Cook Once and Eat All Week with Cassy Joy Garcia

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Speaker 1: Hi. This is Laura Vanderkam. I'm a mother of four, an author, journalist, and speaker. And this is Sarah Hart Hunger. I'm a mother of three, practicing physician and blogger. On the side, we are two working parents who love our careers and our families. Welcome to best of both worlds. Here we talk about how real women manage work, family, and time for fun. From figuring out childcare to mapping out long term career goals. We want you to get the most out of life. Welcome to best of both worlds. This is Laura. This is episode one hundred and fourteen. Today, Sarah and I are going to be interviewing Cassie Joy Garcia, who is the brains behind the Fed and Fit blog and also the author of a new cookbook called Cook Once, Eat All Week, which, as we all know, is sort of the goal in cooking is to spend less time on it and still have fresh, healthy dinners. So I know a lot of our listeners are going to be very excited to listen to her story building her business, building this brand, solving problems for busy parents, and how she runs a business as the mom of a toddler. There may also be a little bit about what she feeds the toddler. We were pretty impressed by better than what I feed my kids. But so, yeah, what are you eating these days, Sarah? Yeah, so I thought it would be fun to kick off with Well, you guys, you know we we we outsource these food episodes because Laura and I vote do a lot of outsourcing of our own meals at home, and we know that you all are looking for information if you're more doing it yourself or you know, other methods other than having someone do it for you. But I thought it would just be fun to kind of share what we're doing currently, and I wrote down what we ate last week so that you could get kind of a real flavor. Pardon the double on tong, sorry. So, our nanny still does the shopping ninety percent of the time. Sometimes we'll pick up some extra stuff on the weekend, but it's generally her. We tend to shop at both Whole Foods and Public's intermittently because I do have some things that I prefer at Whole Foods that I'm picky about. And she still does most of the cooking, and sometimes I do cook on a weekend. I will say since Genevieve was born. That's happened less and less I miss it. Unlike Laura, I actually really do enjoy cooking. I used to really enjoy just sort of getting cut of zen and putting on music. Now i'd probably be putting on a podcast and chopping stuff and making something with my hands. So I do look forward to my kids being a little older and maybe taking back some of that responsibility, or at least doing more on the weekends for fun. But that's where we are right now. And last week, on Monday, we ate salmon, sweet potatoes and green beans, which is a very common Monday meal in our household, just because it's you know, I'd rather eat the fish fresh and it's just so easy. On Tuesday, we ate a recipe from the book Dinner Illustrated, which is by the America's Test Kitchen Team, and I also found it on the Bloe The Frugal Girl, and it's a fantastic cookbook because most of the recipes don't have a ton of ingredients and I love that about it, and they're good. So we had this chicken tigamasala with it has cauliflower in it and it has white rice and my kids love it, so we had that on Tuesday. On Wednesday, we had just kind of a regular spaghetti with meat sauce that our Nanni made, I don't know if she used a recipe or not, and we had broccoli with that. And then on Thursday we just had leftovers of Tuesday's dinner. And on Friday we had leftovers of Wednesday's dinner. And on Saturday, Josh and I were out and the kids ate scrambled eggs that I made and toasted vegetables from the freezer, and then on Sunday we well, it was a kind of not the most random week because we kind of had a hurricane warning and all this kind of stuff was going on, but we heated up two frozen pizzas from the freezer and had them with some salad that we had in the fridge. So yeah, that was our week last night, So what do you guys up to these days? Well, we often will have a frozen pizza night when we're doing this, well, on say a Sunday night, we'll have the Dejorno's four cheese pizza for the kids, that's the one they like, and then find something more adult friendly for us. Oh, we totally ate the pizza just so yeah, I mean it was like it was Amy's brand. But yeah, well I've tried to find a good frozen pizza that I like. I mean, it was something with some greens and veggies, and I don't know, I haven't cut across one that I'm really into yet, So if anyone else, we weren't really into it. But it was just like, this is food and it's there and we can have a salad with it and be I like the Trader Joe's flatbreads, so they have that Truffle black Truffle flat bread pizza, which is decent. So but I try not to actually go to Trader Joe's that often because then I wind up buying fifty snack foods. Yeah, fifty snack foods, and I really just don't need that in my house because it's not a great idea. What were we eating, Let's see, So Sunday night we ate steak Michael grilled, and we also grilled zucchini from the garden. We had tomato salad from the garden that was kind of fun, and corn also on the grill. So that was a good dinner and the kids ate that too. Right, yeah, well everyone except Alex, but that's its own special fun. On Monday night, No, that was Monday night because we're recording this Labor Day week. Tuesday we had salmon. Our nanny cooked a big piece of salmon that Michael had brought bought it. Wegmans had that with carrots and broccoli. Last night it was Tuesdays. We had taco Tuesday. I had taco salad so let us ground beef, sour cream, veggies. The kids had