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.

Food Imposters, plus a smoothie recipe!

My husband emailed me this link, which I found very helpful. It is a bit drastic of a list, depending on where you are at in your "food journey", but every bit of information helps for your decision of what will go into your body. Notice that these are these are not the worst foods, but the worst food that seem like they are good for you, but are NOT.

Here are seven of the worst healthy food imposters:

#1: Farm-Raised Salmon

There’s no comparison between farm-raised salmon and the wild variety. Farm-raised salmon have up to eight times the level of carcinogenic PCBs as wild salmon, and they’re lower in omega-3 fats. Plus, these penned salmon are fed grain and fishmeal, not to mention a ton of antibiotics, and they don’t have nearly as high nutritional value as their wild relatives.

In addition, wild salmon get their red color from astaxanthin, a powerful antioxidant that comes from their natural food source, krill. Farmed salmon get their color artificially from a color wheel.

#2: Supermarket Cereals

With few exceptions, most supermarket cereals are fiber lightweights. The overwhelming majority are loaded with sugar. Most have a very high glycemic impact, meaning they raise blood sugar quickly, contributing to mood swings and energy dips. Whole grains are better, but only marginally, and people who are sensitive to blood sugar fluctuations will still need to be careful.

The best cereals are old-fashioned oatmeal, and a few grocery store standouts, such as Fiber One and All-Bran. Most of the others? Not so good. Look for those that pass the “5 and 5” rule: less than 5 grams of sugar, more than 5 grams of fiber.

#3: Bars

Whether you call them energy bars, protein bars, granola bars, or breakfast, most are simply chewy versions of candy bars. They usually have very little fiber, lots of processed carbs, and a ton of sugar.

You’re better off “rolling your own” out of raw oats, chopped almonds, coconut flakes, raisins, and a dollop of raw organic honey.

#4: Frozen Yogurt

Frozen yogurt is a prime example of marketing triumphing over good sense. The only thing frozen yogurt has in common with real yogurt is that they’re both white.

Real yogurt—one of the healthiest foods on earth—is loaded with live cultures that support your digestive health. The live culture content of frozen yogurt is precisely zero.

What’s more, frozen yogurt is usually filled with chemicals and artificial sweeteners, which can cause cravings just like sugar. You’re better off with real, creamy, organic ice cream. Just don’t eat too much.

#5: Canola Oil

Sounds sacrilegious, but canola oil isn’t such a health bargain. Conventional canola oil is processed with high-temperature, mechanical pressing. It goes through caustic refining, bleaching, and de-gumming.

The high temperatures needed to extract the oil from the rapeseed plant make it’s highly touted omega-3’s rancid and foul smelling, requiring them to be deodorized, a process that can create trans fats. Unless it’s cold-pressed and organic, stay away.

#6: Egg-White Omelets

While these aren’t exactly unhealthy, they are utterly unnecessary. The whole concept of egg white omelets is left over from the 80’s obsession with low fatanything. And when it comes to eggs, it’s a huge mistake.

The yolk contains the superstars of eye nutrition, lutein and xeazanthin, which need fat to be absorbed properly. Egg yolks are also an important sourcephosphatidylcholine, an important nutrient for brain health.

And you can forget the fat issue. Half the fat in the yolk isn’t even saturated to begin with and the saturated part is good for you!

#7: Apple Juice

Apples, good. Apple juice? Not so much.

One cup of apple juice has zero fiber, 117 calories, and 29 grams of carbs, 27 of which are sugar (and your typical serving is a lot more than a cup). Sorry, but that’s not a health drink. It’s sugar water with apple flavoring.

The implications of giving our kids 8 cups a day of this stuff is just now beginning to be understood. An apple a day keeps the doctor away, but apple juice just may necessitate a few house calls in the future.

I think my favorite one is #7 about the juice. I think that we forget that when we make juice, we take out the fiber which means that the sugar is going to go straight to our blood stream. Smoothies are a great way to make kids feel like they are drinking juice when really they are having the whole fruit.

Smoothie Recipe

My favorite recipe has been this one. I have been making popsicles out of them too.

1 peeled and diced mango

Juice of one fresh lime

4 C. frozen strawberries

1 cup milk

1 cup plain yogurt

3 cups water

1 banana

1 t agave nectar

The kids have loved this recipe!

