6 Foods to Try This Year

Is eating healthier on your list of New Year’s resolutions? These six foods are on this year’s must-try list because they pack a nutritional punch. Dig into these better-for-you foods and make your 2015 resolution a reality.

Whole Grains

Eating whole grains isn’t a new idea, but there are some whole grains you may have missed. The Department of Agriculture’s Dietary Guidelines for Americans recommend making half your grains whole. Food companies are producing innovative whole-grain foods, and some forgotten ancient grains are reappearing.

Dave’s Killer Bread: These whole-grain slices of heaven come thinly sliced for 60 calories apiece.

Bob’s Red Mill Organic Kasha: Buckwheat has been around for more than 1,000 years and is one of the earliest known grains. One-quarter cup dry provides 5 grams of protein and 16 percent of your daily recommended amount of fiber.

Gretchen’s Grains Organic Wheat Berries: These whole grains are soaring in popularity. Gretchen’s made a fully cooked and frozen variety, so you can enjoy their goodness without cooking!

Udi’s Gluten-Free Steel-Cut Oats: No more worries about cross-contaminated oats! Udi’s makes sure there’s no gluten found in the package.

Sprouted Grains: Another way to take in those whole grains is by eating them right after they germinate. There are many new and delicious sprouted-grain products on the market to try.

Spicy Condiments

A little bit of these tasty condiments goes a long way. Many fancy brands are making reappearances, while some favorites are getting spiced up.

Three Bridges Superfood Pesto Sauce: This spin on pesto is made from a combo of basil and kale. Use one tablespoon to flavor a mozzarella cheese and tomato or grilled chicken sandwich.

Kosciusko Spicy Brown Mustard: Fancy mustards are making a comeback, and this brand just knocks it out of the park! The spice factor helps keep portions under control, so you can stick to the one teaspoon serving recommendation.

Hope Spicy Avocado Hummus: This Boulder, Colo., hummus company has some of my favorite flavors. Use it as a condiment on a turkey sandwich or with grilled veggies.

Dairy Goods

The dairy aisle is filling up with some new finds; each can help you meet the recommended three daily servings of dairy.

Lifeway Low-Fat Kefir: This cultured milk has a tangy flavor, and it’s made with live and active cultures, many of which act as probiotics.

Siggi’s Icelandic-Style Cream Skyr: If you’re looking to try a new yogurt, this rich and creamy strained version is brimming with calcium and protein.

Dannon Creamery: Satisfy your sweet tooth with a good-for-you dessert! These seemingly indulgent flavors are made with Greek yogurt and topped with fruit sauces, yet they contain a boatload of essential nutrients and fewer than 200 calories each.

New Citrus

More varieties of citrus fruit have become available throughout the country. Now we can have more fun getting our daily dose of antioxidants and fiber.

Cara Cara Oranges: Originally discovered in Venezuela, these babies are now grown in California. They have a reddish-pink flesh and a sweet tangy flavor. They’re available December through April.

Blood Oranges: Originally from Spain and Italy, these dramatically colored oranges are now grown in California, Texas and Florida. The flesh is a scarlet color, and these oranges are less acidic than other varieties. They’re available a short time from January through March.

Exotic Vegetables

Open your palate to new and exciting vegetables. The wider variety of foods you choose to eat, the more opportunities you have to take in all those important nutrients.

Jicama: This edible root is similar to a turnip. The flesh is white with a mild flavor, while the skin is brown. Jicama can be eaten raw on a crudite platter (it doesn’t brown after being sliced), in salsa or in slaw. Or cook it in stir-fries and noodle dishes.

Sunchoke (Jerusalem Artichoke): These silly looking tubers were originally cultivated by Native Americans and have a delicate flavor similar to an artichoke. One-half cup sliced contains 54 calories and provides 14 percent of your daily recommended amount of iron. It’s also a good source of thiamin.

Fermented Foods

The popularity of fermented foods is rising. Fermented foods contain live and active bacteria, many of which act as tummy-pleasing probiotics. Many fermented foods are high in salt, but you can still reap their benefits if you keep an eye on portions.

Farmhouse Culture Kimchi: Made from cabbage, radish, carrots, leeks, and a combo of delicious herbs and spices, kimchi is packed with nutrition and probiotics.

Hikari Miso Organic Miso: Used in Asian cuisines, red or white miso makes a delicious addition to soups, gravy and dips.

Toby Amidor, MS, RD, CDN, is a registered dietitian and consultant who specializes in food safety and culinary nutrition. She is the author of The Greek Yogurt Kitchen: More Than 130 Delicious, Healthy Recipes for Every Meal of the Day.. She sits on Dannon’s Expert Yogurt Board.

