Wizard Recipes

Healthful eating is never so easy as it is in the spring. With fresh fruits and vegetables flourishing, you only need minimal preparation to bring out maximum flavor. From salads to sides, entrées to desserts, here is a collection of our wholesome springtime favorites.

Preventive Medicine

Fresh fruits and vegetables are healthy in part because they contain phytochemicals, or beneficial compounds, such as beta-carotene, folate, and lycopene, which aid in the prevention of cancer

An Apple a Day

There is truth to the old “apple a day” adage, though this time of year, think seasonally and make it a “strawberry” or “artichoke” a day…. Beyond having weight-watching benefits, a diet plentiful in fruits and vegetables decreases your risk of stroke and heart attack, helps lower blood pressure, and even guards against eye disease.

Rich and Thin

Spring favorites asparagus and artichokes are often associated with rich, luxurious menus, but they’re also incredibly healthy: They are both excellent sources of fiber and contain a host of nutrients, including vitamins C, K, and folate. “Asparagus is a particularly well-rounded vegetable, nutritionally speaking,” says Monica Reinagel, chief nutritionist for the site NutritionData.com . “It’s high in antioxidants A, C, and E, as well as vitamin K (for healthy bones), and has an array of B vitamins for energy.”

Start Local

Freshness counts for a lot of flavor, so try to get your fruits and vegetables from as close to the source as you can. Shop at local farmers’ markets, or join a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) group, which delivers seasonal specialties directly from the farm to your house or neighborhood. Don’t be afraid to experiment and substitute based on what you find at the market-for example, in the Sautéed Greens with Cannellini Beans and Garlic recipe featured here, you can use spinach, kale, mustard greens, or broccoli rabe.

Salads are usually served at the beginning of a meal, but a salad can also make a healthy, low-calorie meal all by itself. When you use lots of fruits and vegetables, they can also be loaded with vitamins and antioxidants. The key to keeping salads interesting is to change the ingredients each time you make one. Don’t just think of the simple garden salad, but imagine adding fruits, nuts, and lean meats to your salad to make a great low-calorie, highly nutritious meal.

How Much Salad is Enough for a Meal?

Use the calorie calculator to determine how many calories you need per day, and divide that number of calories by the number of meals you want to eat for the day. If you are eating 2,000 calories per day, you might want to allow yourself 500 calories per each of three meals and 500 for snacks. Or, you could opt for a lighter breakfast and a larger dinner, depending on how you feel. A dieter who is eating 1,300 to 1,500 calories per day might want a smaller salad, maybe 300 to 400 calories. Keeping a food diary is a good way to keep track of your calories and nutrition.

Greens

Most salads start with a pile of greens. Since greens are low in calories and are a good source of fiber, it’s a great way to add volume to your meal without adding a lot of calories. There are different varieties of lettuce, such as iceberg, leaf, spinach, escarole, romaine, or butter. The darker lettuces offer more vitamins than pale iceberg, for example. Spinach has iron, and all varieties are low in calories. One cup of shredded lettuce has about 5 to 10 calories.

Vegetables

Almost any raw vegetable can be cut up and added to a salad. Green beans, snap peas, carrots, radishes, broccoli, cauliflower, zucchini, asparagus, artichokes, avocados, tomatoes, and cucumbers are all great suggestions. We need five to nine servings of fruits and vegetables per day, so eating a salad is a good way to meet those needs. Brightly colored vegetables have bioflavonoids, and the dark green vegetables are lowest in calories — about 20 calories per half cup serving.

Fruit

Blueberries, raspberries, blackberries, apple slices and raisins add vitamins and antioxidants. The delicious burst of flavor and sweetness they add can also help you cut back on, or eliminate, high-calories salad dressings. A half cup of apple slices has 30 calories, and a half cup of berries has about 40 calories.

Meat and Cheese

To make a meal of a salad, you may wish to add some healthy protein sources like chopped or sliced hard-boiled eggs, lean beef, cooked shrimp, tuna, chicken breast, or strips of cheese. Make sure to measure your protein sources, since meats and cheese have more calories than fruit or vegetables. Avoid fried meats like chicken strips or battered and fried shrimp. They contain unhealthy fats and lots of calories. A quarter cup of chopped chicken meat or one egg will add 75 calories. Half a can of tuna will add about 80 calories. Two ounces of cubed or shredded mozzarella or cheddar cheese may add up to 200 calories.

