Smashed Black Beans

2 cans black beans, drained and rinsed (or fresh, cooked black beans)

1 medium onion, chopped

1 jalapeño pepper, seeded and finely chopped

4 cloves garlic, minced

1 tsp cumin

1 cup chicken or vegetable stock, plus more for sautéing (I think the chicken stock makes it heartier)

1 lime

chopped fresh cilantro (as much as you like)

Here’s what you do:

Saute onion in a little broth on medium-high heat for a few minutes until soft. Add jalapeño and sauté another minute and a half. Add garlic and sauté another 30 seconds or so. Add cumin and mix well.

Add black beans and stock. Cook for 5 minutes, stirring frequently. Coarsely smash mixture with either a potato masher or the back of a spoon (masher works better). Keep cooking on medium-low, stirring for about 10 minutes or more until dish gets thick. Season with a little lime juice and toss in the cilantro to let the flavors meld.

HM’s Simple Simple Salad

romaine lettuce

cucumber

fresh basil

thin sliced, unsalted almonds (from trader joe’s)

1 tbsp red wine vinegar

2 tbsp olive oil

1 tsp dijon mustard

salt and pepper

Here’s what you do:

Chop up lettuce, cucumber and basil and put them in a bowl. Sprinkle with almonds. In a separate bowl, whisk together vinegar, olive oil and mustard. Grind fresh pepper and salt onto salad and pour dressing as desired. Then enjoy!!

It was my son’s 3rd birthday and I asked him what he wanted for his birthday dinner. “Meatloaf!!” he cried. I was shocked to learn that my meatloaf was his favorite meal, especially since I hide lots of chopped spinach inside of it. But I have to say that it is really good, and the best part is how easy it is. And unless you have a lumberjack coming for dinner (or a VERY hungry husband) it could last for a few days. I usually serve it with a simple salad of lettuce, cucumbers and tomatoes with a sprinkle of himalayan sea salt and fresh ground pepper and a lemon juice and olive oil dressing, and sweet potato “fries,” which are just thinly sliced sweet potato covered in olive oil and more Himalayan sea salt baked at 400 degrees until they are just as you like them. I hope your family likes this as much as mine does!

HM’s Secret Spinach Meatloaf

2 pounds of organic ground turkey or grass fed beef

1 cup of defrosted, frozen chopped spinach

1/4 cup of bread crumbs (you can sub in oat flour, almond meal or gluten free bread crumbs)

1 lightly beaten egg

couple good slugs of worcestershire sauce

1/2 cup diced onion (optional)

salt and pepper

Here’s what you do:

Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Mix all ingredients together, bake for an hour and voila! While the meatloaf is baking I get everything else done so everything is usually ready at the same time.

I’ve been reading a fantastic book from Judith Beck called the Beck Diet Solution. In the book she talks a lot about cravings and how you can outsmart them. According to Beck, if you can wait them out, they’ll disappear. And once you know that you can wait them out, you are in the driver seat on the highway to health. I boiled down her tips to come up with the ever-popular top five:

1. Label your feeling as “just a craving” and not an “emergency”. You won’t die if you don’t eat that cookie that’s bigger than your kid’s head. You just won’t.

2. Decide that you are not going to eat anything. No eating. Beck says that just making that decision will relieve you of the tension that builds when we debate whether or not to give in to our craving. She says it’s the not knowing that causes the angst, but that once we tell ourselves no the craving will diminish. So ladies, do not give yourself a choice.

3. Do something but don’t watch TV (even watching biggest loser contestants shed pounds and win extreme makeovers won’t make you not want to eat). Instead, take a shower, call or text a friend, catch up on US Weekly gossip, read a book (if your kids aren’t nagging you) or decide that today is the day you are going to organize all those pictures into an album. Finally. But don’t eat.

4. Drink water, tea, seltzer. You get the point – calorie free drinks. Thirst can mask as hunger.

5. Distance yourself from the food you crave. Either remove the food from your house or you from wherever the food is. If that means you have to run away from home for the night, do it. And if you have a new “nighttime treat”, toss it.