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Turn Over a New (Broccoli) Leaf

Looks like Tuscan kale, tastes sweet like sugar snap peas, and offers 100 percent of your daily value of vitamin C and calcium per serving. What is this miracle food? It’s broccoli leaves. No, not those little delicate fronds that you find on the crowns of broccoli (though those, too, are edible); these larger leaves grow around the stalk of the broccoli plant. Farmers previously used them just for cultivating the soil, but now they are being recognized for their nutritional power.

Like kale, broccoli leaves aren’t exactly a new thing. Italians have long grown a variety called spigariello, but unlike broccoli, spigariello’s leaves were always the prize, not the florets. If you can’t find broccoli leaves at your local farmers market, don’t worry; one brand is bringing the greens to the masses. Foxy, which is deeming the greens a “magical power food” even, has branded its product “BroccoLeaf.”

Broccoli leaves can be prepared the same ways as kale, Swiss chard or collard and mustard greens. Try them in soups, salads or sandwiches, or even blended into a smoothie. Here are a few other techniques to try on your first batch of broccoli leaves.

Braised:

Substitute broccoli leaves for the collard greens that brighten this hearty dish of Braised Collard Greens and Butternut Squash.

Sauteed:

Quick, simple and good-for-you mustard greens can be swapped out for broccoli leaves like in Anne Burrell’s Sauteed Mustard Greens.

Stir-fried:

Toss broccoli leaves into this Tofu Vegetable Stir-Fry.

Steamed:

Add broccoli leaves to Steamed Clams and Kale.

Baked:

A one-dish casserole of baked gnocchi gets a dose of vitamin C and calcium with the addition of broccoli leaves.

Kiri Tannenbaum is a graduate of Le Cordon Bleu Paris and holds an M.A. in food studies from New York University where she is currently an adjunct professor. When her schedule allows, she leads culinary walking tours in New York City and is currently at work on her first book.

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This Week’s Nutrition News Feed

In this week’s news: New findings about sugar and diabetes are not so sweet; vitamin drinks may do more harm than good; weight training could prevent your weight from yo-yoing.

No use sugarcoating it

The amount of added sugars, especially fructose, in the U.S. diet may be largely to blame for the nation’s rising rate of type 2 diabetes and prediabetes, clinical experts behind research published in the Mayo Clinic Proceedings have concluded. The researchers say current dietary guidelines allowing sugars to comprise as much as 25 percent of total daily caloric intake should be revised to reduce the amount of sugar allowed and to encourage people to replace processed foods, which often include lots of added sugar and fructose, with whole foods like fruits and vegetables. What’s more, the authors conclude, at “an individual level, limiting consumption of foods and beverages that contain added sugars, particularly added fructose, may be one of the single most effective strategies for ensuring one’s robust future health.”

Too much of a good thing

People who suck down vitamin drinks may feel like they’re doing something good for themselves, but those drinks may actually bring vitamin and mineral overkill and be harmful to their health, nutrition experts tell The New York Times. “You have vitamins and minerals that occur naturally in foods, and then you have people taking supplements, and then you have all these fortified foods,” Mridul Datta, a nutrition scientist at Purdue University, told the Times. “It adds up to quite an excess. There’s the potential for people to get a lot more of these vitamins than they need. This vitamin and mineral surplus may throw your system off balance, though the cumulative effects are unclear.” “With these products,” another nutrition scientist, Valerie Tarasuk, of the University of Toronto, says of vitamin-enhanced beverages, “we’ve embarked on a national experiment.”

Best way to battle rebound pounds?

Lost a few pounds and hope to keep them from sneaking back on? Try exercising. According to a new study published in Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, working out may be the key to keeping off weight after you lose it by dieting. Researchers found that premenopausal women who lost an average of 25 pounds by consuming an 800-calorie-per-day diet were able to keep it off more successfully after they hit their goal rate if they also began to exercise regularly — especially if their exercise regime included weight training. In fact, those who exercised moved around more in general throughout the day, burning more calories, than those who did not. “It seems clear that exercise is very important if you wish to keep the weight off,” the study’s lead author, University of Alabama at Birmingham professor Gary R. Hunter, said.

Amy Reiter also contributes to FN Dish.

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Delivery Services Make Wholesome Meals a Snap

Half of what it takes to eat healthfully is finding the time to do it all — hunting for recipes, shopping for ingredients, putting it all together — it can feel like a full-time job! Take a deep breath. We’re sharing our favorite wholesome delivery services to help you make it all happen without losing your mind. You can order local groceries, healthy snacks, full-on meals and even smoothies! Relax.

Green Blender (pictured at top of post)

What: Smoothie service

Areas Served: Covering the East Coast from Boston to Washington, D.C.