it as actual tacos. Done a lot. That's a very popular they like to make the tacos. I have a taco salad and everybody's happy. Yeah. We do a lot of make your own pizza Night. That's a favorite for the kids that they get the dough and can shape it out however they want put the amount of sauce and cheese that they wish to have on it. My daughter actually puts strawberries on her pizza on make your own Pizza Night, which is not a combination I would have thought of. It's kind of a white pizza with strawberry. She doesn't put a lot of sauce on it. At first, I was picturing tomato sauce and it was kind of cringing that I can do strawberry. She could do some like skip the sauce and maybe add a little goat cheese, maybe little honey, you know, maybe goat cheese and Bosomaic with the strawberries would work. But Islamic, I don't think that's what she does. I think she just does the mozzarella and the strawberries, and that's that's how she likes. Thank you. You know, that's what we're eating. We've had a couple unfortunate changes with the grocery store situation in that our local acme closed. This is very sad because it was a two minute drive from the house, or you could walk there, and so now you actually have to drive more like ten minutes to get to the grocery store, which it's not obviously horrible, but it does add time, Like you can't run there when you realize you forgot sour cream in the course of making dinner or something, which too bad. Yeah, it was too bad. What winds up happening is our nanny or Michael will go to Wegman's, or Michael likes to go to Costco and a big shop. At some point, I sort of discourage the costco because I feel like we wind up with stuff we don't use, because it's like Wegmans has normal groceries in addition to the giant sizes, whereas Casto it tends to be more just the giant sizes and I don't know, massively overspin there. But that's an entirely different story. Our current, Our current you know struggle. Well, listeners may guess when I'm asking Cassie about feeding kids, Alex is just really difficult on this and he always has been, possibly one of those like texture avoidant children. I really hate the idea that that's an actual thing. I would prefer not to put a symptom name on this. It's just say like he's a piggy eater. Yeah, he'll get over well you can. You don't have to put a label on it. Now, just call and we get vegetables in him by doing squeeze pouches. Like he'll eat a squeezy pouch that's aimed at nine month old children, but that has apple sauce and spinach, and my five and seven year old love those poaches. Yeah, so you know, no spinach ones, but they like they'll eat the oil shame in the pouches. So since he will eat the pouches, we only buy ones that have veggies in them too, And then he has to if he wants his apple sauce, he has to get it with spinach and butternut squash and whatever else. So that's how he's getting that stuff in. We massively praise like licking or putting tooth marks on actual fruits and vegetables. He's skinny, but he is growing, so I am just kind of hoping that he'll grow out of this over time. My older, my little brother was a ridiculously picky eater. He would only eat stuff like pizza and orange juice as a kid, and now as an adult, we have conversations about the difference between Sushwan spice and other Chinese spices, and so he fully grew out of it. He fully grew out of it. I've seen a lot And as for patients, I've seen a lot of patients get so much better over the years, especially when you get like a little farther into older school age. They start paying so much more attention to what peers are doing. And I don't know, maybe you should haven't watched a little bit of master Chef if he'd be interested, like just like, he probably wouldn't, but maybe he would for a couple of minutes and be like, hmm, those are kids and they're like into this, maybe this is interesting. But I mean I feel like, I feel like you have so much time and things may change, and I think it's great that he's getting it in pouches. Some kids don't get it at all. Trust me, I have so many patients like I see what a lot of kids eat, particularly kids with diabetes, because they bring in these food logs. And there are like fifteen year olds where I swear to God, I'm like, are you really living on mini muffins and gatorade? And like the occasional cheese stick and bacon? Like what? There are older kids that never even do the squeeze pouches. So if you're even getting them in that form, I think you're doing great. Well. I see. The thing is I love food, so it actually bothers me on subblet little that my children are not into all kinds of different flavors and textures. And but it might come later, or it may come in some of your kids and not others. You know, I love food too. I think I do. I think my kids like food. They're Genevieve is the most picky toddler that I've had, so I'll be interesting to see how that evolves. Because the other two I felt like at that age you could just give them like anything, and she is a little bit more discerning and also likes to throw it on the floor more than the other. I guess this is the thing that kids are just so different, and so this is I mean, one of the things we like about Cassie, how positive she is about everything. Just you know, you get a kid who will never in a million years like the taste of say, blue cheese. Right, these are that's one kid, and then there's others who are like, ooh, let me try mustard, let me try pickles, let me try bosomac, like all these stronger flavors. And these are not the same kids. It's not that you did one thing with one and one thing with the other. So I don't know, you kind of get what you get on this. But yeah, and again, when your end gets bigger. So we'll have to