Episode #319: Five of My Favorite Salad/Wrap Combos!

Intro:

Welcome to The Healthy Catholic moms podcast where we make moving and nourishing our bodies the priority so that we not only fulfill our vocations, but excel in our callings. I’m Brittany Pearson,
a Catholic wife, mom, personal trainer,
and I’m here to help you build healthy habits that actually fit your life. I am here to teach you
how to get the results that you want and maintain the results that you want without spending hours at the gym, or meal prepping
all weekend long. I understand I am right here with you getting my workouts done in the nooks and crannies of time, looking up recipes, while nursing babies and trying to prioritize my own health amidst everything else going on. But I have really good news for you, you can get the results you want. In less time without doing hours of cardio and restrictive dieting. I’m going to teach you how to use strength training and eating in a macro balanced way to get you feeling so good and your skin full of energy, and strong to carry out your life.
Okay, on this podcast, we’ll delve into how to lose fat in a simple, sustainable way. What your workouts and nutrition should look like during different seasons of life, like during pregnancy and postpartum times. We’ll also discuss healthy quick meals and how to get them on the table make foods that kids will actually want to eat. Mom hacks for making your day run more smoothly and so much more. All the while with continuous encouragement to stay the course and live with discipline. This is a place where
we’re striving to steward our bodies well in order to joyfully serve. I am so happy you’re here. Let’s dive in.

