Hey Reader!
In the 145th issue of The MF Kitchen, you'll slice into the details of:
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Recipes for my Spicy Tuna Avocado Melt and Snickerdoodle Cookies!
- Make any recipe for as MANY people as you want!
- This spice was worth more than New York City?!
- Homegoods made me do it...
Preheat your ovens…
Weekly Recipe Roundup 🍽️
Spicy Tuna Avocado Melt
A little twist on a normally basic sandwich that tastes AMAZING!
Very filling while only being 450 calories and with 37g of protein.
Click here for the recipe and PDF:
Spicy Tuna Avocado Melt
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Snickerdoodle Cookies
A great snack with a bunch of protein (for just cookies!).
66 calories for each one plus 7.5g of protein 💪
Click here for the recipe and PDF:
Snickerdoodle Cookies
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Recipe Recreation Of The Week 🤌
🍕 The FDL Pizza (Made Smaller)
Feel free to follow her instructions for a smaller pizza!
Or if you want the full thing...
Here are the macros for my WHOLE 12” Cheese Pizza:
580 Cals, 66g Carbs, 12g Fat, 52g Protein
Here's the recipe and video:
👉 https://www.instagram.com/reels/CtMkaHtAme5/
If you haven't already, join the FDL Community so you can share your own creations.
Click here to join now!
This Week's Flavor 🎥
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Cookie Dough Protein Frozen Yogurt Cookies
These taste like an actual cookie dough frozen yogurt but are secretly a high protein sweet treat you can snack prep for the whole week 🤫
Here is the recipe and video.
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Zach's Beats 🎧
One FAQ ❓
Question of the Week:
"I live alone and every recipe I try leaves me with way too much food. I end up eating the same thing five days straight or throwing half of it out. How do you scale this stuff down?"
Answer: Love that you want to cook!
Most people in your spot just default to takeout because the recipes feel like they're built for a family of five.
So let's fix that...
The good news:
Most of it scales easier than you think.
Proteins, carbs, veggies, cheese, those all scale cleanly.
Recipe calls for 2 lbs of chicken and you want half? Use 1 lb.
Same with the rice, the pasta, the potatoes.
Just cut everything by the same amount and you're good.
This is where the food scale comes in.
Halving "1 ⅓ cups" is annoying.
Halving 320g is 160g. Done.
Grams make scaling basically brainless.
A few things that DON'T scale perfectly:
- Cook times - A smaller batch usually cooks faster (especially in the air fryer or a pan). Don't just set the same timer and walk away. Start checking a few minutes early.
- Seasonings - Scale them down with everything else, then taste before you add more. It's a lot easier to add salt than take it out 😆
- Eggs in baking - You can't really crack half an egg. So swap to liquid egg whites and measure by weight instead. Way easier to split!
- Stuff that comes in a set size - Half a can of beans, half a carton of broth, half a bag of slaw mix. Before you shop, pick a second recipe that uses the other half so it doesn't die in the back of your fridge!
How I actually do it for myself:
I don't scale everything down.
I scale SOME things down and keep others full-size on purpose.
- Sauces, I always make the full batch. They last about a week in the fridge and they go on everything (so it's never wasted). One batch of garlic white sauce covers a whole week of meals.
- Proteins, I cook once and change the main character. Same batch of seasoned chicken becomes a wrap one day, a chalupa the next, a salad after that. It's technically the same food, but it doesn't FEEL like eating the same meal five days in a row. That's the part that makes leftovers actually tolerable.
- And anything I won't get to in 2-3 days, I freeze right away. Not on day 4 when I'm sick of it. Right away so that future me is always grateful!
And if you don't want to do any of the math at all…
The FDL App does it for you!
Just change the serving size on any recipe and every ingredient amount adjusts automatically.
Wanted to mention that 😁
But yeah, that covers it!
Follow those steps and you can make any recipe any serving size.
Weird Food Fact 🤓
It's 1667, and you're a Dutch diplomat sitting at a negotiating table.
On one side, there's a swampy little trading outpost on the east coast of North America, a couple thousand people, lots of fur trading, and it's kind of muddy.
On the other side, there's a volcanic island in Indonesia less than two miles long.
I promise this will make sense in a minute 🤣
You get to keep one of the two.
You pick the tiny island.
And you walk out of that room confident that you absolutely robbed the English.
But that swampy outpost?
Turned out to be Manhattan.
Which ties into perfectly to my New York trip last week (pics at the bottom of the email!).
Anyway...
The island we were talking about? Is just a random island.
But the reason it mattered so much comes down to one thing sitting in your spice cabinet right now.
Nutmeg.
Back then, nutmeg only grew in one place on Earth...
A small cluster called the Banda Islands.
And it was worth more by weight than gold.
Doctors of the era believed it could ward off the plague!
The markup between buying it in Banda and selling it in Europe was astronomical.
The Dutch controlled almost every nutmeg island on Earth.
Except one... 'Run' (the island you picked earlier)... and the English had it.
The fight over those islands got ugly.
In 1621, the Dutch East India Company killed and enslaved much of the local population to take control.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, the English had taken a Dutch colony called New Amsterdam and renamed it New York.
So in 1667, the two countries made a deal.
The Dutch got Run.
The English kept Manhattan.
The Dutch finally owned all the world's nutmeg.
The English had… a muddy harbor.
We all know how that one played out lol.
And another funny part...
On Run today, there's a footpath called Jalan Manhattan.
Locals still call the whole thing "the Manhattan Transfer."
So next time you sprinkle nutmeg on a recipe, just know that tiny spice was once considered more valuable than New York City 🤣
Serving Surprise 😮
This one is genuinely one of my favorite discoveries ever.
Every time I walked through a Marshalls or HomeGoods, I'd see these thin, fancy-looking cookies called Pizzelles.
Had no idea what they were, so i never bought them.
Then one day I learned the trick.
Microwave one for about 20 seconds and it goes soft and bendy.
Now you can shape it into a dessert taco shell or roll it into a cannoli shell.
And as it cools, it crisps RIGHT back up and holds its new shape.
Here's a step-by-step of how you can do it yourself:
The sugar in the cookie softens when it heats up, then hardens again as it cools.
Food science is soo cool!
I got back this week from a New York trip with Miss Macrofriendly 😆
My GOODNESS did i try so much food lol.
I'll probably put pics in a newsletter or two for the serving surprise.
But here were some highlights:
I got some good recipe inspiration, that's for sure 😁
Much love and happy cooking,
Zach