see if Cassie, when she has if she chooses to have more kids, if they're all the same and they're all going to be as adventurous as her first one. But yeah, we're very excited for you to hear this interview. Well, Sarah and I are excited to welcome Cassie to the program. So, Cassie, can you go ahead and introduce yourself to our listeners and talk a little bit about your career path for our listeners who maybe haven't read your books yet. Yeah, I would love to, so, Cassie Joy Garcia. I am a certified nutrition consultant, but I really started fed and Fit as just a personal blog back in twenty eleven as a way to share healthy recipes that we're working for my body and help me turn a real corner corner in my health. And so folks started finding bedfit dot com asking great questions, and I tried to give better answers. So dug into the research and the literature, developed a nutrition program called the Feedfit Project, which featured in my first book, which hit shelves in twenty sixteen, which is self titled and then Cook One Seat All Week, My latest book hit shelves this past spring April of twenty nineteen. I was like, what year is it? It's been one of those days it has, it has, but that was really an effort. It's a great example of what we're doing with bedfit now, evolving from personal blog to online editorial that's really aimed at solving our reader's problems. You know, what are the things that you keep running up against in your life. And one of the things that they kept saying was why this is so hard to get a healthy homemade dinner on the table. It's so expensive, it takes so much time. I feel like I'm not spending time with my family so that I can cook them food. And some folks were cooking three dinners a night because of dietary restrictions, and so we aim to solve that problem. So that's really what we do now. And then bedinfit dot com is a place where we solve, you know, mini problems every week. Lots of problems being said, and you have really built quite a following over the years. I think I came to know you. I kind of got interested in sort of the paleo lifestyle, you know, when everyone else did back in like twenty fourteen or so, and I came across. I loved your positivity, I loved your energy, I loved your kind of not black or white approach to a lot of it. So I've really it's been really cool to see your career just explode, because not only are you an author, but you are you know, just fairly known in that world. And I know you get lots and lots of traffic from a lot of different directions. So I think our listeners will be very excited not only to hear your meal strategies because they are always asking for that, but also to you know, learn about your journey, especially because you now have a toddler. Is that correct. Yes, I have a little girl. Her name is Grayson. We call her Gray. I really wanted to name her gray, and then every time I introduce her to someone, I say her name's Grey short for Grayson, like I gave her toys. Yeah, but yeah, that definitely changed a lot of things and forced me to actually delegate and I built myself an maternity leagu which is a whole other conversation, right, because when you own your own business, you can't just tell your team bye. You went thirty months. So it was a really interesting adventure and it's changed a lot, but in a really great way. And at the same time, we I mean, I don't think you've dialed things back, if anything. Do you feel like it's motivated you to move forward or tell us yes, absolutely, you know I feel like so. About a little over half of our readers are parents of young children, and it has it's and now I can relate to them even more so, and so it's fueled my fire to I can I hear their pain and feel it even more, and so that's definitely motivated me. But forcing me to delegate after I had my baby last January also made me realize. It sounds like such a obvious thing, but I was like, wow, the power of all of these people combined. If I just let really smart people do great work that they enjoy, you know, we can actually scale what we're up to here. And so yeah, we have been able to really put the pedal to the metal and I'm not having to work crazy hours like I did before I had a baby, and it's and I think the products are getting better and better. And Cassie, how old is your daughter? Exactly? She is nineteen months nineteen months, So over the past sort of you know, year or so, as you've been introducing food, real food to her, I'm curious how that process works for somebody who is professionally trained in nutrition and how you approach that, and any tips you might have for our listeners who are going through that. Now, you know, I say do what you can. And I know all kids are different, right, Some kids are gonna want to explore and eat a whole lot. I am lucky that Grayson just happens to be a good eater. I mean say good eater. I actually kind of hate that phrase. She eats a lot and for the most part, she also has her days when she's feeling picky, and it just happens. I think parents need to just give themselves a little bit of a break, do their best. We give Grayson what we eat, we just chop it up smaller. I think it's important to remember too that babies, babies, toddlers, their taste buds are similar to ours. And if we wouldn't eat the goop because it's bland and not exciting, there's a good chance that they won't, and so I try to keep that in mind. I have a four Greens soup on bedfit dot com and it's what it sounds. There's spinach, collars, kale, charred and a bunch of great lemon juice, not a whole lot of salt, some broth, and it is a great green for food for people, and it's delicious. Adults eat it and we're like, ah, I never thought all these greens would be so delicious. And so I think