Skip the potato chips, fruit snacks, graham crackers, and candy. If you’re in a rut here are some quick, great real food any-time or after-school snack ideas for inspiration that kids will love (and adults, too!). Sticking with simple ingredients keeps snack time easy and fun. Keep these tips in mind: healthy fats, like what …
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Real Food Tips: 7 Reasons I Hate Artificial Food Dyes
Artificial food dye, synthetic food dye, food coloring, FD&C Red No. 40, FD&C Blue No. 1, or Tartrazine (a.k.a. Yellow No. 5)… whatever name it’s listed under, it is all pretty much the same stuff. And as I’ve said on this site before I have no problem occasionally digging into yummy homemade baked goods made …
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Produce Storage Cheat Sheet (+ Announcement!)
Do you ever wonder how long certain fruits might last sitting out on your kitchen counter? Or wonder if maybe you should refrigerate them instead? To help solve some of those kitchen mysteries, I am excited to share this handy dandy produce storage guide with you today!
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How to Can Some Sugar-Free Jam: A Simple Method Without Pectin, (Refined) Sugar or Artificial Sweeteners
I hope this will be my first of several posts about how to “can” and preserve fresh foods when they are in season. I am a beginner canner myself, but have always been intrigued by and interested in the whole process. So I recently took a “Canning Class” (led by Ashley Eller at Poplar Ridge …
Real Food Tips: 10 Ways to Switch Up Your Kid’s Lunch
This is the first post in my new “100 Days of Real Food Tips” series. Enjoy! Think Beyond the Sandwich Bread… Pinwheels (pictured) Rolled up whole-wheat tortillas filled with: Cream cheese*, thin cucumber slices, and dill Goat cheese* and roasted red bell peppers (sold as pimentos) Peanut butter* and banana slices Sunflower butter* and all-fruit …
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Real Food Tips: 22 On-the-Go Breakfast Ideas
School started for us this week so it’s time to say goodbye to our leisurely summer breakfasts or even eating breakfast together at all…at least in my family. There is no way I could stomach food at 6 A.M. in order to eat with my daughter, but if she’s going to have a good day …
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Real Food Tips: 10 Highly Processed Foods to Avoid
here are a lot of these “foods to avoid” lists floating around the internet I so was inspired to make a list of my own. Highly Processed Foods and Ingredients to Avoid: Artificial ingredients This includes both synthetic dyes (like FD&C Red No. 40, Tartrazine, or Blue No. 1) and artificial sweeteners (like saccharin, aspartame, or sucralose). When you look at the history of…
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Real Food Tips: 5 Easy Changes
I hear from readers quite frequently who would like to cut out processed food, but are feeling overwhelmed and don’t know where to start. The key thing to remember is that small changes can go a long way - cutting out processed food doesn’t have to be all or nothing! So to help you get off on the right foot this New Year below…
Real Food Tips: 8 Ways to Avoid Processed Food
Read the ingredients label before buying anything. For years, if I even looked at food labels, I was reviewing items such as fat grams, calorie count and sugar content. While this may be important to some, the best indicator of how highly processed a food is can actually be found in the list of ingredients. …
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Real Food Tips: 21 Ways to Plan Ahead for School Lunches
Last week’s “real food” school lunch tips were so popular I thought I’d stay on that bandwagon for at least one more week. Whether you want to spend one Sunday afternoon cooking up a storm or make a double-batch of something new every few days…planning ahead is key when it comes to making “real food” …
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Real Food Tips: Advent Calendars (without candy!)
I touched on the subject of Advent calendars last year, but today I want to expand on the topic by including a detailed list. I like lists. :) As I mentioned our Advent house (which I bought at Target a few years ago by the way) was once filled with little pieces of highly processed …
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Preserving Seasonal Foods: Berries
Every year readers ask how they can eat fresh, local produce in the dead of winter when their farmers’ markets are closed until May or June. Well, this new blog series entitled “Preserving Seasonal Foods” is your answer. I’ve found that many aspects of eating real food require one to plan ahead, and this is …
Real Food Tips: 10 Recipes To Cook With Your Kids
There is no better time than summer break to spend some quality time in the kitchen with your kids. With all the learning our children do when they are off at school a few things they are not being taught are some pretty important household duties like cooking, cleaning, and laundry - just to name a few. In Michael Pollan's newest book, Cooked, he…
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Real Food Tips: 10 Ways to Be Less Wasteful
It has been gradual, but over the last couple years we've been making small changes toward reducing waste that have been inspired by the Zero Waste Family - and the fact that after an entire year they only produced one mason jar full of trash. I am the first to admit that we will likely never even come close to such an accomplishment, but…
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Real Food Tips: 21 Essentials for Freezer, Pantry & Fridge
The timing for this post is perfect because my freezer has never been so beautifully stocked in my life. I’ve actually been wanting to share that my husband and I are lucky enough to be going on the trip of a lifetime tomorrow. While our children stay home with the grandparents we will spend the …
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Top 10 Travel Snacks for Family Vacations (Real Food Tips)
It's no secret that we've done our fair share of traveling so far this summer. If your family still has some fun trips coming up - whether by car or by plane - below are some snacks that we think are great and easy to take along. Even if you just can't (or won't) stick to a real food diet once you get to…
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Guest Post: Honey Sweetened Blueberry Jam (from Food in Jars)
I am so delighted to be here sharing my small batch recipe for Honey Sweetened Blueberry Jam. Most people think that making jam has to be a giant process that takes all day, uses multiple pounds of sugar, and dirties every utensil in the kitchen. But there's another faster way that it can be done with honey in place of sugar, and it's endlessly…
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Real Food Tips: 10 Items I Never Purchased Before Cutting Processed Food
