It's been awhile since I've written more about improving our diet...mostly because we went through some really rough spots lately. It seems to happen when holidays arrive and we're traveling a lot. Anyways...
Spinach.
The health benefits are pretty awesome for this nifty vegetable. It's loaded with tons of vitamins and minerals that you need, so it's a great food to try to add more of into your diet. Easier said than done for many of us, since you've likely only eaten it blandly cooked, or in a salad.
Not that there is anything wrong with those options (I had a delicious chicken Caesar salad with spinach for lunch yesterday!), but if you don't find the taste that appealing, it might be difficult for you to eat it.
No worries though! My husband is not really a salad person, and there is really only so much salad I can handle myself, so we've gotten creative and found a few different ways to eat spinach as part of other meals:
(1) Tacos/Burritos
(1) Tacos/Burritos
For most of our married life, some form of tacos has been a weekly meal (at least). If you are regularly eating tacos, try using spinach instead of lettuce! You can use baby spinach, peel off the stems, and/or shred it to make it work.
(2) Pasta Sauce
This is one of the neater tricks I've tried on a whim, and it worked out! When you make a dish that uses marinara or alfredo sauce, try cooking chopped spinach right in the sauce! You can use fresh or frozen (we usually use frozen) and just mix it right in when you're heating the sauce. It adds a very mild extra flavor to the sauce that really blends right in.
(3) Fruit Smoothies
As weird as it sounds, you really can put spinach in smoothies. I wasn't a believer at first either, but after I made the recipe above, I was a changed person. I even doubled the amount of spinach for that recipe, and I couldn't even taste it! I love this recipe because it's a great way to finish spinach before it goes bad (we used to have a huge problem with never finishing all of the spinach in time)...I just throw the remaining spinach in the blender, add some fruit and yogurt, and bam, instant snacks. We have 8 of these freezer pop containers that I put the smoothie in for later. It really helps to have these on hand when I need a quick snack, but I don't have time (or hands) to make something healthy and filling.
So who's suddenly and surprisingly pumped to try to eat more spinach now? and what other food topics would y'all like me to try to cover on the blog? I love talking about it because I love to share what's worked for us, and it's great motivation to keep striving to eat better.
Thank you for this! I don't know why I never thought of using it for tacos, which we absolutely love around here. Also, I just repinned that smoothie recipe. Do you usually buy your spinach bagged or by weight at the grocery store?
ReplyDeleteWe buy organic bagged spinach from Trader Joe's. I'd rather buy by weight, but the closest store with that option, for baby spinach, is a half hour away. When I was in grad school I lived across the street from the grocery store, which had a cheap salad bar. I'd just stop there after class and buy just as much spinach as I could eat in a day or two. It was so much easier to avoid waste! We choose to buy ours organic too because spinach is in the top 5 most contaminated fruits/vegetables, which makes store options a bit more limited.
DeleteNice! I'm with Cat, I never thought about doing it in tacos either.
ReplyDeleteI always stick it in smoothies too!! My family thinks it looks disgusting, but you can't tell at all! Hope you're having a great week!
ReplyDeleteGreat ideas! we always buy the huge organic box from Costco and I end up sticking it in everything- I love cooking with it because it shrinks so much. I think it predominantly ends up in eggs.
ReplyDeleteYes! I started putting spinach in our scrambled eggs for breakfast. It's delicious.
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