All posts in Health, Sports & Fitness

Heart Smart for Your Loved Ones

My husband’s cholesterol is a little high and he’s tried diet and exercise to bring it down. It helped a little but Lipitor is even more effective. Still, he likes to go off Lipitor for a while just to be off meds, so we’ll shop and cook with more vigilance to make sure we’re eating super healthy when he does that.

Some swaps are pretty simple.

We use extra virgin olive oil as our cooking oil of choice for pretty much everything except baking.

Instead of white rice, I’ll mix half the amount with brown rice. The trick to that is to soak the brown rice overnight so that it cooks at the same rate as the white rice. My Korean mother-in-law taught me that. And if you forget to do that the night before, add hot water to the brown rice for a few hours before cooking.

Oatmeal is also something I push. PickyKidPix and I both like oatmeal — steel-cut or quick oats — but no one else in the family does.  It’s delicious with a little brown sugar and berries and is proven to bring down cholesterol levels. So, for my husband, his oats of choice is Cheerios. I also grind up oats in my blender to sneak it into baked goods like cookies. No one is the wiser for that!

Home made soup is another strategy for getting our kids to eat more cooked vegetables We also welcome the warmth during our cold New England winters! My husband uses the Cooks Illustrated‘s chicken noodle soup recipe and it’s a big hit with our kids.

The problem though, is that it’s very time-consuming.  It’s a multi-step process including making stock and then making the actual soup. I personally don’t have the time or the patience to follow the recipe but I enjoy the end result when my husband is in the mood for an all day cooking project.  Read more…