Sunny Side Up Nutrition

A cooking, nutrition and family feeding blog to simplify your life

Family Feeding

Sauteed Brussels Sprouts – Our Holiday Tradition

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Just before Thanksgiving, Anna and I shared some of our family holiday traditions. These Brussels sprouts are part of our Thanksgiving AND Christmas meal traditions. The process of removing the cores and seperating the leaves takes awhile. But it’s well worth it! And Chad and I enjoy the time together. Sometimes people help with the process and sometimes it’s just us. Either way, we enjoy making this dish.

If you’d prefer not to core and leaf the Brussels sprouts, you can simply feed them through your food processor using the shredder attachment. It’s not the exact same dish, but still works well and tastes great! Either way you decide to prepare them, cook them until they are bright green and some of them just being to brown.

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Sauteed Brussels Sprouts

  • Author: Elizabeth Davenport
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Description

Even Brussels sprout naysayers will like these tender, sauteed Brussels.

Ingredients

2 bags (or 1 branch) of Brussels sprouts

3 tablespoons olive oil

Salt and pepper to taste

Instructions

Cut the end off the Brussels sprouts.  Then, using a sharp paring knife, carefully carve out the core.  Once you’ve cored all the Brussels sprouts you can begin separating the leaves into a large bowl.  (You can do this a day or two ahead and cover the bowl and leave it in the refrigerator until ready to saute them).

Add 3 tablespoons of olive oil to a large saute pan and heat over medium-high heat.  Add the Brussels sprout leaves and salt and pepper to taste.  Saute for about 10 minutes.  Taste and adjust seasoning if needed.  Serve hot or at room temperature.

Tips for Feeding Kids and Teens During the Holidays

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The holiday season is certainly in full swing and a long break from school is fast approaching. Feeding children can take a lot of effort when things are in a “normal routine.” Traveling or having family visit can be an added challenge with feeding, especially with picky eaters. Then, you add in irregular meal times, erratic sleep schedules, lots of exciting yummy foods, new challenging foods, and a man entering the house in the middle of the night and leaving presents! This can certainly be a recipe for lots of fun, but also lots of stress around kids’ eating.

The Scenario

I imagine you’ve been there or can relate: You’re at a holiday dinner. There are appetizers out and your child is hungry because she hasn’t eaten since lunchtime, because you’ve been at various holiday events. (Not to mention that she hasn’t napped in 4 days). She fills up on pre-dinner snacks and then it’s time to sit down to dinner.  Your extended family member tells your child she needs to eat or she won’t get cookies later. You cringe inside. (You’ve been reading Sunny Side Up Nutrition and haven’t been using food as rewards.) The family member then looks at you and says they can make your child something different since she isn’t eating. You’re thinking, “She just ate pretzels, cheese and crackers and mixed nuts, she’s full.”  You want everyone to go back to eating and chatting and take the focus off of your child’s eating. That pressure can feel overwhelming and sometimes feel like a judgment of your parenting, even if that’s not the intention. …

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Our Favorite Cookbooks – The 4th and Final Gift Guide in Our Series

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Gift Guides

I don’t know about you, but I love gift guides.  They give me new ideas and they’re just fun to read.   We’re on a gift list roll right now!  This is our 4th and final gift list in our series.  Click these links to read the previous guides if you missed them or want to revisit them: 13 Favorite Kitchen Essentials That Make Great Gifts, Nutrition and Body Books for Parents and Kids and 7 Nutrition and Body Books for Adults.  We hope ours have helped you find some great gifts for loved ones or for yourself.

Cookbook Love

Anyone who has been to my house has seen my shelves of cookbooks (and there are even more on shelves in the basement). I absolutely love cookbooks! I read them like novels. There’s always a stack next to my bed sitting amidst the other books I’m reading. A babysitter gave me my first cookbook when I was 9 or 10. I still have it! Our Favorite Cookbooks

You can always learn something new when you open up a cookbook. A great cookbook will teach you to cook with easy to follow instructions and a reasonable number of easy to find ingredients. (There are great cookbooks that teach challenging techniques that include recipes with lots of ingredients, but that’s not what this guide is about). A cookbook can also offer a trip to new parts of the world, history lessons, and even some science. Cookbooks offer opportunities for creativity – combining taste, texture, and colors in new or different ways. In great cookbooks, each author’s writing style and the photography or drawings also pull you in. Wonderful cookbooks will make you feel inspired and empowered to cook.

