Monday, November 30, 2009 at 06:45 AM
Every time I hear Andy Williams’ famous tune, I just have to chuckle. Even the opening bars of the song seem to peak in this high-pitched frenzy of activity.
“There’ll be parties for hosting
Marshmallows for toasting
And caroling out in the snow
With the kids jingle belling
And everyone telling you ‘Be of good cheer’”
Ugh! Here it comes – 4 weeks of craziness. Don’t get me wrong. I love Christmas. I do. And I hate Christmas. I think there was one weekend last year during which I ran (literally) between about 7 different events. And I’ve heard those people who say that you should look at your holiday shopping and/or activity list and cut it in half. And I ignore them. And instead, every year I rush, rush, rush and breathe a deep sigh of relief on December 26th. And most moms (and women who are not moms) that I talk to seem to feel the same way.
I admit – I’m a bit of an overachiever when it comes to the Holidays. And my activities which classify me as an overachiever have evolved since having kids. Pre-kids, I baked a lot of cookies. I mean, a lot. I think I made like 12 different kinds. Now, I go to a couple of cookie swaps bringing the quickest kind of cookies I could make and spend another afternoon with the kids making traditional sugar cookie cutouts. Pre-kids, my husband and I went to more holiday parties. Now, there are only about 2 or 3 grown-up events that we attend (one is the aforementioned cookie swap – which is really a party), and instead we do a lot of family activities. But in order to be able to go to the ballet, the church activities, the Boston Pops, or the Festival of Lights, you have to have all the other stuff done. And that’s why I get stressed out.
Back when I worked for Big Supermarket Company, I spent a day with Mr. Meat Expert. Mr. Meat Expert had been in the business for a million years and he knew everything there was to know about the meat departments in Big Supermarket Company. So, as we chatted while riding from store to store, he asked me an interesting question. “Melissa, do you know what the biggest week is for hot dog sales?” I replied, “I don’t know – Fourth of July? Memorial Day?” Mr. Meat Expert replied, “No, it’s Christmas. We’re not quite sure why.” I was incredulous. It made so much sense to me! I was not yet a mother, but I was well in tune to what the holidays do to all of our stress levels. Hot dogs are a quick meal that kids will eat. Of course sales are through the roof at the holidays.
Personally, I do not like hot dogs. But my kids love them. And we always have a package in the house. We buy Hebrew National 97% Fat Free Beef Franks. Unfortulately, they do not yet have a NuVal score. The regular Hebrew National Beef Franks so have a score and it is a 9. One thing I’ve learned at NuVal is not to assume that a reduced fat version or fat-free version of the same product will have a better score. It doesn’t always happen. When they take the fat out, they usually have to put other stuff in to make it taste good.
I did a little research on hot dogs and here is what I found:
Kayen Beef & Pork Frank: 7 (remember 100 is highest)
Oscar Mayer Beef Frank: 9
Ball Park Beef Frank: 8
A much better option would be to switch to Turkey Hot Dogs. I mentioned this today and my son thought that sounded very interesting! I guess he still has turkey on the brain.
Applegate Farms Turkey Hot Dog: 25
Oscar Mayer Turkey & Beef Wiener: 24
Ball Park Turkey Frank: 24
And if you really want to improve your score, there’s always tofu!
Lightlife Tofu Pups: 53
When my son was small, I bought those. I wish I hadn’t stopped!
I don’t know that I’m qualified to give any tips on how to reduce your holiday stress. But here goes anyway!
- Stick to your exercise routine – no matter what! OK, if you are out late at a party, you can sleep in – once. Other than that, shopping is not an excuse. Shop online.
- Set some intermediate goals. I try to get almost all of my shopping done (gift cards excluded) before the end of Thanksgiving weekend. I get my kids Christmas Card picture taken mid-November.
- If you have a husband/wife/significant other, sit that person down and show him/her the calendar. I did this with my husband this weekend. We were just about to head into the grocery store with the kids and I asked him to turn off the car, look at me and hear me tell him what we had on our plate for the next seven days. Then, I had to pick his jaw up off the floor.
Truly, he used to give me a hard time when I demanded that we go get our tree on December 5th because we absolutely had no other day that we were going to be able to do it. After 12 years of marriage, he knows now what December brings and he gets it. While I captain the ship when it comes to Christmas, he’s right in there helping me with cards, shopping, wrapping, decorating and gift-card buying.
- Make dinners healthy but as easy as possible. I am all stocked up on Dream Dinners and I also make some easy favorites that go a long way. Some good recipes are a ‘comin on this blog!
- Listen to good music. Find the holiday music that speaks to you and crank it in the car while you commute or on your Ipod while you run. For comic relief, I turn to Straight No Chaser. For a good spiritual moment, I love Sarah McLachlan’s Wintersong and James Taylor’s At Christmas.