How It Works: It;s time to rethink that morning coffee ritual and consider the smoothie. All you need to become a master smoothie maker is a blender, water and ice — Green Blender does the rest. “Everything is pre-portioned,” explains founder Jenna Tanenbaum. “Just go down the recipe, throw it all in, hit liquefy and that’s it.” Subscribers receive a box shipped to their door that covers a full five days, with each smoothie yielding 24 ounces. (That’s enough for 2 to 4 servings, depending on your appetite). Inside, everything is packed neatly in plastic bags, labeled and portioned out, and includes a letter with storage suggestions, pro tips and all the week’s recipes, which are rarely repeated. You’ll not only get a nourishing breakfast, but also work with ingredients like kumquats, purple cauliflower, mesquite powder, tarragon, pumpkin seeds and butternut squash. Not your everyday smoothie!

Good Eggs

What: Local foods and artisan products to your door

Areas Served: Brooklyn, San Francisco, Los Angeles and New Orleans

How It Works: If you can’t get to the small producers, Good Eggs brings the small producers to you. All you need to do is log on and you’ll be able to custom-order a laundry list of goods sourced directly from farmers and independent artisan producers. Pick your own items or select from the “bundled” options for farmers market shares and get all the items you need for a super Sunday brunch. It’s the go-to site for fresh local produce, pasture-raised meats and dairy, chef-made meals and hand-crafted breads. More incentive: There’s free delivery on orders over $30.

Real Food Works

What: Healthy prepared meals designed by restaurant chefs

Areas Served: National

How It Works: Real Food Works picks up where diet delivery services of the ’80s left off, putting the pleasure, and taste, back into convenient, plant-based prepared meals. How? They’ve modernized the concept by having real restaurant chefs prepare each and every dish. Packages come with five meals, 10 meals or a complete meal pack for the week, which includes 26 meals and snacks and can be shipped nationally. Users get to customize their selections, and everything is supervised by an in-house nutritionist. Chefs design dishes based on shared specifications, but are mostly driven by what’s in season and local. Menus vary, and all feature a bounty of vegetables and layered flavors and textures, and never include any artificial ingredients, dairy or eggs.

Daily Harvest:

What: Smoothie packs

Areas Served: New York City; coming in 2015, the East Coast

How It Works: Rather than get up 30 minutes earlier to prepare a smoothie, you can get portion-sized ingredients delivered to your door from Daily Harvest. While Green Blender does all the creative brainstorming for you, Daily Harvest lets you be the designer by choosing from a variety of blends catering to every palate. Many customers use the blends for breakfast or a boost before or after a workout, but several have found them to be good meal replacements for doing a cleanse. The most popular of the blends is Berry Brightener, a concoction of acai berries, cherries and raspberries that’s packed with antioxidants and vitamin C.

Kiri Tannenbaum is a graduate of Le Cordon Bleu Paris and holds an M.A. in food studies from New York University where she is currently an adjunct professor. When her schedule allows, she leads culinary walking tours in New York City and is currently at work on her first book.

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The Chef’s Take: Jimmy Bradley’s Roasted Broccoli with Almonds, Parmesan and Red Onion at The Red Cat

If you’ve been around the food circles in New York City, the name Jimmy Bradley is a familiar one. He’s a rock star. Bradley opened his iconic restaurant The Red Cat in 1999, and since then has been serving New Yorkers a straightforward, market-driven menu that aims to please. No foams, no dusts, no deconstructed dishes or immersion circulators. Just good, local, seasonal American food with a nudge from the Mediterranean. It’s a formula that has been going strong for 15 years.

About five years ago, though, Bradley was itching to do more than his one-page menu allowed. So he added a second menu — one focused on vegetables. Since then, he has served a five-course vegetable menu nightly. His roster of dishes includes Bibb Lettuce Salad with goat cheese, sunchokes, pears and roasted lemon vinaigrette, Swiss Chard and Ricotta Ravioli with parsley, brown butter crumble and pine nut sauce, and Red Hot Rapini with browned garlic and chili flakes. One of his newest and most-popular dishes, created by Chef Michael Cooperman, is this rustic Roasted Broccoli with almonds, red onion, Parmesan and broccoli puree.

“The broccoli dish is a perfect example of the type cuisine we serve at The Red Cat,” said Bradley. “As is our Zucchini with Almonds and Pecorino. We feel that less is more — we like to use few ingredients in a dish, but prepare them perfectly, to showcase and highlight the flavor of the ingredients. In this case, that ingredient is broccoli. We prepare it a few different ways (including raw) in order to highlight its varied flavors and textures.”

“We treat vegetables as the main protein and we work around it,” said Bradley. “There’s not enough fish in the ocean; too much meat is bad for you, so eat more vegetables!”

