Healthy Food Choices

Healthy Food Choices: Smoothies

The other day I was thinking a lot about how poorly I’ve been feeling and starting thinking about what was some of the differences between days when I feel pretty good and when I don’t, and one thing that came to mind was the amount of fruit I’m eating.

Lately, I’ve not been eating much fruit, mostly because we are low. And then I realized that my son and I had stopped making smoothies as well.  So I headed downstairs to see what I could scrounge up for a smoothie.

Smoothies are just cold blended drinks. My sister-in-law juices her fruit first and then blends the juice with milk or yogurt.  I prefer to just blend up whole fruit and have my smoothies a little thicker and more filling.

A while back,  thanks to this video from Craig Ballantyne, the fitness trainer behind Turbulance Training, my son and I were inspired to start experimenting with adding different things to smoothies.

(in case you are interested that link Craig talks about is www.EasyVeggieMealPlans.com)

An Orange & Banana smoothie made with yogurt, oatmeal, and flax seeds

Since then we’ve found our favorite smoothie recipes include the following ingredients:

• Fruit (usually a banana and something else)
• yogurt
• a handful of oatmeal
• about a tablespoon of flax seeds

My son’s favorite combination is banana and orange juice (I keep an ice cube tray full of frozen orange juice for smoothies and cooking).

My favorite combinations are:

• blueberries, mixed berries, and banana
• banana and strawberry

I’ll even throw fresh spinach in with the mixed berries.

my 6 yo making a pomergrante/blueberry smoothie

We don’t have a blender any more (I broke it), so we use my Cuisinart SmartStick hand blender, and it makes it really easy for the kids to use and for clean up. And, in September, we discovered that the stick blender is really easy to travel with and make smoothies on the road.

So anyway, after I had this realization that I hadn’t been having my fruit or a smoothie in a while. Found some frozen banana slices in the freezer, added in a handful of frozen blue berries (that we picked for a local berry farm), and added in the yogurt, oatmeal, and flax seed.

My son of course drank 1/3 of the mixture. (”Smoothie, you’re making a smoothie? Can I have some?” )

But it tasted good and I felt much better for the rest of the day. So lesson learned (I hope), my smoothies and fruit are impacting how I feel. So Tomorrow I get to go grocery shopping again – and smoothie making ingredients are on the top of the list!

If you haven’t experimented with smoothies, I recommend doing so! It’s a lot of fun to experiment with… and if you have  10 year old son who likes to play with ingredients in the kitchen, like I do, this might be right up his alley

Enjoy!

…Shannon

P.S.  Angie has been experimenting with Green Monster Smoothies, you might enjoy reading her experience with Green Smoothies where Spinach is a major ingredient.

Healthy Food Choices: Homemade Veggie Burgers

I’ve been meaning to try the homemade veggie burger recipe from the Hungry Girl cookbook for about a year now, but only this weekend did I finally get around to giving it a try.

Now, I was a little skeptical about these because they contain a lot of onion and peppers, and while I like those for flavoring, I’m not usually real big on them as main vegetable ingredients in any dish. but I was surprised. I liked these – enough to eat them three times over the weekend!

The original Hungry Girl recipe is called “Oatstanding Veggie Patties” and can be found on page 72 of the Hungry Girl cookbook. But, because it calls for Fiber One cereal (which I don’t have), I chose to adapt the recipe a bit to use ingredients I have on hand.

Here’s the recipe for homemade veggie burgers that I came up with based on the original Hungry Girl recipe:

1/2 cup old fashioned oatmeal (not the instant kind) soaked in 1/3 cup boiling water

1/2 cup of mashed pinto beans (instead of Fiber One)

1 cup chopped onions

1 cup each of chopped yellow and red bell peppers (you can use green too, I just happened to have yellow and red) – so in all you’ll have 2 cups of chopped peppers

1 cup chopped button mushrooms

1/2 cup finely shredded carrot

1 egg (you can use egg substitute if you prefer)

2 teaspoons soy sauce

1 teaspoon salt

black pepper to taste

minced or chopped garlic to taste

Instructions:

Basically just mix it all together, then form into balls and put on a plate lined with wax paper to rest.

