berries – in thriver words

Delicious and Nutritious Raspberries

Red, purple, or gold – raspberries are always delicious and nutritious! I just ate a handful of perfectly firm, sweet red raspberries. Yum! I love them enough that I’ve decided to try growing my own.

I’m familiar with blackberries, huckleberries, and strawberries. All of them grew wild near our farm. Raspberries did not so this experiment feels like foreign territory.

Research tells me raspberries grow well in zones 5-9. I’m in 8a so the climate should be friendly enough. I’m planting in a raised bed, but chose a variety that can also thrive in a container. It should grow to a height of 2-3 feet and width of 3-4 feet. I’m not sure whether I’ll get fruit this year, but I’ll be excited to have healthy growth this year and fruit the next.

The idea of walking out to the back yard to pick fruits and vegetables appeals to me for many reasons. The first is freshness. This seems especially relevant for raspberries. Because the torus remains on the plant, the fruit is hollow in the center. This makes the berries delicate and easy to damage. Fresh will mean a longer shelf life.

Fresh will also mean more vibrant flavor. Any fruit is best when it can fully ripen in place then be picked and eaten quickly.

Nutrition is also highest in freshly picked fruit. Raspberries are packed with nutrients. One cup contains 1.5 grams of protein and 54% of the recommended daily intake of vitamin C.

These gems also contain:

Manganese: 41% of the RDI
Vitamin K: 12% of the RDI
Vitamin E: 5% of the RDI
B vitamins: 4–6% of the RDI
Iron: 5% of the RDI
Magnesium: 7% of the RDI
Phosphorus: 4% of the RDI
Potassium: 5% of the RDI
Copper: 6% of the RDI

And they’re full of fiber – 8 grams per cup or 32% of the recommended daily intake for men and 21% RDI for women.

The goodness doesn’t stop there. Raspberries are high in antioxidants and tannins that may help control blood sugar and prevent arthritis and cancer.

You may not be able to eat enough raspberries to fully prevent a given disease, but including them in your meal plan has many benefits.

Grabbing raspberries off the back porch for breakfast in the summer sounds divine! And I like knowing the berries have been grown without chemical sprays.

And while I prefer eating them right off the plant, raspberries can also be enjoyed in sorbet, cookies, tarts, brownies, coffee cake, and atop yogurt, ice cream or cheesecake.

Don’t hesitate to reward yourself with a sweet, colorful treat! Raspberries are always delicious and nutritious.

Get to Know Some Other Breakfast Foods

Make Your Salad More Salady

Instead of drenching your salad with dressing, why not make it more salady! When it comes to salads, it stands to reason that everyone would have different preferences. The question is, do those preferences make your salad more nutritious and satisfying or just more caloric?
salad
Some of us love salads. Some of us choose salads as a healthy choice on a restaurant menu. If you’re eating salad because you love it, just keep on chomping! If you’re eating salad to be healthy, it’s worth considering what’s in and on it.

While many of you were happily grilling burgers Labor Day, my friends and I were eating salad. Our holiday fare was a Caesar salad topped with grilled chicken. Okay, I guess the chicken was an homage to holiday grilling.

Anyway, one friend doesn’t really like Caesar salads. She says she prefers traditional salads with iceberg lettuce, carrots, tomatoes, cucumbers, onions, and cheese. Another argued that traditional salad has mixed greens, strawberries, blueberries, cranberries and pecans. That was laughingly characterized as a fruit salad by the hardcore traditionalists.

The great thing about serving salad at home is the components can be presented separately so that each family member can fill a bowl or plate with the combination they prefer. This presents a great opportunity for children to explore raw food, flavor combinations, crunchiness, and food groups. The dinner table is the perfect place to learn about food.
arugual
Any salad full of fresh vegetables is healthy. Adding fresh fruit, herbs, and raw nuts can be healthy too. When I eat salad, I tend to dig out the crunchy things first. If the crunch is provided by sugar snap peas, cucumbers, apples, yellow bell pepper, and carrots my bowl is healthier than if the crunch is provided by croutons, bacon, candied nuts, or fried tortilla chips.

Of course a salad can have croutons and still be healthy. The key is the proportion of raw vegetables, herbs, fruit and nuts to bacon, cheese, sweetened nuts & dried fruit, fried toppings, croutons & dressing.

Almost every pre-dressed salad has way more dressing than I prefer. And even when you order dressing on the side in a restaurant, the portion cup will most likely contain 2 to 2.5 ounces. A single serving of dressing is 1 ounce.