Roasted Broccoli
Yield: 4 servings

1 head broccoli

1 clove garlic, sliced

1/2 bunch parsley, picked and washed

1/4 cup canola oil

Salt and black pepper to taste

Extra virgin olive oil

1/4 of a small red onion, sliced paper thin

1/4 cup sliced toasted almonds

1/4 cup grated Parmesan

1/2 lemon

Using a paring knife, separate broccoli into three piles: one with florets, one with leaves and one with stems.

Take the stems and peel them using a paring knife; remove all the fibrous peels and chop the peels so they will cook evenly.

Take the peeled stems and shave them using a mandoline or a vegetable peeler, then soak them in ice-cold water with the broccoli leaves.

For the puree, bring a large pot of salted water to a boil, then add broccoli peels and any scraps. Cook till very tender, then shock in ice water. Add garlic to boiling water and blanch for 1 minute, then add picked parsley. Cook for 30 seconds and shock in ice water.

Drain broccoli peels, garlic and parsley on a towel, then put in a blender and puree with 1/4 cup canola oil. When the puree is a smooth consistency, season with salt and pepper to taste.

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Toss the broccoli florets with extra virgin olive oil, salt and black pepper. Put them on a sheet tray flat so they cook evenly; cook for 8 to 12 minutes or till tender. Keep warm.

To finish the dish, gently heat up the puree in a small pot. Reserve warm. Spin the stems and leaves in a salad spinner till dry. Put in a mixing bowl with the red onion, almonds, Parmesan, juice of half a lemon and a splash of olive oil. Toss salad and season with salt and pepper.

To plate the dish, put puree on the bottom of a plate, arrange florets, then top with the salad of stems.

Andrea Strong is a freelance writer whose work has appeared everywhere from The New York Times to Edible Brooklyn. She’s probably best known as the creator of The Strong Buzz, her food blog about New York City restaurants. She lives in Queens with her two kids, her husband and her big appetite.

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Dessert of the Month: Warm Chai-Spiced Smoothie

In the depths of winter, when the temperatures plummet I’ll take a cup of chai tea over a cool smoothie any day. It was that impulse exactly that got me thinking of combining the two and having the best of both worlds: a warming and invigorating drink with a creamy, whipped consistency. To achieve this, I made a cup of chai and instead of drinking it, I simmered a chopped pear in the spicy brew, then blended it with cashews, a knob of coconut butter and a couple of plump dates. The result was the perfect snack and cup of tea in one.

Warm Chai-Spiced Smoothie

Here I used a rooibos chai for a caffeine-free version, but any kind of chai tea will work.

Serves 1

1 cup brewed chai tea

1 pear, peeled, cored and chopped

1/4 cup raw cashews, soaked 2 to 4 hours in cold water

1 tablespoon coconut butter or extra virgin coconut oil

2 Medjool dates, pitted

Add chai tea and pear to a small pot and bring up to a boil over high heat. Cover pot, reduce heat to low and simmer for 3 minutes or until pear is heated through. Remove from heat and transfer to an upright blender. Drain and rinse cashews and add to the blender along with coconut butter and dates; blend until completely smooth, and drink warm.

Amy Chaplin is a chef and recipe developer in New York City. Her cookbook At Home in the Whole Food Kitchen came out this fall. She blogs at amychaplin.com.

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Inside Food Network Kitchen: The One Healthy Food We Eat Every Day

Here in Food Network Kitchen, food is our job. We eat just about everything, and we all try to eat healthy whenever we can. Between recipe tastings full of savories and sweets, everyone here has their one go-to healthy food they rely on. We thought you’d like to know what a bunch of food-obsessed nerds eat, so we took an internal survey.

And the winner is … GREENS! We are huge fans of our dark and leafy friends, whether collards, kale, spinach or mache. Depending on the green of choice, we are adding vitamins K and C, iron, lutein (may be good for eye health) and omega 3s (thanks, mache).

Things can get pretty hectic here, and we don’t always have time to sit down for a salad. Here are a couple of our favorite ways we increase our green intake:

Inside-Out Wrap: Steam collard greens’ leaves and use them as a breadless option for burritos.

Smoothies: Throw kale into a smoothie for a quick green fix.

Pizza: Use arugula pesto as a pizza topping that will make tomato sauce green with envy.

And the runners-up:

Eggs: We’re all about yolks. New research suggests that the dietary cholesterol found in the yellow part of eggs actually doesn’t have the negative effect on total blood cholesterol that was once thought.

Greek Yogurt: It’s filling and a good source of calcium and protein. Everyone here tops it differently, from guava jelly to shredded cucumber and herbs.

Photo: Brent Hofacker, iStock.com.

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