Agave plus lime juice also makes a great dressing on a fruit salad.

What is for dinner? Sweet Potato and Black Bean Burritos

This recipe is from my new cookbook that I got from my friend Casey for my birthday. All 5 of my kids ate it and liked it. One of them didn't eat much, but she says she liked it. It says that it takes 35 min to make and 30 min to bake, but I left out the baking part and it was a really fast meal with 1 pot, 1 pan, and a cutting board to clean up.

5 Cups peeled cubed sweet potatoes (this ended up being only 2 big ones)

1/2 teaspoon salt

2 teaspoons canola oil

3 1/2 cups diced onions (I did one large which was 2 cups)

4 large garlic cloves, minced or pressed

1 Tablespoon minced fresh green chile (I left this out since I didn't have any)

4 teaspoons cumin

4 teaspoons coriander

4 1/5 Cups cooked black beans (three 15 ounce cans, drained)

2/3 Cup lightly packed cilantro leaves

2 Tablespoons fresh lemon juice

1 teaspoon salt

8 eight inch flour tortillas

Fresh Salsa

Preheat oven to 350 degrees (or not)

Place the sweet potatoes in a medium saucepan with the salt and water to cover. Cover and bring to a boil, then simmer until tender, about 10 minutes. Drain and set aside.

While the sweet potatoes are cooking, warm the oil in a medium skillet or saucepan and add the onions, garlic and chile. Cover and cook on medium-low heat, stirring occasionally, until the onions are tender, about 7 minutes. Add the cumin and coriander and cook for 2 minutes longer, stirring frequently. Remove from the heat and set aside.

Ina food processor (I used my vitamix on a low setting), combine the black beans, cilantro, lemon juice, salt and cooked sweet potatoes and puree until smooth. Transfer the sweet potato mixture to a large mixing bowl and mix in the cooked onions and spices (I did this my pan that I cooked the onions in).

Option #1 Lightly oil a large baking dish. Spoon about 2/3 to 3/4 cup of the filling in the center of each tortilla, roll it up, and place it, seam side down, in the baking dish. Cover tightly with foil and bake for about 30 minutes, until piping hot. Serve topped with salsa.

Option #2 Spoon about 2/3 to 3/4 cup of the filling in the center of each tortilla, roll it up, and place it, seam side down, on a microwavable plate. Put a bunch of shredded cheese on top and microwave for 1 minute, or until cheese is melted.

Top with fresh salsa

Each serving has 8 grams of fiber, 20 grams of protein, and about 550 calories.

Clif Kid Organic Twisted Fruit on sale on Amazon

This is a really good deal on something my kids really love. Clif Kids Organic Twisted Fruit variety pack. Kinda like fruit leathers, but even better! Ends up being .56 cents a piece when you do the subscribe and save. If you have never tried the subscribe and save on Amazon, it is really easy. You can cancel anytime. I even recently signed up for diapers and then canceled it the next day (potty training), and it was as easy as a click of a button. I blogged about these fruit twists almost 2 years ago. Click here to see that blog post.

Jamie Oliver is at it again!

Last night Jamie Oliver's food revulution was on again with an all new season. I haven't finished the show, but here are some highlights of the night.

• Jamie has 4 kids and has moved to LA with his family. I don't know how permanent this is, but I loved seeing him with his kids. Too cute!
• Ground beef can have up to 15% of what they call "pig slime" in it. It isn't pig, but it is worse. They take all the parts of the cow that are not edible, put it through a centrifuge to separate out the little pieces of meat, and then rinse the meat with a mixture of ammonia and water to kill all the bacteria since it comes from the stomach of the cow and such. Then they "rinse" it and grind it up. The real shocker is that they don't have to put ammonia on the ingredient list because it is part of the "processing of the the meat"!!!!!!!! Yes, this is in the school lunch hamburgers, and no, it isn't on the list of ingredients.
• LA has ban Jamie from their entire school district!
• LA has a central kitchen where the food is made and then it is shipped around to the different schools. Nothing is fresh and most of it is heated up in plastic bags (think BPA)

It is so fascinating to watch! Hope you will tune in to ABC Tuesday nights 7/8 central. Click here for more info on the show

BPA FREE

My sister in law Katy sent me this article about Toxins in our diet from one of my favorite shows, the biggest loser. Julian Michael's says we should avoid certain plastics that have BPA in them.