that just keeping that in mind that our kiddos want their food to taste good also, and then we just try to I try to give her at least what I think of as very nutrient dense foods once or twice a day. So liver worst for breakfast. I was like, this poor child is going to go to school. When they're actually sharing about what they're eating for breakfast, you'd be like, wait, you don't eat liver for breakfast. Well, this is the child of a nutrition us here right, you know it is awesome. My husband was like, we need to call it breakfast meat or something where our daughter's not gonna face it's bacon and quote marks, Yeah, she's gonna say your bacon looks weird. My bacon looks really different. Oh that is crazy. And did you do you know commercial baby foods orre you grinding up your own? I'm curious what you guys did a mix. You know, when I was pregnant or breast Gray was breastfed for six months. By that, I mean I breastfed her for fourteen but only breastfed for six months. And in that period I think maybe maybe a lot of first time parents go through this. I thought, oh, I will never give my daughter a pouch, And boy did we give her pouches. Pouches are very are awesome, awesome. You know, when I finally walked down the baby, I'll read the ingredients is like, you know what you're like, it's organic butternut squashed and spinach, Like this is okay, exactly Why am I sacrificing two more hours of sleep so that I can make the same thing we did a mix? You know, I used to miss supplements and tried to not make that as a base and yogurts things like that. We give her those as are all prepackaged little chewy snacks sometimes when she was ready for it, but for the most part, you know, when we were cooking from home, she eats that as well. But there have been the road trips where we're like another pouch. There's nothing wrong with it. That is good to know that even a nutritionists will we'll go that route, and we have been known to subsist on pouches and ritz crackers. So my kids may or may not have eaten M and M's yesterday morning for breakfast. But that's another story. That's not normal Jesus for breakfast, you know, but sometimes it happens. I have learned anything goes you go, Mama. Sometimes you know, you do deliver worst one day, and then the eggs the next day, and then the third day maybe something else. So that's awesome. So that's evolved with time. Do you feel like it's changed the style of your cook I mean, I know you say you eat what she eats, but do you find yourself gravitating to more efficient cooking than you used to? Or like, is that what helped you develop the cook ones eat all week technique or is that something that you had kind of been thinking about all along. That's a great question. You know. I tinkered with this meal prep method of cooking components in bulk and then assembling them together. I tinkered with it almost from a curiosity standpoint. There's got to be a way to make this more efficient. And then after I had my daughter, I was like, no, there's actually has to be awake, this more efficient, this has to work, and so I worked on it before I had Gray, and then after I had Gray, I just maybe once or twice a week, I will make a nice pork roast, you know, and sear it and then bake it. And there's this I love to cook, obviously, it's what I do, but I mean there's this romance to it, and I really enjoy it. But I can only do that now, or only want to do that now maybe two times a week. The other times I just want dinner on the table. And so it definitely informed my cooking style. You know, I'm definitely more of a I'm finding ways for shredded chicken and ground beef like you've never seen before because I can scale that. And that's definitely something that comes across in her new cookbook, which for our listeners again is cook once, eat all week, which of course is like the holy grail for many of our listeners of like, well, I'd love to cook once and eat all week. This is a question we get a lot on this podcast of how to make dinner take less time and you know, have leftovers for lunches too, which you address as well. And one of the different things about your technique is you're not about saying, Okay, spend all Sunday cooking and put this stuff in your freezer and then reheat it through the week. You have a slightly different technique. So can you talk about that a little bit. Yes. So when we sat down, I was like, let's put all of the problems on the table, as far as getting dinner on the table and the meal prep problems, right, some of them were it takes spending four to six hours on my feet in the kitchen. A lot of people meal prep on a Sunday, So I'll just use that as an example, right, spending a small fortune on groceries, the hours that go into planning these meals and then writing the grocery list, and then rewriting the grocery list, you know, making it an order of the store, and then to your point, they are eating leftovers all week long, which is fine for a lot of people. A lot of people will find with the rents and repeat method. But for me and for a lot of our readers, and a lot of the feedback we got was by the time when rolls around, they're sick of it. There's a stick of their food, they're sick of just reheating, and they're ready to order take out pizza anyways, And so that was one of the riddles on the table. Also family friendly and versatile depending on dietary needs. And so we have all of these little parts and pieces, and I thought, there's got to be a way, there's got to be a way we can make all of this work. And so that's that's really how we honed the concept. So we do we take we focus on a protein, a vegetable, and in most cases of starch, sometimes it's a second vegetable. So three components, and your prep day is then cooking those