Beef Daube (because everything sounds better in French)

If the words "beef stew" make you think of an unhealthy concoction in a can, you're missing the boat! The French have long known that the cure for the winter blahs involves a bubbling pot of beef, slow cooking with vegetables, red wine, and stock. Pair this version of their traditional "Boeuf Daube" with a loaf of crusty bread and a bright green salad (one made with spinach, sliced oranges, and toasted walnuts in a citrus vinaigrette sounds about right) and you have the perfect dinner to warm you from the inside out. God bless the French.

Beef Daube
adapted from Cooking Light 2004 

serves 6

Ingredients 
1 Tbsp. olive oil
3-4  garlic cloves, crushed
1  (2 lb.) boneless chuck roast, trimmed and cut into 2-inch cubes
1  tsp. kosher  salt
1/2  tsp.  freshly ground black pepper
1  c.  red wine
2  c. chopped carrot
1 1/2  c.  chopped sweet onion
1  c.  beef stock or beef broth
1  Tbsp.  tomato paste 
1 tsp.   chopped fresh rosemary
1  tsp.  chopped fresh thyme
1  (14.5-oz.) can diced tomatoes, undrained
1  bay leaf 

3 c.   hot cooked whole wheat  noodles

Directions 

1. Preheat oven to 300°.

2. Heat oil in a Dutch oven over low heat. Add garlic; cook 3-4 minutes, stirring occasionally. Remove garlic with a slotted spoon; set aside. 

3. Increase heat to medium-high and add beef to pan. Cook 5 minutes, browning on all sides. Remove beef from pan. Add wine to pan, and bring to a boil, scraping pan to loosen browned bits. Add garlic, beef, salt, pepper, carrot, and next 7 ingredients (through bay leaf); bring to a boil.

4. Cover and bake at 300° for 2 1/2 hours or until beef is tender. Discard bay leaf. Serve over noodles.

Note: You can also make this in a slow cooker/crockpot. Simply complete steps 1-3 and transfer mixture to the slow cooker. Cover and cook on HIGH for about 5 hours.

KISS-able Meals to Cook at Home

Everywhere I've been this week, people have been abuzz with talk of resolutions. I wrote earlier about how important it is to take it one step (or one bite!) at a time when it comes to tackling those long lists of commitments designed to build the "new you". Taking on too much at once is a recipe for failure. So, we'll tackle just one change at a time.

Even then, if we over-complicate the plan to change that one behavior, we're doomed to fall short.  And when we fall short, we often just abandon the whole idea and go back to our old ways. So, to help you stay on track, I offer you one very important piece of advice.  

KISS - keep it simple, sweetheart.

Let's look at an example. Imagine you've resolved to cook at home more often. Many MANY of my clients begin coaching programs with this goal in mind, and it's one I wholeheartedly support. But here's the thing. Cooking at home does not have to mean Gourmet Tuesday! In fact, I often tell people who are just beginning to cook at home that if it requires a recipe it's probably too complicated for a weeknight! Seriously! K-I-S-S.

Here's what I mean. Let's say you're on Day 2 of your New Year's Resolution and to find inspiration, you're flipping through the January issue of your favorite cooking magazine.  You see a meal that looks terrific. You decide to make it tonight, to begin your first week of "more cooking at home." With side dishes, it involves three recipes, 24 ingredients (18 of which you don't already have on hand), and several hours of prep time. Are you going to do this every night? Are you going to do this even ONCE?


So, how do we KISS this dinner? Like this:


Grilled salmon           (topped with chopped fresh herbs)
Baked sweet potato  (topped with a dollop of  Greek Yogurt)
Steamed broccoli      (drizzled with lemon juice and olive oil)


Now that's a healthy meal you can prepare in about 15 minutes - and by doing the little things in parenthesis, which don't even require a recipe, you can take the whole meal from good to great. You can cook this way routinely and save those delicious but complicated recipes for those days when you have more time to devote to playing in the kitchen.


Try it. Test me. See if you can cook at home more often without even getting out a cookbook. Discover for yourself that simple is better. And when you do? You might just want to kiss me.


 

3 Kitchen Tools You'll Love

I'm not a big gadget person. I like to keep things pretty simple, especially in the kitchen. I detest clutter (I mean really detest clutter) so I don't always think gadgets are worth the space they take up in my cabinets. 

Have you seen some of the crazy things being sold on television? Do we really need the Egg Genie? Or pizza scissors? How about the hot dog toaster  - one gadget to simultaneously cook hot dogs and toast buns? Please.

Yet there are a few kitchen tools that I find myself reaching for so often, they are worth every square inch of space they require. There are more than three on my personal "must have" list, so I'll share some more another day,  but here are three I don't think I could (happily) live without.

1) A garlic press                2) A salad spinner             3) A citrus juicer

Let's start with the garlic press. There are few kitchen tasks as tedious as mincing garlic. If you've ever found yourself mincing clove after clove with irregularly shaped bits clinging to your knife and praying you don't cut off your fingertips, this is for you. This tool allows you to hack the ends off a clove of garlic, stick it inside, and press out perfectly minced garlic. Simply scrape out the fibrous outer layer that is left inside the press and toss the tool in the dishwasher. Brilliant.

