A Better Bag of Groceries

A Balanced Thanksgiving

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:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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 6 comments

Posted in: Green Beans, Uncategorized

Tags: roasted green beans, thanksgiving

Don’t Be A Vegetable Snob

Thursday, August 6, 2009 at 02:06 PM

My kids eat vegetables. Many mom bloggers would follow that statement by saying “I am lucky.” But I won’t say that. I will say that my kids eat vegetables because I’ve made it a priority and I haven’t been a vegetable snob. By that I mean – yes – I resort to canned vegetables. I know that there are moms gasping in horror by that statement. But consider this:

On the NuVal scale:

Fresh Green Beans score a 100

Del Monte No-Salt Added Canned Green Beans also score a 100

Del Monte Fresh Cut Whole Green Beans (Canned) score a 59

I’ll admit, it wasn’t until I started working for NuVal that I switched to the No Salt Added variety. Canned vegetables that add sodium, fat or sugar don’t score so well. However, those without additives score nearly as well as fresh.

So here is how my canned vegetable habit started. I was at a playdate back when my first child was about 15 months old. We had a wonderful playgroup of 5 moms, all with kids born within weeks of each other. We were all venturing into that stage when you graduate from baby foods and move on to more real foods. One mom – the mom with the oldest of our children actually – caught my attention when she opened up a can of plain old green beans and started feeding them to her daughter straight out of the can. What a great idea! It was cheaper than the “graduate” kind you see in the baby food aisle – tiny little pieces of green beans in tiny little jars at an astronomical price. So from that day on, I started giving my son vegetables out of the can: green beans, wax beans, carrots, peas, beets. And to this day (he is 6!), he goes to school with a serving of canned vegetables in his lunchbox and he eats them at room temperature. Additionally, at dinner time, when I add vegetables to everybody’s plate, I often finding myself opening up a can. Perhaps dinner included steamed broccoli, which we like and my daughter likes, but my son does not. In that case, my son gets no salt added sliced carrots out of a can.

Here’s another example:

Fresh Peas score a 96

Del Monte No Salt Added Peas (canned) score an 82

Del Monte Peas (canned) score a 39

My kids like some fresh vegetables too. They are big on baby carrots and cucumbers. They both like fresh green beans, especially at this time of year. But let’s face it. There are nights when I just don’t have time to wash and trim those green beans. It’s good to know that I can open a can of no-salt-added vegetables and get almost the same benefit. And the kids are used to the soft texture. There are no fights. It’s all good.

Check out this link, where a dietitian at Hy-Vee, the Iowa-based supermarket chain where we’ve implemented NuVal, advises that canned vegetables are an OK way to make sure you get your veggies. http://www.kcci.com/health/20310760/detail.html

Most kids today do not get the recommended amount of fruits and vegetables according to researchers at Ohio State University. More on that in this link: http://www.eatright.org/cps/rde/xchg/ada/hs.xsl/media_20431_ENU_HTML.htm

And http://www.mypyramid.gov/ has some great tools for figuring out how many vegetables (and other foods) are recommended for your child.

I am happy that my kids do eat vegetables and I know that now our next steps are to vary the vegetables that my kids eat. Not always easy. A friend and colleague of mine introduces her 3 boys to a new vegetable every Monday. Great idea! And if they don’t like it the first time, she keeps trying. She says that she’s never been able to get her boys to like cooked spinach, but they happily munch on raw baby spinach with ranch dressing. Ranch dressing is a secret weapon isn’t it? I can get my kids to eat anything with a little bit of Ranch on it.

For more canned vegetable scores, visit http://www.nuval.com/Pages/ScoreCannedVegetables.aspx.

I would love more ideas. How do you get your kids to eat more vegetables?

Posted by: Melissa 3 comments

Posted in: Canned Vegetables, Green Beans