Let rest in refrigerator for at least an hour.

Drain any excess fluids carefully.

Preheat griddle or pan with olive oil

Place ball of mixture in pan, and press flat with spatula. Cook for 4-5 minutes on each side or until done.  Flip carefully as they tend to come apart if not fully done on one side.

Serve as you would any burger, or use as filling for a tortilla wrap.

This made 7 burger patties for me, which I ate over three different meals. I just kept the uncooked patties in the refigerator until I was ready to cook some, then drained off the excess moisture and cooked up the ones I wanted. Worked well.

They were very moist and flavorful. But don’t hold together well, which for me was okay. But I think next time I’ll try adding some of  Bob’s Red Mill high fiber cereal to emulate the Fiber One’s ability to soak up more of the moisture

Enjoy!

…Shannon

P.S. If you don’t have a copy of the Hungry Girl cookbook yet, try to check it out from the library or you can pick up on Amazon new or used below. It’s full of great recipes and tips for eating well without a huge amount of calories and fat.

Healthy Food Choices: Fuddruckers Buffalo Burger

This afternoon my husband and I went out to Fuddruckers for a meal and a business discussion. I usually stick with the turkey burger there, and he usually gets a regular 1/2 pound burger. But today he decided to try something new, and supposedly healthier: a Buffalo Burger.

He’s never tried Buffalo before, and is usually not very adventurous food wise. But it’s advertised as being high in iron and low in fat, and since he decided that if I’m going to shrink that maybe he should too, he decided to give it a try. 

And guess what? He liked it!

Wow! (like I said, he’s not adventurous with food)

So I decided to look up what the real deal was nutrition wise. Is the Fuddrucker’s Buffalo Burger really healthier?

Apparently so. According to The Daily Plate, the Fuddruckers Buffalo Burger with Cheddar Cheese and a bun is 520 calories, 12 grams of fat, and 32 grams of protein.

While my husband’s normal Fuddrucker’s burger choice: a 1/2 pound beef burger rings in (without cheese) at 660 calories, 56 grams of fat, and 36 grams of protein.

Now these are NOT the official numbers from Fuddruckers (which doesn’t make their nutritional info available online – bummer!), so I decided to go look up another source of nutritional comparison between beef and buffalo meat.  After all, if my husband will willingly eat a healthier meat source, then heck I’m all for it!

According to the National Bison Association, buffalo meat has not only less calories and less fat, but more iron and more Vitamin B12, than both beef and chicken.

So…buffalo is healthier. Cool.  Guess I better start looking into sources of Buffalo meat for him.

If you are looking for a healthier alternative to beef, maybe see if you can hunt a place that serves Buffalo Burgers and give it a try.

Enjoy!

…Shannon

Photo Credits:
Buffalo Burger by pengrin™ 

(Photo note: I didn’t think to take the camera to Fuddruckers, so this photo is just an example of what a buffalo burger looks like (much like beef), not an actual Fuddruckers Buffalo Burger.)

Healthy Choices: Homemade Veggie Pizza

Every Friday, for the last 15 years, is pizza night at our house. Pizza and movie night to be exact. I make homemade pizza and we all retire to watch videos (the kids downstairs, my hubby and I upstairs). It’s our date night, on the cheap.  Everyone gets grumpy if they have to miss pizza night.

Now my favorite pizza toppings are pineapple and tomato, but one night early this year I didn’t have either on hand, so I decided to try some veggies.

Years ago, when I was a nanny in southern California, there was this pizza delivery place that made the BEST vegetable pizza. So I decided to see if I could make one I like. And discovered that I actually really prefer a veggie pizza over my pineapple and tomatoes (though that’s still good).

I’ve also since been working on moving toward a healthier crust. We’ve used the same pizza dough recipe for years, but started tweaking it, transitioning to a more whole wheat recipe. 

