SuperFoods And
Healthy Kitchen Tips
by Susan Smith Jones

Let food be your medicine and medicine
be your food.

Hippocrates

As I continue this series of healthy foods and culinary tools, I’m delighted to begin with one of my favorite recipes and kitchen friends – the Veggie Spiralizer.

• Veggie Spiralizer. This is an inexpensive, versatile kitchen tool that enables you to transform vegetables into long strands of angel hair pasta and other beautiful designs such as ribbons. The uses are endless. You can create elegant plate garnishes, julienne strips, professional-looking salads and fast and easy onion rings or French fries. You can cut any kind of raw, firm, fresh vegetable with your Spiralizer; I often use carrots, celery, cucumbers, onions, potatoes, radishes, turnip, butternut squash and zucchini. It’s not for soft vegetables or fruits such as tomatoes.

I use it most often to make live-food pasta. Here’s a tasty recipe,

Pasta with Pepper-Tomato Marinara.

With your Veggie Spiralizer, make enough angel hair pasta using zucchini, yellow squash or butternut squash. This will take you only a minute or two. Next, in a food processor or blender, pulse the following ingredients until you reach your desired consistency: 1 1/2 red bell peppers, chopped; 1 1/2 cups tomatoes, chopped; 1/2 cup sun-dried tomatoes, hydrated and chopped; 1/2 cup apple, chopped (I use Red Delicious*); 1/3 cup raisins (optional); 2 Tbs. olive or flaxseed oil; 1 Tbs. garlic, minced; dash of cayenne or paprika; 1 tsp. Celtic sea salt (optional); 2 Tbs. fresh basil, chopped; 2 Tbs. fresh chives or green onions, chopped; 1 Tbs. fresh thyme, chopped. Top the veggie or other pasta with this delicious marinara sauce and you’ll have everyone coming back for seconds. Moreover, you’ll be enjoying a tasty, enzyme and nutrient-rich meal or snack with only a few calories and lots of phytonutrients.

The Veggie Spiralizer also makes a wonderful gift that I have given to countless friends and clients over the years. Call Spiralizers at (877) 740-6082 or visit www.livingnutrition.com.

*Red Delicious apples have the highest level of antioxidants of all apples and the skin of the apple contains the most antioxidants (six times higher).

• Cranberries. Among berries, the cranberry is an anomaly. It’s not a tender, sweet and juicy product of sun-warmed summer fields. It’s not picked and popped into the mouth. In fact, it’s rarely savored fresh by anyone except for a few die-hard cranberry lovers like me. The cranberry is firm and tart, not ripening to red until cold fall days start to set in. Fresh cranberries traditionally appear shortly before Thanksgiving when you can’t miss the colorful bags abounding the produce section of every grocery store. That’s the time to stock up. They will last in the fridge for up to two months and they also freeze well (for as long as a year) and maintain their firmness. No need to fuss or thaw. Just rinse them well with running water and use as if they were fresh.

One test of a ripe cranberry – it will bounce. In fact, they’re sometimes called bounceberries. Fresh, frozen or bouncing, use them abundantly in your diet – at just 44 calories a cupful, they are a bona fide health food. Cranberries possess more phenols than red grapes and 18 other fruits, according to a study in the Journal of Agriculture and Food Chemistry in 2001. Phenols are plant chemicals that lower oxidation of LDL (“bad”) cholesterol.

Cranberries also make it hard for bacteria to stick around – literally. Researchers believe that proanthocyanins in cranberries prevent the bacteria E. coli from attaching to bladder walls and causing urinary tract infections. The effect can last for 10 hours after you drink 8 ounces of a cranberry juice beverage that contains at least 27 percent juice, according to a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) in 2002. Cranberry juice also prevents bacteria from adhering to teeth.

I always keep frozen cranberries on hand to use in my smoothies. Mixed with other sweet berries or fruits, such as strawberries, blueberries and bananas, they are the perfect addition to a smoothie blend to help make it colorful, delicious and very nutritious.

• Green beans. Also known as snap beans, green beans are among the most common vegetables grown and eaten in North America. These edible-podded legumes are grown for their pods, which are picked while young and the seeds still small and tender. There are over 150 varieties of green beans in cultivation today, including thick runner beans, the more slender French beans and the yellow wax bean.

Compared to most other vegetables, once harvested, green beans age quickly, so plan to use them quickly. They are delicious eaten raw or they can be blanched, steamed and served on their own or used in salads, casseroles, soups and stir-fries – either whole, cut into lengths or sliced into small rounds. To French beans (cut them into ribbon-thin lengths), trim the beans and using a vegetable peeler with a frenching end, cut the beans into thin strands. This works best with very fresh beans. Select green beans that are firm, whole and crisp, without rust spots. A fresh bean snaps crisply and feels velvety to the touch. Old beans are bulging and leathery. Those with greatest commercial availability include plain green beans, Italian (flat Romono), purple podded, wax beans, which are usually yellow and yard-long beans.

