Nutritious choices made simple®
Packing lunch every day can become a grind for parents, especially when half of it ends up in the trash because kids didn’t want to eat it. Empowering kids to help pack their own lunches can help take some of the pressure off parents and give kids more investment in their chosen lunch for the day. Here are a few tips for letting even the littlest ones in the family pack their lunch.
If you’re sick of seeing your kids’ lunches come home half-eaten, or hearing them complain about the food you pack, you’re not alone. One strategy for helping match what you send to what they’re willing to eat is to engage them in the work of planning lunches.
School is right around the corner, and with it, the challenge of keeping lunch nutritious and appealling to your young eaters. School lunches can leave a lot of the less exciting fruits and veggies uneaten and heading for the compost bin. This month, we’ll revisit our favorite tips for making sure your kids are getting solid nutrition, even when you’re not with them to encourage nutritious choices.
To be honest, finding treats when you’re vegan is easier than you might imagine. Technically, Oreos are vegan. If your objective in choosing a more plant-forward diet, however, is in part to eat more produce and fewer processed foods, those technically vegan snack foods don’t need to be your first choice for satisfying your sweet tooth. Let’s look at a few tips for bringing the qualities of a lovely treat into a vegan dessert.
When you’re looking to decrease the animal products in your diet, one of the first questions you might ask is, “How will I get enough protein?” Plant-based protein isn’t actually all that hard, but the question underneath that question is really often, “What can I replace meat with as a filling and satisfying entree?” The cheap, delicious, sustainable option that many people are less familiar with is lentils.
Cheese is one of the things many people miss the flavor of when they’re trying to reduce the amount of animal products in their diet. Cheese is usually high in salt and saturated fat, so it’s a sensible thing to limit. It’s so flavorful that a little can go a long way, so it’s easy to enjoy in small quantities, but if you’re looking for plant-based alternatives altogether, let me introduce you to cashews and nutritional yeast.
Plant-based eating is getting its day in the sun for good reason: it’s good for the environment and good for us. Learning to eat fewer animal products can be a challenge, especially if you’re used to relying on butter and cheese for flavor. These dishes show you a sample of choices from breakfast to an after-dinner dessert that are fully vegan to get your mouthwatering and your creative juices flowing.
If vegetables aren’t routinely the star of the show at your cookouts, let me share a little secret: grilling does more for veggies than it does for meat. Whether your flavor weapons of choice are marinades, the smoke of quality wood, or the char on the food itself, vegetables shine on the grill. Brilliantly.