Our Current Favorite Cookbooks

For this post, I decided to stick with just a few recommendations for cookbooks that make cooking accessible. I’ve also included a few that delve into cooking that’s not quite as simple, but fun for anyone who enjoys cooking. It was hard to narrow them down!

Cookbooks for the New or Experienced Cook

Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat

 Salt Fat Acid Heat by Samin Nosrat

This book is the first on the list, because it’s my current favorite.  I love everything about this book!  The first half of the book is divided into 4 sections that correspond to the 4 words of the title. You’ll learn how each element works and how to use them in your cooking. The illustrations are more intricate than those you find in most cookbooks. In “How to Use This Book,” Nosrat writes that the choice to use illustrations instead of photos is to prevent you from feeling like there’s only one way for a dish to look.  If you’re interested in food and the science of cooking and want to learn the essential elements, get this book!   Most of the recipes are easy to follow with just a few ingredients.

If you haven’t had a chance to watch the Netflix episodes, (you can watch the trailer here) make sure you put this at the top of your list.  This 4 part series warms my heart.  I know that might seem hard to believe, but it’s such a pleasure to watch.  

Our Favorite Cookbooks - 4th and Final Gift GuideHow to Cook Everything by Mark Bittman

This is one of Anna and her husband, Dan’s, go-to cookbooks. Anna loves the book because everything is explained in a straightforward way. The recipes are simple and have just a few ingredients. Dan likes the book because the recipes don’t require buying unusual ingredients that are only used once and then end up sitting in the refrigerator for ages.  

Our Favorite Cookbooks - 4th and Final Gift Guide in Our SeriesHow to Cook Everything Vegetarian by Mark Bittman

I love this book because it’s filled with easy to follow techniques and a ton of ideas for vegetarian meals.  Throughout the book, Bittman provides lists like “39 Vegetable and Legume Dishes That Can be Tossed with Pasta” and “39 Dishes That Can Be Stir-Fried with Asian Noodles” and the page numbers where you can find these easy recipes. These are just 2 of the many useful lists that direct you to recipes throughout the book. If you want to own only one cookbook about basic vegetarian cooking you can’t go wrong with this one. …

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Gift Ideas: Nutrition & Body Books for Adults

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Are you looking for a gift with a theme of body positivity, self care, or leaving diets behind? We hope you enjoyed our first post with a list of books for parents, caregivers and kids that would make great gifts. We’ve now pulled together a list of our favorite nutrition and body books for adults. There’s so much media out there telling us that we need to do more and that we’re not enough. These books strive to be the antithesis of that. Do you or someone on your list need a bit more self focus or TLC? Would you like to spread the non-diet message this holiday season?  Maybe, introduce or reintroduce someone on your list to the idea that controlling your body or making yourself smaller doesn’t solve problems. Or, buy one of these fabulous books for yourself and focus on your own self care next year.

7 Nutrition and Body Books for Adults:

1. Eating Instinct by: Virginia Sole-Smith Sole-Smith became interested in how we learn to eat the way we do, when her own infant daughter stopped eating. She realized that so many of us struggle with eating and set out to understand why. This book asks three important questions: How did we learn to eat this way? Why is it so hard to feel good about food? And how can we make it better?  It is so refreshing for someone outside of the eating disorders field to fully “get” the complexities of food, nutrition and why people eat the way they do.

2. Body Respect: What Conventional Health Books Get Wrong, Leave Out, and Just Plain Fail to Understand About Weight  by: Linda Bacon and Lucy Aphramor Linda Bacon, the author of Health at Every Size, co-wrote this book that is powerful and eye-opening!  It’s a quicker and easier read than Bacon’s first book and breaks down both the research, but also importance, of treating people with respect and kindness, including ourselves. This is a great book for anyone who is ready to leave diets behind and wants to understand why weight does not define health.

         

3. Intuitive Eating book or workbook by: Elyse Resch and Evelyn Tribole Intuitive Eating helps the reader break free from diet culture and return to using internal cues.  The authors published The Intuitive Eating Workbook in 2016 and it has been a fabulous resource with actionable steps.

