Snack like a boss, part 2

Ok, so to finish off this subject, I'm going to make a list of some of my favorite snacks. With fruit, I just eat it straight, since they taste so sweet anyways. But I've never been a big veggie eater, especially since the time my parents nearly force fed me green beans (but now in adulthood, I'm a big fan of green beans). So I had to figure out how to not only eat them, but eat them 3 times a day! I figured out different ways to season the vegetables so that they appealed to me. In my opinion, it was better to eat veggies with a few added calories from the seasoning than to not eat them at all. In time, I began to need less and less added flavor, and now I eat most veggies like I do fruit- plain and straight up.

So here's a list of common snacks that I recommend:
-Fruit with yogurt
-Banana muffins (see recipe below)
-Carrots with a little ranch on the side
-Celery with peanut butter
-Bean salad (see recipe below)
-Avocado/Tomato salad (aka the best veggie snack ever. Click for recipe)
-Chili Cucumbers (see recipe below)
-Cheese and crackers (careful on the amount of cheese you use. It may be more fat and calories than you need)
-Raisins with yogurt
-Cooked green beans with a little garlic salt
-Cooked carrots with a little honey

If that's not enough to get you started, I don't know what will be!


Banana Muffin recipe

These are the best because they are made of mostly fruit! No flour, and most of the sugar is from the fruit itself! Cage and I either make these for breakfast or munch on them for an afternoon snack. This recipe will make seven regular sized muffins.

Ingredients
-1 1/2 mashed banana
-1/2 cup milk
-1 egg
-1/2 tbsp baking powder
-1 1/2 cups oats
-1/2 tsp vanilla extract
-1/2 tbsp sugar
-raisins

Heat oven to 375. Mix all the ingredients together, throw in muffin tins and bake for 20 minutes or until the edges turn brown and the middle of the muffin is firm.

This recipe adapted from http://greenlitebites.com/2009/03/07/banana-oatmeal-cups-with-chocolate-chips/


Bean Salad

Dave's mom is a fabulous southern cook. One day she made this salad for dinner and I ate it for the next three days! It was so flavorful and I couldn't get enough of it!

Ingredients
-1 can of black beans
-1 can of pinto beans
-1 can of corn
-1/4 cup onion finely diced
-1 tsp cumin
-Italian dressing
-cilantro, finely chopped

Rinse and drain the cans of beans and corn. Mix with the onions and cilantro (I don't know the exact amount of cilantro. I just add enough til it looks right, probably about 1/4 cup). Add the cumin. At the end, I pour Italian dressing into the salad. Just enough to cover all the ingredients and give it a bit of flavor. This salad is so yummy!



Chili Cucumbers

This is super simple and I eat this on a day where I don't want to put much effort into my snacks. Essentially, slice a cucumber up. Mix together 2 tbsp of olive oil with a few drops of lime juice. Brush the cucumber slices with it. Sprinkle with garlic salt, pepper, and chili powder. Delicious and simple!

Boring scientific note: There are two types of vitamins. Fat soluble and water soluble. Fat soluble vitamins are vitamins K, D, A and E. All the others, like C and B, make up the water soluble category. So...why do you care? Well, fat soluble vitamins can be stored in your body because they move into fatty tissues. Remember, we all have fatty tissues so this is not a bad thing necessarily. Water soluble vitamins do not stay in your body for more than a few days, so they are not stored. This means that your dietary intake of water-soluble vitamins needs to be more frequent than your intake of fat soluble vitamins. Fat soluble vitamins (boy, I am sick of typing the word "soluble") are found mostly in your animal meats and fats, though they can also be found in produce as well. However, water soluble vitamins are found MOSTLY in produce and not very often in meats and fats. So it's what I've been saying all along- you need plenty of produce every day. Otherwise, those water soluble vitamins get flushed out of your system and don't get replenished as often as they need to be. Although fat soluble vitamins are important, the daily intake is not as essential compared to the others. It's funny, in my religion there is a revelation called the "Word of Wisdom" and we use it as a guide to keeping our bodies clean and strong. Well I always thought it was strange that the WoW said to consume meats sparingly. But now as science is revealing more and more about the human body and the food that goes in it, it's all starting to make a lot of sense. Turns out God knows what he's talking about!