Eat a Rainbow

A meal lacking color is not as aesthetically pleasing nor as flavorful and nutritious as a meal bursting with green, orange, red, purple and more.

Yesterday, as in many previous posts, I made reference to the phytonutrient-rich properties of colorful vegetables.

Last week after posting information about food-pyramids, the ANDI food ranking list and tips for shopping on a budget for health and wellness, a friend remarked that sometimes food just seems scary!

That is, she said, if you deviate from the prescribed 5 servings of fruits and vegetables a day.

Prescriptive information can be scary; in fact, I think it's best used as a guideline rather than the formula.

When I googled "servings of fruits and vegetables per day," five did appear to be the number, but it did go as high as nine.

One food pyramid suggested 2-4 servings of fruit and 3-5 of veggies a day -- if you did eat the 4 and the 5 then you would be consuming 9 servings in total.

Frankly, I find the idea of the 2-4 and 3-5 servings not scary, but potentially daunting in its capacity to cause me to feel obsessive about counting and weighing and measuring my food, which is no fun.

I like color. And preparing my meals so that they are filled with a combination of green, purple, orange, red, yellow and white is a far easier, less neurotic way to ensure eating sufficient veggies and fruits.

And I like this fun little tune about color; it sure beats perusing pyramids and counting portions.

I also get quite excited by the art of coordinating vegetables and fruits so that the end result is a plate vibrating with interest, texture, flavor, and of course color.

The pic above is a plate of braised winter vegetables: leftover orange-yellow acorn squash from yesterday's meal, purple cabbage, curly green kale, and white and green spring onions.

I love the combination of the purple against the yellow-orange squash -- I probably wouldn't wear it, but it's gorgeous on a white plate!

For flavor, I tossed in a clove of peeled and chopped garlic and the same of a chunk of fresh ginger root, plus a couple rashers of Applegate certified-humane turkey bacon.

I served the veggies atop a portion of cooked quinoa (yesterday it was quinoa noodles) which I'd drizzled with olive oil, salt and pepper and then I poached an egg and set it in the middle (pic left).

This made for a rainbow-of-meal with who knows how many servings of veggies, but without a doubt plenty of color, and thus plenty of phyto-nutrients, and it included neutral-colored quinoa, a high-protein grain, plus a white and yellow Omega 3-rich egg.

Color: Eat it; it's good for you!

10 Tips For Saving on Superfoods

This week I've been featuring executive fitness coach, Bonni Doherty.

Though Bonni is not a nutritionist, she does recommend her clients eat many small meals throughout the day, meals high in essential fatty acids and phytonutrients.

Bonni calls her favorites --leafy green & red vegetables, some fruits, avocados, nuts, seeds, deep-sea fish, good fats and oils--Superfoods, and when we shopped together at Whole Foods, my task was to help her locate great deals on those items.

So far this week, I've offered a number of tips for getting great deals on superfoods and to recap, those tips are as follows:

1. In the produce section look for the Good Stuff for Less, Weekly Specials, Weekly Buys signs since veggies and fruit under these signs are a great deal.
2. Leafy greens like kale, chard, spinach, and celery, often go on sale: two-bunches-for-the-price-of-one, so watch the weekly prices and buy more when the price is lower. Whatever leafy greens you don't plan to eat that week wash, saute, and freeze portions for later consumption.
3. Consider buying WFs loose braising mix. It contains all of the above leafy greens (plus other bitter leaves), but it's just the leaf -- no woody stalks. So you'll pay only for the portion of the plant you'll eat.
4. Avocados are in season now and because of their tough outer skin, it's safe to consume non-organic avocados, and the price of conventionally grown is less than organically grown. If you buy several at a time, pick firm through soft. Store the firm avocados in the fridge and eat the softer fruit first. Take the firm avocados out of the fridge a day or two in advance of eating them so they have time to soften.
   
5. Pick bunches of beets with healthy green tops. Cut the leaf from the stalk, wash it, and saute it with other leafy greens. In other words, bunches of beets are naturally a two-for-one vegetable.
6. Buy nut butters and olive oil in bulk at WFs and save on packaging by bringing your own containers.
7. Also shop the bulk aisle for seeds and whole nuts. Buying dry goods in bulk offers a great savings over brand-name packets of nuts and seeds.
   
8. Consider purchasing tinned fish, i.e. sardines, tuna, salmon by the case and receiving WFs 10% case discount. Ask a WFs associate for help, and get the best deal on deep-sea tinned fish.
   
9. Cut back on your consumption of expensive cuts of meat and consider tofu products, tinned deep-sea fish, or fresh and or fresh frozen salmon, and less expensive cuts of chicken and or turkey.
10. Because you'll save when you cut back on meat protein, buy the DHA Omega 3 eggs, they cost a bit more, but if you follow the above tips, you're still saving overall.

It's one thing to buy all these healthy superfoods, but it's another to cook them up into satisfying meals. With that in mind, and in-keeping with Bonni's counsel that her clients eat regular small meals, I'm offering two mini-meal ideas using superfoods:

Beets with Pear or Apple and Cheese
1) Cut beet bulb from stalks. Wash and gently scour beets of dirt. Add to pot of water and simmer till tender, about 45 minutes.
2) Peel beets and slice. Store in an old yogurt container or Tupperware. You can add the strained beet water from the cooking pot to the container so beets don't dry out. To the beet water, you can also add rice wine vinegar if you wish -- the vinegar off-sets the sweetness of the beets.

To Serve: Slice a pear or an apple, lay alongside sliced beets. Drizzle with lime or lemon juice. Grate or thinly slice your favorite aged Italian cheese, i.e. a Romano or Parmesan or Asiago etc. Place cheese alongside beets and fruit to create an eye-appealing superfood mini-meal.

Red Chard with Apple, Chicken and Walnuts
1) I posted a variation of this dish a couple of months ago.
2) You can swap out spinach for chard, or chard for kale, or use the WFs braising greens I mention above.
3) Then either turkey or chicken or tinned tuna or Tofurky would work with this dish, since all compliment apple well.
4) And of course walnuts are the crowning glory!

To serve: drizzle with olive oil and juice of a half lemon.