Fresh Fruit Water

With Summer around the corner, I was feeling like experimenting with flavored waters.  I used my giant drink dispenser so that I could leave it out all day long as an incentive for my kids to remember to drink up.  It worked!

When I was in Flordia on a trip with my husband, they had the most amazing displays of water dispensers with all kinds of patterns of fresh fruit pushed around the edges.  Here is what you will need to make the fruit look as pretty as it tastes!

1.  slice up fruit.  I like watermelon, cucumbers, limes, oranges or strawberries.  

2.  Add some ice and then add 1 row of fruit.  Use the ice to hold your fruit to the edge.  

3.  Then add some more ice and another layer of fruit.  Repeat till you are close to the top.

4. Fill with water.  

What are some of your favorite combos of fruit infused water?

Crock pot chicken and rice soup

Tried this recipe on pintrest and loved it! Everyone in my family liked it, and it is made with chicken, brown rice, and 8 cups of hidden vegetables! The only thing I changed in the recipe is that I put the chicken in frozen, and then I pulled it out before serving and put it in my mixer with the paddle attachment on low for 30 seconds to make it shredded chicken. I guesstimate that this soup has about 120 calories per 1 Cup (for the moms and dads that want to look good in a swimsuit in a couple of weeks for vacation;). Click on the link for the website I got this recipe from.

The Ingredients.

--2 boxes of chicken broth

--1 cup of uncooked brown rice

--1 cup of water

--1 cup cooked, shredded chicken

--1 1/2-2 cups almost purreed vegetables (I used celery, carrots, brocolli, cauliflower, a red bell pepper, and green onion). Just fill up your vitamix to the top with veggies. Then puree into a mush and put the muss in the crockpot.

--1 t herbs de provence (sounds fancy)

--salt and pepper to taste after cooking

The Directions:

using a food processer, blender or hand chopper, chop up all the vegetables into whatever sized pieces your family likes.

I don't have a food processer, so I used the Vita Mix.

Then cook on low for 10 hours, or high for 5 hours (I am just guessing).

Serve with a whole grain loaf of bread and a little butter and jam.

Foil Dinners

I always have a hard time coming up with a weekly menu that is easy, healthy, and yummy!

I had a request a few months back for some dinner ideas that are healthy, and easy and that her kids would eat.

I think foil dinners are a perfect meal that is easy, yummy and healthy!

Here is the general recipe and some tips on how to make it healthier.

Makes 8

2 lbs super lean ground beef (ours came from a grass fed cow in ID that my friend Corrine named Blackie 2)

8 Carrots, sliced

8 small potatoes, sliced

1/2 puple onion, chopped

1 yellow bell pepper, chopped

Some parsley, chopped

Some olive oil for the potatoes

no season salt, salt, garlic powder, and hamburger seasoning.

Mix the hamburger with the onion and spices. Divide up the hamburger making a patty in their own separate foil in the shape of a patty.

Place the potatoes in a bowl and mix well with about 1 T olive oil.

Divide the potatoes up evenly and place on top of the ground beef. Then place the sliced carrots and bell pepper on top of those.

Fold the foil sealing the side. Double wrap in foil if desired.

Cook for about 1 hour on 350 degrees.

Tips:

• These can be made ahead of time and then just placed in the oven. Just put some lemon juice with the olive oil on the potatoes.
• If you are trying to get your family to eat more veggies, do 2 carrots per person instead of just one.
• you don't need to peel the potatoes. The skin will give you extra fiber. Just wash them really well.
• Use organic ketchup, it is less sweet and doesn't have HFCS in it. (We like ours with ketchup!)

My new 10 min Popsicle Maker!

I got an X-press Pop popsicle maker for Christmas. I gave one to my sister-in-law, and then asked my husband to get me one. I was hoping that it worked well, and . . . . . I LOVE it! My kids are always wanting me to make popsicles, and I usually make a big batch of smoothies in the morning and then freeze the leftovers, but then they have to wait a few hours before they can have some. Not anymore! I can make 8 popsicles in 20 minutes!

It works like most modern ice cream makers that you use at home. You keep the unit in the freezer and then you pour the liquid in it and put the popsicle sticks in. 10 minutes later you have made 4 popsicles.

I bought the one for my sis-in-law at Bed Bath and Beyond. It is priced at $30.00, and then, of course, you can use your 20% off coupon bringing the price down to $24.00. They sell one on Amazon for $50.00 that has great reviews, but this one works great, so why pay twice the price? It comes with 8 popsicle sticks and this cool remover tool that gets the popsicle sticks out in a snap by just tilting it to the side.

