[Healthy Life] Purees

I fully believe that the best way to get good nutrition is to pick vegetables out of your ground/greenhouse/whatever (assuming it is toxin-free), rinse, and consume.  Ideally, each one would be grown in conditions most conducive to reaching their full nutritional potential.  In a perfect world, the plethora of vegetables, beans, legumes, and fruit on our dinner plates would be both appetizing and satisfying.

But that is not real.  My mum's home cooking was of the McDonald's, Pizza Hut, Kraft Mac 'n Cheese oeuvre and my husband's diet when I met him was composed of chicken nuggets, Doritos, and yet more of the cheesy blue box.  I've been working on improving this, but I have to confess:  I don't like peppers, carrots, celery, asparagus, cauliflower, and all their little friends, though I do pretend most of the time to try to fool myself into eating them.

We do have some veggies with our dinners, but it is just a side, and I have a usual rotation that I use with The Mister- green beans, peas, broccoli, and carrots.  In anything with a red sauce, I hide spinach, which my Aunt Marcie taught me.  She also taught me that I can use applesauce instead of oil when baking. I use brown sugar or molasses instead of white sugar, so that along with the sweetness (and calories) comes at least a little nutritional value.  I add a little pepper or lemon juice to almost everything savory I make, because science suggests that they increase bio-availability (they help your body absorb the nutrients that you ingest).  I cook with olive oil (the good stuff that burns when you take a shot) in place of other oils, butter or margarine.  I keep a refrigerated tub of the stuff for spreading.  You get the picture- I try to make our food as healthy as possible.  Despite this effort, we still probably have higher proportions of meat, carbs, starches, and cheese than we should and not enough of the vitamin-packed vegetables.  The Mister and I aren't that many years off from having kids, so I've been thinking about how to address this, and get us into good habits before little and impressionable people happen.

Enter my friend, Cassandra.  A couple of years ago, she and I were talking about cooking and she told me about Deceptively Delicious and the Sneaky Chef books. The main theme behind these books is to make purees of fruits and veggies, and include them in our regular cooking.  The directions say to make them ahead of time and freeze them.  This sounded great, but when I froze some, I found that I had to thaw the whole thing to get a little out each time.  Not good, as freeze-thaw cycles degrade the good stuff.



Okay, so aliquots it is.  Storage dishes left me lacking when it came to left-overs and took up too much space in my little freezer.  Next came the ziplocs, but wow was that wasteful.  Also, they froze into amorphous blobs that made it difficult to stack and to store other things around them. 

Enter my friend, Stacy.  Stacy has a son, and is a particularly awesome parent, who made her own baby food.  This involved a lot of puree-ing.  I remember her saying that she'd freeze them in her silicon muffin pans, and that it would be the right serving size.  Soooo....

I stole that.

 So we'll see how it goes.