- Make memories and savor them. I don’t know how many of us are really “caroling out in the snow” as Andy Williams suggests. But find what means the most to you and make the time to do it.
Question of the Day?
There are 2 really.
- What is your holiday dinner time strategy? What do you do that’s quick and easy?
- What do you do to reduce your holiday stress?
I can’t wait to see what you’ve got to say. Here’s to a healthy and sane holiday season for all of us.
Posted by: Melissa
Posted in: Uncategorized
Wednesday, November 25, 2009 at 07:30 AM
Yesterday, I had a meeting with Caryn at NuVal. I headed into her office only to see her candy dish chock full of candy. “This is the last of my kids’ Halloween candy,” she exclaimed with glee.
I’m not quite sure how Caryn manages to sneak the candy out of the house, past her pre-teen daughter and first-grade son. It used to be so easy. When the kids were really little, I could easily dump most of their halloween stash into a big ziploc baggie the day after Halloween and bring it into work for my hungry colleagues faced with a 3 pm slump. No more. Not only do my kids seem to have a mental calculation of just exactly how many Nestle Crunch Bars and Twizzlers they got, but their loot has expanded as they’re grown and their Trick-or-Treat stamina has increased. We made it to a lot of houses this year, particularly since Halloween was on a beautiful, balmy Saturday night.
Check out my little Spider-Girl and her take!
Not surprisingly, candy does not score so well on the NuVal score. OK, that is an understatement. Candy scores abysmally low on the NuVal scale. It is hard to find any candy that scores above a 1 (remember, 100 is highest).
- Twizzlers 1
- Tootsie Roll 1
- AirHeads (one of my kids’ favorites) 1
- Heath Bar 1
- Kit Kat 2
- Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups 3
- Snickers 5
- Hershey’s Special Dark 6 (Woo hoo – I’m a dark chocolate fan!)
- Hershey’s Mr. Goodbar 7
So, slowly and deliberately, my kids ate their Halloween candy. My son has only 1 piece left. My daughter, who does not like chocolate, just has her chocolate left. I’ve read about different ways parents handle the tsunami of candy that enters the home on October 31. Some parents let their kids eat all they can on Halloween night and throw out the rest. Others let their children keep a certain percentage and require them to donate the rest. I must admit I did somehow manage to sneak out a portion of their candy. After that, I made them each a ziploc bag with their names on them, filled them with their candy and placed the bags on top of the refrigerator. I did not make a rule about candy-eating. I waited for them to ask when they wanted a piece. And they did – generally for “dessert” and I did require them to stop at one piece. I wanted them to learn how to live with “treats”. After all, they will grow up and live in this world where there are “treats” everywhere. I am known to say that we live in a big field with poor nutritional landmines everywhere. Think about it, we go from having Halloween candy in our offices right into the over-indulgent Holiday season. There’s a brief respite at New Year’s and then we’re right back at it with Superbowl Parties, Valentine’s Candy, Easter Candy, and all those Summer Cookouts. Before you know it, you’re back in the office staring at a big bowl of Halloween candy during your meeting. So, I believe in teaching my children how to live in that world, with some boundaries of course.
Question of the Day:
How do you keep on track with all the “treats” that surround us?
Yesterday’s Winner:
Congratulations to Carol, Commenter #4 on yesterday’s Trade-Up Tuesday. Carol has won a fabulous red colander, five boxes of Barilla Plus Pasta in various shapes, and a NuVal aluminum water bottle.
Thanks to all of you who shared your trade-up stories! Happy Thanksgiving!
Posted by: Melissa
Posted in: Halloween
Tags: candy, chocolate
Tuesday, November 24, 2009 at 06:45 AM
Welcome to Trade-Up Tuesday – a weekly feature on my new blog where I fill you in on one of my trade-ups and ask you to tell me how you’re trading up for better nutrition.
This week, I introduce you to Barilla Plus Multi-Grain Pasta, which gets an amazing NuVal score of 91. That’s incredible when you realize that the median NuVal score for pasta (half are above, half are below) is a 52. For example, Prince Spaghetti gets a 49. Now, let me just admit right here that it took me some time to try out Barilla Plus. I had tried some whole wheat pastas in the past and they just didn’t do it for me. Also, since I was so used to thinking about foods in terms of calories & fat alone (and not in terms of total nutrition), I figured I would just stick with regular old pasta.