components. So if it's chicken, sweet potato, and broccoli, then you would roast the chicken or birotissory if you're in a pinch, if you would cook the chicken and then deconstruct it. You would bake the sweet potatoes, all of them. Get a whole bag of sweet potatoes. Just go ahead and bake the whole thing. And then the broccoli. Let's say we're gonna steam half of it and the other half we're gonna roast. Okay, so it gives you two different treatments, and that chicken. I'm going to walk you through how to shred the breasts, but keep the legs and the thighs and the wings intact because we're going to turn that into something different. So and then maybe also on prepday, you whip up a couple sauces, but that's it. So we're aiming for an hour, hour and a half max. Then when it comes time, you're ready. Monday night, everyone's home from school, you get home from work, and you want to spend that time with your family or doing whatever it is you want to do. You can spend ten to fifteen minutes. Then assembling these components. Let's say it's into a buffalo chicken casserole. The baked potatoes go on the bottom, the shred of chicken on the top, some broccoli sprinkled in there for nutrition, and then we put one of the sauces you made a buffalo sauce, and then bake it and the oven cooks it. But it's like a fresh meal, it's not a leftover. It's enough to feed. But the way we've written it is for a family of four. And when I wrote these portions was I thought four husbands just to make sure that nobody went hungry. So if you have, I don't know if I think my husband eats quite quite a lot, so that informs some of the large serving sizes, so that could be enough for dinner and lunch the next day if you want. And then you get to do that two more times, and they're totally different meals. Maybe it's a taraiaki chicken bowl one of them, so it's a very different meal. And the last one maybe is some sort of a Greek sheep pan dinner. So hopefully you're not bored. It doesn't feel like leftovers, but it's easy and quick to assemble. I think that's so cool because I mean, the freezer meals were definitely are definitely a big trend as well, and people love that. But like Laura has pointed out that, you know, it can take a really long time to thought out a freezer meal, so sometimes it doesn't save you as much time, whereas if you've prepped stuff, whipping it together theoretically could be faster and have more of a fresh taste to it than something that's been sitting in the freezer. Nothing against freezer, but yeah, no, but I mean we've definitely investigated this, and you know there's ones we've looked at of like, you know, you can cook one day and eat all months, and I'm like, well, okay, by the last time you're pulling out that chicken casserole from the freezer, you may be wishing to move on from the chicken castle. But just to give our listeners an idea, you know, Cassie was mentioning some of this, like you shred a chicken, like she's got three recipes here in a row from it that you'd make barbecue chicken and rice casserole, white chicken chili, and then chicken and broccoli fried rice. I mean, so you have basically like three different kind of ethnic profile flavors even in a row. It's not the same meal at all, which I think and I can honestly say though sound pretty kid friendly, like your kids are pickier than mine, Laura, but my probably eat all of those, yeah, or even just thinking about something like ground beef for ground port. You know, these things can be assembled as components with sauces in a lot of different ways, so it's a lot of cool variety and it's different. Cassie, I feel like you came up with like I haven't. I haven't seen something like this really, so you should feel proud. I am proud, you know. After I wrote Fed and Fit, I felt like I left everything on the table. It's like I said it all. I don't ever I have to write another book. You can write another book of the same sort of thing, because I can tell you people will keep coming back to this topic. I think we've talked about meals a number of times on this podcast, and get we get in trouble because neither Laura nor I really do our own cooking. So we need people like you to come on and explain that there are strategies that can work for very busy families in addition to outsourcing, which can also be great. Oh absolutely, I'm all about it, you know. And that's why it came down to you. I thought this is something that I think the word they need, the world needs, Let's do it. I signed the book contract two days before my daughter was born. Well, she was two weeks past her due day, and I was bored. Yeah, like, I'm going to go make a book contract. Why not'll that's why I'll fill my time. This makes sense. It was meant to be that's why she waited so long exactly. So I'm really really glad we did it though, and definitely have plans to expand it. Yeah, okay, I have two more questions for you. One is, do you have a favorite week, a favorite ingredient combo that you can share from your cookbook. I will throw out that I saw a recipe on your insta for Hawaiian instant pot chicken, was like, Oh, my kids would be all over that. But I was curious if you had like a favorite that you liked to showcase. Oh I'm so excited. I can't remember exactly what week number it is off the top of my head, but the ingredients are it's a beef roast and kale and polina. There's a polento week in there, and now that we're coming, we're almost peaking in the fall, it's almost the right time for it. But there's this like rustic beef polenta castle role in there with caramelized onions and a balsamic reduction. And there's another one that's these stuffed poblano peppers with barbacoa flavoring on that seasoned beef. That is so good, you guys. That