Mediterranean Oven Fried Eggs with Crispy Halloumi + Cooking in Color Annual Planning Guide
Plus a trick and short video on how to get your halloumi SUPER CRISPY
Colorful chefs - new and old, welcome! This is where we cook easy, delicious, saucy, colorful meals made from whole, unprocessed foods, and we make it fun, easy, and learn important stuff about metabolic health while doing it.
On today’s menu:
Mediterranean Oven Fried Eggs with Crispy Halloumi: The simplest yet most impressive brunch you’ll ever make. If you are a Color Club member who has been asking for recipe PDFs to download, you’ll find a link to a PDF at the bottom of the recipe page!
A reflection on the FOOD in your life in 2024: Tis the season for reflection, celebrating wins from the year, and thinking about how we want to ENJOY life more in 2025. I’ve put together a little annual review - Cooking in Color style - to help you think about what worked really well for you this year when it came to your cooking, food and nutrition habits, and what you want to consider going into next year.
Gingerbread balls: According to many of you, this free recipe has been a BIG HIT, so if you are looking for a holiday treat that’s also blood sugar balanced, give these a try!
Stock up on my fave regeneratively farmed fish - Seatopia - and you can now get 15% off with this link (code COOKINGINCOLOR). I’ve been tagging Seatopia for maybe a year now and making it at least 2x a week because I love it so much, and since a few of you have asked, they finally gave me a code so you can get a discount! YAY.
A quick aside on farmed vs. wild caught:I often prioritize wild-caught fish since most conventionally farmed fish comes with a host of issues - it pollutes surrounding waters, antibiotics are often used, there are higher ratios of omega-6s:omega-3s which can lead to inflammation etc. However, Seatopia is focused on solving many of these challenges. Seatopia uses sustainable farming practices that restore the marine ecosystems, thereby reducing contaminants like mercury and microplastics in the seafood itself. On the other hand, many aquaculture farms follow the industrial ag model: cheap products for commodity aggregators who resell to distributors who resell to smaller distributors who resell to retailers who eventually resell to consumers. It’s not their fault, their incentives are volume and price.
However, there are a growing number of aquaculture farms who are prioritizing quality and sustainability, through focusing on algae-based feeds, low-density open ocean farms, antibiotic-free operations, and multi-trophic permaculture systems. Seatopia is focused on partnering with these farms! BTW all Seatopia fish is lab tested for mercury and microplastics, and it’s such high quality you can eat it sushi grade too.
Like anything in health, there’s nuance so in the conversation around farmed seafood. My answer on what to eat - farmed vs. wild - lies somewhere in the middle. There is an environmental impact of overfishing from “wild-caught” seafood, but also many factory farms are devoid of transparency or any sort of environmental accountability.
My TL;DR: buy wild-caught and high-quality sustainably farmed seafood, but do your research on the sustainable fishing farms before buying.
Tis the season for annual reviews, reflection and planning/goal setting. Honestly, I’m here for it all because my brain loves an organized, structured reflection. There are so many good formats out there, such as Sahil Bloom’s Annual Planning guide, and Mel Robbins 2024 Best Year Yet. If you have one that you love btw, please comment below or send my way.
However, the thing that I find missing from most of these annual review templates is (to no surprise) a focus on FOOD. Food is the foundation that fuels our life. It’s the molecular information that helps our brains and bodies do everything else on our goal and to-do list, so let’s give it some love at year end too! Let’s reflect on what worked for us this past year when it came to planning, sourcing, preparing, and consuming our food.
As I wrote about in a previous post, my goal is to help you (and everyone who’s willing to listen) find food freedom. My focus on eating colorful, real, whole, unprocessed foods is intended to be empowering and lead you towards your own food freedom. The set of questions I’ve created for this lil’ Cooking in Color 2024 Annual Review are designed to help you create the most joyful and empowering relationship with food in order to best support your health in 2025.
I’m sharing the questions this week, and then next week I’ll share my answers too!
ACTION FOR YOU: Block some time in the next week to answer these yourself, and if you want to print out and jot your answers down, I’ve put the Qs in a little PDF download for you here below.
Cooking in Color 2024 Annual Review
Step 1: Reflect on 2024
1. What were some of your favorite meals or cooking moments this year?
Think about meals that brought you joy, satisfaction, or connection. Go through your phone and look at those meal pics (I know you have them). What made those meals special? Was it the food or was it simply appreciating the setting and people you were sharing the meal with? If it was specific recipes or dishes, write them down so you can re-make them!
2. What habits or routines around food worked really well for you this year?
Did you meal prep, eat more home-cooked meals, try eating for stable blood sugar, try getting more protein into every meal, start intermittent fasting, or discover some better-for-you swaps for previous items in your pantry? What worked? Let’s celebrate those!