"Bisphenol A (BPA): BPAs are chemical compounds that are added to plastics to make them more durable; they're most commonly found in the linings of food containers, beverage cans, some baby bottles, and drinking bottles, and they can leach out into foods and liquids. Harmful side effects from consuming them can include increased risk of breast and prostate cancers, infertility, polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS), and insulin resistance (which, in turn, can lead to type 2 diabetes). To be safe, store foods in glass containers, drink from stainless steel water bottles, and do your best to avoid canned foods."

The biggest no no is to warm up food in plastic with BPA in it. If you still have plastic tuperware that you are using to store your leftovers in, then consider getting a set of glass storage containers. You can find a nice set from Costco for only $15.

Update! My sister Julie went and bought a set yesterday and it was $30, but sometimes they have a coupon for $5 off. See her comments below. Still worth it!

Annie's Mac and Cheese on sale this week at Smith's!

If you live around a Smith's food and Drug, then you need to know about the great sale they have this week. About 4 different varieties of the Annie's Mac and cheese are only .49 cents each when you buy 10! They are usually $1.99 each, but they are on sale for .99 cents each and then when you buy 10 of them you get $5 off when you check out.

I have been feeding my kids annies for sometime now because they don't have any food coloring or hydrogenated fats in them. They also are made with organic pasta. This is really the best deal I have found on them.

Sale goes through Tuesday March 29th, 2011!

UPDATE on McDonald's Hamburgers . . . Good Science vs. Bad Science

So do you remember that post I did about the McDonalds hamburger that was almost a year old and still looked the same? Well my daughter Amanda needed a science fair project, so I gave her that idea, and she was really excited about it.

The main difference between her experiment and the McDonald's hamburger that stayed the same is that she used a control . . . a homemade hamburger! If you don't have a control, then it is all hype and NOT GOOD SCIENCE!

This is what she did . . . Took a plain McDonald's 1/4 pounder hamburger, and put it in a zip lock bag with a couple of slits in it (the thought of a hamburger rotting in the open grossed me out). Then she took and then a homemade 1/4 pound patty on a homemade hamburger bun and put that in a gallon zip lock bag with a couple slits in it. She then let them sit on top of our cupboards for 6 weeks and took pictures each week to see the change. I wrote the date on the bags with a permanent marker so we knew when each picture was taken.

Results:

After about 2 weeks, mold appeared on both hamburgers. Black mold on the homemade hamburger, and green and white mold on the McDonald's hamburger. More mold was on the homemade hamburger.

Conclusion:

Mold needs moister to grow, so by putting the hamburgers in ziplock bags, there was enough moister to allow the mold to grow.

When we were trying to figure out why our McD's burger got mold, but this other one did not, we came across this great website that took about 9 different hamburgers and put them under different environments. Some where kept in a container, and some in the open air. They came to the conclusion that the McDonald's hamburger's moister evaporated so quickly, that the mold didn't have a chance to grow. Click here to see the blog post.

We also found out that a McD's bun has a ton of preservatives in it. That is probably why the black mold (one of the most common molds) didn't grow on the McDonald's burger.

Here is the ingredients list of the bun:

Enriched flour (bleached wheat flour, malted barley flour, niacin, reduced iron, thiamin mononitrate, riboflavin, folic acid, enzymes), water, high fructose corn syrup, sugar, yeast,soybean oil and/or partially hydrogenated soybean oil, contains 2% or less of the following: salt, calcium sulfate, calcium carbonate, wheat gluten, ammonium sulfate, ammonium chloride, dough conditioners (sodium stearoyl lactylate, datem, ascorbic acid, azodicarbonamide, mono- and diglycerides, ethoxylated monoglycerides, monocalcium phosphate, enzymes, guar gum, calcium peroxide, soy flour), calcium propionate and sodium propionate (preservatives), soy lecithin.

I explained to Amanda that mold spores are literally everywhere! But, if they don't have the right environment (moister, heat, and sometime the right light, or darkness), then the mold will not grow. I remember learning about this in a biology class I had in college, and it grossed me out for weeks. They showed us a video of mold spores in slow motion.

Such a fun experiment. She won first prize too! Great science Amanda!

