Eating Healthy for the Week

I try to plan my weekly dinner menu around my Full Circle Farms organic food box. This is such a great service - especially in Alaska! Full Circle Farms is out of Washington State and you can join their co-op to have a box of fresh organic food delivered for pick up at a convenient location to your home or work. To find out more about them, see their website at http://www.fullcirclefarm.com/. If you decide to join, please mention my name as a referral - I would get some free organic produce and I promise to do wonderful things with it to benefit many people!

This week, some of the main food items were:

Spinach

Carrots

Salad Greens & Dandelion Leaves

Strawberries

Rhubarb

Asparagus

Potatoes, white & sweet potatoes

Tomatoes

Apples, Lemons & Mangoes

Working with these items, here is the menu I've made for the week:

1. Veggie Lasagna - with the spinach and carrots - plus I bought zuchini, yellow sqash, and a red pepper.

2. Asparagus Risotto & Salad - with the asparagus and a lemon. I'll make it with 1/2 risotto rice and 1/2 barley, plus fresh chicken broth I'm cooking right now in the crock pot.

3. Strawberry Rhubarb Pie - Ok, this one is gone already. I also added 1 of the apples and bought 2 peaches. I topped it with an oatmeal, wheat flour, brown sugar, and butter crumbly mixture.

4. Potatoes with Broccoli & Chicken, Salad - Sauteed white & sweet potato chunks with a side of broccoli (I still have some left from last week) and I buy a rotisserie chicken from New Sagaya City Market near downtown Anchorage. I prefer their chicken because it does not have nitrates as a preservative. I really like City Market, too, because it's the one place in Anchorage that really reminds me of some of the artsy gourmet markets near where I grew up (think Georgetown DC and Bethesda MD). For the chicken, I clean off the meat and cook the skin, bones & scraps into a fresh broth to use in other things - like the risotto.

5. Chef's Special Soup - any unused veggies will get cooked into a soup with the chicken broth as a base. This is so good! People that attended my Five Elements Nutrition workshop last weekend LOVED my soup topping choices of buttermilk or plain yogurt.

Extra fruit, carrots, and some of the dandelion leaves get juiced or eaten for snacks - juicing these is such a great way to get high quality nutrition into your kids.

So, I do eat meat but in moderation. I also eat red meat on occasion and I prefer buffalo (mashkode bizhiki) to honor my ancestors, but a good steak from range fed beef is also tasty! I don't eat much fish only because I personally don't care for the taste.

I hope this inspires some ideas for you!