I used to think we were fairly adventurous eaters and cooks. And even though I didn’t actually learn to cook until after college, once I did I quickly dabbled in everything from homemade egg rolls to pasta from scratch to my grandmother’s crepes. Nothing could have prepared me though for all the “new foods” that …
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Real Food Tips: 10 Reasons to Cut Out Processed Food
We originally cut out processed food because we thought it was the right thing to do. What we didn’t expect were all the surprising improvements to our health that followed. It’s hard not to let those positive changes confirm that it was in fact a very good decision to cut out the junk. In case …
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Real Food Tips: 34 Random Food & Cooking Tricks
There’s no better title than “random” for this list. These tips and tricks are all over the board, but these are the things you learn and collect after so many years of cooking. First are some tricks that I use regularly, then at the bottom you’ll find a long list of tips from our readers. …
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Real Food Tips: Using Freezie Pop Molds
I seem to get a lot of questions and feedback from readers about the reusable freezie pop molds that we use (and recommend). First of all, I have absolutely no relationship with the company whatsoever…I simply found these molds online and have been a very satisfied customer. In fact, we own two sets now and …
Real Food Tips: 4 Super Quick Wholesome Dinners
When your day just doesn’t go as planned or you simply don’t feel like cooking up a storm, here are four super easy “real food” dinners that can be whipped up in 15 minutes or less. That’s faster than the pizza delivery man. And most of these meals are made from ingredients with a decent …
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Real Food Tips: 12 Ways to Deal with a Picky Eater
Winning over your picky eater is no easy task, but (in most cases) it can be done! Following is a list of tactics to hopefully convince your child that “real food” is good stuff. Also, don’t forget that it can take time for one’s palette to adjust to new tastes so if you experience some …
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Real Food Tips: School Lunch FAQs (the answers to all your questions!)
When I post my daughters' "real food" school lunch pictures on Facebook it often provokes a lot of questions. So here - all in one place - are some answers for ya! Now let's just hope we can get all those with the questions to actually read this post :) If I left out any of the more common ones please let me know…
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How to Feed Busy Families Real Food
I very strongly value the notion of feeding my kids well and not resorting to fast food places simply because I "have to." I've found the following ideas help me feed my busy family real food without having to compromise.
Real Food Tips: Buying “Real Food” from a Mainstream Supermarket
Obviously not everyone lives in a town with a Whole Foods or Earth Fare down the street. Readers actually write in quite frequently saying they only have access to stores like Walmart or Food Lion, which can make finding all the “real food” items on their list challenging at times. So whether your health food …
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Real Food Tips: 8 (More) Common Misconceptions
As soon as I published my first list of “common food misconceptions” I thought of a few more, so here they are… If it’s “gluten-free” then it is good for you…wrong (for most people). Unless you have an allergy or intolerance we do not believe people should avoid gluten…or any grains for that matter. And …
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Real Food Tips: 20 Ways to do Halloween without candy!
Whoever said you “had” to hand out candy on Halloween anyway? Trust me kids will be getting PLENTY of candy this month regardless so it wouldn’t hurt, and it actually might help, if you break up the monotony by doing something a little different. I personally kind of like to be different (let’s just call …
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Healthy Eating Defined: Clearing up the Conflicting Messages
Everywhere you look these days someone is touting one diet trend or another. Whether it’s swearing off all meat (vegetarian), all wheat (gluten-free), all grains and dairy (Paleo), or all animal products in general (vegan), let’s face it - unless you have a specific known allergy, there are a lot of conflicting messages out there. Plus on top of some of the more recent…
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Real Food Tips: 5 Ways to (Easily) Eat More Kale
If you want to eat local foods in the winter then you better figure out how to eat some big leafy greens like kale. Not to mention kale is packed with all sorts of good stuff for your body so if you can learn to enjoy this veggie then it’s a win-win for everyone. :) …
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Real Food Tips: 3 Deceiving Food Products
When I give my “100 Days of Real Food” presentations I routinely bring along a grocery bag full of “tricky” food products to discuss. Here are a few the items I share: – 1. Garden Veggie Sticks Ingredients*(according to Amazon.com as of May 2012): Potato Flour, Rice Flour, Expeller Pressed Sunflower Oil, Spinach Powder, Tomato Powder, …
Real Food Tips: 10 Common Misconceptions
Don’t be fooled by these misleading food myths: A healthy diet means eating “low-fat” and “fat-free” food products…wrong! Michael Pollan basically abolishes this myth in his book In Defense of Food, and you can check out our mini-pledge post from week 6 for some detail. Mutli-grain crackers are better than crackers made from white flour…wrong! …
Real Food Tips: 6 Ways to Transform Breakfast in the New Year
Some of the best advice I can give you is to start with just one meal of the day - like breakfast - and once breakfast is all cleaned up then you can move on to another meal like lunch or snacks.
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Real Food Tips: 8 Meal Planning Pointers
A couple of weeks ago we discussed the fact that meal planning is an important part of sticking to a budget. Not only does meal-planning help you stay on track financially, but I personally think it helps keep things interesting as well. If I actually dedicate a little time to planning out our dinners for …
Real Food Tips: 12 Easy Ways to “Go Green” at the Grocery Store
People are waking up to a collective feeling of responsibility for being good stewards of this beautiful planet on which we live. We are starting to see that our consumption choices matter and that mindless consumption hurts us all.
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Preserving Seasonal Foods: Bell Peppers
Bell pepper season has officially started, and I am pretty excited about it. It’s hard to think of another vegetable I like this much that’s also so versatile (tomatoes might be a close second!). We enjoy eating bell peppers in so many dishes from fajitas to gumbo to grilled panini sandwiches to pizza (as a …