This double portion (and sometimes there are two of these cups on the side) may not seem like a big deal while you’re pouring it on your salad, but if you’re pouring Ranch Dressing you’re adding 290 calories to your vegetables. That’s only 10 calories less than two medium chocolate cupcakes with frosting.

To help keep calories in check, I sometimes choose cottage cheese instead of dressing or skip the dressing altogether. In a salad filled with berries and nuts, I’m often happy with no dressing at all. I’ve also been known to use vinegar and a little salt, but skip the oil. When I make dressing at home, I often start with yogurt or avocado instead of mayo or use vinegar, oil, and water in equal proportions.
peas
Once you’ve toned down the dressing, an easy way to keep the fat and calories down is to avoid any fried toppings. Some croutons are fried. If you opt for croutons, choose baked ones. If you’re gluten-free, the easiest thing to do is skip them. Substitute grilled chicken for fried chicken, and hold the bacon and fried wontons.

I’m not opposed to a wedge salad covered in bacon, bleu cheese and dressing. When properly chilled with perfectly crisp lettuce, they’re scrumptious. I just don’t think of it as a healthier alternative to a burger.

Reducing the amount of cheese in your salad can dramatically reduce the fat in your salad as well. This is why I think of making a healthy salad as keeping it more salady. The more flavor that is derived from fresh veggies and fruits instead of from things used to smother the veggies and fruits, the more salady it seems to me.

If you’re choosing salad as a meal, only vegetables and fruit with limited dressing may leave you feeling hungry soon after you eat. For a heartier salad, boiled eggs, black beans, chickpeas, avocado, tofu, and quinoa are some of my favorite additions.

Salad may be the most versatile entree that exists. The options are limited only by your imagination and the availability of ingredients. There’s a minimum of cooking required and fresh ingredients are encouraged. No wonder we love them. Now, if we can just bring ourselves to let them be more salady….

https://www.fatsecret.com/calories-nutrition/generic/cake-cupcake-chocolate-with-icing-or-filling?portionid=15043&portionamount=1.000

http://www.cooking2thrive.com/blog/salad-days/

It’s Strawberry Season, Now What’s a Shortcake?

It’s strawberry season, now what’s a shortcake?

The farmers market in my neighborhood just opened for the season with a strawberry festival. I love strawberries! As a child, I picked tiny wild ones from my great aunt’s yard. Now I enjoy medium sized locally grown or gigantic shipped-in berries. My favorite way to eat them is right off the stem, but strawberry shortcake makes me happy as well.

My grandmother and mother called traditional pie crust sprinkled with sugar shortcake. Thin, flaky, and crisp, it played well against partially mashed, sweetened strawberries and whipped cream. There’s a restaurant in my area that serves this style of shortcake two layers tall. It is divine!

I can’t say crust-based strawberry shortcake is widely known. My grandmother’s house, my mother’s house, and that one restaurant are the only places I’ve eaten it. I suppose in the strictest sense, sweetened crust fits one of the original requirements of shortcake in that it contains fat that has been cut into the flour. The only problem is that it’s not really a cake.

But is shortcake really cake or is it a scone or biscuit? The first recipe for shortcake appeared in an English cookbook in 1588, but I don’t know what it said. That makes it difficult to determine exactly what sort of crumb it had.

A quick scroll through several culinary guides failed to find mention of shortcake. Shortbread is often included, but not shortcake. Perhaps that’s because there are too many versions to narrow down a definition. Or perhaps it’s because perfectly ripened strawberries sweetened and topped with whipped cream are so good they don’t really need any sort of biscuit, cake, or crust. Anything that absorbs and delivers that scrumptious juice will be appreciated and well received.

When shortcake is mentioned in culinary articles, it is often differentiated from sponge cake. This is sort of amusing because I’ve probably been served strawberry shortcake made with sponge cake more often than any other kind.

So what’s a shortcake? Whatever vehicle you prefer to deliver sweetened strawberries and whipped cream. Most of us probably gravitate to the version of shortcake that is most familiar. I prefer pie crust to squishy cake. I’ll take a sweetened biscuit in a pinch. You may prefer a butter-rich cake or corn muffin.

Whatever you place it on, a combination of fresh strawberries and cream sweetened or not, whipped or not, will provide a delicious summer treat!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shortcake
http://bakingbites.com/2009/09/what-is-a-shortcake/
http://www.cookthink.com/reference/1990/What_is_shortcake