3. Were there times when food felt challenging or stressful?
Reflect on moments when cooking or eating felt less nourishing—whether due to time constraints, emotional stress, or other factors.
4. Is there a specific food, ingredient, or habit you relied on that didn’t fully serve your health or well-being?
Be honest with yourself: Are refined sugars, processed foods, or certain eating patterns sneaking into your routine more than you’d like? It’s okay, you can make changes!
5. What did you learn about your body and how it responds to certain foods?
Did you notice how different meals made you feel—energized, sluggish, or satisfied? Think back to what your body might be trying to tell you, and in 2025 we are going to lean into that intuition more!
Step 2: Set Intentions for 2025
6. If you could describe your dream relationship with food in 2025 in one word or phrase, what would it be?
Use this as your guiding intention for the year ahead. Mine is FREE. I wrote about my definition of food freedom here.
7. What is one habit or mindset shift you’d like to carry into the new year?
This could be things like prioritizing more balanced, colorful meals, trying to get more protein or fiber, diversifying your meals, adding fermented foods to your diet, or simply trying one new recipe each week!
8. Is there one habit around food you’d like to eliminate or replace in 2025?
Identify a habit that no longer serves you and brainstorm what you could do instead. For example: Replace sugary desserts with fruit or herbal tea or one of my refined sugar free desserts, or finally swap the white sugar in your pantry with allulose!
9. What foods or cooking styles do you want to explore or bring more of into your life?
Think about cuisines, techniques, or ingredients you’d love to experiment with in the kitchen. Perhaps you want to learn to make your own bone broth every week (I can show you, it’s easy!). Learning new things can actually increase your enjoyment and satisfaction, so you might end up loving cooking even more if you focus on learning something new!
10. How will you prioritize making cooking and eating a joyful, nourishing, and FUN experience?
Write down one or two actions to make cooking fun or relaxing, like playing music in the kitchen, involving loved ones, pausing for 60 seconds before diving into dinner every night, or setting up a weekly ritual around your food shopping or prepping.
If you want to share your reflections, please do and head to the chat! 👇🏼 I’ll share my responses in next week’s issue.
The why behind this Mediterranean Oven Fried Eggs with Crispy Halloumi is simple: minimal dishes, maximum color and flavor.
This is an easy sheet pan brunch that punches way above your typical sheet pan meal. The flavors of the roasted veggies with the crispy halloumi and the tahini oregano dressing come together to make a perfect plate (in my opinion, obviously) with minimal dishes (Alex can confirm). I love to serve this over a grain-free tortilla (I recommend Coyotes and Siete), but you could also serve this over grain-free bread or a bed of arugula.
Similar to my sheet pan sumac chicken and plum recipe, this recipe uses a sheet pan or roasting tray not only for the vegetables, but also as a skillet for searing the halloumi on the oven floor and cooking the eggs to fried perfection. I learned this halloumi searing trick from Molly Baz and I am SO grateful because it can be used to make a variety of sheet pan creations spectacular. Thank you Molly!
Something you might not know is that halloumi contains a very low amount of lactose compared to other dairy products, and it’s often made with goat’s or sheep’s milk (or a combo). So if you have trouble digesting dairy but can tolerate a little, halloumi would be a great option for you.
For the eggs portion, in the last few minutes you’ll crack the eggs onto the sheet pan with all the other veggies and halloumi (acting like a skillet here) and return it to the oven, eliminating the need to dirty any more dishes!
How to make sure your halloumi actually gets crispy 👇🏼
I had a few people say from the sheet pan plum recipe their halloumi didn’t get crispy 🫣😭 and I am HERE to the rescue. See short video below.
Key tips for crispy halloumi:
Tuck your halloumi in-between the vegetables and if there is excess moisture or tomato juice near them, carefully dab around that with a paper towel. You want the pan to be relatively dry where you put the halloumi.
Put the pan on the FLOOR of the oven (the heat from the oven floor + the sheet pan act as a skillet for searing it) for 5 minutes.
Take it out and flip the halloumi to the other side before you crack the eggs onto the sheet pan next.
Makes 4 servings
Takes 40-45 minutes (10 minutes to prep, 25-30 minutes to cook)
What You’ll Need
This recipe is for my paid Color Club members only! It’s $5/month or $50/year and you get (at least) 1 new colorful recipe each week, as well as access to a library of 50+ recipes (and growing!). Join here!
* Charging a small fee for my recipes enables me to keep doing this without ads or playing the SEO game where you have to scroll scroll scroll to actually get to the recipe.
If you make this recipe (or ANY of my recipes!), I’d LOVE to hear how it turned out and any feedback you have! Give me your notes - big and small, and if you are on IG, tag me @sonjakmanning.
Chefs kisses,
Sonja