Nutritious choices made simple®
At times when so many factors feel out of our control, it’s essential to remember that we can still guide our day and the experience we’ll have, even if it’s not at all the way we pictured it. When life feels uncertain is when we need to embrace the small steps we can take to better our health and feel in control.
I’ve gotten really practiced at dealing with the challenges involved in cooking to clean out a pantry or working with ingredients that are unfamiliar to me. I know many of you are experiencing these cooking challenges in a freshly unavoidable way as grocery stores have uneven supplies and stay-at-home mandates are making us try to use up what’s on hand. I have some ideas that may be of help.
Whether you are like me and spending some extra time at home with your kids during this time of social distancing, or whether you’re just looking for some fun things to do on a weekend once this world is more normal again, cooking is a great family activity.
Every cook around the world has recipes they reached for when a loved one isn’t feeling well. Nutritious foods nourish our bodies and help us recover. Some sicknesses reduce our appetites or leave us with sensitive digestion for a few days. Some sicknesses congest us and inhibit our tastebuds. The recipes gathered here are meant to help you draw on the wisdom of different cultures to find recipes that will help you and your loved ones nourish a body that’s on the way to recovering from illness and offer food comfort to your household on the whole.
Not leaving the house to “go to work” seems great on paper. You picture the super short commute, flexibility, and comfort of knowing you could work in sweatpants if you wanted to. However, the work-from-home balance can be easily disrupted when loved ones are home and need caring for, schools are closed, or any other stressful situation has you feeling unsettled. This combination of a shift in your usual and greater stress can undoubtedly lead to unhealthy eating patterns. That said, even on the best “work from home” day, we need a strategy for keeping our meals in check, our body properly nourished, and our bored appetites out of the kitchen.
If you’re sheltering in place or self-isolating somewhere that offers only a microwave to cook, the ability to eat nutritious and flavorful meals may seem impossible. If you can expand your cooking tools a little, your options increase, but if a microwave is all you’ve got, you can do more than you might realize. Microwave dinners and canned soups, move over.
With the growing number of coronavirus (COVID-19) cases in our communities, how to protect yourself from getting sick is in everyone’s search history. Of course, the best way to prevent illness is to avoid being exposed to the virus. For this reason, health professionals advise that we practice social distancing as much as possible right now. Boosting our immune systems so we are less likely to get sick sounds super appealing right now. It’s widely circulating online, and some products and diet plans are being marketed to prevent or cure the Coronavirus. Is it even possible to boost our immune systems? Can we do it by improving our diet and eating certain foods? Are there vitamins or herbal remedies that we should consider? What else can we change in our lifestyle to get our immune systems in tip-top shape? Let’s tackle these questions as we discuss healthy ways to support your immunity.
As COVID-19 (aka, coronavirus) spreads, the number of people who are asked to stay home to slow and minimize the spread of the disease is likely to increase. If you’re among the people who can make your money from home when necessary, you may actually choose to stay home to take pressure off the system. And certainly, if you are sick, you should already be staying home except to seek medical care. What that’s going to mean for many folks is eating a lot more pantry staples. Diets high in prepared foods can quickly become boring…and high in sodium. We’ve got some tips and recipes to help you make smart pantry-stocking choices in case you need to stay in for a couple weeks.