Hey Reader!

In the 70th issue of The MF Kitchen, you'll slice into the details of:

• Recipes for my Meal Prep Surf & Turf Crunch Wraps and Protein Chocolate Chip Breakfast Cookies!
• Not sure if this fruit is ripe? Try bouncing it...
• Track your meal prep macros better with this trick!
• 300 calories of carbs vs 300 calories of fats (surprising difference)...

Preheat your ovens…

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Weekly Recipe Roundup 🍽️

Meal Prep Surf & Turf Crunch Wraps A big ole crunch wrap that has just over 500 calories and 48g of protein. So easy to make and great for meal prep! Click below to download the recipe and make it easy yourself: ​​​Meal Prep Surf & Turf Crunch Wraps.pdf​

Protein Chocolate Chip Breakfast Cookies It's official, we're having cookies for breakfast. Try out this huge cookie for only 336 cals! ​​Click below to download the recipe and make it easy yourself: ​​​Protein Chocolate Chip Breakfast Cookies.pdf​

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Recipe Recreations Of The Week 🤌

Protein Dessert Pizza’s are slept on! Just as always, make sure you are using a high quality whey/casein protein and they will come out amazing 🤌🏻

Here's the Oreo Dessert Pizza Recipe:
👉 https://www.instagram.com/p/Co-TwyutgEh/​

Here's the Cookie Dough Dessert Pizza Recipe:
👉 https://www.instagram.com/p/CvfV--uxuej/​

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Zach's Beats 🎧

Jon Bellion is the 🐐. First album since 2018 is coming out here soon. Excited for the vibes. ​WASH - Jon Bellion​

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Weird Food Fact 🤓

Picture this:

It's Thanksgiving morning, your mom is in full holiday-prep mode, and you wander into the kitchen just as she's unpacking groceries.

There's a bag of fresh cranberries sitting on the counter, bright red and tempting.

You pick one up, inspecting it like it's some alien fruit, and your mom hits you with a casual, "You know, you can bounce those."

You think she’s joking (or maybe messing with you after that one time you spilled gravy everywhere).

Turns out, mom was 100% serious.

Fresh cranberries actually bounce.

Farmers even have a name for it. It's called the "bounce test."

Cranberries have tiny air pockets inside, allowing them to spring back when dropped.

Good berries bounce, while the sad, squishy ones just hit the floor with an embarrassing splat.

In fact, farmers discovered this by accident more than a century ago.

Legend says a grower named John "Peg Leg" Webb dropped some cranberries down the stairs, noticed they bounced around like tiny red ping-pong balls, and boom, the bounce test was born.

So next Thanksgiving, if you want to impress (or confuse) your relatives, casually bounce a cranberry off your dinner plate and tell them it's quality control.

Just don't blame me if grandma doesn't get the joke 🤣

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One FAQ ❓

Answer: This is a great question (and it's a very common one).

I'll cut to the chase... weighing your food raw is always going to be the most accurate way.

Because when you do cook something, the cooking method will change the weight but the nutritional profile will remain pretty much the same.

Let’s do an example with chicken breast.

When you cook chicken breast, it gets smaller.

Why? Because it loses mostly water.

The ratio I have found to work great with meat when I cook it by itself is:

4oz raw = 3oz cooked

So if you prepped 16oz worth of chicken breast then the cooked weight would be around 12oz.

You can do this yourself also to be super exact.

Just weigh your meat raw. Then weigh it again cooked. And now you have the exact ratio.

Super simple. No need to overcomplicate it.

And now you might be thinking,

“Ok Zach, this sounds all great and dandy but what if I am making a whole recipe with a ton of ingredients!? How do I know what a serving size is?”

Let me show you...

So first you are going to track the whole recipe in your macro tracking app.

I personally use Carbon (here's my link to check it out) they're actually working on getting all my recipes into the app as well!

Once you've tracked the whole recipe, now you need to weigh out the full recipe once it's done.

So let's say you make the egg roll in a bowl ramen I have as one of the two recipes in today's email.

It makes 4 servings.

But what is an actual serving in grams instead of just 1/4th of the recipe?

You'd take the whole recipe once done and weigh it to get the total weight amount.

Let's say for a nice round number it was 2000 grams.

You'd then know 2000/4 servings = 500g a serving.

So now you'll take each 500g serving and add it to your meal prep containers or however you're serving it.

But now how do you track this?

What I like to do is write down the total macros of the whole meal aka the full 2000 grams from our example above.

1. Total Macros for Egg Roll in a Bowl Ramen:
   ​160g Carbs, 48g Fat, 124g Protein
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2. Now we divide each by 4 servings to get the macros for each serving:​
   160/4 = 40g Carbs
   48/4 = 12g Fat
   124/4 = 31g Protein
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3. So now you can figure out the calories too:​
   40g carbs x 4 calories per gram = 160 calories from carbs
   12g fat x 9 calories per gram = 108 calories from fat
   31g protein x 4 calories per gram = 124 calories from protein
   Total calories per serving = 392 calories
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4. Total per serving (500g) calories and macros:​
   392 calories, 40g carbs, 12g fat, 31g protein

I hope that all makes sense!

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Serving Surprise 😮

When I hear someone say “carbs make you fat,” I immediately think:

“Well I don't know about that.”

This visual is a great representation of that.

Fat sources are naturally much more dense in calories.

9 calories per 1 gram of fat.
4 calories per 1 gram of carbs.

So that means, for every gram, carbs are less than half the calories as fats.

Let's compare the two:

Which do you think is easier to overeat on?

This is not to demonize fats (you should know by now that I love me some balanced macros).

We should be eating protein.
We should be eating fats.
We should be eating carbs.

They all serve their purpose.

They make up a dream team for optimal health, body composition, and performance (which is what we're after).

It's just something to look out for!

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Here's something I’ve been thinking about...

People like us don’t follow diets. We break them.

We don’t trade joy for results.

We cook food that fuels us and actually tastes amazing.

We flip cravings into victories.

And we treat every meal like an opportunity, not an annoying math problem.

Because eating better should feel like a flex.

Not a punishment.

Much love and happy cooking,​
Zach

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P.S. Happy Easter! Grateful you take the time to read these emails I send you! And glad you deal with my meme humor 🤣

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