Fresh green beans are rich in vitamin A, B-complex, calcium and potassium. You’ll also find good sources of folate, magnesium and vitamin C. They have long been considered a diuretic and beneficial to help treat diabetes. With their abundance of potassium, green beans supply the alkaline needs of the pancreas and salivary glands. The yellow or wax bean is considered inferior to the green bean in nutritional value.

• Pineapple. The pineapple is a symbol of hospitality and often appears in household art motifs. Start noticing these pineapples and you’ll soon see them on everything from brass door knockers to light fixtures.

Its high sugar content and lush flavor make it one of the most popular fruits. A tropical fruit, the pineapple originated in Brazil and is now a large segment of industry in Hawaii. Unlike most other fruits, pineapples do not ripen or sweeten after picking. Since they have no reserve of starch to be converted into sugar, they start to deteriorate instead. Look for large, plump, heavy fruit with fresh, deep green plumage. Skin coloring may be green or yellow-gold, depending on the variety. The base should be slightly soft and there is generally a sweet, but not fermented, aroma. Avoid fruit that is old looking, dry or starting to decay at the base. To ensure a uniformly sweet fruit, remove the leaves and stand the pineapple upside down at room temperature so the sweet juice concentrated at the base can run throughout. Pineapples can be stored at room temperature if used within a few days. Cut into chunks, the fruit can be kept in a container in the refrigerator for four to five more days.

Pineapples are a veritable warehouse of valuable minerals and enzymes. One enzyme in particular, bromelain, is renown for its health benefits. Bromelain helps digestion by breaking down protein into more easily digestible amino acids. In addition to its digestive properties, it is also credited with reducing swelling due to arthritis, sports injuries and trauma, promoting the healing of wounds, soothing sore throats, threatening laryngitis, reliving sinusitis, curbing appetite and promoting absorption of antibiotic medication.

As a cardiovascular support, bromelain also may help alleviate angina, help prevent and treat atherosclerosis and may inhibit the abnormal blood clotting that causes second heart attacks. Another enzyme found in pineapple, peroxidase, increases the production of cytokines, an immune system component that stimulates cells to protect themselves against cancer.

I recommend pineapple to my clients to help detoxify the body and provide a natural diuretic. Pineapple contains a fair amount of acids – notably citric, malic and tartaric – which in their organic form exert a diuretic action, aid digestion and elimination and help clear mucous waste from bronchial tissues. The citric and malic acids also improve the process of fat flushing. The greatest value of pineapple juice lies in its digestive power, which closely resembles that of human gastric juices.

For a delicious, nourishing smoothie, blend the following ingredients until you reach the desired consistency: pineapple, cranberries, a bunch of parsley and a tablespoon of Living Food. It’s always beneficial to add some greens into the mixture. If I’m out of parsley, I might add baby spinach, cucumber or romaine lettuce. Enjoy.

• Meyer lemon. It was during my early childhood that I discovered this small, juicy, exquisite lemon. We had a prolific fruit-bearing tree in our backyard and my mom put the juice of this lemon into many of our meals. It was the most welcomed gift we gave to our neighbors. Prized for its amazingly sweet fragrance and flavor, it combines the familiar qualities of a lemon with hints of orange and tangerine. Yet, it wasn’t until the mid-1970s, however, that it suddenly seemed as if every California chef, at once, discovered the Meyer lemon.

While I learned about it over four decades ago, Meyer lemons had actually been growing in California, Texas and Florida for almost 70 years. First hybridized in China some 400 years ago, it was discovered near Peking and introduced to America in 1908 by a U.S. Department of Agriculture botanist named Frank Meyer.

You’ll find Meyer lemons with increasing frequency today in farmers’ markets and enterprising supermarkets. It’s hard to miss them with their fairly smooth skins that have a hint of orange mixed with the yellow and a wonderful perfume you can detect several inches away. They’re also very easy to grow at home in a temperate climate and can bear fruit year-round.

Use them just as you would regular lemons: in dressings, marinades, sauces or drinks or squeezed over grilled vegetables and other grilled foods. There’s no better citrus to put in your filtered water, in my estimation, than the juice of a fresh Meyer lemon or for making lemonade. For its vitamin C content and alkalinizing and detoxifying properties, it’s an excellent choice.

 © Susan Smith Jones, Ph.D.

Susan Smith Jones, PhD has authored hundreds of magazine articles and 15 books, including her latest, Unleash the Power of NatureFoods: 50 Revitalizing Foods & Lifestyle Choices. For autographed copies, call (800) 253-6383 Mountain Time or visit www.susansmithjones.com.