Skip the flowers – give Mom Nourish @Home

There is nothing quite like a mother, is there? Personally, I think I have the best mother on the planet, and I’m not sure how I was ever deemed worthy of the blessing.  She is one incredible lady, impossibly devoted to serving others and finding ways to ease life’s burdens for those around her. Finding a way to take care of her isn’t so easy, as she rarely sits still long enough to enjoy it! She’s happiest when she’s bustling around her kitchen, turning out family favorites for a hungry crowd of guests.

Mother’s Day is just around the corner (May 8th this year), and I, for one, will not be giving flowers. I won’t spoil all the Mother’s Day surprises here (C’mon what mother wouldn’t loyally read her daughter’s blog?) but to kick things off, I’ve already told her I’m giving her a week off from kitchen duty via Nourish@Home – we’ll provide meals for her and my dad for a week. I know she’ll love knowing that dinner is taken care of while she is out taking care of others (most often ME and my three munchkins!).

To help you honor your own Mother,  we’re offering a Mothers Day promotion at Nourish@Home. We’re dropping our normal price AND throwing in the groceries – which means for one inclusive price of just $279* you can give Mom an entire week off from kitchen duty! Just think of what she can do with the time she WON’T be spending in the kitchen!

As a reminder of how this service works… Mom simply chooses her menu selections from our online menu, answers a few questions on our client info form, and then puts up her feet! We’ll shop for, prepare, and store enough food for 4-5 amazing family dinners. She doesn’t even have to be home while we cook – in fact, she can use that time to go do something else for herself…or just sip an iced tea and read a book while we buzz around the kitchen.  That’s what putting up your feet is all about, after all.

If you’d like to treat your mother to a week of Nourish@Home,  call us at 513-245-4224 and order a gift certificate. We’ll mail it to you or directly to Mom. When she calls to schedule a date for us to cook, she won’t owe a penny.  And she has a whole year to redeem the certificate, just in case she wants to save that “week off” for a time when she really needs it!

Of course, if you’re the Mom in question, and this blog post were to somehow make its way to your husband’s inbox or a hard copy were to appear in his sock drawer with our phone number highlighted, we’d never tell…

 

 

*$279 includes groceries for a family of up to 4. Larger families of 5-7 will have an incremental $30 grocery fee. Please remember we can only service homes in the Greater Cincinnati area with Nourish@Home.

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A Healthy Approach to Easter

I hope you’ll indulge me as I “recycle” this post in honor of Earth Day! I wrote it last year and since many of you are new to the Nourish Blog since then, perhaps it will be new to you. Isn’t that what’s so great about recycling, after all? Besides, I’m hopelessly behind this week and recycling this post is one way I can be gentle with myself – I hope you find your own way to do the same so you can find a little breathing room for yourself to enjoy the weekend ahead!

Easter Treats – Make ‘Em Worth It (originally posted 4-3-10)

It’s Easter weekend and for many would-be healthy eaters it’s a test of endurance to survive the seemingly endless parade of Easter treats that arrive in stores at this time of year. Frankly, whether you celebrate Easter or not, I think the retailers make it hard to resist the onslaught of sugar-laden treats with which they fill the aisles. And that’s all BEFORE the family feast scheduled for Easter Sunday!

My philosophy around Easter Treats is pretty simple. Pick the ones that are unequivocally worth it to you and enjoy them without guilt this weekend.

Personally, I treasure the tradition of an Easter dinner eaten among family and friends, and ours includes a host of Eastern European traditional foods: a rich egg bread called “paska”, baked ham, kielbasa (aka Polish sausage), pickled eggs and beets, freshly grated horseradish, and many other family treasures. I look forward to the annual meal and to the tradition its preparation upholds, so I eat it without a trace of guilt!

As for those sweet treats? My personal “worth it” list includes:

1) Cadbury Mini Eggs…not the kind with the yolk centers but those little pastel-candy-coated-solid-chocolate gems…

2) Starburst Jelly Beans…original flavors please – none of the tropical stuff

3) My newest obsession…Martha Stewart’s Chocolate Babka (oh my word)

I can’t wait until Easter morning when I “discover” my basket that holds those chocolate eggs and jelly beans. And, truth be told, we’ve already cut the first loaf of babka since this was the first time I’ve ever made it and I wanted to make sure it was worthy of an Easter Day appearance…believe me…it is. That’s it, pictured at the top of this post. See recipe via the link above.

My advice to those of you trying to get through Easter without derailing your healthy intentions is to figure out which treats are worth it to you …then have them…and skip the rest. Peeps don’t do it for you? Then by all means, leave the Peeps in the store! But hey, if Peeps are your thing, then enjoy their once-a-year appearance and be done with it till next year!

It’s a bit late to offer up this last idea, but I’d also suggest not opening any Easter treats until it’s actually…well…Easter! While retailers would have us believe we should be filling our carts with candy as soon as Valentine’s Day has passed, in truth, it’s probably best to just wait to buy or make Easter treats unitl it’s time for Easter. This makes it much easier to resist the temptation to open and eat entire bags of the stuff before the holiday has even arrived. (And yes, the same advice goes for Halloween!)

Well, I’m off to go color eggs with my little guys…Happy Easter one and all!

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Why eat artichokes?

When I’m taking someone through a Whole Foods or grocery store to teach them how to shop in a more healthful way, we almost always begin in the produce section. It seems we often kick off with a discussion of how bored the client is with broccoli and cauliflower and baby carrots! With that as context, we make our way from display to display, and talk about how to select a perfectly ripe specimen of a pear or a melon or a tomato. I explain how to make zucchini or rapini or portobello mushrooms as delicious as can be. We demystify crazy-looking vegetables like swiss chard or ginger root or daikon radish. And eventually, we come to the artichokes. That’s one pictured here, in case you’ve never seen one outside of its usual cheesy, creamy home, the beloved Spinach Artichoke Dip.

At this point I usually say, “Artichokes are sort of an advanced vegetable. They’re a lot of work for not a lot of payoff. And since you can readily find them canned or frozen, I don’t know many people who are willing to deal with them in their fresh state.” But after a one-two punch from articles in both Eating Well and Cooking Light magazines that featured artichokes this month,  I’m changing my tune just a bit.

In short, artichokes are packed with health benefits – one whole one delivers 25% of your daily folate needs and 10 grams of fiber! Ten grams! That’s 1/3 of your daily need. It also has more antioxidants than almost any other vegetable. That’s a lot of good reasons to do find a way to fit them into your diet. Here are two suggestions.

If you’d like to try a healthy makeover to Spinach Artichoke Dip, and want to avoid wrestling with whole artichokes (which, for the record, I still think is a fair amount of work) here’s one from Cooking Light that uses white beans instead of cream cheese. It’s called, aptly enough, Artichoke, Spinach, and White Bean Dip and has just 87 calories in a delicious 1/4 cup serving.

If, however,  you’re up for a little artichoke-wrestling, try this recipe for Steamed Artichokes with a Balsamic Dipping Sauce from Eating Well. You may want to double the sauce if you’re making all four artichokes as directed.

Either way, you’ll be getting a great dose of nutrients and fantastic flavor. Maybe a break from broccoli, cauliflower and baby carrots is just what you need to fall in love with vegetables again.

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