does sound perfect for fall We're going to hit Fallen in South Florida in about November, but for those of you further north, December, possibly December. And that sounds amazing, Yeah, totally cool. Okay, So our last thing is that second to last thing. Maybe we would love to hear a day in the life of Cassie. Now, I'm sure you have a lot of variability to your days given what you do, but you are someone who has really built a company, and you do have a toddler at home, and everyone's always curious to how those pieces are put together. So we would love you to go through a typical day in the life. So it is, man, I wish it was, I wish it were Rinse and repeat an ideal day. I'll start there is wake up before my daughter wakes up, Right, isn't that always the goal? Yes, wake up at least an hour before, have coffee, hammer out a few emails, and then when Gray wakes up, we cook breakfast together and our whole family goes on a walk. We have a great Pyrenees named Gus who's very red. His schedule must be abided by and so we all go for a nice long walk as a family. In chit chat about our day, which is something awesome and I've been doing since we've been since we dated. And then I will well, Grayson just started school air quote school right for a one and a half year old, and so she'll go to school now for the first half of the day, and then we'll pick her up and bring her home for a nap. But she goes and she plays with other kids and learns some fun songs and things, and then I work in the morning, and then as soon as she wakes up from her nap, I'm off the clock. And that was really hard for me because I don't know if I'll dug into any of the Enneagram stuff ever, but I'm an Enneagram three, which means I'm essentially addicted to constantly doing things. It's very easy for me. So I have to time block and Mommy starts exactly when she wakes up from her nap, and that's a firm i'll get back to you tomorrow kind of way that we have to do it. And then I'm just with her all afternoon. We'll go to splash parks in the summertime and go run errands, and then we do dinner together. That sounds like you made it work, and I guess it's because you've built so much kind of ahead of time that you're now able to have enough of things going. So your worktime's a little bit truncated, but you probably get a good four or five hours in there and then maybe one to two more during the nap, so you're able to kind of keep things going. Yes, exactly, I would say right now, when Gray is at this stage, I'm probably putting in a computer time with my computer open, maybe twenty five ish hours a week. And then, as y'all know, you're also working whenever you're on your phone, answering emails and firing off messages to team members, and so it definitely rounds out to a good full time effort that I do in the margins. Yeah, and I have a question about you building it as a business. So you mentioned that you had learned to delegate more, which is great. That's an awesome skill for business owners to develop. I'm very curious how you scaled that up. What were the first things that you started delegating As you realize, okay, fed and fit is not just me anymore, it's got to be bigger. What were the first things that you decided to send out the easiest ones. I went with the easy one easy ones first. So I'm not a gifted baker. I am. I can cook anything savory all day long, but dealing with chemistry and coming developing baking recipes is a challenge for me. I remember, I put together this perfect paleo pie cress is what I called it, because it took me twelve iterations. Just I'm a slow learner. It's a lot of pie. There's a lot of probably a lot of bad pie the first few times, right, Yeah, this is nothing to be jealous of. It was a lot of bad pie. So I delegated developing some of those more persnickety recipes to folks. One team member in particular, her name is Amber, who's very gifted at that, and so it was a really obvious one. And then as time went on, realizing the team's skill sets and what everybody could really contribute and really enjoyed just happened to really compliment what I wasn't good at and didn't enjoy. And so that's how we started. And then just developing programs and ideas. I want to offer a lot of autonomy to my team, members and help so that they feel real ownership. So they have an idea for a free e course, go for it, go develop it, do the research. We'll work on it together and then we'll plug it into the content calendar. So just slowly and surely through that kind of effort. Cool. Well, we always do, Sarah, Shall we do our love of the week? Yes, we always end with this, and it can be anything. It can be a food item, it can be a concept, it can be a weather pattern, or it can be some specific product. Would you like me to start? Yeah, why don't you start, Sarah? I actually changed it so with me change. It was going to be sheet masks, but and then I decided that they were making my face too cold. So I will share another beauty product. This is called Kosa Sport and it is a clean beauty line and they like it's from Sephora, but my friend Amy gave it to me and they make these really amazing tinted lip bombs. Because I'm not a lipstick person, but these just are really kind of subtle colors. And this one's called Pulse and I really like it. So that's my lovel Yeah, So my love of the week is my cross pen, and I think someone must have given it to me because I never would have bought it on my own, so it must have been given as a gift, like speaker swag type stuff. But it's really nice. Like I had been using those ink Joy paper mate which are also very good. This kind you can just get a target, but this is a step up. I've apparently now upgraded my pen experience entirely, which could be the start of a