Simply Fruit

We love jam in my family. We go through about 1 jar a week. We eat lots of PB&J sandwiches, have toast in the morning, and jam on a piece of bread is a great snack. It is really hard to find jam with no High-Fructose Corn Syrup in it (HFCS).

It is really fast to look on the back of the jar on the ingredients list to see if your jar has HFCS in it. Jam really only has 3 ingredients, 1. fruit, 2. sugar, 3. pectin.

My favorite jam is the simply fruit brand by smuckers. This kind is sweetened with fruit juice instead of sugar. Walmart has the best price on this jam. I always stock up when I go there.

If it says "organic" on it, then it shouldn't have HFCS in it.

Costco has organic strawberry jam, and they have another kind of berry jam that is free from HFCS.

So if you are looking for a jam that is free of HFCS, look for simply fruit at Walmart, shop at Costco, or buy organic!

Thanks James for being my model for the Simply Fruit Jam!

Beach Day in the middle of Winter

My girls love to get their swimsuits on and wear them around the house. To make it an official beach day in the middle of winter, you have to make a smoothie and put mini umbrellas in them of course. I bought the mini umbrellas at Target for a couple of dollars.

Today's smoothie consisted of

• 1 Cup OJ
• 4 Strawberries with the green parts still on
• 1 Cup ice
• 1 peeled orange
• 1 peeled banana
• 1 scoop strawberry ice cream

Super yummy!

Meatless Monday

I have now joined the pledge to have meatless Mondays at my house. I have always tried to have 2 meatless meals a week, and I often cut the meat in half from a recipe. When I saw on another blog a "meatless Monday" logo, and just had to look into it.

You can go to www.meatlessmonday.com to find out more.

Here is some information I pulled off their blog about the benefits of eating meatless once a week.

Going meatless once a week may reduce your risk of chronic preventable conditions like cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes and obesity. It can also help reduce your carbon footprint and save precious resources like fresh water and fossil fuel.

Read about these benefits below. But keep in mind that just going meatless is not enough. That’s why we give you the information you need to add healthy, environmentally friendly meat-free alternatives to your diet each week. Further, if you do eat meat on other days, we strongly recommend grass-fed, hormone-free, locally-raised options whenever possible.

Health Benefits

• LIMIT CANCER RISK: Hundreds of studies suggest that diets high in fruits and vegetables may reduce cancer risk. Both red and processed meat consumption are associated with colon cancer.
• REDUCE HEART DISEASE: Recent data from a Harvard University study found that replacing saturated fat-rich foods (for example, meat and full fat dairy) with foods that are rich in polyunsaturated fat (for example, vegetable oils, nuts and seeds) reduces the risk of heart disease by 19%
• FIGHT DIABETES: Research suggests that higher consumption of red and processed meat increase the risk of type 2 diabetes.
• CURB OBESITY: People on low-meat or vegetarian diets have significantly lower body weights and body mass indices. A recent study from Imperial College London also found that reducing overall meat consumption can prevent long-term weight gain.
• LIVE LONGER: Red and processed meat consumption is associated with modest increases in total mortality, cancer mortality and cardiovascular disease mortality.
• IMPROVE YOUR DIET. Consuming beans or peas results in higher intakes of fiber, protein, folate, zinc, iron and magnesium with lower intakes of saturated fat and total fat.

Environmental Benefits

• REDUCE YOUR CARBON FOOTPRINT. The United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization estimates the meat industry generates nearly one-fifth of the man-made greenhouse gas emissions that are accelerating climate change worldwide . . . far more than transportation. And annual worldwide demand for meat continues to grow. Reining in meat consumption once a week can help slow this trend.
• MINIMIZE WATER USAGE. The water needs of livestock are tremendous, far above those of vegetables or grains. An estimated 1,800 to 2,500 gallons of water go into a single pound of beef. Soy tofu produced in California requires 220 gallons of water per pound.
• HELP REDUCE FOSSIL FUEL DEPENDENCE. On average, about 40 calories of fossil fuel energy go into every calorie of feed lot beef in the U.S. Compare this to the 2.2 calories of fossil fuel energy needed to produce one calorie of plant-based protein. Moderating meat consumption is a great way to cut fossil fuel demand.

If you would like to join me in the pledge of going meatless once a week, then visit their website and sign up. I even looked at their recipes to help me plan my menu for this week. We are going to try the butternut squash chili. Yummy!