How to Do Farm to Table in the Fall

My perfect fall Saturday always starts at our local farmers market. The air is cool and the leaves are brilliant with color. I just throw on my workout clothes, grab my favorite reusable tote and walk over.  There are whole blocks filled with everything from meats and dairy to fruits and veggies to local honey and fresh cut flowers… it’s like being a kid in a (very healthy) candy store. With the farmers markets in trend right now, you can find everything you need to put “fresh” in every meal. And you know what else is even better about the market? You can get to know your farmers! Ask them questions about their farms. How do they grow their vegetables and are they produced organically? What do they feed their animals?? Ask them what THEY enjoy cooking.  Be inspired by the farmers themselves and prepare something new. How about a healthy version of your favorite snack? Grab a bunch of beets and slice them thin. Place them on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper, spray with olive oil and sprinkle a little rosemary, garlic and sea salt on top. Bake in the oven around 350 until crispy. Crunchy, delicious and a perfect snack. This is also the time to remind yourself the aroma of fall doesn’t have to be at the mercy of a wick. Throw those perfumed candles away and fill your house with fresh autumn scents straight from the market – zucchini bread, baked cinnamon apples, pumpkin protein pancakes, endless options for you to make that healthy fall transition. The best part is, not only will these delish scents fill your house but you also get to savor the taste. It’s like a two (senses) for one! Let autumn’s colors inspire you and your palette. Let the falling leaves and crisp breeze be your motivation for a nice walk to the local market. Take advantage of the final months of the farmer’s fresh harvest in full bounty. Load your bag with the colors of the season, grab a veggie you have never tried before, and experiment with a farm to table recipe. {Tweet this}. Here’s one of my faves…enjoy!   Kale and Sweet Potato Hash Serves: 4 Time: 25 minutes INGREDIENTS: 2 teaspoons extra virgin olive oil 1 ½ teaspoons fresh garlic, minced 2 shallots, finely diced 2 large sweet potatoes, diced Sea salt & fresh ground pepper, to taste Pinch of red pepper 2 ½ cups kale, chopped and ribs removed 4 farm fresh eggs, poached or fried   DIRECTIONS: Heat olive oil in skillet. Add garlic, shallots, sweet potato and spices. Cook until potatoes are tender, about 15 minutes. Add kale and cook until soft, about 5-7 minutes.  Taste and add additional seasoning if desired. Divide hash onto 4 plates and top with egg!  YUM!!

7 Books That Will Totally Change How You Think About Food

If you think eating healthy is only about figuring out which foods contain the most antioxidants, one (or a few) of these may just blow your mind.

3 Tips to Eat Healthier and Spend Less

Think it’s impossible to eat organic food on a budget? It may not be easy, but it’s definitely doable. In this video from the A Little Bit Better series—which focuses on small yet meaningful habit changes—Keri explains how you can get started. While organic foods can be a lot more expensive than their conventional counterparts (for complicated reasons we don’t have the space to get into here!), you can make up for that price difference by making smart choices. RELATED: Grass-Fed Beef Vs. Organic Beef: Which is Healthier? Take beans, for example. You really can’t find a more affordable source of nutrients. Whether they’re black, pinto, or garbanzo, they’re all loaded with fiber, protein, and B vitamins and are crazy cheap, even when grown organically. RELATED: The Essential Guide to Plant-Based Protein Get a few more simple tips by watching the video, below. As Keri says, “You don’t have to spend a fortune to eat healthy. If you shop smart, you’ll feel just a little bit better.” 3 Tips for Organic Food on a Budget

The 5 Best Food Documentaries on Netflix Right Now

Netflix and grill: That’s one way you might enjoy spending an evening, especially given the food-related viewing we are about to queue up. I mean, who doesn’t want to get busy cooking—ideally with a grandmother by your side—after watching bestselling food writer Samin Nosrat dive into world cuisines in her four-part series Salt Fat Acid Heat? That’s as comforting as comfort food gets! (And if you want some comfort TV afterwards, you can always fire up Schitt’s Creek again.) True, some of these docs examine some of the dark sides of food—factory farming, manipulative distribution practices, toxic additives. (More like Netflix and swill, right?) But these serious stories are important, too, including surprising facts about sugar in our food supply to lessons on how sustainable food production is linked to both health and environmental issues. Whether you’re curling up at home on the couch or you’ve got time to kill during holiday travel, you can’t go wrong with one of these top food documentaries. 5 Food Docs to Netflix and Grill With Salt Fat Acid Heat (Image: Salt Fat Acid Heat) Named after the four pillars of successful cooking, Samin Nosrat’s Salt Fat Acid Heat is a kitchen primer, comic book and cookbook, all rolled into one. A publishing phenomenon in 2017, it became a Netflix miniseries one year later, with each of the episodes focused on one of the four key factors. We lucky viewers join Nosrat as she travels around the world, consulting local experts—which frequently means grandmothers—about their approaches to cooking. (As Nosrat told the Washington Post, “The bulk of all cooking has been done by women. And yet, in popular culture and in media, it’s very rarely that women are given credit for that.”) So come along for the journey, learning about salt in Japan, fat in Italy, and acid in Mexico. Will it make you hungry? Probably, but the show will teach some great recipes and trusty tips to improve your own home cooking. RELATED: The Inflammatory Foods You Should Really Avoid Rotten (Image: Rotten) This investigative docuseries explores the complexities of the food chain, crop by crop and coop by coop. Season 1 tackles honey, peanuts, garlic, chicken, milk and cod; season 2 looks into the issues at play with foods including avocado, chocolate and cannabis edibles. Reception to the show has generally been great: The first season scored 86% from critics, according to Rotten Tomatoes, while the second season was nominated for a News & Documentary Emmy Award and won the 2020 James Beard Media Award for Visual Reporting. The C Word (Image: The C Word) Narrated by Morgan Freeman (need we say more?), this 2016 documentary follows the personal journey of director Meghan LaFrance O’Hara, who survived stage-3 breast cancer. In the process, it dives into the “anticancer” philosophies of another survivor, French physician David Servan-Schreiber, who developed a four-pronged strategy for wellness against cancer: nutrition, exercise, stress management and the avoidance of toxins. A review in Variety praised The C Word for taking aim at “big-business entities abetting the toxic unhealthiness of the American lifestyle with chemically unregulated products and addictive foodstuffs crammed with sugar and additives.” What The Health (Image: What The Health) OK, this one’s a little bit dicey, we admit. It’s biased in favor of a vegan diet (of course, there’s nothing wrong with a documentary wearing its heart, and its biases, on its sleeve)—but it also has a lot of flaws in its reporting, as this Vox article explains. Still, it’s worth checking out to get a sense of some of the issues behind making vegan choices. (While you’re at it, check out Forks Over Knives, another doc about plant-based eating; it’s no longer on Netflix, but you can stream it directly on its own website.) RELATED: What You Need to Know to Be a Healthy Vegan Cooked (Image: Cooked) Back to the joy of cooking and the glories of exploring other cultures, with an expert as our guide. This time, instead of Samin Nosrat, our host is Michael Pollan, another bestselling author. The four episodes of this miniseries are each themed around one of the ancient elements: fire, air, water and earth. The audience gets to visit Australia, India and Morocco as Pollan dives into a wide range of foods, from barbecue to bread making. In its review, the New York Times applauded the documentary’s “long-view history lesson in how innovations that we take for granted transformed the human species.” (Image: Shutterstock)