rather expensive habit life. It's too short for bad pens. I guess life is too short, so I need to sort of savor this pen experience. But yeah, I got to say that I hide this one, that I'm not letting anyone take this one off my desk. So I'm enjoying my cross pen. Cassie, how about you? Okay, I'm so glad y'all went first because I was noodling while you were talking. I can, I say an audiobook? Yeah, of course, of course, So yeah, I and I am a voracious audio book listener, and the one I'm on right now is so what I needed. It's called Radical Candor by Kim Scott. Have y'all read it by chance? I've heard of it? Okay, so it is. It's it's like medicine that I need. It's not going down very easy, but it's really good information for me, especially if you're working, if you work with people in a professional setting that you just want to figure out how can I how can I really tell them? How can I say the unsaid? And or even if it's just friends, or if your book you're working on building a team, or heck, if you have any sort of a public facing business, you know, like how do I communicate to my clients and my readers and my customers. I think it's a really great download. It's an actual book if you like to read real books too, But I'm a I like I prefer the audiobook versions. And when do you listen to audiobooks? So do you have a lot of time in the car? No? I listen to them. Well, I listened to them whenever I'm house cleaning house, so sometimes that overlaps when my daughter naps. I'll listen to them when I'm folding laundry and gosh one else. And then when I'm driving in the car commuting to places, if I'm headed to go meet a team member for a coffee or something like that, it's my audio book Time great way, is that time what we love? Well, Cassie, Yeah, yeah, Cassie, thank you so much for joining us. And again everyone can check out her book Cook once, Eat all week, and you really will cook once and eat all week in a way that's very efficient. You're still getting fresh meals, so we really appreciate you coming on. Thank you so much for having me. Well, that was an awesome interview. And now we come to the question section, which Sarah labeled this one as juicy. So I guess that's our transition from food because this is not food related at all, all right, she said. This listener writes in that after seeing it mentioned on your blog, I started listening to the Marriage, Kids, and Money podcast. A recent guest who was a fire or enthusiasts that remember that means financial independence retire early described his family as fifty percent savings rate. Now, Sarah, I know your goal is to make smart money decisions and not explicitly aim for fire, but and I'm making an assumption here, presuming you don't save at an ultra high rate with super low spending, how do you avoid feeling guilty or less than for the choices you make is part of it a numbers game. So for instance, if you're a fire family taking home eighty k annually and saving forty K, and I'm a dual career couple making two hundred k annually and saving forty k, our savings rates look a lot different, but our actual money in the bank is the same. My family, as much I seem like yours is. My husband and I both work. We are in a very comfortable living but spend a lot on childcare and a not insignificant amount on conveniences. And without the childcare and other conveniences, we wouldn't be able to have the higher ending careers that we do. Perhaps the lesson here is you do you? But people are so reticent to talk about money in any way that vague generalities she's saying don't work. It seems so unsavory to acknowledge that one both earns and spends substantial sums. I feel very unmoored from the conventional conversation. So how do you wrap your head around the unique financial situation you are in? Although thinking about it's probably not that unique. I mean, there are lots of people that are probably in a similar conversation, and I will go ahead, and she said it's unsavory to acknowledge that one and earns and spends substantial sums. You know, we earn and spend substantial sums. There you go. And I'm not going to give very very specific numbers, but I feel comfortable sharing some. So I wrote her back, and I'm going to kind of read my response because I think I said it more eloquently than I'm going to prattle on right now. So I wrote, I guess I don't feel terribly guilty because I don't see fire as dogma, just a collection of ideas. I know that we are in a very expensive period of life right now, especially as it relates to childcare, and I accept that, and I try to mitigate that to some extent by living below our means. In other ways, we were saving a close to the fifteen to twenty percent mark, but are currently around ten percent. Yes, our financial expert would not approve. That is mostly due to our house issue, because we are sort of bleeding into the one we are still trying to sell in a market that's not fantastic. I hope that someone buys it by the time this airs. It really is a lovely house. And a wonderful place to live, and I think whoever buys it will be happy. But it is still on the market, so anyway, I'll feel more comfortable once we're back up to around twenty percent, which is our goal. Looking at what we spend, I just guess I don't think we need huge amounts of money in retirement in terms of like the amount that is outflowing now, because more than half of our money inflow goes directly to child related cost and by retirement, I don't think that will be the case. I'm not counting college since we have separate savings for that, and again, so I know nobody likes to give out numbers, but those are kind of the ones we have right now. It is a lot in and a lot out, but it is a reasonable amount saved too, and we're all