Welcome to Meatless Mondays!
Meatless Mondays is a national public health campaign in association with Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health to help Americans eat healthier for themselves and for the environment. The goal: to reduce our consumption of saturated fat by 15 percent by 2010. The method: skip meat just one day a week.
Michael Pollan, author of In Defense of Food and several other sustainable food tomes, also advocates reducing the amount of meat in our diet. He says the easiest way to reduce our carbon footprint is to to reduce the amount of meat we eat. "I'm not talking about going
vegetarian," he says. "But even one meatless day a week—a meatless
Monday, which is what we do in our household."
Reducing the amount of meat we eat not only helps the environment, it helps our bodies as well. "To the extent we push meat a little bit to the side and move
vegetables to the center of our diet, we're also going to be a lot
healthier," Pollan says.
I'll be posting menu ideas on Monday mornings... Please share your own ideas as well in the comments!
Tonight we're having dipping day, aka tapas for tots. The best part? You don't need any silverware. Heck, if you're a really close family, you don't need any plates either!
Of course what you serve depends on what you have around, but here's what we're having:
Hummus and pita wedges: The kids aren't too keen on the hummus, but the parents are, and sometimes the kids will try it. Eventually, I figure, they'll get so used to it they'll eat it themselves. I like to make my own hummus--it's a fairly simple combination of chick peas, tahini, lemon juice, garlic, water, olive oil, and salt and pepper, pureed in the food processor--but you can certainly buy it as well.
Roasted tomato salsa and pita chips: I don't have any tortilla chips in the house, so I'll toss some pita wedges with olive oil, salt and pepper, and bake them in a 400 degree oven until they're brown and crisp, about 10 minutes. Since the oven will already be on, I'll roast some tomatoes, garlic, red onion, and red pepper for a quick salsa. That takes longer, about 30 minutes, until the veggies begin to blacken at the edges and the onions are soft. Then I puree it all in the food processor with some lime juice and, if I have it, cilantro (unfortunately, I don't have any today), and of course, salt and pepper. Though I prefer my salsa spicy, I keep this one on the sweet side since the kids actually seem to like it.
Veggies and dressing: Pretty self-explanatory. I've got baby carrots, celery, and red peppers. And a bottle of ranch for the kids. We also have some leftover Caesar dressing my husband made over the weekend, so I'll put some of that out for the adults.
Fruit and vanilla yogurt: We're got strawberries, grapes, and clementines. And lowfat vanilla yogurt.
I'll put everything out on big platters and let the kids eat whatever they want. We've recently instituted a no-dessert policy in the house, since dinnertime turned into a giant negotiation by the kids to see how much food they had to eat to get dessert (we'll just save the treats for earlier in the day or on the weekend; we're not heathens). So now we just tell them to eat what they want until they're full, since there won't be any more food before bed. We'll see how that works.
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