Give them the gift of nourishment instead! We’ve selected some of our favorite products, books, services, and kitchen tools that spread the spirit of crunchtime – make it real, make it fast. make it real fast food.

real food gifts:

Let’s start with real food itself and consider a gift certificate or subscription to a local CSA service(here’s mine)to give real, organic, local food delivered keeping them nourished for weeks to come.

Fruit baskets provide healthy alternatives to cookie and fruitcakes this time of year. There are the usual suspects who you can count on for gargantuan pears and apples in shipping boxes, but for a really dazzling edible gift, you can’t beat Manhattan Fruitier -pricey no doubt, but a gift this spectacular is always in good taste. Also, you can’t beat the local food supplier or small grocer who oftenprovides gift packaging and delivery services. And for you crafty types, check out this video for making your own fruit basket presented by Martha Stewart and created by Manhattan Fruitier – yeow the perfect pairing.

Or go beyond complex carbs and into proteins with impressive gifts of grass fed or organic turkeys and chickens from Good Earth Farms or sustainable seafood from i love blue sea.

Dark chocolate is a simply too delectable to be good for you and a good company Endangered Species Chocolate out of Indy offers several gift box ideas for their socially responsible chocolates. We’re always nuts about nuts here. Boxed sets of walnuts, almonds, pistachios are gifts for smart people, because we all know that the natural oils in nuts boost thinking. You smart gift giver! Next Gen Foods offers a fineWalnut and Almond sampler for a good price.

Finally, make your own tasty treats with a healthy spin. Try our granola bars or swag bars for this holiday’s homemade gifts.

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I came home form a long Thanksgiving weekend (turkey done 7! ways) to find my trusty New England Journal of Medicine had a published an interesting study on weight loss. Now let me preface my remarks with the fact that weight is NOT an issue for my children-if anything I struggle to get more high quality calories into them. However, as we parents age so does our metabolism…

In the study patients who had recently lost weight were randomized (that means assigned to a group by drawing random numbers) to diets that were high, medium or low in glycemic index AND high, medium or low in protein. The group assigned to the lowest glycemic index and highest protein levels was able to best keep the weight off. Even better this group presumingly living the good life of eating sausage, squash and greens, was best at keeping to the prescribed diet!

The take home message? A diet rich in whole grains, fruits and vegetables with adequate protein from beans or meat is most satisfying to the human body and soul.

[april]We favor a few good cooking methods that take basic food combinations and turn them into meals in moments: omelettes, pasta, stir fry, soup, and salads. These dishes can elevate even the sorriest of foods from leftovers, too-ripe produce, foods you don’t like that much, and – if you’re refrigerators are not in as desperate state as mine – they’re just great go-to cooking ideas for down right terrific meals made with real food.

I’m partial to risotto for the same reason. Risotto takes thirty minutes of easy tending, true it’s longer than zapping frozen sorta-dinners in the microwave, but you get a fresh satisfying one-dish meal out of it.

With leftover squash saute´from the big feast and two spicy Italian sausage links (a mistake of fortune made by the butcher at WF who insisted the flame orange links were sweet), a risotto dish blossomed before us. Just a note about kabocha (pronounced ka-boh´cha), it is a Japanese winter squash similar to butternut or acorn squashes, but slightly sweeter and richer.

Okay folks, I will share my general preparation process for risotto. I will share my exact recipe for this dish. I will share that my stomach is still digesting Thanksgiving dinner. Still, risotto should and could stand improvisation on your part. Look in your refrigerator for inspiration. Find two, maybe three core ingredients that you think will taste great together. They will. recipe and how-tos after the jump

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You’ve already made the bold move to lighten mashed potatoes by using more chicken stock and less cream. Good for you. If you’re not there yet, I’ve provided an instructional at the bottom of this post.

Now, let’s see if we can go one step further and consider the potato skin peels that most of us discard in order to please all tastes at the table.

The skins not only offer nutrients and fiber, but they can become a satisfying snack food that falls somewhere between potato chips and baked potato skins. It’s a little something I concocted when having to peel the potatoes for my teenager who had just invited mashed potatoes into her fairly exclusive list of ‘foods I will eat,’ but the skins didn’t make the cut.

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What would you talk about with the Barefoot Contessa, if you met her face to face? I’d like to share with you that Ina Garten came to town, my town Los Angeles, and we had lunch atCafe Surfasand then together had our knives sharpened while discussing the finer points of sumac. But I can’t. read more