Main Episode:
Hello, friends welcome to July if you are listening to this episode, right when it airs here we are just starting that mid year month super exciting. Over here to healthy Catholic bombs. That means that we are starting a fresh month of workouts in the chasing greatness monthly workout group. So I usually suggest that the pre requisite for joining the group is to have taken the eight week beginner program. But if you have a pretty good knowledge of macros, and things already are gleaned enough from the podcast, and you just want to check out workouts, that’s more what we focus on over there. Not so much on the nutrition side. I assume that is already going on. But it’s a great community of women. We have a big lively Facebook group, we do some live workouts, all that stuff. You can try it even just for a free trial over on my website if you’re interested in popping in with us for July. And today we are going to chat actually about nutrition. And we’re just going to get really straightforward here. This is the time of year where I think healthy eating is a lot easier than it is other times of the year. I know summer gets a bad rap because I think of barbecues and socials. But even that food that’s usually available at parties and barbecues. I find at least in the events that I’m going to the things I’m experiencing, it’s usually a lighter fare than what you typically get during the year. Like even if I’m going to a kid’s birthday party or get together it’s usually more like grill out foods rather than pizza and heavy foods. You know, there’s obviously everybody’s different here, there’s variants, but I think it’s a really good time, especially the foods that you are in control of to just lean into those lighter foods. Go to farmers markets, like saturate your family with fruits and vegetables instead of those heavy comfort foods. But I also do think by this point like that is me I jump into that I dive into that all in May like yes, all the salads, all the whatever. Then sometimes at this point of July is where I start feeling like what do we eat, and I get sick of things. Now I am sharing with you my favorite salad and ramp combinations today. And these are my favorites and my go twos for years I used to just share these on a little Microsoft Word document with my very first online training clients like many years ago, and I would just give suggestions of things to eat for lunches and dinners and i These were probably on there because these have been such trusted go twos. But I will say even though we’re talking about sales and raps, it’s important to just anytime we’re in a food rut but this can obviously be happening in summer if you are hitting the sales heavier. If you get sick of something like just switch up the modality I was chatting with a client about this a couple of weeks ago where she hadn’t even said it we were just talking about incorporating vegetables more and I mentioned how I was feeling salad it out was the exact words I use which is not a word. And I said so I’ve been just kind of roasting a sheet pan of veggies most nights and or like one night having leftover but I really like fresh roasted veggies so I was doing that just as a side for a lot of our dinners topping it with goat cheese like making it delicious. And she then shared like you know what, I actually am pretty salad it out too. So I’m going to try the roasted veggies. But just switch things up when things get stale. Like if you’ve been having a ton of roasted veggies, maybe try some raw veggies that you love with hummus and a good homemade dip or something like that. You know, there’s a lot of different ways to incorporate vegetables, it doesn’t have to be a salad or wrap. But that is what I’m sharing today. Because I do think that having just some go twos, and like, these are the things that I typically think about for lunches, where, if I’m grilling up a bunch of chicken on Sunday, or Monday to have for the week, or I’m going to make a bunch of grown Turkey, I just want to know roughly what my plan is for lunches, sometimes I just do leftover lunches. But oftentimes I’ll plan to eat, like one kind of wrap for most of the or I will have, you know, my husband and myself will grill a bunch of chicken and then I’ll just switch these up in and out throughout the week. That happens a lot of the time. The tricky part there is having the different items to complement it on hand. Like you know, if you’re switching from a Cobb salad to taco salad, you’re gonna want different, like, you might want blue cheese, and then you might want Taco cheese or whatever. So it’s a lot to have in the house. But we have a lot of people eating, we go through it anyways, if I buy a couple kinds of cheeses, so I just kind of usually try to have some of those supplemental things on hand so I can just have that freedom. And I think that is a big point of contention with a lot of my clients, when they start eating more healthily and have to pre log their macros, they think like, well, I just want to be able to be spontaneous, that’s great. You absolutely can just because your Food Prepping, you know, Food Prepping is different than meal prepping. Meal prepping is word like you prep the whole meal, it’s done, it’s ready to go think like you make a meatloaf and it’s ready, or something like that that’s assembled. And that’s the meal you’re going to eat food prepping is just prepping those bulk items in your, that you can use in your foods. That’s more of what we do. All the time. I know this is a big old tangent to get us eventually, I promise is coming to the wraps and salads. But I thought of that this weekend where I don’t consider myself a meal prep or I really don’t prep our meals. But there’s a lot that I just kind of do behind the scenes or as I’m going to prepare myself for a week or make things easier on myself I’ve shared before one of those things is at least a meal a week, I’m usually doubling one and sending to the freezer, I just think about it. When I get to those meals like I’m making sauce, I’m automatically gonna make a huge pot of sauce, put several of them freeze it flat and freezer Ziploc bags, stick them in the freezer, because I’m not going you know, I love making sauce, but I’m not going to give that time to it. I keep it on the pot for like, around the stove for like three hours. So I’m not always going to do that. So I will make it worth it. Same thing with same family here Italian style was making meatballs. If I’m gonna bother to get the I get the bread crumbs, mix everything, roll everything, fry everything. I’m going to make a big batch and I’m going to freeze half as well. So there’s some little things I do that that’s more specific, that’s more like a meal prep. But that’s just if I’m already making the meal and I just make double and freeze one. But I do food prep often like this weekend, I planned for Sunday to be a big old grilled chicken meal, which if you’re in the chasing greatness group, too, you’ll see I always give a meal calendar, make sure you’re checking that out if you’re in the group. And I just give suggestions of usually there’s like a Sunday or Monday dinner like theme and I will say why we’ll make one of those days. General food prep typically, because that’s what I do at our family like it’s, I’ll jazz it up that and so for example, my husband’s grilling a bunch of chicken for me, which was great. And then I just planned that that night I was going to make a little sun dried tomato sauce. Not like a creamy one but kind of a light olive oil sauce with sun dried tomatoes and garlic. And then top it with goat cheese to go over a couple pieces of the grilled chicken that we were eating that night. But I was taking that other like three grilled chicken breasts to use the next day for Cobb salads. And then so I should back myself up. To even start this. This is just Saturday. It didn’t take a lot of pre thought I thought What are we gonna eat tomorrow I go to the freezer and have a big bag of chicken that I froze all together and I didn’t separate so I was like alright, we’re gonna defrost this and we’re gonna work with this this week. So I defrosted the whole thing overnight. I mean, I took out like three or four breasts. All the rest I marinated in a really simple grill marinade. And then while he was grilling, like I said, we then took a couple of breaths to have that night for dinner and I topped with little sauce and goat cheese. I saved the next couple for Cobb salad the next day. And those other ones that I took away before even marinated, I made into buffalo chicken salad to have for the whole week as lunches. So I’m sure a lot of you are doing things like this, but some of you might not be and might think like wow, that makes sense. Because you’re just like multiplying your efforts. You’re doing pretty much one action and making a goal a lot Are there? No, there’s several other actions in there. But this was all for me wrapped up in the like a half hour of preparing dinner. I had the chicken boiling while I was or not, you know what I mean? You boil it and turn it off. But I had the chicken cooking for the chicken salad while I was making that little sauce for the grilled chicken and everything felt different. It wasn’t like, Oh, we’re eating chicken all week, like there were there’s a vast difference in eating like a mixed chicken salad that’s prepared. Even if you prepare it like a different way. This was a buffalo one. But if you you know, there’s a ton of ways you can go with that too. You could do celery and walnuts and things like that. That’s tastes very different than like a grilled chicken with sun dried tomato, and goat cheese on top. So the little tips to get us through for those of you who maybe aren’t doing that, that is a huge, it’s just a huge time saver.