Here is a smoothie recipe idea for some popsicles

4 kewi, skins removed

4 cups frozen strawberries

1 peeled banana

2 cups of OJ

1 Tablespoon (or more if you want it really sweet) of agave syrup

Super yummy, and super healthy for the kids!

Are you feeding your children the "worst" sugar cereal?

WARNING: The Following Breakfast Cereals Contain More Sugar Than A Twinkie

Dina Spector | Dec. 8, 2011, 10:01 AM | 579 | 3

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Image: Flickr

Most parents probably wouldn't knowingly serve their child a Twinkie for breakfast.

Unfortunately, an alarming amount of sweetened breakfast cereals, popular with the younger set, are just as unhealthy as the iconic creme-filled snack cake and many other packaged desserts.

The Environmental Working Group analyzed the nutrition labels of 84 popular children' cereals and found that more half of the brands they reviewed deliver more sugar than three Chips Ahoy! cookies.

Three cereals — Kellogg's Honey Smacks, Post Golden Crisp, and General Mills Wheaties Fuel—contain more sugar than a Hostess Twinkie.

A shocking 75% of cereals did not meet the voluntary nutritional guidelines proposed by the International Working Group, a federal advisory board responsible for foods marketed to children.

The IWG recommends that children's cereal have no more than 26% sugar by weight. Most of the breakfast cereals that made EWG's worst list exceed the government's proposed limit by nearly double.

Take a look at the list below:

1. Kellogg's Honey Smacks—55% sugar
2. Post Golden Crisp—51.9% sugar
3. Kellogg's Froot Loops Marshmallow—48.3% sugar
4. Quaker Oats Cap'n Crunch's OOPS! All Berries—46.9% sugar
5. Quaker Oats Cap'n Crunch Original—44.4% sugar
6. Quaker Oats Oh!s—44.4% sugar
7. Kellogg's Smorz—43.3% sugar
8. Kellogg's Apple Jacks —42.9% sugar
9. Quaker Oats Cap'n Crunch's Crunch Berries—42.3% sugar
10. Kellogg's Froot Loops Original—41.4% sugar

So what's the issue? Child obesity rates are climbing as a result of eating foods high in sugar. Meanwhile, manufacturers of sugary cereals spend upwards of $20 million a year in advertising targeting the youth market.

"Somehow, reading a nutrition label and seeing that Honey Smacks has 20 grams (that's nearly five teaspoons) of sugar per serving does not have the same impact as slapping a label on the box that reads, "Warning: Equivalent to Eating a Twinkie," says Tom Laskawy of Grist.

General Mills recently argued that that kids won't like their cereal if they reduce the sugar content anymore than they already have over the last few years. Maybe that's a good thing.

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/childrens-cereals-sugar-environmental-working-group-2011-12#ixzz1fxexWXtr

Saturated fats not bad for you?

My mother-in-law forwarded this on to me. To sum up, several studies have been done that show that saturated fat doesn't raise your cholesterol, but in fact simple sugar, particularly High-fructose-corn syrup, does raise your risk of heart disease, cholesterol and type 2 diabetes.

I listened to a lecture given to med students that said pretty much the same things. The lecturer said that the study that showed that saturated fat raised cholesterol didn't cross reference the study, and they based their findings on other countries whose diets where low in saturated fat (think Italy, Japan), but these countries also have diets low in SUGAR!

So here is the link, and here is the article that I copy and pasted from that link.

You're correct that my thinking on saturated fat has evolved. One catalyst was a scientific analysis of 21 earlier studies, which showed "no significant evidence" that saturated fat in the diet is associated with an increased risk of coronary heart disease. The 21 studies analyzed included nearly 348,000 participants, most of whom were healthy when they were enrolled. They were followed for five to 23 years, during which 11,000 developed heart disease or had a stroke. Looking back at the dietary information collected from these thousands of participants, the investigators found no difference in the risk of coronary heart disease, stroke, or coronary vascular disease between those individuals with the lowest and highest intakes of saturated fat. This goes completely against the conventional medical wisdom of the past 40 years. It now appears that many studies used to support the low-fat recommendation had serious flaws.