When I started drinking soymilk years ago I thought I was being smart. I would even admit to feeling virtuous – who bought soy creamer?! I’d watch other women buy their skim milk and wonder if they knew that they could do better with soy. But now I’m not so sure. More and more research has shown that maybe soy isn’t the health food we thought it was. On a recent episode of The Dr. Oz show, Dr. Kaayla Daniel and Dr. Mark Hyman battled it out. According to Dr. Daniel, because of the phytoestrogens in soy that mimic real hormones, soy causes issues in adults (think infertility, thyroid problems, breast cancer risk) and is harmful to children (early puberty and fertility problems in girls and future infertility and delayed physical maturation in boys). Dr Hyman disagreed saying that as long as you avoid processed soy products (cheese, burgers, etc.) that soy is overwhelmingly better for you than it is harmful. Dr. Oz’s final word? That soy in its whole food form (tempeh, tofu, miso) eaten once a week is ok. So what should we think? And what should we do? Let me also mention that soy is in everything – snack bars, cereals, breads, crackers, salad dressing, you name it.

Listen, we’re moms. We’re busy moms. I might have time to make my own salad dressing out of olive oil, vinegar and lemon, but I don’t have time to bake my own bread and I have no clue how to make cereal. Add to that the fact that my son is obsessed with graham crackers, which have an emulsifier called soy lecithin in it, and I’m back where I started. Kind of. Nutrition is an evolving science and really the only thing we can do is be open to learning and trying new things. Becoming obsessive is never the right answer, for us or for our kids. So I’ll make smarter choices when I can, not freak out over the graham crackers, and remember that healthy is one step at a time…

Warmly,

Stephanie

Here is a fantastic snack for both you and your kids. Crunch, salty and loaded with healthy goodness like protein, fiber and lots of vitamins!

What do I need?

• 1 bunch of kale (or more depending on how much you want to make)
• canned chickpeas
• olive oil
• salt and pepper to taste

What do I do?

Preheat oven to 350. Tear the leafy parts of the kale off of the fibrous stem and tear into smaller pieces. Clean and dry as thoroughly as possible. Rinse and dry the chickpeas. Put both together in a bowl and drizzle with olive oil and season with salt and pepper. Spread mixture onto a baking sheet and bake until edges of kale are brown and crispy looking, about 15 minutes. Then enjoy!!

Dear Healthy Mom:

I just found a green pasta in kid friendly shapes and it says in has spinach and zucchini in it. Is this like the ultimate in healthy kid food or am I kidding myself?!

—Healthy Mom Rachel

Dear Rachel:

The good news is that you’re not entirely kidding yourself. Let’s look at one brand: Barilla’s zucchini and spinach mini wheels. If you look at the ingredients, it lists zucchini and spinach puree as main ingredients. And if you look at the nutritional breakdown, this specific pasta contains higher levels of key B vitamins like thiamine, which help the heart and nervous system, and folate, which protects against certain cancers. So this is good news of course. But if you read on the side of the box it says “this package is made with the puree of 1 zucchini and 1/2 cup of spinach.” That’s the entire box!! So unless your child is eating the entire box of pasta, which is roughly 7 servings (and I wouldn’t recommend it) then there aren’t enough vegetables in it to really matter. My other gripe is that it doesn’t get your kids actually eating vegetables, which in the end is what you want. You want them to see spinach and not run for cover.

But not to be a negative nelly, I do like that the pasta is green. I love green. Green foods are the most highly nutritious (think plants and leafy greens) so getting kids used to eating green things never hurts. I actually made this pasta for my own kids and when it was al dente I noticed that the pasta water was green which means that some of the nutrients leached out into the water. Now you could drink the water to get all the goodness back, but blech. Ultimately, the pasta tasted good and my kids ate it without complaining. Real mom, real solution.

Warmly,

Stephanie