Welcome! I am a mom of a busy 8 year old and an adventurous 6 year old. I also happen to work for a great company called NuVal. NuVal is a nutritional scoring system that rates foods on a scale of 1-100, based on how nutritious they are. We are implementing NuVal in grocery stores around the country.
NuVal may not be in your area yet. But I see the scores while they are "hot off the press" and because of that I am able to make better decisions about what to feed my family.
I am not a registered dietitian. I am just a mom who happens to work for NuVal. I am also an AFAA-certified Group Exercise Instructor. NuVal is a system designed to lead customers to the most nutritious food choices. It is not a diet or weight-loss plan. Before starting a diet, you should always consult your personal physician. The opinions expressed in this blog are the opinions of the writer and not the opinions of NuVal LLC.
My husband and kids really are good sports. Not only do they support me when my job with NuVal can mean lots of travel and some long hours, but they have whole-heartedly jumped in and agreed to volunteer to undertake this New Food Challenge. So that means that as a family, we are trying a new food (one that we have never tried before) each and every week. I guess it helps that the foods have included things like hot dogs and this week – pancakes!
I’ve actually been the person to shop for the foods. This is not some kind of Corporate Conspiracy here. I just went shopping at my local Big Y – where they have NuVal scores on the shelf – and looked for some foods with higher-than-average NuVal scores that looked intriguing. And I looked for foods that we needed and that I could incorporate into our weekly menu and life. So, this week, I bought some already-made pancakes that I found in the refrigerated section.
I hope that my faithful blog-readers will not jump ugly on me about this!
Let me just plead my Pancake Case here. Here is what we usually do when it comes to Pancakes in our house….
On the weekends, we make a whole bunch of whole wheat pancakes. We make some that are plain, some with blueberries, and some with dark chocolate chips.
We typically use a whole wheat pancake mix like this one.
This Hodgson Mill Whole Wheat Buttermilk Pancake Mix gets a NuVal score of 25.
After we make all these pancakes, we freeze them. During the week, we microwave them every morning for breakfast. My son typically eats pancakes every day for breakfast. He just loves them. He is turning 8 very soon, and he is playing a lot of basketball and baseball these days. Suddenly, he has an appetite. There are weeks that we run out of pancakes before Thursday.
So when I spied these Mama Mary’s already-made pancakes in the refrigerated section, with a NuVal score of 23, I thought we’d try them out. I figured these would make good back-up pancakes when we run out of our home-made varieties.
I looked at it it this way: Score-wise, they compared pretty well to the Hodgson Mill. Much better than some of the other mixes out there, like:
Aunt Jemima Original: NuVal score of 5
Bisquick Original: NuVal score of 2
And they also score better than some frozen brands, like:
Aunt Jemima Low Fat Frozen Pancakes: NuVal score of 14
Pillsbury Hungry Jack Frozen Mini Buttermilk Pancakes: NuVal score of 16
The Verdict
While my husband and kids prefer our homemade pancakes (especially since they have either blueberries or dark chocolate chips in them), Mama Mary’s are a great addition to our refrigerator for when we run out of the homemade cakes. And like I said, now that our son (he is Mr. Pancake in our house) is growing and suddenly a big-time sports fan with an increasingly voracious appetite, this is probably a good back-up plan. My son, who is turning 8, still wears shorts in a size 5! He is very lean. But I’m teaching him to eat when he’s hungry, stop when he’s full and to eat nutritious foods. Thankfully, NuVal can guide us along the way.
Welcome to Trade-Up Tuesday, the best day of the week here at A Better Bag of Groceries because I blog about a Trade Up I’ve made since learning about NuVal and I give away something for free. Today, it was easy to decide just what to give away because, after all, it’s Pancake Tuesday!
Thanks to my little Impresssionists calendar that I bought for $4 I also can tell you all the other names for this day:
It has a lot of names…
Growing up, on the night before Lent started, we would either make pancakes at home for dinner or go to our Church’s Pancake Supper. It was always a hit.
These days, we’ve traded up in the Pancake department in our household, thanks to NuVal.
You see, I used to just buy regular old Aunt Jemima Original Pancake Mix. Then I found out that it scores a 5 on the Nuval scale. I wondered if there were better options, and so I researched it and I found out that there are.
