cup freshly squeezed lemon juice.
• Olive oil (enough to cover the chicken pieces).
• 1 Tbsp dried oregano.
• 1/2 tsp garlic powder.
• 1-2 tsp sea salt.
• 1/4 tsp freshly cracked black pepper.
• Pinch of red pepper flakes.
• 1 medium yellow zucchini or use a green one if you can’t find yellow.
• 1-2 Tbsp grass-fed butter/ghee.
• Sea salt & Freshly cracked black pepper.

*You will most likely have left over chicken so use it the next day in a breakfast omelette or as part of a salad or with other veggies for lunch the next day.

Method:

Place your chicken pieces into a mixing bowl. Add in your fresh lemon juice, oregano, garlic powder, sea salt, black pepper and red pepper flakes. Mix well to combine.

Add in enough olive oil to cover the pieces of chicken and again mix well. Cover and leave in the fridge to marinate for 30-40 minutes.

In the mean time heat up a griddle pan or regular pan on medium-high heat. Remove the chicken from the fridge a few minutes before cooking then using tongs transfer onto the heated pan to cook. Do this in batches so you don’t overcrowd the pan.

Cook until golden and cooked through on both sides then transfer each batch as it finishes cooking onto a plate. Cover the chicken and set aside.

Using a spiraliser (I use this one) or a julienne peeler, create noodles or in this case yoodles (yellow zucchini + noodles = yoodles) with your zucchini.

Heat a pan on medium and add in the grass-fed butter/ghee. Once melted add in your zoodles/yoodles and cook until just softened but still with a bit of crunch. Season with S&P.

Add some onto a plate and top with chicken pieces. Enjoy!