Magazine Review: Clean Eating

Clean Eating is a fantastic magazine; it's full of tips about how to eat healthier foods. In fact, it's the first place where first I read about the list of fruits and veggies you should eat as organic produce. Of course, it was the top 10 instead of the Dirty Dozen I addressed in a prior post, but it's the same concept.

The general concept involves eating more whole (unprocessed) foods, such as fruits and veggies and whole grains. "Acceptable" sweeteners include agave nectar, honey, stevia and evaporated cane juice rather than processed sugar. See sample Clean Eating menu (and actual recipes for a week) on the website.

For those who like shopping lists, everything you need to feed a single person from these menus  is available (I assume that the four serving menu items could, theoretically, be frozen if you don't use all the leftovers). You can also print a clean copy from the website rather than tear it out of the magazine or photocopy it.

The recipes included in the two-week plan have nutritional information and there is a daily nutritional calculation. If you wish to deviate from the daily choices, you'll have to look up on the labels of what you're eating for the individual meals.

Tosca Reno (who is credited for the popularity of the eating clean movement) has written a couple of books that explain the concept in greater detail. One of them is The Eat-Clean Diet Cookbook: Great-Tasting Recipes That Keep You Lean.

Deceptively Delicious Review Part II

To add on to my review earlier this month, as promised: Deceptively Delicious: Simple Secrets to Get Your Kids Eating Good Food's author Jessica Seinfeld started her deception because her family members wouldn't eat their vegetables and found them "'disgusting.'" She started with an idea of blending in pureed vegetables (butternut squash into mac and cheese for her first attempt) and it took of from there.

I believe the Sloppy Joe recipe I tried this past week alone is worth the price I paid for the book. I will say, however, that making the food purees right before the recipe (which I did) is not recommended. It added probably 20 minutes of prep time, for a total of about one hour from start to finish. Seinfeld takes about an hour making her purees for an entire week. I probably never would do that, because I have very rarely planned a whole week's worth of meals at one crack. But then, I don't have to juggle work, a husband and children, either. Whichever way works for you is fine.

The recipe calls for 1/2-cup sweet potato puree and your choice of either 1/2-cup red pepper (my pick) or butternut squash puree (which I might yet try next, as the red pepper was not fun to peel). I also added some paprika and garlic powder to it, because the garlic cloves it calls for were inadvertently left out and I felt it need a bit more kick. (I have never claimed to be any kind of domestic goddess. That's a good thing, because my family members would die laughing if I even implied such a thing, which would truly be a pity. I'm rather fond of them.)

The next time I make this, I might use pureed tomatoes rather than tomato paste, which means I'll need more of it and also will have to reduce the beef broth accordingly. Otherwise, the result will be sloppy joe soup, which would be just a little too sloppy for me.

I definitely believe that the downside to the cookbook is the lack of individual nutritional information for each recipe. The cookbook, does, however, include some general information about why certain fruits and vegetables are good for you. I did find a copy of the recipe on sparkpeople.com with calories, fat grams, etc. if you're interested in trying it out. It's probably healthier than most sloppy joes you'll be finding at any graduation party you attend, too.