Nutritious choices made simple®
Have you got an abundance of one kind of produce? Whether you’re shopping seasonal sales, have a farm share, or grow your own, it happens. One of the key ways many of us deal with this bounty is preserving it to take us through the year. Not all preservation methods are, however, nutritionally equal. I’m […]
Whether you’re taking advantage of seasonal produce sales at your local grocery store or participating in a local farm’s CSA program, eating in-season produce can save you money. Taking this focus can also help introduce more fruits and vegetables into your diet, which is great for nutrition. Why doesn’t everyone eat this way?
Snack bars can run the gamut of snack foods. Easy to make and highly flexible, they’re a great option to experiment with if you have kids. Though often designed to be eaten at room temperature, they can include warm and tender variations fresh from the oven or chewy, frozen varieties perfect for summer. How you might play with bar-shaped snacks depends a lot on whether or not they require cooking.
When I was a kid, my absolute favorite recipe to make was called “Peanut Butter Bumps.” It had three ingredients: peanut butter, butter, and oatmeal. All you did was mash everything together and roll it into sticky little fat bombs, and I LOVED them. Those little bumps have too much saturated fat, salt, and added sugars to earn Guiding Stars, but working on the Guiding Stars recipe database, I have discovered something: snack balls can be delicious and nutritious.
Nothing says “Hello, summer,” quite like a smoothie. Smoothies are also a great way to engage kids in some culinary play. Offering ample room for choice and creativity, taking very little time, and yielding a sweet treat that can give the ice cream truck a run for its money, smoothies are prime for playing with.
Earlier this week, our nutritionist, Garrick Brown, wrote about fun ways to get your kids involved in the kitchen. Building off his foundation, Kitchen Smarts this month is going to dive deep into the world of what makes a recipe fun to play with.
“We have food at home” is the most boring sentence on the planet. It’s so lame that it’s the subject of a viral meme. It is the response of the health-conscious, budget-conscious parent to the child who wants fast food. And, let’s be honest: it’s the inner adult voice that keeps us on track with health and budget goals when we’d rather take a break from cooking. I don’t know about you, but under the current guidelines to go food shopping no more than once a week, telling myself “we have food at home” is hard. It’s exhausting. One thing cooking from the pantry doesn’t need to be, however, is boring.
Stock is one of my favorite things to make. For one thing, you take something that was destined for either the trash or the compost and you get more food out of it before you toss it. For another, you save money. For a third, you reduce your trash from cartons or bouillon wrappers. And finally, you can control the final product for both flavor and nutrition. If you have the freezer space, I highly recommend it.