Now, we buy a higher- scoring mix, such as this Aunt Jemima Whole Wheat Blend (NuVal score of 24) or this Fiber One (NuVal score of 24) that you see pictured.
Hodgson Mill makes a pancake mix that scores a 35 on the NuVal scale: Multi Grain Buttermilk Pancake Mix with Milled Flax Seed & Soy! Wow!
And while most of the Bob’s Red Mill pancake mixes score in the 20s, I was disappointed to find one that scored an 11. That is why you need NuVal in your supermarket! You can’t always go by brand alone!
Today’s Giveaway
One lucky winner will be celebrating Pancake Tuesday even though Lent will already be underway (hey – at least they’re nutritious pancakes, right?) I even threw in some Blueberry Agave nectar to make it extra special. All you need to do is leave a comment below telling me one of the following:
What you like to put in or on your pancakes (bonus comment if you know the NuVal score for that item)
How you like to celebrate Fat Tuesday/Shrove Tuesday/Mardi Gras
I’ll select one winner at random at 8 am Eastern on Wednesday March 9th, so don’t delay. Good luck!
Welcome to Cooking With Kids, a frequent feature here at A Better Bag of Groceries. My kids (especially my daughter) love to cook and I love to teach them to cook, so whenever we can, we find a recipe and we blog about it. On this particular day (this past Monday – Columbus Day), I was working and my husband was home with the kids. So I asked him (nicely) if he could play Daddy Blogger for me. My husband is the best!! He took this recipe for Pumpkin Pancakes that I got from Jodie Fitz who runs the Kids Cooking Club for Price Chopper Supermarkets and he made them with our kids. And he took pictures! And then he cleaned up! What a guy!
1 1/2 cups flour (NuVal score of 91 for Bob’s Red Mill 100% Whole Wheat Flour)
1 cup low fat milk (My husband traded up to skim milk because it’s all we had in the house, NuVal score of 91)
1/2 cup pumpkin (NuVal score of 94)
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 Tablespoon baking powder
3 Tablespoons light brown sugar (NuVal score of 1)
1 package chocolate chips (12 – 15 chips per pancake, NuVal score of 8 for the Ghiardelli premium 60% cacao chips we had in our pantry)
Note: My daughter does not like chocolate. So my husband substituted raisins for her smiley faces. (NuVal score: 87)
Caramel Cream: (Note – my husband did not make the Caramel Cream sauce because we did not have the light cream in house, but here is the recipe anyway)
1 Tablespoon butter (NuVal score of 2)
1/2 cup light cream (NuVal score of 6 for Hood Light cream)
3 Tablespoons brown sugar (NuVal score of 1)
Directions:
Mix the egg, flour, milk, pumpkin, cinnamon, vanilla, baking powder and brown sugar together with an electric mixer.
Over medium to low heat, cook pancakes on a griddle coated with cooking spray.
While the first side is cooking add chocolate chips to the uncooked side of the pancake to create a face.
Flip and cook the second side. Serve with caramel cream.
To make the caramel cream, in a sauce pan, melt the butter. Stir in the brown sugar and continue stirring until the sugar is dissolved. Add the cream and heat until the liquid is bubbling along the edges. Continue stirring throughout the cooking process.
So, how did the pumpkin pancakes go over with the kids? My daughter liked them, but my son loved them. And he ate them plain – because we also did not have maple syrup in the house! We just moved, so we’re still getting our pantry back up to speed! But, yes, my son loved these whole wheat pumpkin pancakes just plain. So, my husband froze the leftover pancakes so that we can heat them up on busy weekday mornings. What a great recipe from Jodie Fitz!
Last week, Jodie and I got on the phone to talk about these pumpkin pancakes. She and I have met a couple of times at Price Chopper events and we’ve been really looking forward to working together on some blog projects. We talked about the Caramel Cream sauce and if it had a place on A Better Bag of Groceries, seeing that my blog has such a healthy slant. But both Jodie and I have the same philosophy about cooking with kids: Teach them to cook and worry about the nutrition later. So, if we had had the light cream in our house on Monday, my husband would have made the Cream Caramel sauce too. But the cool thing is that now my son has learned that he can enjoy these whole wheat pumpkin pancakes without an added sugary sauce – or even syrup!