4. EveryBody Yoga: Let Go of the Fear, Get on the Mat, Love Your Body by: Jessamyn Stanley  This book, complete with fabulous photos of yoga poses for the reader to be able to learn, is the first of its kind. You see many different bodies in the photos and it is certainly free of body based or diet talk, as many “fitness” books include. Stanley, a native North Carolinian, shares her own journey into the yoga field.  

5. Your Body is Not An Apology – Sonya Renee Taylor During a time when the world feels so unjust and unkind, Taylor offers the concept that radical self-love as a place to start to not only change our relationship with our own body, but also can be a powerful catalyst for change in our world.  Taylor challenges to reader to leave behind shame and not apologize for the powerful body you have.

6. Eating in the Light of the Moon by: Anita Johnson This book, first published in 1996, uses metaphors and stories to help the reader investigate their relationship with food and weight.  This is one of my very favorite books and truly a gem to have on one’s bedside table.

7. Mindful Eating Workbook by: Vincci Tsui  This brand new book can be preordered now. Written by an expert HAES Registered Dietitian in the field, this workbook is sure to be a fabulous resource for my clients. The cover looks beautiful and will make a very special gift.  I’v preordered mine!

Do you have one of these books? We’d love to hear what your favorite book is and how it has helped you.

*Sunny Side Up Nutrition is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program and the books listed above are affiliate links.  Thank you for supporting our efforts to promote positive relationships with food.

Gift Ideas: Nutrition & Body Books for Parents and Kids

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If you’ve been to my house, you can see that books are something my family loves to give and receive.  Books can be a personal gift that someone can use and go back to over and over. Elizabeth and I often get asked about food and nutrition book recommendations from clients, friends and social media followers. We’ve pulled together 2 lists of our favorite feeding, nutrition, and body image books to give as gifts. This post includes books for parents and kids. Look for a Part 2 post in the next week with books for adults about developing or continuing a healthy relationship with food and your body.

Books for People that Care for Children:

1. Child of Mine or Secrets of Feeding a Healthy Family by Ellyn Satter: Do you know someone who is either expecting a baby or a family that may be interested in learning more about how to take the stress out of feeding? Child of Mine is great for a new or expectant parent and leads the reader through feeding from birth. Secrets of Feeding a Healthy Family may be a good gift for a family of young to older children. It also supports parents in establishing the Division of Responsibility in Eating and includes easy recipes to get dinner on the table. My favorite thing about these books is that they decrease pressure and stress on parents, when many “self help” books may leave someone feeling like they have a big “to do” list.

2. Love Me, Feed Me: The Adoptive Parent’s Guide to Ending the Worry about Weight, Picky Eating, Power Struggles and More by: Katja Rowell: This book, about feeding children, is easy to read and implement. Satter’s Division of the Responsibility is present throughout and Rowell further translates feeding into doable steps. It is specifically written for adoptive parents, but I recommend this book to anyone feeding children.

3. Born to Eat by: Wendy Jo Peterson and Leslie Schilling: Born to Eat is a fabulous book about child led weaning for a parent of a baby getting ready to transition to eating solids. However, this book is also a guide on how the whole family can approach food, weight and bodies from a weight neutral perspective. This is a resource that can be used for many years to come.

4. Social Media Wellness: Helping Tweens and Teens Thrive in an Unbalanced Digital World by: Ana Homayoun As a parent of a 6th grader, I’m finding myself being less concerned about how I feed my daughter and more focused on how I handle electronics. I love Homayoun’s approach to how to think about teens’ use of electronics, using a wellness model. This is a great resource!

Children’s Books About How Awesome Bodies Are:

5. Shapesville by: Andy Mills and Becky Osborn: This is a picture book for young children (preschool) that highlights that people have different sizes, shapes, colors and talents. Talking to children about their own unique talents can model what is truly important. The book includes discussion questions for parents and educators.

6. Listening to My Body by: Gaby Garcia and Ying Hui Tan: Elementary aged children enjoy this book about listening to the very wise signals of our bodies.  When so many messages we receive is about controlling or overriding messages from our bodies, it’s awesome to reinforce the wisdom of our bodies to kids.

7. I like Myself by: Karen Beaumont and David Catrow  This is a fun and important picture book about self esteem.  It encourages kids to love and accept themselves just as they are!

Non-Diet, Body Positive Books for Tweens/Teens:

8. Celebrate Your Body (And It’s Changes, too) by: Sonya Renee Taylor  I bought this book for my daughter as soon as it was released. I loved the feeling of handing her a book about puberty that I knew had images and discussion of all different bodies and no diet talk!

