Food and nutrition – Page 2 – Patricia McLellan's Blog

2020-01-18

What’s for Dinner? Nutritional Balance

When planning a meal, it is important to get a balance of the three major food types – protein, carbohydrates and fats.

Protein usually comes from meat or fish, but can also be from milk products including cheese, eggs and legumes (such as lentils and chick peas).

Carbohydrates are typically potatoes, pasta or rice, but can also be bread or other wheat products such as couscous.

Fats are often a part of the ingredients, as meat will often have fat with it, or it can be the cooking oil that is used in preparing the meal. Some fat will give more flavor to the meal, but too much will increase the amount of calories. Fats can be from animals or from plants.

In addition to these three main food types, it is necessary to eat food with a lot of fiber, such as raw vegetables and fruit. We also need a variety of minerals and vitamins from our food.

In future posts I will be looking at various ingredients that are typically used in dinner meals and looking at how they contribute to good nutrition. I will be looking at how we can vary our diet by increasing the variety of ingredients that are nutritious and tasty.

2020-01-14

What’s for dinner? Salad #1

We eat salad quite regularly as I am very fond of raw vegetables. The most common ingredients for my salads are lettuce, cucumber, tomatoes, red peppers and carrots. However, today I decided to put some protein in my salad. I cooked some black-eyed peas (also called cowpeas) ahead of time and added them cold to the salad.

When making a salad, I usually try to have various colors in the bowl. Red is usually tomato and red pepper. Orange is grated carrot. Green is the lettuce and cucumber. In addition I decided to have cooked black-eyed peas. I put a dressing on the salad based on mayonnaise, dill and parsley. I also added paprika (the spice) though it didn’t get in the picture as it was an after-thought.

We both enjoyed the salad. The peas in the salad made it a bit crunchier. They also added protein to the salad.

2020-01-012020-01-01

What’s for dinner? Color

I remember my mother saying that making dinner wasn’t difficult. What was difficult was deciding what to make. I agree with her.

One of the challenges when deciding what to have for dinner is to create a variety of dishes over the week, or even over a two-week period. I often get in ruts and it is easier to just make the same thing this week as I made last week.

A second challenge is to make the meal nutritious and healthy without using a lot of high calorie foods or using a lot of processed foods. I am also concerned with the salt content in food.

The third challenge is that the dishes should look appetizing and taste good. Even when trying something different, I want to feel that I have made something that was worth repeating. Every now and then I goof, but in general the meals are always edible, even though I may never make it again.

If we look at what makes a meal look appetizing, the first thing I think of is color. There should be a variety of colors and the colors should be a bit bright.

Here’s an example of what I chose to put on a pizza, with yellow, red and green as the main colors.

Here’s what the pizza looked like with the ingredients spread over the dough, before the grated cheese was added. The red is from sliced tomato. The yellow is from pineapple. The green is sliced zucchini and chopped green pepper.

New Year’s Eve’s dinner required two pizzas, so though the same colors were used, the ingredients were slightly different on the second pizza. It is also important to think of taste and what tastes good together, as well as color. When asked, some at the dinner table preferred the one pizza and others preferred the other one. We all have different likes in taste and that is as important as looks.