I have two people to thank for finally making the switch. First, I remember having dinner with our friends, Pete and Heather, last winter. Heather is a fabulous cook and is known for sneaking vegetables into some of her kids’ favorites. Pete is a super-healthy long-distance runner who posts Lance Armstrong-like times during marathons. Pete is a huge fan of NuVal and he chooses some very high-scoring foods. While out for this dinner, he said to me, “So, I assume you’re eating Barilla Plus.” Well, I wasn’t. And I felt a little guilty about it. I mean, I worked for NuVal and I was learning all this great new information about different foods, but I wasn’t “living” NuVal.
Soon after, I met Shari Steinbach, MS, RD, Healthy Living Manager for Meijer supermarkets.
We were conducting webinars together, training sessions for all of the store associates at Meijer, who would soon be implementing NuVal. She mentioned Barilla Plus, it’s high score and also offered up that it tasted just like regular pasta. It was enough to make me try it. And I’ve never gone back.
Today’s GiveAway
Today, I’m giving away my Barilla Pasta Trade-Up Package – which comes complete with a red colander and a NuVal water bottle. To enter, just leave a comment and tell me about a trade up you’ve made since learning about NuVal. And if you haven’t traded up yet, check out www.NuVal.com and find a trade up you’d like to make. The contest closes at 11:59 pm November 24th. I can’t wait to hear from you!
Posted by: Melissa
Posted in: Barilla Plus, Pasta, Trade-Up Tuesday
Monday, November 23, 2009 at 07:05 AM
Poor Thanksgiving! It has become our new forgotten holiday. Now that Christmas starts on November 1st, it’s like Thanksgiving doesn’t even exist. Try to find Thanksgiving decorations. They are almost extinct. Three radio stations in our area started playing round-the-clock Christmas music three weeks ago. I was so proud of my kids. Every time we heard a Christmas song while scanning the dial, they would shout, “No! It’s not Christmas yet! Thanksgiving comes first.” That is until they heard “Feliz Navidad,” one of their all-time favorites. “Go back, Mom, go back!” And so it begins!
Despite the short shrift that Thanksgiving gets these days, it is a big topic for foodie bloggers, health and fitness professionals and the Food Network. Everyone, it seems, wants to weigh in on how to have a healthier holiday. And so I must as well!
Annette Maggi, MS, RD, Senior Dietitian for NuVal, and my colleague, shares my sentiment about Thanksgiving and all the holidays. She says, right there on the NuVal website, “But the holidays are an opportunity to enjoy the true indulgence of food. To sit around a table with your loved ones and savor in the flavors that for many of us only come on this one day a year.” So true! My sister, Pilates Julie, after reading my post about Butternut Squash, texted me: Do u want me to make traditional B Squash recipe or the healthy 1 on ur blog? My reply: Traditional pls! And I promise not to make fun of u on my blog!
You see, I could blame it on my family. “They want all the traditional recipes,” I could moan to my other healthy friends. But the truth is, I want them too. Thanksgiving is the one day of the year that I eat stuffing, mashed potatoes and other winter vegetables with lots of butter, gravy, my grandmother’s creamed onions (I don’t even like those, but you know, it’s tradition), and my mom’s apple pie. One Day. One. Not Four. That is the key. So how do I get from Thursday to Monday and still be at My Happy Weight:
- Attend the Turkey Trot Workout at my gym on Thanksgiving Morning. My Dear Husband is joining me for this 90 minute cardio and strength blast. It’s a great time. All the participants are organized into teams and we move from room to room for short bursts of Spin, Kettlebells, Boot Camp, etc.
- Skip the appetizers. I am cooking this year but my guests are coming rather late – 4:30 – since they are either working or visiting in-laws earlier in the day. So I have no appetizers planned. We’ll start with cranberry-seltzer spritzers or some Chardonnay and then get right down to business.
- Keep Thanksgiving to One Day. I bought a whole bunch of ziploc storage containers to send everyone away with all the leftovers. Bye-bye turkey! I’m not a big fan of Thanksgiving leftovers, so it is easy for me to do.
- Keep the traditional favorites, but add a healthy dish (if you want to – it’s not a requirement!)
On that last point, my family never ate the Green Bean Casserole with the crunchy onions on top. You know the one. I checked it out on the Campbell’s website. I can tell you that is you make it with the regular Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom Soup, the soup NuVal score is a 24. Using the 98% Fat Free Mushroom Soup doesn’t really help you out much – it gets a NuVal score of 26. As for those French’s French Friend Onions on top? Well, they’re famous to us at NuVal for being a canned vegetable that gets a score of 1.
I’ve added Cooking Light’s Roasted Green Beans to my menu. It’s a dish I make often – especially when I have company for dinner – because it literally only takes 10 minutes in the oven. You can prep it ahead and then just pop it in when everything else is ready to go. There it is with one of my very few, pitiful Thanksgiving decorations – because, as I said earlier, you can’t find any Thanksgiving decorations!