All right, so
my five of my very favorite salad wrap combinations that I do Lean on often for lunches and dinners. Sometimes, like I just mentioned, we just had one of these for dinner. These could all be salads or wraps. And wraps are not the death of you. If you don’t like to include a lot of gluten and you feel better without it. That’s great. There are tons of alternatives. Now there’s like the CIT almond flour, tortillas, lots of different other brands that don’t include greens, if that’s not your style, or there’s more ancient grain healthier options. And most of us do need carbs in there. So please don’t feel like you always need to have salads. A lot of us don’t feel full without a carb present. Even though fat is really satiating, even though protein is satiating, sometimes we that it’s just like a personal preference that we need a little bit of carb there. I’m this way. So even as we had that Cobb salad for dinner, I knew I had a little bit of sourdough bread left that I had made a couple days before that I was like okay, perfect, we can I’ll put out some olive oil and spices we can do that with it because I knew like we needed more of a carbon just vegetables there to help us all feel a little bit more full. So these could be not just salads, but they could be wraps and I eat always all the time. So number one is buffalo chicken. Now, the one I do it this way in a salad or wrap, I’m thinking like lettuce, grilled chicken or rotisserie chicken, baby some kind of cheese I’ll pack it with veggies or like spicy for this. So I’ll do like banana peppers and jalapeno peppers and red peppers and all that stuff. And then I do use like a blue cheese dressing and hot sauce. No more and more and more spice. And I do this very often for wraps. If I have grilled chicken in there and I’m just looking at what I’m eating for lunch. This is what I’m going to a lot of the time I’ll melt some pepper jack cheese on with it Seymour spice and do that when I mentioned it so that could be salad wise. Sometimes I’ll do that in a big salad bowl or sometimes a wrap. When I mentioned a different buffalo chicken salad. Something else that I love and what I did for lunches this week is not what I meant here, but that’s where I just cook the chicken breasts like in water over the stovetop. shred it up, add some olive oil bale some hot sauce and pepper Rica. Really whatever vegetables I did onion and red pepper this week because I knew my husband was going to eat it too and he does not love it too spicy. So otherwise I would have thrown jalapenos in there. And salt and pepper. I like a lot of black pepper. Again, more spice. So then mix it up. Obviously keep it in the fridge. It’s so good chilled. And I’ll eat that with crackers. I got really good crackers from Trader Joe’s. And I’ve been doing that for lunches long with fruit and vegetables. So there’s a little bonus for you in here.

Number two have a salad or wrap that I hit up all the time is a taco salad. And this kid just Delight me. It’s on a day anyways. And I’m like oh man, like I am ready to sit down, put my feet up for some lunch. And then I remember It’s taco salad. And we happen also have gwoc and epic to also have tortilla chips available that I can crunch on top. That’s a good day as a good day. So I there’s not too much to recommend here. You can do this however you like to do tacos salads, you can use ground turkey can use ground beef, any of that stuff. I do try to buy those little individual gwoc cups because avocado timing is just never ideal. And then if you’re like eating this multiple times in the week, if you make walk one day, you know the next day, it’s gonna look terrible. I know there’s all kinds of tricks and hacks and none of them have ever worked for me. So I just buy the little mini like pre sealed snack packs of Glock and keep them in the drawer for times such as these so it’s always a good one. Again, wrap it up, eat it as big salad doesn’t matter however you want to however you enjoy tacos.

Okay, next up this is really nice for summer and a big I know that the crowd is mixed on goat cheese. But this combination is goat cheese, strawberry and walnuts. So assume there’s a protein in there of course. This is often what I’m the combination I’m doing for our side sales with dinner. We’ve had an A really good about a lettuce coming From the garden this year, and we’ve had a side salad with dinner almost every night to round out, which is good because I’ve been actually getting most of our vegetables from the farmers market more so this year than any other year. I’ve just like prioritize that in our schedule more, we have a great market really close to us though that’s open three times a week. So I have a lot of flexibility there and I will just go grab fresh vegetables but so then when we’re out, we’re just out and I haven’t been relying on frozen as much just yesterday actually, for the first time I went to Aldi and I grabbed some bags of frozen, just in case to fill those gaps. But otherwise it’s it’s been kind of like well, then we can do salad at least. So I do usually like to do a salad and another vegetable with dinner. But this is where I’m usually doing a side salad for us it might look a little more even than just what I listed there. I’ll usually just do like goat cheese strawberries, if we have sunflower seeds they usually have on hand and then I really like like those kind of sugared up nuts that they have in the sale of toppings like candied pecans or something like that, or I mentioned like walnut something with a little bit of sweetness and crunch to throw in there and that’s what our side salad is usually looking like but sometimes I’ll make a big old salad for myself for lunch or dinner that I will also throw in then grilled chicken with this combo and usually some kind of balsamic dressing delicious so summery.