Congratulations to Commenter #22, Jessica! You are the lucky winner of yesterday’s granola giveaway! Send me an email at abetterbagofgroceries@gmail.com with your mailing address so that I can mail your prize out to you. Thank you everyone for all your great suggestions! You’ve given me lots of ideas for Trade-Up Tuesdays!
Welcome to Trade-Up Tuesday, a weekly feature here on A Better Bag of Groceries where I tell you about Trade-Ups I’ve made since learning about NuVal and I give away free stuff. Today, I have a fantastic giveaway! In honor of Fat Tuesday and the Winter Olympics taking place in Vancouver, Canada, I am giving away pancakes and Canadian maple syrup! Oh, and the winner gets a NuVal T-shirt too! Good times!
Sorry, the skis are not included!
To learn more about why I traded up to Aunt Jemima’s Whole Wheat Blend Pancake mix, check out my Youtube video.
To Enter Today’s GiveAway:
Leave a comment and tell me something that you learned on the video, such as:
The NuVal score for Aunt Jemima’s Whole Wheat Blend Pancake Mix
The NuVal score for regular Aunt Jemima’s Pancake Mix
The NuVal score for the frozen mini pancakes that I used to buy
What I do now so that I have easily accessible pancakes during our busy weekday mornings
What it says on the back of my T-shirt
What my son’s drawing is on the front of my refrigerator (you get bonus points for that one!)
My favorite brand of chocolate chips
Don’t cheat! No fair if you just look at the other commenters. However, if you are at work and can’t really watch a video right now, I’ll take a comment on your favorite Winter Olympic sport!
One winner will be randomly drawn from all the comments. The contest closes at 11:59 EST on February 16th. Be sure to check back here tomorrow to see if you’ve won!
There’s nothing like a 3-day weekend. This Columbus Day was special because the whole family either had or took the day off. My plan for the Monday holiday was to drop the kids at my gym’s babysitting and take a great cardio class while my dear husband spent some time at home painting the bathroom that we’re remodeling. Well, that plan was dashed when we all slept until 9 am! I guess we all needed our beauty sleep. We also needed a lazy, quality-time family day since I’m now headed into an 11-day work week that includes a trip to the American Dietetic Association conference in Denver this coming weekend. So instead of exercise and home improvement, we spent some fun time in the kitchen trying a few new things.
The kids wanted pancakes so it was the perfect time to try out the Aunt Jemima Whole Wheat Blend Pancake mix that I picked up on a recent shopping trip. I figured that it must get a better NuVal score than the Original and I was right!
I also will confess right here that I used to give my daughter Aunt Jemima Frozen Mini Pancakes – until I found out that they scored a 6! I’m still getting over the guilt.
Here’s what the pancakes looked like. You can see that they are pretty wheaty!
Somehow the kids could sense that Mommy & Daddy really wanted to hang out, read the paper & drink coffee. The sight of Mommy & Daddy relaxing on the couch is foreign to my children. Mommy & Daddy must be busy, busy, busy. So, they next asked for fruit smoothies. No problem. I got out my old blender (a 12-year old wedding gift that my sister makes fun of) and put in the following ingredients:
some plain Greek yogurt (Score of 91)
some skim milk (Score of 91)
a banana (Score of 91)
some strawberries (Score of 100)
some frozen blueberries (Score of 100)
That was one healthy fruit smoothie. And somehow, everything is more exciting when you put a straw into it.
The kids loved the whole wheat pancakes so we made a whole bunch and put the extra in the freezer for quick heat-ups during this crazy stretch of work that I have ahead of me.
In the meantime, I’ll be preparing for my absence from home for four whole days. Thankfully, my mom will come to the rescue, my DH is SuperMan, and my BFF can’t wait to take by daughter to ballet (she has 2 boys!). The bad news is that I will be away for my daughter’s School Picture Day. Horrors! I mean my DH is amazing, but his talents end when it comes to doing my daughter’s hair. One of my friends suggested that I cancel my business trip. Oh well, there’s always Picture Retake Day!
The NuVal Nutritional Scoring System gives nutritional guidance to consumers frustrated with complicated nutrition labels and misleading packaging promises. Under NuVal, all foods and beverages are rated on a scale between 1 to 100. The higher the score, the higher the overall nutrition.
Awards
A Better Bag of Groceries was recently named by Medical Assistant Colleges as a Top 50 Blog for Understanding and Preventing Childhood Obesity. Hooray!