Nuts

Sprinkle a few nuts like walnuts, pecans, almonds, or cashews for a nice crunch. Just a few nuts will do, about one-eighth cup of nuts adds about 90 calories. Walnuts are a great source of omega-3 essential fatty acids, and all of the nuts add protein and heart-healthy polyunsaturated fatty acids.

Salad Dressing

One tablespoon of regular commercial salad dressing will add 50 to 80 calories, so be careful to measure how much you use. A large salad may tempt you to use a lot more, just remember that one-quarter cup of dressing could add up to 300 calories. Low fat dressings are available, which offer fewer calories, but they may not taste as good. A salad with a variety of fruits and vegetables really doesn’t need any dressing; some freshly squeezed lemon or lime juice will likely be enough to suit your taste.

A Salad to Try

Here is a great example of a delicious, healthy salad:

• two cups of green leaf lettuce
• one-fourth cup raw green beans
• one-fourth cup snap peas
• one-fourth cup chopped tomato
• one-fourth cup sliced carrots
• one-fourth cup apple slices
• one-fourth cup blueberries
• one-fourth cup chopped chicken breast
• one chopped hard boiled egg
• one ounce of shredded mozzarella cheese
• one-eighth cup walnut pieces
• lemon and lime wedges

This salad has lots of vitamins, antioxidants, phytochemicals and fiber and comes in at just under 400 calories. Serve this salad with a glass of iced-herbal tea or a big glass of sparkling water with lemon.

Salads can be changed and adapted to any diet. Choose low carb green vegetables for low carb diets and use low-fat or no dressing for low-fat diets. Choose the lowest calorie ingredients if you are watching your calories. Keep lots of salad fruits and vegetables on hand, and you will find it easy to create salads several times per week. Change the ingredients to create completely different flavors, and you will never get bored with healthy salad meals

Often the long nearness between various food and those that are consuming them creates complex communication systems along the food chain, so that the creatures come to know that certain elements are edible guided by taste, smell and color. Very often, even foods emit these signals, because it is in their interest to be eaten.

The fact that a fruit is ripe is signaled by a specific odor (a seductive aroma that reaches quite large distances), color (a shade that stands out from the green mass) or taste (usually sweet).

Usually, maturity, is when the plant seeds are ready to unwind and to germinate, is the period when the fruit has the highest concentration of nutrients and therefore the interests of plants (spreading the seeds) coincides with (the feeding) of the consumer. As a result of the previously received signals from various fruits and vegetables, our body has established that a fruit is edible, it occurs for enzymes and acids required for its decomposition. Health depends largely on the body’s ability to decode these biological signals: this fruit seems ripe, that there seems altered, that cow looks good.

This process is much easier when you know for a long time a particular food product and much more difficult if the food that you have to deal with was created just to fool your senses, using, for example, artificial flavors or synthetic  sweeteners. Food products that are fooling our senses are difficult issues of Western food to manage. It is important to note that the ecological relationships involve, at least in the first instance, those creatures that eat whole foods, not the nutrients or chemical elements contained in them.

Even if, eventually, once they have reached in our body, food is decomposed into simple chemical elements such as maize, for example, is mostly reduced to simple sugars, the whole food qualities are not unimportant. For example, the quantity and the structure of corn fiber will determine the speed with which will be released and absorbed the sugars that it contains, this is an essential aspect for the metabolism of insulin. A chemist will tell you that once in the blood the corn starch will turn into glucose, but such a reductionist view overlooks the complex and variable process that it assumes this transformation. Despite the nutritional labels, not all carbs are equal.

In other words, our body has an old and lasting relationship with maize, but not with the corn syrup with high fructose. Perhaps at some point humans will create this type of relationship with corn syrup with high fructose (as people will develop superhuman insulin systems to cope with the regular flow of pure fructose and glucose), but for now, this interaction make us sick because our body doesn’t know how to deal with all biological innovations.

In the same way, the human bodies that can handle chewing coca leaves - an old relationship met between indigenous and coca plant in some parts of South America -can not cope with cocaine or crack cocaine, even if those are three substances containing the same active elements. Maybe that reductionism, as a way of understanding, is a harmless vision or even required vision in terms of food and drugs, but the applied reductionism means to reduce food or narcotic plants to the chemical elements that they contain, and this can create problems.

