Spring Clean Your Eating
It's that time of year where many begin to clear the clutter and deep clean their homes as they welcome the warm rays of sunshine and shed the weight of the dark, cooler months. Did you know your kitchen and recipes can benefit from a similar approach? Let's learn best practices to spruce up the kitchen through food choices, and kitchen efficiency.
Important Education Takeaways
Spring cleaning what we eat! Take inventory of your pantry, fridge, and freezer.
Make sure the foods on hand are still fresh, unexpired, and aligned with your nutrition goals.
Minimize processed foods. Aim to reduce highly processed foods with long ingredient lists.
Often, these are high in sodium, sugar, and fat but low in nutrients.
Swap in simple items that better fit within your healthy eating plan.
Check out this post in our Ask the RD blog sharing on the unhealthy nature of processed meats and swaps you can easily make for healthier choices.
Make the easy choice the healthy choice. Offer a variety of snacks for easy grab and go and don’t forget to make a plan around your produce and meals — and make it known what’s available for the week.
Stock your kitchen with fresh produce and healthy snack options. Keep them in the same place, and organized, so you’re more likely to choose these options instead of the unhealthy, processed snacks and foods.
Don’t forget to slice and dice a few extra veggies when meal prepping to have on hand for snacks.
Get organized! Organize the easy grab and go options and easy to see produce.
Store foods in a manner that makes them easy to see and use.
Practice weekly meal planning and choose recipes with multipurpose ingredients to minimize food waste.
Eat foods that are in season. Get inspired by fresh seasonal foods and try to incorporate these into your current cooking routine.
It is even better if they are locally grown for best value, flavor, texture, nutrient content, and variety. Our Ask the RD blog chimed in on the topic of organic versus conventional produce.
Our Ask the RD blog offers ideas to help bring fresh, green veggies into the meal plan for those with picky eaters or limited tolerance to flavors or textures.
Recipes
Recipe of the month: Ultimate Tuna Sandwich (no mayo)
As always, this recipe is the showcase of our live taught, virtual cooking class. Our chef and registered dietitian bring the recipe to life as they walk you through food prep, swaps to meet dietary or taste preferences, plus tips and tools to support you being your own healthy chef at home.
Bonus recipe: Smashed Banh Mi Tacos
From Jamie’s kitchen to yours, our monthly bonus recipes are published on our website and social media the 4th Wednesday of each month. We invite you to browse our recipe collection and come back often to find more flavorful and heart-healthy recipes.
We invite you to join us for the live taught, virtual nutrition classes each month to gather more information on our nutrition topics. This is also an opportunity to ask topic-related questions of our experts as well as connect socially with attendees for idea sharing. As a registered participant for our In the Kitchen program, you receive a few reminders ahead of each scheduled monthly classes, but here’s an easy to remember schedule: Nutrition Education (30-minutes, 2nd Wednesday, 12pm), Cooking Class (up to 60-minutes, 3rd Monday, 12pm).
Contributing author: Jamie Libera, RD, LD, CCTD, registered dietitian, Providence.