Category: Nutrition Science

Between a busy fall season and upcoming holidays, big batch cooking holds appeal for lots of us at this time of year. After all, having plenty of prepped food ingredients around can make it easier to put together a variety of healthful meals quickly and easily. Maybe you’ll be cooking for a crowd in the next month or two and doubling (or tripling) recipes to accommodate your guests. And don’t forget those comforting slow cooker meals that result in multiple portions of food. Whatever your reason, it’s important to realize that recipes that have large yields require special food handling in order for the food to remain safe to eat.

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Chances are you have a slow cooker, and there’s a good likelihood that you don’t use it for more than making chili or soup. That’s okay, certainly, but if that’s the limit of your slow cooking, you’re missing out on a lot of easy meal possibilities! If you are new to slow cooking or it’s been a while since your cooker found a perch on the counter at your house, check out this previous post that covers some of the basics. Would you be more adventurous if you knew how to modify traditional recipes to work in the slow cooker? If that’s your issue, this post is for you. As an author of a couple of slow cooker cookbooks, here are my best tips for solving the modification conundrum…

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If you keep up with food and health news, you probably saw coverage of a recent study on red meat that seemed to give the green light to red meat consumption. But most health authorities recommend limiting the amount of red meat and processed meat. So is meat okay to put back on our daily plates or not? Here’s our take…

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Traditional pasta is comfort food for lots of us. Filling, warm, and comforting, regular pasta is generally made from refined semolina flour (from durum wheat, a type grown specifically for pasta). Eggs are sometimes added in, making them egg noodles instead of regular pasta.

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You know that including more whole grains in your diet—and limiting refined grain products—is recommended for an overall healthful diet. Yet, though we eat enough grain foods, we’re not taking the advice of the Dietary Guidelines for Americans to “make half your grains whole,” which translates to 3 oz. of whole grains per day. 

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Calories, macros (macronutrients), daily weights, water intake…the amount of data one can track on dieting apps can really add up. For me, as a person who has made her living talking, writing, and teaching about nutrition and food intake, tracking my diet when MyFitnessPal and other similar apps were new was an interesting (even fun!) thing for me to do. It fit with my mindset about weight control (calories matter…and I still think they do). I wrote about macro tracking on this blog in 2017 if you’re not familiar with what I’m talking about. But, somewhere along the line, tracking my food intake and weight became less fun, much less fun. I also grew as a nutrition professional over time, and found that diet tracking didn’t suit me or fit my food and health philosophy anymore.

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In a perfect world we’d all have a few hours a day to devote to nourishing ourselves well—growing and harvesting our own organic produce (if that’s your kind of thing), planning well-rounded meals, carefully preparing beautiful and healthful meals all from scratch and then allowing ourselves plenty of time to mindfully savor those meals with friends and family. Doesn’t that sound amazing? It makes me smile just to think about all that. Of course, that scenario isn’t real-world for most of us. In fact, with the autumn season arriving, your life may be getting busier by the day. 

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It seems to me that main dishes and desserts get all the glory. Lots of times side dishes are an afterthought, and coming up with something to put “on the side” ends up being a hunt through the fridge or pantry for anything that can fill in the empty space on the plate. When we do that, we shortchange both our plates and our palates.

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