Our five a day do not necessarily have to be fresh food even though that's what I usually aim for. At the moment I have quite a lot of dried fruit in the cupboard, the remains of packs I bought to make the Christmas puddings. Apricots, prunes, figs, sour cherries and dried cranberries may appear on my menus over the next few weeks. Actually I had a few cranberries with my breakfast yoghurt.
Tinned fruit and veg can also be used. I use a lot of tinned sweetcorn in salads and am rather partial to a tin of mushy peas with red sauce or mint sauce. Just on their own. Comfort food. (Come on, a girl is allowed the odd guilty secret.) Those are about the only tinned vegetables I buy and there are several tins of each in the cupboard.
But there's another tinned veg which I never think of as tinned veg - and that's baked beans. I buy the reduced sugar, reduced salt variety and I think they may be consumed several times before November ends. I don't often buy any other tinned beans.
And of course there are vegetables in the freezer. Beans I've frozen, ramekins of cauliflower cheese, portions of braised red cabbage, bags of frozen peas. I should be able to eat healthily one way or another!
We eat loads of frozen veg, it's a perfect way to ensure no wate, but we only eat sweetcorn from a tin. Hubby eats beans, but I don't like them.
ReplyDeleteI agree that using both tinned and frozen fruit & veg as part of our daily intake is perfectly fine - but I do laugh a wee bit when I read some of the UK articles about how hard people find it to eat 5 servings a day! We are told 7 to 10 servings a day! Plus, we don't get to count dried fruit (too much sugar) and things like baked beans are carbs not veg.
ReplyDeleteI actually don't find it all that difficult - but it does take some prep work - I usually take an hour and peel and chop and then roast a pile of different things to use all week long.
Yes, I know, we should be ashamed of ourselves. The trouble is that many of us were brought up on a meat-and-two-veg routine - and one of the vegetables was always potato! For ten years I ate school dinners and that's what we always got. It was followed by fruit crumble or pie sometimes. Even at home we had several vegetables on Sunday but usually only one at each meal during the week,
DeleteThe recommendation was increased to seven portions a day a few years ago but a lot of people just gave up so it dropped back to 5 a day. To be fair to me a quick check through my food diary shows that in "normal times" I get way over my five a day as I regularly eat chopped salad, stir fries and soup. I like your idea of a stack of roast veg in the fridge.
I love creamed corn. Those and tinned mushrooms are pretty much the only canned items I buy. I don't get my 7-10 servings here all the time, but I do try.
ReplyDeleteMost of my veggies are the frozen or fresh type.
God bless.