In the meantime, as nutritionists have been recommending low-fat foods, consumption of added sweeteners, especially high-fructose corn syrup, has been steadily rising. This may be at least partially due to the fact that low-fat prepared foods are often highly sweetened. A study from Emory University and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published in April, 2010, showed that sweeteners appear to lower levels of HDL ("good") cholesterol and raise triglycerides. Both of these effects increase the risk of heart disease. What's more, through their direct effects on insulin and blood sugar, refined starches and sugars are more likely than saturated fat to be the main dietary cause of coronary heart disease and type-2 diabetes.

Another study, published in the Dec. 21, 2010 issue of the Annals of Internal Medicine,showed that a natural substance in dairy fat, trans-palmitoleic acid, may substantially reduce the risk of type 2 diabetes (and, as result, of heart disease). The research team from the Harvard School of Public Health looked at more than 3,700 men and women age 65 or older in a National Institutes of Health funded Cardiovascular Health Study who had been followed for 20 years to evaluate risk factors for cardiovascular diseases in older adults. The investigators found that participants who reported eating more whole-fat dairy products had higher levels of trans-palmitoleic acid in their blood. Over the following years those men and women who had the higher levels of trans-palmitoleic acid were about 60 percent less likely to develop diabetes than those whose blood levels of trans-palmitoleic were lowest.

In addition, the findings from two other studies conducted by the Harvard School of Public Health on the health effects of dairy products are intriguing. One found that consumption of low-fat dairy foods contributed to infertility caused by failure to ovulate, while consumption of full-fat dairy foods may help the problem. The second showed that drinking skim milk was associated with a higher incidence of acne in teenage boys.

Given the results of these studies, I no longer recommend choosing low-fat dairy products. I believe the healthier choice is high-quality, organic dairy foods in moderation. My personal choice would be high-quality, natural cheese a few times a week. I don't advise eating saturated fat with abandon, because the foods that are full of it (salty bacon, conventionally raised beef, processed cheese) are often not the best for our health. Try to limit it to about ten percent of daily calories. You may choose to use your "budget" of saturated fat calories on ice cream, butter or high-quality natural cheese, or even an occasional steak (from organic, grass-fed, grass-finished cattle, please). I still recommended skinless chicken and turkey because poultry fat (concentrated just beneath the skin) contains arachidonic acid, which promotes inflammation. I also still recommend strictly avoiding foods that contain chemically altered fats (such as hydrogenated vegetable oils found in many prepared foods), as these do appear to raise cardiovascular disease risk.

Continue to emphasize fruits, vegetables and whole grains, and limit sweeteners and other high-glycemic-load carbs.

Andrew Weil, M.D.

Orange Chicken Stir Fry

I watched Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution Friday night, and on there they had a single dad of 2 boys who took his family out to eat fast food at least once a day.

Jamie had the Dad go get fast food at a fast food place they usually went to while Jamie and the boys made dinner. It was a race to see who could get it done faster, and cheaper.

The Dad took 45 minutes and spent $30

Jamie and the boys took 30 minutes and spent $22. They made chicken with fresh tomato sauce on top, a really yummy looking shredded salad with homemade vinaigrette, and a yummy looking lime drink.

I guess that doesn't include the time it takes at the store, but most of us try to only go to the grocery store once a week.

I was about to take my kids to Arby's Sat, cuz my husband has been out of town for over a week, and the kids were restless, but then I remembered Jamie's great example of cooking a homemade meal, and I put myself to the challenge.

I put all 5 of my kids in aprons and put them to work. 28 minutes later we had rice (white cuz we were doing it fast), with orange ginger chicken stir fry. My kids LOVED it. Not all of them ate every single veggie, but they tried eat one and they all at least liked one of them. I think the whole meal cost me about $5, and we had left overs.

To make the meal extra special, we used chop sticks. Have you ever seen those chopstick holders for kids? We used those too.

We did have a pot and pan to clean up, and some plates, but as soon as we get some more paper plates, things will be great around here!

Orange Chicken Stir Fry

Brown or White rice cooked

About 3 chicken breasts diced up

1 bunch asparagus cut into 2 inch pieces

handful of broccoli

2 small zucchini cut into 1 inch slices

Minced ginger

soy sauce

orange juice

While the rice is cooking, add chicken and 1 Tablespoon oil (we used olive and sesame) to a pan. After chicken is browned up (3 minutes?) add asparagus. After a couple more minutes, add the broccoli, and after 2 more minutes add the zucchini. Add about 1/4 C water, 1 T soy sauce, and about 1-2 T. ginger. I like the minced ginger that they sell in a tube that you keep in the fridge. Then add about 1/4 Cup of orange juice and cook till everything is done and juice is sticky.