The salad spinner is a relatively recent addition to my kitchen (and one my husband is amazed I actually use - it's pretty big for my taste). But washing greens is so important in order to remove dirt and potential contaminants, and there is nothing worse than a salad made with the resulting wet lettuce. The leaves are soggy and the dressing won't stick! A quick turn through the salad spinner (which is a job my 3 year old refers to as "pumping the lettuce") crisps the greens right back up again. Just the way they belong.

The citrus juicer is one tool where simpler is better. There are fancier versions on the market, but the one I have pictured above is my favorite. It makes short work of juicing lemons, limes, or oranges. If you're doing that job by squeezing with your hand today this is a worthwhile upgrade. You'll get more juice and no seeds or pulp in your finished dish. This is another one you just throw in the dishwasher to clean.

So there you have it, 3 kitchen tools you'll love. I'll share another round of favorites soon.

Stevia - an zero calorie natural sweetener

Stee-what?? Until about 6 months ago, I'd never even heard of stevia. Now it's so key to my cooking repertoire I'd be lost without it! My daughter calls it "that special sugar" - special indeed!

Stevia is a plant, native to South America, grown for its sweet leaves. The extract from the leaves is used to make a natural sweetener that has up to 300 times the sweetness of sugar, but with ZERO calories and negligible impact on blood sugar. And of course, it's all natural, not a synthetic chemical sugar substitute. Does it get any better? YES! It tastes like sugar and has no aftertaste (unlike most artificial sweeteners).

Stevia has been widely used in other countries for hundreds of years (e.g. South America, Japan) but it has gone mainstream in the US more recently followng FDA approval for use. It is marketed under brands like Truvia, Sun Crystals, PureVia, SweetLeaf, and Stevia Extract In The Raw. You can find it in most grocery stores and in any health food store near the sugar (and other sweeteners). It is also slowly being incorporated as a sweetener in beverages and other processed foods.

I've experimented with a number of recipes using stevia as a replacement for sugar. I haven't done any baking with it since sugar plays such a key role in the texture of most baked goods, but I have had great luck with it in salad dressings, marinades, and sauces that call for sugar. My daughter's favorite use is on top of strawberries (when she doesn't think they are already sweet enough - ack!). It of course is a great sweetener option for coffee or tea or other beverages as well. I recently made homemade lemonade by squeezing fresh lemons and adding cold water and stevia - and it was amazing!

Here's a chart from PureVia listing conversion rates from sugar to stevia to get the equivalent sweetness if you're ready to do some experimentation of your own!

And here's a link to some recipes from Truvia if you need a little inspiration to get you started.

I'd love to hear what you try and what your results were!

My beef with Children's Menus

Have you ever noticed what is ON a Children's Menu? If you don't have small children, you may not be able to rattle off a list, but suffice it to say that the menus are incredibly similar from restaurant to restaurant. They generally include some combination of the following items, regardless of the ethnicity or fanciness of the restaurant in question:

Macaroni and Cheese
Grilled Cheese
Cheese Pizza
Chicken Fingers or Chicken Nuggets
Hot Dog
Buttered Noodles
Spaghetti

Not exactly the healthiest or most varied fare for our littlest eaters. I will concede that nearly every child will eat (and moreover will really like!) these dishes given the opportunity, but I'm often left wondering why these are the only choices on kids menus! To me, it reinforces a widely-held belief that there are two types of food in this world - "Grown Up Food" and "Kid Food" - and I just don't buy that.

As the mother of preschool age children, I'm often asked questions about how I get my own kids to eat healthfully. So many of my clients, friends, and family struggle with children who are either picky eaters or habitual snackers or reluctant eaters overall. The truth is, on certain days I could call my own children the same things...but I have a few principles that generally keep them eating healthy diets full of foods that nourish them.

Here's what I do:

1) There's no "Kids Menu" at our dinner table
I cook one meal for the family and the kids can either eat it or not...but I don't make separate food for them. Since we've done this since their very first meals, they don't know any other way so they agree to this pretty readily. I may "deconstruct" our meal so that they have slices of grilled chicken and mandarin oranges if we are having an Asian Chicken Salad, but I simply won't prepare different food for them.

2) I put at least one KNOWN hit on their plate at each meal.
To help with the first principle, I make sure that there is at least one thing on their plates that I know they love at each meal. While they then at least try everything, when they don't love ALL of their dinner, there is something healthy there to fill their bellies.

3) I don't have a "Clean Your Plate" rule.
Since I'm constantly introducing new flavors and textures at the dinner table, and since it's unlikely they'll love everything I ask them to try, I don't force them to completely finish their lunch or dinner plate. When they are full, they stop, and that's cool with me! The beauty of this is that they stop eating when they are full...even on nights when one of their favorites is on the table! I'm far more interested in training them to listen to their bodies for fullness cues than I am in policing them while they reluctantly choke down those last bites of potatoes. Kids will not starve themselves. Trust me. They may not be hungry when we want them to eat a meal, but when they get later, they will eat healthful, nutritious food if it is what is offered to them.

