In Celebration of Food: The First of Many

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This blog post is the first of what is hopefully many in a series I am calling “In Celebration of Food”. I’m calling it this for a couple reasons:

1. Food is delicious and should be celebrated! To me this means appreciating the whole process food takes to get to our tables through planting, production, processing, cooking or baking…Basically how to gets to you and nourishes your body.
2. Food shouldn’t be scary. Good food vs bad food is something that I hear a lot in terms of how your should eat. For example, “My new years resolution is to cut out bad foods.” What does that even mean exactly? All food is going to provide your body with some level of nourishment and labeling food as bad makes it scary. A lot of times those so called ‘bad’ foods nourish your mind and soul more than your body and that should be taken into consideration too for a more holistic approach to health.
3. One of my favorite quotes is, “Food is the ingredient that binds people together.” Food has the power to bring people together and create memories. I’ve taught hundreds of cooking classes and one of my favorite things to watch is how people that previously didn’t know each other can come together to make a meal and then sit down to enjoy it. I want to focus on the positive aspects of how food can bring us together.
4. There are a million different ways to prepare food! This might be one of the things I like best about food, all the different combinations and the science behind cooking and baking. Having a solid foundation of what food taste well with others and how properties and chemicals in food impact recipes allows you to have confidence in the kitchen and prepare yourself healthy meals that taste good.
5. Food is what fuels our bodies. As a dietitian learning about how exactly the macro and micronutrients in food go to work throughout our bodies is amazing. I want to pass on some of this knowledge to you. I’ve heard from patients that it’s hard to know what to eat because nutrition news is always changing. I think there are a few reasons people think this. One, fad diets are always changing and that’s what is confusing. Two, they don’t know what sources to trust when it comes to nutrition. Well, you can trust me and other registered dietitians to give you the facts and not fad diets.

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From reading the above you’ve probably figured out that I really like food! Good thing because I’ve made a career out of it now 🙂 For all the reasons listed above I want to provide my readers and followers sound information about food in all the ways it impacts our life so you too can come to truly appreciate what it does for us.

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Something that I hear a lot of people say is that they don’t have enough time to make a dinner at home. This recipe doesn’t take much time or ingredients.

A few tips before you start:

• Cover the sheet pan with parchment paper or aluminum foil to avoid scrubbing the pan and make clean up easier.
• Cut your vegetables in uniform sizes so they cook through at the same time.

For this recipe I used orange zest and juice. Why use zest? The zest is going to have the highest portion of essential oils of the fruit. It provides a ton of flavor without having all the liquid, this is especially useful to know if you are baking and want to add citrus flavor.

Stop zesting when you get to the white part of the orange. This is called the pith and it has a bitter taste to it.

Now let’s talk about some nutrition this recipe has. The sweet potato is a great source of a phytonutrient called alpha-carotene. In the body this converts to Vitamin A. Not only is Vitamin A a powerful antioxidant it also helps your immune system. Like other carotenoids (orange colored phytonutrients) it absorbs best with fat so the olive oil in this recipe serves dual purposes.