9. Coming in April: The Intuitive Eating Workbook for Teens: A Non-Diet, Body Positive Approach to Building a Healthy Relationship with Food by: Elyse Reach You can preorder it now!  I can’t wait to have this as a resource for teens!

10. Conquer Picky Eating for Teens and Adults by: Jenny McGlothlin and Katya Rowell  I have already purchased 3 copies of this workbook for me and my clients. This workbook walks the reader through thinking about what has influenced the way they eat and helps them takes steps forward.

I love giving and receiving books as gifts.  What are your favorite books for parents, kids and caregivers about food, nutrition, bodies and self care?  We’d love to hear about your gift ideas.

The links in this post link to items at Amazon.com.  We are members of the Amazon Affiliate program which means we receive payment from Amazon when our readers purchase items from links in this post.

13 Favorite Kitchen Essentials That Make Great Gifts

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We hope everyone had a nice Thanksgiving. Did you have a chance to read our post about self care during the holidays?  If not, here’s a link to it. We share our tips for taking care of yourself during the holidays.

The holidays are officially ON. The fun has begun! Over the coming weeks, we’ll share links to some of our favorite kitchen essentials, books on building healthy relationships with food, and our favorite cookbooks.

Kitchen Essentials

I love kitchen gadgets.  These are some of our favorites.  Many of these items were actually given to me as gifts over the years, so I can attest they make great gifts!

The links in this post link to items at Amazon.com.  We are members of the Amazon Affiliate program which means we receive payment from Amazon when our readers purchase items from links in this post.

Stainless Steel Cookie Spatula

I love this stainless steel cookie spatula. It’s great for baking. And it’s great for young kids to use because it’s easy for small hands to manage.

Ceramic Paring Knife

While I was at my mom’s over Thanksgiving, I used her ceramic paring knife.  I loved it! I don’t have one, but I’m definitely asking for one. The benefits of ceramic: it’s light, it retains its sharp edge and it’s stainless.

 Kitchen Shears

I use them for so many tasks. They’re great for making peeling shrimp easier, cutting herbs, opening bags and boxes of food – like those beans that come in boxes? I can’t open those without scissors despite the perforrated top!

Microplane Grater/Zester

I’m not sure what I used before I owned this!  I have two of these. One I use for grating parmesan cheese and the other I use for zesting citrus peel.

Oxo Y Vegetable Peeler 

This peeler rocks! It is by far the best peeler I’ve owned. You want this in your kitchen!  You can even peel butternut squash with it.

Flat Whisk

A friend gave me this many years ago and it’s one of my most used utensils.  It can reach the bottom edges of pans, so when you’re cooking and whisking (like making mac and cheese) bits don’t get stuck in the pan. …

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Your Care Instructions

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Listening to the way that our culture talks about the holidays, you’d think they are 100% fun and festive for everyone. The truth is, they can also be hard for many people. For some, it can be hard seeing family that they don’t usually see. For others, it can be a lot of togetherness without enough alone time. Holiday meals and food can be a challenge for many people. Holidays may be lonely or bring up difficult memories. They can become a day with high expectations and a focus on taking care of others and/or lots of details. By the end of the Thanksgiving weekend, you may feel like you’ve given and given and you’re left feeling empty. We talk to our clients (and ourselves!) a lot about taking care of themselves so that they can take care of others. We can be a broken record, but we like the metaphor of putting on your own oxygen mask on the airplane before putting on others’. Or, another pertinent metaphor is you can’t pour from an empty cup. By being intentional about self care this holiday weekend, you may feel a little stronger and more available at the end of the festivities.

Your Care Instructions

We like to think about self-care as “Care Instructions” for you. If you buy a new sweater there will be a care label with care instructions: “delicate wash, line dry.” Or a new plant may say “Keep soil moist, partial sunlight.”  What would YOUR care instructions read? Anna’s would say: Needs plenty of sleep, needs to be around others, offer daily alone time, feed regularly, does better with regular movement and sunshine.  Elizabeth’s are similar with some guided meditation and reading added in.  

What would your care label read?  What do you need for certain this holiday weekend to feel the best possible, physically and emotionally?