4) I use condiments like catnip and kids dishes like art canvases.
All kids LOVE LOVE LOVE to dip! I will let them dip anything in anything if it works for them! Ketchup is a favorite...homemade salad dressings....sour cream....mustard....barbecue sauce...kids can handle a few extra calories if it gets them to eat REAL FOOD for dinner! Try it. I swear to you my kids eat their vegetables FIRST because of this. I also have those sectioned-off kids dishes and often artfully arrange their food in fun presentations. They love the visual fanfare as much as you love it when a great restaurant stacks or fans your food on a gorgeous plate. We eat with our eyes first - kids do too.

5) I keep healthful snacks on hand all the time.
Kids have small stomachs and need to eat smaller quantities more frequently. Rather than fighting the "not now it's almost time for dinner (or lunch)" battle, I keep healthy snacks on hand and let them eat when they are hungry. If that means they eat a smaller dinner, so be it. As long as what they are eating for snacks is nourishing, it doesn't really matter WHEN they eat. This means snacks are things like turkey and cheese, fruit, raw vegetables, soups, plain nonfat yogurt with fresh add-ins, leftovers from previous meals, healthy cereals, dried fruit, etc. Get the good stuff in. Don't be picky about when it happens.

6) I teach that treats and snacks serve two different purposes.
We have "healthy snacks" (see #5 above) and we also have "treats". My kids love cookies and ice cream and french fries as much as any other child does, but I'm trying to teach them that those are things we eat because they taste good and are a fun treat...NOT because we're hungry. When we are actually hungry, it's time to fuel our body with healthy food..not to go digging for a cookie. Incidentally, this reduces the craving for "treats" overall because their bellies are full of GOOD stuff...and when they do have a treat, that's exactly what they call it and how they see it. One is not a substitute for the other. When you want that chocolate chip cookie, let's face it, nothing else is going to scratch that itch. I think there's a place for both and the important lesson is learning to tell the difference.

7) I let them eat treats!
I absolutely admit that I give my kids "treats" on a daily basis. My objective is not to withhold indulgences from them; in fact I often indulge right along with them! My goal is to help them learn how to integrate these things into an otherwise healthful, nourishing diet. We keep portions kid-sized. If my 5 year old asks for chocolate, she means 1 or 2 Hershey's kisses or 10 chocolate chips in a little pile....NOT a king sized Snickers or 4 cookies. Make sense?

8) I try to cut myself some slack.
That means when someone asks my daughter what her favorite meal is, and she says "chicken nuggets and french fries" I try not to cringe! The truth is that she really DOES love it when we let her have lunch at McDonalds...it's just not a frequent occurrence in our house. My answer to the favorite meal question may be Maine lobster with drawn butter eaten on the coast....but that doesn't mean I eat it often, right? Every meal isn't going to be perfect...in your house or in mine...but I take heart in knowing that on most days my children are getting healthful, nutritious foods into their bodies and learning how to really enjoy food!

So, what do I do about Children's Menus? I rarely have my kids order from them. I'd rather get them a plate to share my meal or order an adult meal or side dishes for the two of them to share than give in to the conformity of the ubiquitous Children's Menu.

Do you have other ideas to share? Comment here and tell us what YOU do to keep the kids in your life healthy and thriving!

Chicken and Black Bean Burritos

If the arrival of warmer weather makes you crave Mexican food eaten al fresco, but you normally shy away from it because you think it's unhealthy...think again! Remaking less-than-ideal restaurant meals at home can shave tons of calories and fat while preserving the essence of the flavors and textures you love.

Take, for example, these chicken and black bean burritos. Staying in control of the preparation of the meat, the amount of cheese and sour cream and the fiber content of the burrito turns what could be an overstuffed restaurant meal into a healthful meal for under 350 calories! I serve these with a salad of greens, tomatoes and cucumbers...maybe a few chunks of Hass avocado...and a little vinaigrette. They're delicious and go together quickly so they make a perfect weeknight dinner. Try them and see what you think!

Black Bean and Chicken Burritos

Serves 6

1 T. canola oil	2 c. black beans, drained & rinsed
1 c. chopped red onion	1 T. fresh lime juice
1 lb. chicken breast, cut in strips	4 oz diced canned green chiles
½ tsp kosher salt	1-2 T. chopped fresh cilantro
1 tsp chili powder	6 lg whole wheat tortillas
Salsa	Sour cream

1. Heat the oil in a large nonstick skillet. Toss together the onions, chicken salt and chili powder and put in the skillet. Cook over high heat, stirring constantly, until the chicken is cooked through, about 6-8 minutes.
2. Stir in the beans, lime juice, chiles and cilantro and warm through. Remove from the stove, cover and keep warm.
3. Warm the tortillas. Fill each tortilla with ½ c. of the chicken mixture. Roll and place seam side down on a serving dish. Serve with small amounts of salsa and sour cream.