Healthy, easy and delicious- new dish each week

September is almost here

Most of mothers with school aged kids (and any age kids, and even no kids)- look forward to the start of school and dread it the same time… Well, I do anyway…

One of the main reasons for me is food. I love food, I teach about food, food is a huge part of my life and yet, it makes me shake in my boots by the end of every August.

As a Health Coach I teach nutrition classes and cooking classes which makes me very comfortable in the kitchen and with my kitchen gadgets. I can whip up a healthy meal in 20 min from scratch and satisfy everyone nutritional needs taste buds and caloric requirements. So why do I shake in my boots? - You might ask.

Lunches… school lunches to be exact. Both of my kids ( 10 and 14 years old) choose to not buy school lunches (they had attended several of my nutrition classes and based on the knowledge they got- they strongly prefer to eat food from home).

Feeding them in the summer is easy, because they eat whatever I serve (with few small exceptions of certain ingredients), but some of those foods look totally foreign to most kids. Explaining each dish to their friends everyday is not how my kids want to spend their lunch time at school. As a result of that they ask me to give them food that looks like foods their friends might be eating, but be healthier and have lots of nutrients.

Well, I have tried making Oreo cookies from zucchini, chips from kale and chicken nuggets from cauliflower, but successful I was NOT. My kids would eat everything at home, but didn’t necessarily want to bring it to school. So this year, yet again, I have to kick my cooking to a higher gear to create dishes that will be nutritionally and calorically pleasing to me, be tasty enough for my kids and visually acceptable to my kids’ friends.

So I am taking on a new challenge- One day a week I will experiment with a brand new recipe from the piles of my healthy cookbooks and if the dish meets all the above mentioned requirements- I will post a recipe on my website and write about the experience of making it in this blog.

The recipes I will be choosing will be mostly dinner dishes and kids will be taking leftovers to school the next day.

I am excited for this adventure and a bit anxious, since I am not much of a “follow the recipe” kind of a cook. But I am ready to grow from this challenge and share what I learn in the process.

So till next week…

Iwona Leger, RN, MSN, Certified Health Coach, founded Love and Peas Health Coaching and runs individual and group coaching sessions. She is very passionate about disease prevention, lifestyle and diet modifications, as well as stress reduction techniques.

For more info visit www.loveandpeashealth.com