For my kids and hubby, I make this pizza dough recipe 2 cups white, 1 cup whole wheat, with a 1/4 cup of my favorite high fiber additive (Bob’s Red Mill High Fiber Cereal). 

For my 12 yo daughter and I, I make it as either 1 1/2 cups white and 1 1/2 cups whole wheat  with 1/4 cup of the fiber additive, or all 3 cups whole wheat flour with a 1/4-1/2 cup of fiber additive. You can play around and see what you like.

Here’s the pizza dough recipe:

2 1/2 teaspoons yeast

1 teaspoon sugar

1 cup water

Combine and let proof that for 10 minutes

Add in:

2 Tablespoons EVOO (extra-virgin olive oil)

1 teaspoon salt

3 1/4 flour mixture (I usually do the 3 cups of flour and 1/4 of fiber additive)

Mix & Knead until smooth and elastic. Remember if you are using whole wheat dough, it requires a little more kneading than white flour. (I cheat and use my mixer ) 

 Let rise, covered, in an oiled bowl for 1 hour or until double. Break into balls and press out on a greased pan. 

(2 batches of this recipe makes 1 large pizza and 3 small pizzas for my family)

Now for the Toppings:

For pizza sauce, I use a quick and simple homemade pizza sauce recipe made from tomato paste, honey, and a little seasoning.

Then for my pizza, I chop up my veggies. I prefer carrots, broccoli, zucchini, and spinach. You can use whatever your favorites are. I sometimes will mix broccoli and cauliflower. And have found that I don’t care for zucchini on the pizza if there’s no broccoli (not sure why).  Anyway, the veggies all chopped up look something like this:

After I put on the sauce and a thin sprinkling of mozerella cheese, I put the carrots on the bottom, then the broccoli, and then zucchini. So it looks something like this:

Then I pile on handfuls of spinach and sprinkle on the cheese. The spinach cooks down, but when it’s fresh it is a huge pile of veggies. My husband just shakes his head at how many veggies are on this pizza, but I like it. 

Here you can see the height difference between my veggie pizza and his salami-sweet onion-bell pepper pizza next to it (before it’s cooked):

So this is cooked for 10-12 minutes at 450, and it’s done.

That’s it. I usually end up eating all but 3 or 4 pieces, which I then save for breakfast. Usually my 10 yo son comes in the morning and steals a piece (which I think is pretty cool that he’ll eat a cold breakfast pizza of veggies )

But anyway, if you like veggies and are looking for a healthier replacement for pizza, I encourage you to experiment and see if you can come up with a veggie pizza that you like.

Enjoy!

…Shannon

A Free Low-Budget Vegetarian Cookbook

Yesterday, after once again trying to figure out how to make my grocery budget stretch two week feeding six people, I realized I was going to have to do some more beans and rice meals for the family. 

Now, I LOVE beans and rice, and lots of veggies. I eat only small amounts of poultry, and the rest of my diet is vegetarian. But so far I haven’t been real successful in finding healthy, inexpensive vegetarian meals that my family likes, much less loves. (Okay, cheese pizza doesn’t count…) 

So once again, yesterday I started hunting around for new recipes to try on them.  In doing so I ran across this wonderful low-budget vegetarian cookbook ebook – that’s amazingly FREE (wow!) and loaded with information (90 pages of it!). 

It’s written for those who are fairly new to eating vegetarian, and who are on a low budget.  I’m not new to cooking and eating vegetarian, but this little cookbook takes a new approach than most I’ve seen or have on my shelf:  

 - It shares how to make beans more digestible;

-  it teaches the “patterns” of cooking grains and bean dishes and the flavor combinations so you can easily mix and match your own; and

- it shares where to look for the ingredients at the best price.

I spent all my free time in the last 24 hours reading and studying this little book. And spent much longer than normal at the grocery story today trying to figure out the prices for the staple ingredients I don’t have on hand, so I can start to budget them into my grocery budget.

If you are looking at a vegetarian diet or are a vegetarian looking for more recipes, I highly recommend downloading a copy and reading the first section before even looking at the recipes.