Pears With Goat Cheese & Optional Prosciutto

Here’s a great flexitarian recipe for the holidays. It’s easy, healthy, and sure to please!
Ingredients

• 2 pears
• 2 teaspoons fresh lemon juice
• 1 cup arugula
• 3 ounces crumbled goat cheese (or blue cheese)
• 6 ounces thinly sliced prosciutto, cut in half lengthwise

Directions

1. Cut pears into 8 wedges and splash with lemon juice to preserve fresh bright color.
2. Place a tablespoon of cheese and arugula leaf on the pear.
3. For the vegetarian option, wrap the pear with the arugula.  For the meat option, add a piece of prosciutto and roll up.

Serves: 8
Time: 10 minutes
We adapted this recipe from Real Simple Magazine,  January 2008

What’s for lunch?

School API: 943. School lunch sodium: 770.

What’s for lunch in a public elementary school in Sunnyvale, California? One curious mom stopped by at lunchtime to find out…

The school’s multipurpose building (cafeteria/gym/auditorium) has been torn down and is being rebuilt, so for the next year and a half, students will be served lunch from a trailer on the school playground. Many students ate their lunches in their classrooms because it was too chilly to eat outside on the grass or at the picnic tables under the metal awning.

The kids filed up the ramp into the little trailer and walked into the spare interior. Student volunteers in plastic gloves handed out the food. First choice was one of three entrées, placed into a paper tray: a PB&J sandwich on whole-wheat bread in plastic wrap, or two mini cheeseburgers of “seasoned” beef with American cheese on white bread buns (720 milligrams of sodium), or a mini cheese pizza (770 milligrams of sodium). The last two items—packaged in cellophane—had been heated offsite and delivered to the trailer in insulated bins. Next, kids could choose from a plastic bag of baby carrots, or a paper bowl of salad with two cherry tomatoes. Dessert was either an apple or two orange quarters, served in another little paper dish. Finally, the kids could choose between plain or chocolate low-fat milk. Then, with a napkin and some plastic cutlery in hand, they filed outside into the chilly October breeze.

Cellophane cheeseburger and pizza bags blew around the asphalt and tumbled across the grass field nearby. Serving a prepackaged lunch generates a huge amount of trash every day—the paper trays and bowls, plastic bags, milk cartons, paper napkins, and plastic cutlery.

I asked two fourth-grade boys what they thought of their lukewarm mini cheeseburgers. One boy was picking the white-bread bun off the “seasoned” beef patty and eating it bit by bit. “It’s okay,” he said mildly. Another boy was eating his cheeseburgers the normal way. “I like it!” he said brightly. A third boy, eating a home-packed lunch of cottage cheese and fruit alongside his friends, offered his opinion: “It smells horrible!”

The meal service at this school is by Sodexo, “A world leader in food and facilities management services.” We’ll have more school lunch snapshots in the months to come…

Recommended Daily Values for Children

The Baylor College of Medicine has published a handy table that lists the nutritional recommendations for children. 

Prevent Diabetes, Eat Your Leafy Greens!

Spinach may do more than build Popeye-like muscles: Eating green leafy vegetables could reduce your risk of developing diabetes, new research suggests. Roughly 4 ounces per day of broccoli, kale, spinach, sprouts, or cabbage appears to cut type 2 diabetes risk by 14 percent, according to researchers who analyzed data from six previous studies involving more than 22,000 participants. The

Sarah Silverman Promotes Vegetarian School Lunch

I’m writing to you about something that has shocked and offended me.  And trust me when I say it takes a lot to shock and offend me.”  So begins a letter to Congressman George Miller, chair of the House Education and Labor Committee, from comedian Sarah Silverman, one of a slew of celebrities who have signed on to support the Healthy School Meals Act of 2010.

The bill, introduced in March by Rep. Jared Polis (D-CO), “would reward school districts with additional food aid if they offer most students plant-based vegetarian food choices every day.”  Pretty revolutionary, considering that many schools still offer sloppy joes and meatloaf as a lunchtime treat.  According to the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, “there are 66 congressional co-sponsors who support this bill.”

The sweeping changes recommended in the bill would start with a pilot program providing select schools with “high-fiber, low-fat vegetarian protein products and nondairy milk options.”  This bill comes at an important time, because congress will soon take up reauthorization of the Child Nutrition Act.  According to the government’s School Nutrition Dietary Assessment Study, “more than 70 percent of schools serve meals too high in saturated fat to comply with federal dietary guidelines.”

But is America, land of the free and home of McDonald’s, ready for a meatless (or less meat-filled) lunch?  The PCRM thinks so.  “Schools want to serve healthy meals, but they need help from Congress,” says PCRM nutritionist Kathryn Strong, R.D. “The Healthy School Meals Act would give school cafeterias the power to offer more fruits, vegetables, and low-fat plant-based options.”  The PCRM notes that ”a veggie burger, for example, has the same amount of protein as a hamburger.  But while the hamburger has 15 grams of fat, the veggie burger has only 5, and it contains no saturated fat, no cholesterol, fewer calories, and more fiber.”

It’s clear that cafeteria reform, if perhaps not as vegetarian as Polis hopes, is on its way, and that’s good news for our nation’s kids.

(via babble)

How Garbanzo Beans Prevent Heart Disease

In a study that examined food intake patterns and risk of death from coronary heart disease, researchers followed more than 16,000 middle-aged men in the U.S., Finland, The Netherlands, Italy, former Yugoslavia, Greece and Japan for 25 years. Typical food patterns were: higher consumption of dairy products in Northern Europe; higher consumption of meat in the U.S.; higher consumption of vegetables, legumes, fish, and wine in Southern Europe; and higher consumption of cereals, soy products, and fish in Japan. When researchers analyzed this data in relation to the risk of death from heart disease, they found that legumes were associated with a whopping 82% reduction in risk!

A study published in the Archives of Internal Medicine confirms that eating high fiber foods, such as garbanzo beans, helps prevent heart disease. Almost 10,000 American adults participated in this study and were followed for 19 years. People eating the most fiber, 21 grams per day, had 12% less coronary heart disease (CHD) and 11% less cardiovascular disease (CVD) compared to those eating the least, 5 grams daily. Those eating the most water-soluble dietary fiber fared even better with a 15% reduction in risk of CHD and a 10% risk reduction in CVD.

Flexitarian Cookbook Contributing Chefs

Thank you to our contributing chefs!

• Top Chef’s Micah Edelstein
• Michael Anthony, Executive Chef at the Gramercy Tavern
• Celebrity chef Dean James Max
• Lynn Bound, Executive Chef at the New York Museum of Modern Art 
• Food writer and award-winning chef Dawn Viola
• Christina Valencia of Farm and a Frying Pan
• Chef Joe Wittenbrook, owner of The Culinary Salon
• Cathy Erway, author of The Art of Eating In
• Lindsey Nixon of Happy Herbivore
• Marissa of Pumpkin & Pomegranate
• Soma Rathore of eCurry
• Deborah Kay of Eclectic Flexitarian
• Sophie Aaronson of Philosophie
• Julia Gartland of Sassy Kitchen (major contributor)