Self care tips to consider:

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Thanksgiving Pumpkin Pie

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Thanksgiving Day means different things to different people.  Some families have traditions that are very important to them to continue each year. Other people may not have specific plans or may choose to spend the day with a small or large group of friends.  For some, it brings excitement and for others it can be a difficult day. Food, of course, is a big part of the Thanksgiving holiday and we think it’s fascinating to hear how different people celebrate. We thought we’d share with you our families’ plans and a couple of recipes we make for the holiday. 

Our North Carolina Thanksgiving

On Thanksgiving, for the last several years, my family of 5 and my mother join my sister’s family at their house that’s a short 45 minute drive away. The focus of the day is for the 5 young cousins to be together and hopefully for the adults to not work too hard. Each adult typically has a job of making one or two food items for the Thanksgiving meal. My sister makes corn pudding and a green vegetable, like roasted brussel sprouts. My brother-in-law often makes an amazing apple and sausage stuffing and a new and different dessert each year. My mother makes a cranberry orange salad and brings rolls that are often the hit of the grandchildren. My husband makes the turkey and has perfected the process using Alton Brown’s recipe for brining a turkey. (One year, my husband decided to make a beef tenderloin rather than a turkey and we are still hearing about this travesty from the 12 and under crowd.) I make the pumpkin pies. I wouldn’t say the adults in our family are particularly fans of tradition, but this division of labor seems to work for us. The meal choices were mostly driven by what the individual members think must be present at the Thanksgiving meal. My husband is the one that says there must be pumpkin pie every year. …

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Keep it Simple! 3 Quick and Easy Meals

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I can’t believe Thanksgiving is next week! I love this time of year. We’re looking forward to getting together with family and friends as always. However, life gets so busy during this season. There’s shopping for gifts, parties, activities, travel and holiday shows – It’s all so much fun, but it can all feel overwhelming if I don’t take the time to plan and keep meals simple. We don’t want to eat out most nights, which is what happens if I try to wing it. Plus, making dinners allows for leftovers for at least a couple of lunches each week.  

At the end of the day, as Anna highlighted in her most recent post what you eat for dinner isn’t what’s most important.  It’s the meaningful time you spend connecting with your family.  

Here are 3 quick and easy meal ideas you can rely on through the holiday season. I’m also going to use Anna’s printable meal planning template (sign up at the top of our blog to receive it) along with a couple of other go-to meals I wrote about last spring to simplify meals.  

Sausage (vegetarian or meat) with sweet potato fries and sautéed brussel sprouts

30 minute meal

I tend to buy this Neiman Ranch Sweet Italian Sausage. All four of us really like it. If it’s a vegetarian option you’re after, the Field and Stream sausages are quite good.  Shaved or shredded Brussels sprouts are a favorite in our house.  Everyone loves them, there’s no prep work and they cook in less than 10 minutes!  When I can’t find shredded Brussels sprouts, I buy them whole and run them through my food processor with the grater blade.  If I know I don’t have time for that extra step, I’ll cook a frozen vegetable I have on hand.

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Easy, Convenient, Go-To Fruit and Vegetable Sides

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We know family meals are important. They are a strong predictor of kids’ nutrition, happiness, self esteem, and even success.   Research suggests that the modeling that happens at family meals helps increase kids’ food acceptance.  Family meals do not need to be complicated and it’s okay to rely on convenience foods to get dinner on the table.  The benefits of family meals are not necessarily about what one is eating, they are about the family time together and the communication that happens over food. I believe if we are too black and white about what a family meal is, we can fall into a routine of not eating as a family very often, because the bar is set too high. When working with families, I’ll hear this dichotomous thinking of either cooking with recipes or having take out in front of the TV.  There is a lot of grey area between these two scenarios in which family meals can happen. 

Meal Make Up

Like many of us, I’m often coming in from work or a kid’s activity right before dinnertime and, therefore, I rely on convenience or quick prep foods to get dinner on the table.  I use a basic template for our meals of providing at least a protein, starch and fruit or vegetable.  Providing this structure and offering different foods without pressure helps kids learn to eat different foods overtime.  However, again, it doesn’t need to be complicated or gourmet. Sometimes, I need the fruit or vegetable to be quick and easy. 

Go-To Fruit and Vegetable Sides

Here are 6 of my convenient go-to fruit and vegetable side dishes that I rely on to round out family meals: …

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