happy, eating good food, taking some nice vacations, and enjoying life. And I will add that our now did take the kids while we were on call this past weekend, and I said to Josh, like, oh, you know what, like when your kids are out of the house, work might be I don't know, less stressful in a way than it even is now. Like maybe I'll even want to work more. I mean, of course, you don't know what your health is going to do and what your you know, maybe your efficiency is going to go down as those gen Z kids, you know, get so fast with technology, and maybe I won't be able to keep up. I don't know. But the idea that like, let's say all my kids are adults and then I'm just working like nine ten hours, even like that's so much free time, like more than I can even imagine right now, free time to maybe outsource less things, and free time to you know, enjoy life. So I guess I'm really not aiming for fire, and I think that's okay. But I still find those ideas really interesting and valuable, Like it's just a different perspective of looking at the world, just like I still think sometimes it's interesting to read about people who are vegan or paleo, even though I don't do those things either. Yeah, I mean all that, I'd add to that because I agree entirely. It's what Sarah said. You know, if you're saving fifteen twenty percent of your income, that's great, and most people don't hit that, and certainly if you're saving percent of a larger income that's going to be a pretty high amount, and as your expenses will probably go down over time, there may be other sources of income as well over the years, whether that's pensions or employer contributions or social security if that's around. I mean, but you know, it's stuff that's there. I have a funny thought about I've been somewhat obsessed with the fire people too, just because it's like, you know, it's so interesting a community that it really gets into this. But I find there's so funny definition. So I've been listening to the How to Money podcast. I know Sarah listens to that too. They had a lady on as a guest who had just written a book about growing up in rural China. I'm very little and now she's a millionaire in Canada, and that's awesome, traveling the world, lovely life, great story. But she said something really funny about the whole finance independence thing. She said, well, you know, you're trying to get to this number quickly, and so you're trying to earn a lot of money to get there. She's like, but you know, if you have a passion project on the side that you'd like to do in retirement and this brings in some amount of income, Well, this is less money that you have to have in your portfolio. And she said something like, well, you know, so if you have five, you know, five thousand dollars a year that you're making on your side passion project, well that's one hundred and twenty five thousand dollars less you have to have in your portfolio. And I found this so hilarious because I'm like, well, what if you're supporting yourself already in a job you love, like, then that means your portfolio could be zero and you'd be financially independent by that definition, which is clearly not the case. But so much of the FI movement defines work as something you don't want to do, and I fundamentally disagree with that. I think that work can be awesome, it can be wonderful, it can be a huge source of joy and meaning in your life, and so I'm not against financial independence. I've definitely prioritized building up savings. You know, I think probably we could retire in the next few years if we wanted to. We're not going to because we both love what we do, so why on earth would we do that? So anyway, That's that's my little thought on that. I think for many people, aiming to have a couple years at least of expenses built up will give you a lot of the same mindset of freedom that actually having you know, twenty five x expenses in you know, treasuries or something ridiculous that is some of the hardcore financial independence people believe in. You'll still feel a lot of that same level of freedom. Like if I do want to try a different job, if I do want to start a business, you know, as long as I know my family has expenses to live on for a couple of years, like, most likely we'll find something else in that time, particularly if you have professional skills that are in demand. So that's a good goal to aim for. You know, retiring at age thirty five is up. Well, that ship has sailed. That ship has sailed. Oh my gosh, no. I think it's fascinating. And actually the number of physicians that are into FI has been a very funny and interesting thing to explore. And I guess some part of me is a little sad because I feel like more energy needs to be going into career crafting and fixing these careers rather than figuring out ways for people to end them at age forty two, because that was a lot of specialized training. Now each person is allowed to do whatever the whatever they want, so that I'm not like judging any one person, but it is symptomatic of maybe a problem in the industry and the healthcare system overall that hopefully at some point we'll get addressed before everyone leaves where everyone quits at forty two, because that would be a problem. All right, Well, this has been best of both worlds. We've been interviewing Cassie Joy Garcia and then talking a little bit about financial independence at the end. We'll be back next week with more on making work in life I fit together. Thanks for listening. You can find me Sarah at the shoebox dot com or at the Underscore Shoebox on Instagram, and you can find me Laura at Laura vandercam dot com. This has been the best of both worlds podcasts. Please join us next time for more on making work and life work together.