copy of this cookbook so they can duplicate the snacks they've had at camp, and I've tried to make it friendly for home use. For the camp staff, I have also put together this lesson guide to help make snack time more educational. Enjoy these recipes with the kids in your life, or make them for yourself!
This summer I am excited to be piloting healthy snacks for the Lincoln, NE Parks and Recreation Summer Day Camp Programs! Four of our eight sites are using the recipes I've created below to introduce kids to healthy fresh foods and basic food prep techniques. Every child will be taking home a
I can't lie; there is no temptation quite like walking down the candy aisles this time of year. Halloween novelties are fun, but if you're trying to eat healthier or have kids in your life that don't become any more pleasant when on a sugar high, then you might be looking for some fun, healthy alternatives. The picture above is a veggie skeleton that the elementary students I teach made to celebrate Halloween. They had a blast creating it, and it was very simple! It worked well to have the 10-11 year olds using knives under supervision to chop the vegetables and then to have the younger kids assemble the skeletons. To make the skeleton you will need: 6 oz plain Greek yogurt 1 packet ranch dip mix 2 leaves of dark green lettuce 1/2 pound mushrooms 1 red bell pepper 2 stalks celery 1 cucumber 1 package baby carrots Start by rinsing all your vegetables. For the face, mix the Greek yogurt and ranch packet together in a bowl. Tear the wider leaf-tops off of your lettuce. Place these along the top edge of the bowl to look like hair. Slice the mushrooms and use two slices for eyes (tear part of the white stem off so you have dark parts on the bottom for pupils). Cut your celery stalks in half and use two for shoulders. Slice the cucumber and stack the slices like fallen dominoes down the middle to make the backbone. Cut your red bell pepper into strips and place about 6 strips on either side of the cucumber backbone to look like ribs. Shape a big bunch of the mushroom slices at the bottom of the cucumbers to look like a pelvic bone, and place your remaining celery sticks on either side to be legs. Place one carrot pointing down underneath each piece of celery to be the lower legs and then place a carrot on each side pointing horizontally to be feet. Add a mushroom slice on each side at the end of the horizontal carrots. Take two carrots and make an arm pointing down from the celery-shoulders. Put a mushroom slice on the end for a hand and repeat for the other arm. Your skeleton is complete; now enjoy dismantling him for yummy veggies with dip! Making a funny skeleton is a great way to encourage kids to eat vegetables, and the Greek yogurt ranch dip is high in calcium and protein! If you're looking for healthier alternatives for trick-or-treaters, check out these suggestions from Nourish Interactive! Extension Educator Alice Henneman and I went on a video-making adventure and this is the product. I hope you enjoy!
Over the past month, I have had the awesome opportunity to work with registered dietitian and UNL Extension Educator Alice Henneman! She taught me some great things about food blogging and online nutrition education. With her help, I was able to create a blog post about these yummy granola bars. You can find that post at cookitquick.org. I thought for my lovely readers, I would add a little info here about the awesome nutrients in these bars. While the peanut butter used may be high in fat, over half of that fat is in the form of monounsaturated fatty acids. As The Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics explains, this type of fat can actually improve blood cholesterol levels. Peanut butter is also a good sources of magnesium, a major mineral that plays a role in many body functions and may help protect against diabetes by improving insulin action. The rolled oats used in the recipe are high in soluble fiber which has been associated with a decreased risk of heart disease. They are also an important source of B vitamins, folate, iron, magnesium, and selenium. The raisins are a great way to add some sweetness without adding fat or sodium; they have a considerable amount of dietary fiber and potassium. The coconut used is also a good source of dietary fiber. It is high in saturated fats; however, they are medium chain fatty acids so they increase both "good" and "bad" cholesterol equally. Carrot shreds are another ingredient in these granola bars [I promise you won't even notice when you taste them ;) ]; they have antioxidants called carotenoids which may lower the risk of some cancers and boost eye health. Finally, I'd like to talk about the honey. In this recipe and many others, it serves as a sweetener; thus, it contains sugars! This means that it is not a particularly low calorie option if you're substituting equal parts honey for sugar since it weighs more per tablespoon.That being said, because it is not just sucrose like table sugar, it has greater sweetening power. Ultimately, this means that you can use less honey than you would table sugar and that's how you save calories. There are also a variety of antioxidants and beneficial phytochemicals found in honey that boost its nutritional quality so that you're not just consuming "empty calories" like those in table sugar. Find out more from the National Honey Board. Overall, these granola bars are what we call "nutrient dense." For their weight and calorie content, they have many of the nutrients your body needs to keep functioning at its best! Here are the recipes many of my friends and family have been waiting for! They come from the collection which I learned to make in my class entitled Food, Culture, and Society in Italy that I was enrolled in at Florence University of the Arts this summer. Every recipe includes the notes that I took and is already written with the modifications we made, and thus the only ones which I can wholeheartedly recommend. Each recipe reflects the cooking of a different region of Italy or showcases a special product such as wine or olive oil. In my experience working with a chef who has spent all her life in Florence, I learned that an Italian will always tell you to add more salt or more extra virgin olive oil. Apart from these ingredients, Italian cooking is not big on excess. Despite the impression we get of Italian food in America, each recipe only showcases one or two flavors rather than combining many at once. A nice Italian dinner will have at least five courses and they use each as an individual opportunity to display a different flavor and cooking technique. Enjoy! |
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