Eat products grown and cultivated on healthy soils.

It would be easier to say “eat organic products“, it is true that certified organic nourishment is usually properly cultivated or grown on healthier soils- soils fed with organic matters. Yet, there are some farmers in America that don’t have attested organic food,  but whose products must not be overlooked. The “organic” mark is important, but it is not the only key for the production of quality food.  In fact supermarkets are full of processed organic food products that are just a little bit better, at least in terms of health, than their conventional equivalents.

Organic cream cookies aren’t a healthy food product. When an organic Coca-Cola will be launch, what will happen for sure, then it will be probably a big strike in ecological terms, but not for our health. Most of the consumers expect automatically that the mark “organic” is a synonym with “healthy“, but the fact that the corn syrup with high fructose from your soft drinks, is organic, is not at all an advantage for the metabolism of insulin.

Yet, the superiority of real food grown on healthy soils seems to be obvious. More and more studies support the hypothesis which was first launched by Sir Albert Howard and J.I. Rodale; soils that are rich in organic matters produce nutritious food. Recent some comparisons made between organic and conventional crops have shown that several plants from organic crops had much higher levels of antioxidants, flavones, vitamins and other nutrients. But of course after been carried for several days by truck, any fresh product loses its nutritional quality, therefore it would be good to search not just for organic food but also local organic food.

If you have enough space, buy a freezer.

If you find a good supplier of meat, produced in a traditional way, on a pasture, buy a big amount of meat- a quarter of veal, or a whole pig. This is a great method to eat healthy without spending a lot of money. Freezers are a much cheaper than you expect because of the fact that you don’t open them as often as refrigerators. Besides, if you have a freezer you will buy larger quantities of season goods, then they are plenty and therefore cheaper. And (unlike conservation) freezing doesn’t significantly diminish the nutritional value of fresh products.

Nourish yourself like an omnivorous

No matter if you eat or not animal products, try to enrich your nourishment with some new food species, not just with new products. The confusing diversity of foods in supermarkets is misleading because many products are made of the same plants- especially from seeds- like soybean or grain. The higher your diet is more varied in terms of consumed products species, the more you will answer several nutritional needs.

This is an argument assumed from nutritionists, but there is a better one which involves a larger vision on health.

The biodiversity of food means greater biodiversity of cultivated lands. If we don’t reduce the mono-crops that are nourishing us in the present, farmers no longer would have to spread so many chemical fertilizers, and soils, plants animals and hence the people would be much healthier. Health is not restricted only to your own body and probably what is good for the soil is good for you as well. This brings us to the following rule: Eat products grown and cultivated on healthy soils

You don’t eat where you refuel your car. Nowadays the American gas stations obtain o greater profit by selling grocery (or cigarettes) than by selling gas. But, about what food are we talking about?

Besides milk and water, there are highly processed and durables snacks and refreshing drinks, that are sweetened in excess, bottled in little pint bottles. The gas stations turned into corn stations with high content of fructose for you.

Try not to eat alone!

Americans eat increasingly more often alone. Although some studies sustain that moderated persons will eat more if they dine in a group (perhaps they spend more time at the table). In the case of those exposed to excess, the meals taken together with other people are limited, because it’s less likely that we stuff ourselves under the eyes of others.

That’s why the advertising is encouraging us to eat in front of the TV or in the car. When we eat alone in a mechanic way, we eat more. The appetite control is one of the smallest advantages of a meal taken with others: this activity evolves eating from a mechanical process of feeding into a family and communication ritual, from a simple biological act into a cultural act.

Psychologists proved, the most of us eat according to external signals, especially the visual ones. The bigger the portion of food, so much more we will eat; the bigger the plate, so much more we pour soup, the more we buy if the wending machine is nicely arranged and the more we will eat, if the bowl with M&M’s is closer to us

The best way to get rid of the Fast Food culture and its values (that the food has to be fast, cheep and easy to cook; that food is a industry product, not a natural product; that food is a fuel, not a form of communication and bounding with other people or a bounding with the nature) is to participate to the complex but fascinate processes that involves the procure of food.