Alright, last to number four is Cobb this is what we just had the other day I love this option because it’s usually the one I can pull off. If with little to no thought like I did not pre plan the cab salad I just knew that I wanted to have a salad night that following night because one night a week my husband and I play volleyball and it was before that so I knew that we weren’t going to have anything super heavy so it’s like we’ll do a salad before that. Let’s see what I can pull off and I almost always have eggs so it’s easy to again just throw the eggs in to hard boil. I made some extra I ended up making myself like a bacon breakfast sandwich for lunch and I just made a bunch of extra bacon to top on the sale for dinner. So again just making a time go farther. And that those are the kinds of things I put in there again avocado we actually did not have because you know the avocado timing is tricky. So he just had like lettuce grilled chicken bacon eggs, I threw some cheese in there I threw some extra vegetables in there to tomatoes and his onions and mine all that kind of stuff. And then I use just this like house vinegar at that I had gotten from all the previously to so it was really delicious. We both had a huge plate of it. I mean, you throw bacon on a salad and how can it be bad but it’s good. You get all this protein and healthy fats I was actually thinking about yesterday as I am not tracking macros and I didn’t do out you know what the macros were or what doesn’t there has got to be a lot of protein to this because the chicken breasts alone had about 30 And then he had the bacon and then he had the egg so that he had the cheese it was definitely had to be pushing like 40 Almost 50 grams of protein for that meal from a salad which is crazy.

Alright, lastly, I actually get another bonus because I couldn’t decide I put Caesar in Southwest and then an all caps tie. And I love both Caesar is like just one of my go twos. Funny aside about Caesar pre having my first baby when I first got really into nutrition and macros and I was a lot more strict than I am currently or have been since I was doing no gluten no dairy at all. I had no butter in the house was only coconut oil. This was when we first like before right before we got married and then when we first got married but that it was funny because I got pregnant a month into our wedding while our marriage should say and I remember like some funny things creeping in that I thought were the world’s biggest indulgences like I was like, I think I’m gonna buy cereal for like the first time in years and then Caesar salad was one of these because I didn’t let myself have Caesar dressings I thought was too fattening. It was like Oh, I really craving Caesar salad though. And that first pregnancy I had a Caesar salad like every night at 9pm I would have a huge like mixing bowl Caesar salad. And since then it’s just stayed in the rotation pregnant not pregnant. I don’t care. I have Caesar and I love it. I love the croutons. I love the Parmesan cheese. This is where guys I just feel like there’s a lot of life that has been to be enjoyed and it can’t all be like this is where I’d rather be 2% higher body fat and having Caesar salads than not. Okay, so personal preference. You can load it up with veggies and you can do it as healthy as you want to. There’s a lot of great homemade dressing options that are not as thick and heavy. And then southwest salads are just fun to me again, because you can throw tortilla chips in it or tortilla strips, but you can really load these up with protein too. If you tolerate and like black beans, this is the one I get a pushback for in my family but you could throw black beans in there even instead of chicken. If you’re trying to have a meatless meal. That would work really well. You can load So many veggies you can even use salsa as the dressing itself. So you’re saving a lot of calories there if that is something that you’re trying to be conservative with and get even more vegetables. So Southwest is a great one for us. I am usually doing that with like a grilled chicken, some kind of cheddar or taco cheese tortilla strips, lots more veggies added. And what else do I put in there, like I said, they usually do serve us with like a salsa or maybe some kind of a
like Sriracha ranch or something like that, with a little bit of kick. And again, these could be wraps, these could be salads. So Delicious, good way to bang out all of your vegetable needs for the day. I like to do that a lot too, if I know that it’s been sparse, and some meals are just harder to hit breakfast is usually harder to hit vegetables on unless you’re doing a shake with frozen vegetables or you’re doing like an egg with salsa or some kind of omelet where you can pack a lot of veggies and it can be hard to fit vegetables into breakfast. So just it’s totally fine to bring them all out in one sitting too. And salads can really help with that. The leaves leave you with one last trick what I do most often for us most Tuesday nights, we’re doing tacos, and I do like a taco salad. But I also like the feeling of eating a taco and I feel like I’m missing out if I don’t have the taco so I will put the shell on the plate. And then I will load it up like a salad I will eat it down like a salad with a fork until it gets manageable. And then I wrap it up and eat it like a taco so I do feel like it’s the best of both worlds and you get a lot more chewing. So that’s a lot more volume you so you feel a lot more full for the same amount of calories because you’re consuming so much lettuce. So hot tip for you could do that with any of these if you want to finish it off as a wrap, but eat it as a salad. All right, ladies, I hope this was helpful. I hope that you can get some inspiration from these please share it if you found it valuable and rate and review would always be great. If you have a second to do that. I’d appreciate it. Thank you so much for joining me next time we’re going to talk about the necessity of completing proteins if you are eating more veggie based meals, alright, so stay tuned for that.

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