First Lady Michelle Obama cultivated a fresh vision heard around the world when she initiated a kitchen garden on the White House ground last spring. But don’t think that as the snow flies this growing venture will dive into hibernation. Thanks to the vision of Sam Kass, Food Initiative Coordinator at the White House and garden visionary, the First Family will be eating local through winter thanks to simple winter gardening tactics.
Here are three tips from the White House for eating local and season from your garden year round:
Going to a body and nutrition expert with my husband is one of the best things we’ve done for ourselves. What was the key take away? Warning! Turn Alkaline!
Turn Alkaline? Are we magicians? Well according to biochemists we are! You can change your body chemistry with what you eat!
Chemicals have seeped into foods, air, and water, which in turn lower our system’s ability to control the chemistry of our body fluids, increasing illness and chronic disease.
The sad fact is that most food consumption in the wealthiest nations has shifted from nutritious raw foods to low nutritional value processed foods and we need to shift it back. Now that our total biological terrain is at risk, we urgently need to do some clean up by shifting our body chemistry back to the raw, organic foods it was designed to function on as we’ve evolved.
Below I’ve listed out a quick list of the good foods (alkaline) to treat your body to often…
Indian food is my favorite, so I may be a little biased on this one. Nonetheless, the following is a delicious meal that I think most people can enjoy.
I am calling this “Homemade Indian Yum Yum” because it is full of spices often used in India, but it isn’t actually based on any specific Indian dish.
If you are a vegan and want to build up your protein intake here is a guide to grains, beans, nuts, and veggies that will help. Remember to seek out local and organic whenever possible.
Grains and beans are a truly remarkable way to add protein to a meat and dairy free diet. Quinoa (pictured in a field above) has nine grams of protein. Tempeh is a vegan food that has 41 grams of protein in a cup. Sometimes it is made from cultured organic soybeans, water, organic barley, organic brown rice, and organic millet, like this lightlife tempeh. Here are more grain facts:
Quinoa (shown growing in the image above) has 9 grams of protein
Bulgur, cooked into cup has 6
Brown rice, cooked into a cup has 5
Sunflower seeds make great additions to salads. 1/4 cup of sunflower seeds (pictured below) has six grams of protein.
June on our Wisconsin farm and B&B, Inn Serendipity, ushers in a few weeks of chaos. Tending everything from gardens to B&B guests, June packs in a cornucopia of duties that take time away from the kitchen and savoring the abundance of the early summer season.
Don’t get me wrong as I truly relish this time of year, when both the days and work lists are long but satisfying. Which is why we need quality fuel, good food to provide energy for the day. This Spring Spinach and Asparagus Pasta ranks our new seasonal favorite, as it blends the tender seasonal flavors of asparagus and spinach with a filling dose of pasta, nuts and cheese, seasoned up with a unique, savory soy sauce-based dressing. Plus it makes a sizeable batch, perfect for easy leftovers throughout the week.
My kids and I are crazy about green smoothies. We make them a couple times daily usually. Never before has it been so easy to get my kids to eat plenty of those all important leafy greens! Just check out my daughter’s green smoothie moustache (left).
You may be wondering what a green smoothie is exactly. Or maybe not, they seem to be getting really popular in healthier living circles everywhere lately. A green smoothie does not refer to being “green” in the eco sense of the word. Although they can be that too. The green in a green smoothie refers to what is in the smoothie and usually the color as well. Quite simply, green smoothies are blended beverages that combine fresh or frozen fruit and leafy greens like Kale, collard, spinach, or wild edibles. Veggies like carrots may make a cameo appearance in green smoothies as well. The genius of a green smoothie is that they are jam packed with nutritional goodness, usually in its raw life living form, and they taste absolutely fantastic! When was the last time your kids begged you for fresh spinach? Well, mine ask me daily for some.
Winter veggies usually get short shrift, but there are many reasons to savor them. They add loads of vitamins and nutrients to our diets, do wonders for our immunity, and are wonderfully versatile. Plus, eating seasonally is eating green: as it takes us back to the old days of eating only the freshest available products, it’s a more sustainable eating model and it’s better for reducing our carbon footprints.
Here’s my guide to making the most of these five fabulous winter veggies:
1. Play Squash
I actually look forward to winter just for its squash varieties. Acorn, banana, butternut, spaghetti, delicata, hubbard, sweet dumpling, buttercup, and turban squashes—not to mention pumpkin—add a colorful and sweet accent to your plate. Plus, they are among the healthiest types of complex carbohydrates (the best kind of carbs), with high fiber, vitamin A, and vitamin C content. Roast ‘em, mash ‘em, or slow cook ‘em into a heaping bowl of soupy goodness for the perfect warm winter meal.
My CSA box this week contained sweet potatoes…lots of sweet potatoes. The ugliest sweet potatoes you’ve ever seen.
This is what a sweet potato looks like when it’s been damaged by voles. Pretty ugly, eh? But other than the obvious cosmetic damage, there’s no harm to the sweet potato — you can trim off the damaged parts and use it as usual. Vole-damaged sweet potatoes even store just as well as perfect specimens. But of course a lot of people would be put off by the visual and pass these up in favor of more perfect-appearing sweets. So when you’re hitting the farmers’ markets at the end of the season, if you see some ugly sweet potatoes cheap, snap ‘em up! They’re a bargain, and you’re rewarding a farmer for using organic methods.
I also had some excellent-looking young spinach in this week’s CSA box, and a few onions. I’d picked up some wonderful linguica from a local sausagemaker a few weeks earlier, and I always keep chicken stock in my freezer. It’s a blustery day here in Southwest Ohio, with the first sleet of the season. Soup seemed like the perfect choice. So I made one of my favorite rustic autumn soups: Linguica, Sweet Potato, and Spinach Chowder.
From our friends at ZapRoot: Farmers take it to the extreme to protect their crops. The Auto Alliance has jump on the green bandwagon. These Guys are Full of **it returns.
This week from our friends at ZapRoot: The FDA needs to have their heads examined. We respond to the numerous Chinese comments. Explore the world through Google Earth’s Environment section.
Irradiated spinach and lettuce are coming soon to a store near you!
In the name of food safety, the Food and Drug Administration will now allow producers of fresh spinach and iceberg lettuce to irradiate their products to kill germs.
Following in the wake of the recent E. coli and salmonella outbreaks from fresh produce, the FDA is announcing a new regulation that permits producers to use radiation to reduce bacteria content in spinach and lettuce.
—add a colorful and sweet accent to your plate. Plus, they are among the healthiest types of complex carbohydrates (the best kind of carbs), with high fiber, vitamin A, and vitamin C content. Roast ‘em, mash ‘em, or slow cook ‘em into a heaping bowl of soupy goodness for the perfect warm winter meal.