Yum – although I admit – the kids complain that they’re too spicy. So for them, I just open a can of no-salt added canned green beans. I wonder if someday “traditional” for them will be a can of green beans?
In keeping with my plan to celebrate the holiday and thanks to our late-day dinner this year, the kids have a great plan. They are headed out to the backyard at lunchtime with my husband to celebrate Thanksgiving Snoopy-style. That’s right, they are having the meal made famous by the 1973 holiday special: toast, popcorn, pretzel sticks and jelly beans. I can’t wait to watch that from the kitchen window while I mash up turnip with lots of butter! Happy Thanksgiving!
Posted by: Melissa
Posted in: Green Beans, Uncategorized
Tags: roasted green beans, thanksgiving
Thursday, November 19, 2009 at 06:55 AM
When I was setting up my new blog, I decided to divide my recipes into Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner and Snacks. This categorization quickly made me realize that I’ve been remiss in giving you some good lunch recipes. This is probably an indication of my lifestyle. In my life B.C. (Before Children), there was time for lunch. I could make a great salad in my company’s cafeteria, head out with some co-workers, or even better – when I worked in Manhattan – shop on Fifth Avenue. Those were the days. Fast foward to now. Working Moms do not eat lunch. They work through lunch. They type with one hand while balancing a quick sandwich in the other. And Stay-At-Home Moms suck down a Campbell’s Soup in Hand while driving from here to there. It’s pitiful. But with the daycare deadline looming (and some of them charge by the minute if you’re late), most working moms (and dads!) have no choice. I’m asking you all to step away from the keyboard, take a few minutes and warm up a nutritious lunch this winter.
One of my favorite lunchtime recipes comes from Robin Abrahams. Robin has become a virtual friend of mine these past few years and I credit her with being the first Blogger to whom I became a devotee. Robin is also known as Miss Conduct, the witty author of the Sunday etiquette (well, she calls it social advice) column in the Boston Globe Magazine. Robin can help you with all your etiquette dilemmas, such as should you say “Bless You” to a sneezing atheist. She also has a great book, Mind Over Manners, and I am the proud owner of an autographed copy. Now and then, Robin throws a little recipe into her blog and I’ve been making her Easy Greek Casserole for a few winters now.
1 1/2 cups cooked brown rice (or other whole grain)
1 T olive oil
1 small onion
1 bulb garlic, chopped or one T minced garlic from a jar
1 bag baby spinach
herbs
1 pint grape tomatoes, sliced in half, or one can diced tomatoes
1/4 to 1/2 cup crumbled feta cheese
1/2 block firm tofu, drained and pressed
sliced black olives
I also add chopped roasted red peppers out of a jar
Cook rice or other grain. Preheat oven to 375. Heat olive oil in skillet and add onion and garlic. Wash the spinach and squeeze dry. When the onion has become limp and tractable, add the spinach and whatever herbs you like (Robin uses dill, oregano, basil and black pepper – she advises against adding salt since it’s already in the feta). While that cooks, spray the pan with non-stick spray and spread the rice or other grain evenly across the bottom. When the spinach mixture is jsut barely cooked, put that on top. Put the tomatoes on top of that, cover in foil and bake for about 20 minutes.
Squeeze the tofu between your fingers and into a bowl. Add feta cheese. Mix together until it’s all just crumbly white stuff.
Remove the casserole and add the feta cheese & tofu topping. Add sliced olives and chopped roasted red peppers on top
and baked uncovered until topping browns, about 15 more minutes.
Robin says – and I quote – if you like your casserole servings to have neat edges and structural integrity, you should add a beaten egg or two somewhere, probably in the spinach. I’m a control freak so I go for the egg.
How Does It Score?
Pretty Darn Good! Baby Spinach scores a 100 on the NuVal scale. Remember 100 is best. Brown rice scores an 82. I often use a pre-cooked brown rice from Trader Joe’s to save time. This time, I used wild rice which gets a score of 91. Wow! The olive oil gets an 11 (hey – it’s better than the butter in yesterday’s recipe). Garlic gets a 91 and the grape tomatoes, a 96. As for the tofu, we have not yet scored it. NuVal is scoring all products in grocery stores (more than any other nutritional scoring system out there). We just haven’t finished tofu yet. I used Athenos Mild Feta Cheese crumbles which score a 24. If I I had left off the final toppings (kalamata olives, 10 and Pastene’s roasted red peppers, 7), it would have been healthier. But that’s how I like it!
So, enjoy your lunch and look for more high-scoring lunch recipes to come!
Question of the Day:
What are you having for lunch today?
Posted by: Melissa
Posted in: Uncategorized
Tags: baby spinach, Greek Casserole
